How Jesus Saw Himself - The BAS Library

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The quest for the historical Jesus began as a protest against traditional Christian dogma. But when the supposedly “neutral” historians peered into the well, all they saw was a featureless Jesus. Even when these scholars decided that everybody else—John the Baptist, the evangelists, Paul, the Q peoplea and so on—was at home in a richly storied and symbolic world, 023Jesus himself was not allowed to act symbolically, to criticize his contemporaries, to think theologically, to reflect on his own vocation or to evoke any of the various meta-narratives with which his Jewish world was replete. At this point, objectivist […]

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Footnotes

Q, a hypothetical fifth gospel, consists of non-Marcan material common to Matthew and Luke. See the following BR articles: Stephen J. Patterson, “Q—The Lost Gospel,” October 1993; Eta Linnemann, “Is There a Gospel of Q?” August 1995; and Patterson, “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Q,” October 1995.

In current scholarship, “apocalyptic” denotes a literary genre, a world-view or the belief common among first-century Jews (and frequently, though not always, expressed in the writings of the genre) that their history, and with it world history, was reaching a great climax. I use the word in the last sense in particular. “Apocalypse” denotes either writings belonging to the apocalyptic genre (especially the Book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse) or the climactic historical event itself.

See John Dominic Crossan, “Why Christians Must Search for the Historical Jesus,” BR, April 1996.

The Tetragrammaton, four Hebrew letters, is the unpronounceable name of the Israelite God, often vocalized as “Yahweh.”