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Summing up the historical Jesus debate

By Scot McKnight - Posted on March 28th, 2008
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The historical Jesus debate, as we have seen, has three (or four) phases: the old quest (Reimarus to Schweitzer), the no quest of Bultmann and the new quest following Bultmann, and then what Tom Wright dubbed the "third quest" of the present day, though there are plenty of "new" questers still around. What is the 3d Quest?

First, it is concerned with a more positive appropriation of the Gospels and a less skeptical approach to them.
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Rudolf Karl Bultmann

By Scot McKnight - Posted on March 27th, 2008
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More people say bad things about Bultmann than who have read him (1884-1976). Bultmann was escorted into the theological world in the day of Schweitzer's famous Quest. Bultmann, a faithful church-going organist-playing son of the Lutheran church, knew that one could jettison it all or dig under and behind the historical to find the existential and demythologized true faith. Marburg University, so I've been told, could not have found lecture halls big enough for Bultmann's lectures in his glory days.
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Albert Schweitzer

By Scot McKnight - Posted on March 26th, 2008
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Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), famous for being a missionary doctor in Africa (Out of My Life) and for his "reverence for life," had three earned doctorates -- music, theology, and medicine -- and it was his second one that got him in trouble with the religious authorities. When he sniffed the wind of opposition to his free-thinking about Jesus, he chose to spend his life in Africa in obscurity as he worked out his own ideas.
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Radical Apocalyptic Jesus

By Scot McKnight - Posted on March 25th, 2008
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Go to your local Barnes and Noble or Borders or any bookshop of fine taste and you will find a section on Jesus, and the books about Jesus make one subtle or not-so-subtle promise: the book will reveal who the real Jesus was and what the real Jesus was like. These books belong to what scholars call the “quest for the historical Jesus,” and most know that this Jesus is not the Jesus Christ of Christian faith but someone less, someone more human, someone far more Jewish, and someone many like to shove in the face of orthodox Christians who believe Jesus was Son of God.
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Every now and then ...

By Scot McKnight - Posted on March 23rd, 2008
... a book comes along and you make a decision about its importance. This book, you decide, ends the need for a dozen or so other books on your shelves. You go to your shelf, pick up those books, put them in your "To Sell" (or "To Give Away") stack, and put that one book on your shelf that replace the others. Yes, I've got such a book for you:
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