INTERPRETING THE TEXT
a tissue of fables and allegories, incapable of giving any true idea of things, and calculated to please only a savage and ignorant people - Baron d'Holbach
Ought not all of these things to excite a doubt of the infallibility of the evangelists, and the reality of their divine inspirations? - Baron d'Holbach
Reimarus starts off like d'Holbach in pointing out the disagreements between the four Gospels. However, Reimarus goes further, arguing that there is a difference between the original teaching of Jesus and the teaching of Jesus' disciples. The disciples believed Jesus had been raised from the dead but Jesus himself (Reimarus argues) could not have known about this with certainty. Since most of what Jesus does and says in the Gospels makes no sense without an understanding of the Resurrection, Reimarus concludes that most of the Gospels is an invention of the disciples, not something Jesus actually did or said.
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Some scholars propose that the historical Jesus can be discussed, analysed and re-imagined quite separately from the Christ of faith - that the two have almost nothing to do with each other.
Certain liberal Christian scholars have proposed that Jesus was a Zealot or a Cynic philosopher or an unremarkable Jewish exorcist but they still worship Christ as a symbol of the love of God. However, not everyone finds this easy to do and, for many, separating the historical Jesus from the Christ of faith leads to the LOSS of faith: if Jesus is nobody special in history, then Christ is just an idea his followers invented after he died, not someone who reveals God "in grace and truth". |
This cartoon (from a traditionalist viewpoint) shows modernist (liberal) Bible critics descending into darkness and atheism. The symbolism is straight out of John's Gospel!
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In the 1980s, a group of 50 Bible scholars formed the "Jesus Seminar" to discuss, research and publish ideas about the historical Jesus. The Jesus Seminar codes passages in red that Jesus probably did say or do, in pink if its possible Jesus said or did them, grey if it's unlikely and black if Jesus almost certainly didn't really say or do these things. The Jesus Seminar works on the assumption that miracles don't happen and that Jesus was an ordinary human and not a supernatural being.
This is the source of the conflict today between conservative/traditionalist and liberal/modernist Christian thinkers. For traditionalists, the historical Jesus IS the Christ of faith: he's a supernatural person who preformed miracles and predicted his own crucifixion and Resurrection. Liberals doubt these things and are prepared to admit that most of what we believe about Christ was invented decades or centuries after the death of Jesus.
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