The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition by Paul Rhodes Eddy & Gregory A. Boyd

Author:Paul Rhodes Eddy & Gregory A. Boyd
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Religion, Jesus, New Testament, Biblical Studies
ISBN: 9780801031144
Publisher: Baker Academic
Published: 2007-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

3: ONE AMONG MANY LEGENDS?

1. We remind the reader that for the purposes of this work the only distinction we are making between “legend” and “myth” is that “legends” purportedly are about (relatively recent) historical figures while “myths” generally are not.

2. On the history of religions school, beyond the sources cited in chap. 2, see W. G. Kummel, The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of Its Problems, trans. S. Gilmour and H. C. Kee (Nashville: Abingdon, 1972), 206–324; K. Rudolph, “Religionsgeschichtliche Schule,” in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. M. Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 12:293—96; H. Koester, “The History-of-Religions School, Gnosis, and Gospel of John,” Studia Theologica 40 (1986): 115–36. The claim that the Christian view of Jesus parallels other myths goes back at least to Celsus in the second century (Origen, Against Celsus 2.55–56). Some early Protestants used a version of this argument as a polemic against Roman Catholicism. They claimed that Roman Catholic sacramental theology could be traced back to magical views found in ancient Greco-Roman mystery religions. One of the first to offer this critique was Isaac Casaubon in his 1614 work, De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes. On the consideration of the influence of ancient mystery religions on early Christianity from the Renaissance period into the nineteenth century, see E. Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958).

3. This point presupposes the “radical early Christian diversity thesis,” the idea that early Christianity was not a united movement, but from the beginning was characterized by a number of very diverse communities, each with its own understanding of who Jesus was and what following him entailed. Most contemporary forms of this view are influenced by Walter Bauer’s famous work, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, 2nd ed., ed. R. A. Kraft and G. Krodel, trans. Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971). Bauer, of course, had predecessors. F. C. Baur and the Tübingen school-whose ideas were indebted to an unabashed Hegelianism-proposed the idea of a radical tension in early Christianity embodied in the antagonism between Jewish (e.g., Peter) and Hellenistic (e.g., Paul) factions. More recent incarnations of this perspective include J. M. Robinson and H. Koester, Trajectories through Early Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971); and R. Wilken, The Myth of Christian Beginnings: History’s Impact on Belief (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971). For several important critical assessments of Bauer’s thesis, see M. Desjardins, “Bauer and Beyond: On Recent Scholarly Discussions of Hairesis in the Early Christian Era,” Second Century 8 (1991): 65–82; J. Lebreton, review of Rechtglaeubigkeit und Ketzerei by W. Bauer, Recherches de Science Religieuse 25 (1935): 605–10; J. McCue, “Orthodoxy and Heresy: Walter Bauer and the Valentinians,” Vigiliae Christianae 33 (1979): 118–30; H. E. W. Turner, The Pattern of Christian Truth: A Study in the Relations between Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Early Church (London: Mowbray, 1954); and esp. T. A. Robinson, The Bauer Thesis Examined: The Geography of Heresy in the Early Christian Church (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1988).

4. W. Bousset, Kyrios Christos, trans.

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