Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
4 Phases of the Historical Jesus - Coggle Diagram
4 Phases of the Historical Jesus
No Quest
David Friedrich Strauss — the life of Christs critically examined denied that we could find natural explanations for supernatural events in the Gospels; argued instead that the miracle tradition as a whole represented myths and legends that developed over a long period of time
William Wrede — theologically motivated propaganda rather than historical; challenged the first quest assumption concerning the historicity of Mark’s gospel claiming that Mark and other before him had created a motif he called the Messianic secret as a way to explain Jesus is essentially un-messianic life; significance of his work was that the Gospels were now increasingly viewed not as historical documents but as apologetically motivated propaganda intended to promote the theory of the early church
Extreme skepticism concerning the historical Jesus
Johannes Weiss — challenged the 19th century view of Jesus as an enlightened liberal social reformer; according to him Jesus was a wild-eyed apocalyptic prophet expecting the soon end fo the world
Martin Kahler — claimed that the quest of historical Jesus was completely misguided and was doomed to failure; claimed that the so-called historical Jesus reconstructed by the rationalist was not the real Jesus, but a figment of scholarly imagination, the only real Jesus was the Christ of faith worshipped in the Church; goal was to salvage the significance of Jesus for the church but in fact he separated the historical Jesus from the church’s christ
Rudolf Bultmann — claimed Gospels were filled til myths that arose in the context of the preaching of the early church
The First Quest for the Historical Jesus
Scholars believed that Jesus was a mere man an ethical teacher proclaiming the love of God and the brotherhood of all human beings the miracles they said could be explained away from unrecognized causes or perhaps mistaken observations made my primitive people’s
scholars were merely creating a Jesus in their own image transformed the historical Jesus into a modern philanthropist preaching an offensive message of love and brotherhood
Sought to find Jesus set free from the mythical worldview of the Bible
The New (second) Quest
A "minimalist perspective" that did not go much beyond Bultmann’s no quest conclusions
Claim was that since Jesus was in fact a historical figure we should be able to discern something about his identity and his goals by looking at the historical evidence while rejecting Bultmann’s extreme skepticism
The (so-called) Third Quest
Sparked by advances in linguistics, archeology, and the deployment of new methodologies such as socio-cultural methodologies, athropological rhetorical methodologies
New methods continue to appear for example one recent area of research has center on social memory theory (how do communities remember and pass down authoritative tradition and what can this tells us about the gospel tradition
Impact on my opinion of the Gospels
Listening and reading on all the different views there are on the gospels and expectations and opinions, although I myself already say some of the things mentioned in the Gospels and the Bible in general I would say not to be taken literally because some readings are just stories. When in some cases people take literally which I dont think should be the cased. Knowing what can be applied to real life and what can's is what you should consider when reading the Bible.