This chapter was an occasion for me to reflect on Chartism and unjust death. Crossley notes for the Chartist interpretation of Jesus: Jesus’s death was regularly understood as an example of the unjust end that always awaits the benevolent reformer, though this Jesus did not always passively accept his fate. From our point of view, … (10) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: Chartism and the Forgotten Quests by James Crossley

A couple of passages stood out to me in this essay. Firstly, characterizing Augustine’s thoughts on time: In that latter masterwork, time emerged as the great divide between humans—intrinsically time-bound and, thus, caught up in confounding problems of interpretation, be it of experience, of language, or of biblical texts—and the timeless god for whom the … (9) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: The Late Latin Quest by Paula Fredriksen

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Religious dispositions are not so much viewed as one’s subjective set of beliefs for the faithful but rather the way they experience the world, like how the world might appear/present itself to a schizophrenic in a conspiracy saturated way.  The religious details seem woven into the fabric of reality itself for the believer. Young writes: … (8) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: Myth and Mythmaking by Stephen Young

One of the great underreported sins of New Testament scholarship is the problem that, unless we’re told by the writers, there is no way to tell whether specific interpretive units like the lord’s supper or the empty tomb have their origins as historical memory, lie, rumors, dreams, visions, hearsay, etc. We know in the case … (7) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: RELIGION, VISIONS, AND ALTERNATIVE HISTORICITY by Deane Galbraith

Some things mythicists point to is the lack of detail about Jesus in Paul, and Mark as allegorical literature. This, though, needs to be qualified in a way that favors historicity, not mythicism. Paul says he resolved to know nothing among you but Christ and him crucified (1 Cor 2:2), which suggest Paul knew far … (6) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: Missing Pieces by Mark Goodacre

Keith gives an interesting example of how even if we consider something to be true of Jesus, there is so much that we still don’t know. He writes: If I could indict atomistic approaches to the historical Jesus for one thing, it would be that their attempts to recover tradition out of the narrative frameworks … (5) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: Beyond What is Behind by Chris Keith

Bond stresses the difficulty in trying to distill historical information about Jesus from the gospels. She writes: Thus the many chreiai in the Gospels are not primarily repositories of oral tradition, but fundamentally literary creations, crafted to take their place in a larger biographical work… There is most likely some historical fact at the core … (4) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: Biography by Helen K. Bond