RELI 1690: World Religions — 22363 by Edited by Mary Nyangweso

RELI 1690: World Religions — 22363 by Edited by Mary Nyangweso

Author:Edited by Mary Nyangweso
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-05-04T09:50:05+00:00


Figure 4.1 Jesus Christ the all-powerful ruler of the universe stares out at viewers in this thirteenth-century mosaic from the Hagia Sophia church (later a mosque, now a museum) in Istanbul.

published posthumously in 1778. Reimarus stressed the distinction between the proclamation of Jesus by his early followers and the message of Jesus himself. According to Reimarus, Jesus was a Jew who fully accepted the messianic expectation of his contemporary Jews. His innovation was in proclaiming that the messianic kingdom (i.e.

the kingdom of God) was about to be realized. As a Deist, Reimarus denied the reality of miracles – that is, events contrary to the laws of nature – but he acknowledged that Jesus performed healings that his contemporaries took to be miraculous. Jesus saw himself as the promised messiah, but few of the Jews of either Galilee or Jerusalem believed in him, and his death on the cross marked the tragic end of his mission. After his death, his disciples decided to continue living the life Jesus had taught them, so they stole Jesus’ body, invented stories about his resurrection, and announced that Jesus would return soon to the earth to save the faithful. Reimarus’s portrait of Jesus was a radical departure from the traditional Jesus accepted by the vast majority of Christians in the eighteenth century, so it is not surprising that his work was roundly renounced by many.

Nevertheless, Reimarus’s work had raised many questions regarding the historicity of the gospel accounts, questions that were to infl uence future scholars.

In the wake of the publication of the Wolfenbüttel Fragments, many people over the next century undertook to write “lives of Jesus,” either historical reconstructions or fi ctional recastings. One of the most infl uential was that of David Friedrich Strauss, Th e

Life of Jesus Critically Examined. Strauss was a university student in Berlin when he came under the spell of the famous theologian F. D. E. Schleiermacher. He was particularly fascinated by Schleiermacher’s lectures on the life of Jesus. He soon realized, however, that the Jesus that Schleiermacher painted in his lectures was not so much historical as the idealized Jesus that fi t into his own theological system, a Jesus who refl ected the 187

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concerns and ideals of early nineteenth century liberal Christianity. Determined to develop a more historically accurate picture of Jesus, Strauss devoted himself to writing a historical life of Jesus, which he published in 1835. In response to his many critics, he issued several more editions over the next 30 years, and he also wrote other books on the subject. Despite the disciples whose names were associated with the gospels of Matthew and John, Strauss denied that any of the gospels were written by eyewitnesses.

He characterized the stories of Jesus’ birth and resurrection as myth, detracting from the more historical events of Jesus’ actual life. Strauss, a devoted student of the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, took the traditional Christian doctrine of Jesus as God and man and reinterpreted it in light of Hegelian philosophy.



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