First Glance
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Who was Jesus? This question has dominated recent New Testament research, with scholars searching for its answer among biblical texts, the apocrypha and archaeological remains. Their work has garnered overwhelming interest among Bible scholars, who flock to hear each other’s accounts of the Real Jesus at academic conventions, and among the public, which has made books on the historical Jesus bestsellers. But, lately, a backlash has developed. In the December 1995 BR, New Testament scholar Luke Johnson (see “The Search for (the Wrong) Jesus”) claimed that these attempts to reconstruct the Jesus of history are destroying our only true witness to early Christianity—the New Testament. But is the search for the Jesus of history misguided, as Johnson suggests? Looking at the four divergent accounts presented in the gospels as models for interpreting Jesus’ story, John Dominic Crossan challenges Johnson and demonstrates “Why Christians Must Search for the Historical Jesus.”
Crossan is professor emeritus of religious studies at DePaul University in Chicago. His own best-selling reconstructions of Jesus’ life include The Historical Jesus (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991) and Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (HarperSanFrancisco, 1994).
The Jerusalem Temple, the center of Israelite religion for nearly a millennium, was destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. In the following centuries, the synagogue became the focus of Jewish life. Steven Fine asks, “Did the Synagogue Replace the Temple?” His answer is, Not really. Not only were synagogues being built while the Second Temple still stood, but Temple and synagogue had different, though complementary, functions. In the sacred Temple, priests offered sacrifices and chanted ritual prayers; in the informal synagogue, the main activity was the study of Torah. Later, the synagogue did take over some of the destroyed Temple’s functions, such as providing a place for prayer—and one ancient rabbi referred to the synagogue as a “small temple.” Yet the synagogue was never the Temple’s replacement; rather, it was an intermediary institution, a this-worldly reflection of the eternally holy Temple that was to be rebuilt.
Assistant professor of rabbinic literature and history at Baltimore Hebrew University, Fine is curator of the exhibition, Sacred Realm: The Emergence of the Synagogue in the Ancient World, running through December 1996 at Yeshiva University in New York.
Soon after Cyrus the Great, king of Persia, conquered Babylon, he allowed the Jewish Exiles to return to their homeland. Three-quarters of a century were to pass before the returnees, together with a remnant that had stayed behind in ancient Israel, could repair the walls of Jerusalem and build the Second Temple. This great reconstruction project occurred under the leadership of, initially, Ezra and then also Nehemiah. Or was it Nehemiah and then Ezra? That we have to ask points out a rarely noticed problem in Biblical chronology. A cursory reading seems to place Ezra in Jerusalem a good 13 years before Nehemiah. Yet the accounts describe Nehemiah arriving in a depopulated city, while Ezra returns to a thriving metropolis. Author Aaron Demsky proposes a solution to the timing problem, suggesting that the books of Ezra and Nehemiah use two distinct dating systems. (see “Who Returned First—Ezra or Nehemiah?”)
Demsky is a professor of Bible at Bar-Ilan University, in Israel. He wrote the entry on literacy in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Near Eastern Archaeology, as well as several entries in the Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion (also forthcoming).
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A Note on Style
B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era), used by some of our authors and often used in scholarly literature, are the alternative designations corresponding to B.C. and A.D.
Who was Jesus? This question has dominated recent New Testament research, with scholars searching for its answer among biblical texts, the apocrypha and archaeological remains. Their work has garnered overwhelming interest among Bible scholars, who flock to hear each other’s accounts of the Real Jesus at academic conventions, and among the public, which has made books on the historical Jesus bestsellers. But, lately, a backlash has developed. In the December 1995 BR, New Testament scholar Luke Johnson (see “The Search for (the Wrong) Jesus”) claimed that these attempts to reconstruct the Jesus of history are destroying our only true […]
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