I just started reading Helmut Koester’s From Jesus to the Gospels: Interpreting the New Testament in Its Context and I thought this bit from the preface is relevant to the recent posts from Matthew Montonini, Michael Bird, and Ben Witherington, which were all collated and added to by Doug Chaplin. Koester said:
Isolating particular types of traditions as belonging to Jesus of Nazareth–no matter how critical or how conservative this approach is–has proven to be a dead-end road. This is clearly shown in the more recent literature about Jesus. Whether Jesus is presented as a magician, or as a Cynic philosopher, or as the follower of the female Wisdom goddess, or as a revolutionary prophet–it is always a Jesus according to the hermeneutical presuppositions of the modern author. The historian can be liberated from such presuppositions and prejudices only by the establishment of a historical trajectory. In such a trajectory it is necessary to consider the totality of the historical, religious, theological political, and social components of the entire history that reaches from the prophetic tradition of Israel (rarely considered in modern studies of the historical Jesus!) and the Roman imperial eschatology to the reception of the tradition about Jesus in the surviving Gospel materials.
From Jesus to the Gospels, (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2007), vii.
Food for thought.
B”H
Posted in Biblical Studies, Historical Jesus
