author of a Gospel regarded Jesus by what he reported (and how he reported it), it is not always possible to penetrate beyond the Gospel portrayals of Jesus to Jesus himself. We cannot determine with certainty what Gospel statements about his life
and career are genuine.
5.
exactly it took place.
wretched end...
He is a man without a
Ranke-Heinemann, Uta, Putting Away Childish Things, Harper-Collins., San Francisco, 1995, p. 2: We encounter this truth in the person of Jesus. We know neither when and where he was born, nor when he died:
biography. We don’t know how long his public activity as a peacher lasted or where
Strictly speaking, we don’t know a whole lot more than that he was born, that there were people who followed him as his disciples, and that he was executed on the cross – the Roman version of the gallows – and thus came the
This Jesus lies burried not only in Jerusalem, but also beneath a mountain of kitsch, tall tales, and church phraseology.
6. Harvey, Andrew, Son of Man: The Mystical Path to Christ, Jeremy P. Tarcher / Putnam,NewYork, 1998, p. 4.: Historical criticism has proved, conclusively, that the Gospels are to be read not as Spirit-inspired, faithful eye-witness accounts of Jesus’ life but as carefully sculpted versions of that life, arranged to suit or promote different spiritual interests, personalities, and factions within the dramatic years of
The Gospels are neither directly inspired divine documents nor straight-forward historical records; neither divine revelations directly inspired by God nor eye-witness accounts written by people who had known Jesus and wanted to report clearly what they had experienced with him.
century, they express and condense the traditions of different early Cristian communities and were put into their current form slowly over a period of three
early Christianity.
hundred years.
Written in the last third of the first
7. Spong, John Shelby, Born of a Woman: A Bishop Rethinks The Birth of Jesus, Harper, San Francisco, 1992, p. 35. Jesus was interpreted by the early Christians in terms of their assumed and unquestioned concepts of God, modeled after the image of a heavenly king. The focus was on the exalted Jesus seated at the
right hand of the heavenly throne.
The image reflected the popular mythic
his father.
understanding of the universe as a kingdom.. But he was “born of a woman”.. His origins were equally as scandalous as his means of death. He was a nobody, a child of Nazareth out of which nothing good was thought to come. No one seemed to know
He might well have been illegitimate.
undetected and unexploded nuggets of dynamite in the landscape of the early
Christian tradition.
Hints of that are scattered like
8. Spong, John Shelby, Ibid., p. 41. ... Once again the interpretive task went to work. He was not an illegitimate child, God was his father; he was born of the Holy Spitit. He was not a native of Nazareth, he was born in Bethlehem, the city of David. That Bethlehem birth had been foretold by the prophet Micah. He was not a nobody,
he was of the royal house of David...
9. Gruber, Elmar R. & Kersten, Holger, The Original Jesus: The Buddhist Sources of Christianity, Element Books, Inc., Rockport, MA, 1995, pp. 3-4.: Hardly any other theme has caused such a stir in the Western world as the person of “Jesus of Nazareth”; hardly any other theme has led to the writing of so many books, or such animated and passionate discussions. And yet the personality of the historical Jesus is veiled in profound darkness. For a millennium and a half there were only accounts depicting Jesus in accordance with official Church theology, written with the objective