Talk:Jesus/Historical Jesus/Moral teacher

The sentence I inserted earlier has a citation needed tag on it:

Many Some secular writers agree ((fact)) that Jesus was an itinerant preacher (Matthew 4:23) who taught peace (Matthew 5:9) and love (Matthew 5:44), rights for women (Luke 10:42) and respect for children (Matthew 19:14), and who spoke out against the hypocrisy of religious leaders (Luke 13:15) and the rich (Matthew 19:24).

I borrowed the sentence from Rick Norwood's talk page (see User talk:Rick Norwood#Jesus His references are listed above.

However, these are references for Rick's entire paragraph (not just the sentence I borrowed), and I also don't have the page numbers. Can anyone help me narrow this citation down? Grigory Deepdelver of Brockenboring^TalkTCF 14:14, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Indeed, the Jesus Seminar itself has been brought up at least three times, with some discussion of where to place their views. I borrowed one sentence from Rick's paragraph here, and the citations are for the entire paragraph. I asked Rick to help narrow down the citation for this one sentence. He answered, "You ask for a citation. Sadly, I read a lot, and don't take notes. I'm sure all of the ideas I mention are from books I mention, but which idea comes from where is more than my powers of memory will supply. I think these ideas are in common currency. I have supplied Biblical references for the ideas. If you can't find a secondary source, how about changing it to read, "According to the Bible..."?" Now I'm asking for help from people on this talk page to help narrow down the citation.

I don't know how mainstream these ideas are. They have been added to the section "Other current ideas about Jesus," which may as well be "miscellanious ideas about Jesus."

Our last round of discussion on the Jesus Seminar itself can be found here. I think all we really decided was that the Seminar supports the vision hypothesis. If, indeed, the ideas of this one sentence are coming primarilty from the Seminar, we can always change the citation to reflect that. Grigory Deepdelver of Brockenboring^TalkTCF 09:53, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Okay, strike Schweitzer. From their Wikipedia articles, I see that Crossan and Funk are associated with the Jesus Seminar. That leaves Ehrman and Thompson. Do they agree with the sentence? Grigory Deepdelver of Brockenboring^TalkTCF 11:05, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Strike Thompson as well, based on this description from amazon.com, "But with The Messiah Myth, noted Biblical scholar Thomas L. Thompson argues that the quest for the historical Jesus is beside the point, since the Jesus of the Gospels never existed." That would place Thompson in with the Jesus-Myth folk, not the Ethicist folk. What does Ehrman say? Grigory Deepdelver of Brockenboring^TalkTCF 11:18, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

I looked at Thompson and searched in vain for his position on anything. Short of reading his book completely, its hard to say where he stands. He is summarizing everybody's opinion. Could you tell me where you found the quote above. I'm not inclined to trust it. --CTSWyneken 11:53, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

It's the publisher's blurb for the book, as presented onm Amazon and other sites and catalogues. Thompson also believes that David was a myth, and the most of ancient Israeli history is mythical. Paul B 12:02, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! I'll dig at it when time permits. The problem: I can't find him saying it at all. Very thick, scholarly prose. So-and-so said Jesus was such-and-such. He went on to say... Jesus was... This kind of approach is standard style, but leads people to believe the last statement is what the author of the book is saying. In fact, it is a summary of another scholar. The whole work is that way. --CTSWyneken 12:21, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

To answer John K, Rick Norwood and I are coming at this from slightly different angles: he was looking for the Skeptical view of Jesus, and I was looking for the Ethicist view of Jesus. Ever since I read Mere Christianity, I've been wondering whom C. S. Lewis directed his trilemma to. Wikipedia's article on trilemma states, "Lewis..attempts to portray as foolish those who dismiss Jesus as merely a moral teacher." Now, obviously Lewis predates the Jesus Seminar, so the Jesus-as-moral-teacher view that Lewis was responding to must also predate the Seminar. Yet the only author we have so far that predates Lewis is Thomas Jefferson.

I started out looking for the anti-Lewis, but when Jim62sch told us about Gary Wills' book What Jesus Meant, I expanded the topic of the paragraph slightly to "those who draw a distinction between Christianity and the moral principles attributed to Jesus." This apparenly includes Wills, the Seminar, and Jefferson. That's better than the original, vague, unsourced "have empathy with Jesus' moral principles"; however, I'm still looking for the people whom either Lewis was responding to, or who responded to Lewis.

Back to Storm Rider: apparently Ehrman's thesis is that the Gospels were altered by the early church and thus Jesus' message might have been different from what Christianity teaches? Is this too vague to include under the topic "those who draw a distinction between Christianity and the moral principles attributed to Jesus."? Grigory Deepdelver of Brockenboring^TalkTCF 18:57, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

These ideas were in common currancy long before the Jesus Seminar, and at least some of them appear in the Schweitzer book. But I got most of these ideas directly from the Bible, from the verses cited, which I long ago committed to memory. It is hard to pin down to a specific source ideas that are "in the air", and yet the C. S. Lewis quote above confirms that they were ideas in common currency, back in my earlier youth, when I avidly read everything C. S. Lewis wrote. Rick Norwood 20:37, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Indeed, with the Thomas Jefferson reference we've gone back to the Deists. I'm still not clear on Ehrman's position, though. Lewis was a starting point for me, to try to find out more about the Ethicist view. To be more precise, my starting point was the PBS special The Question of God, which contrasted the views of Freud and Lewis. From there I read Mere Christianity, and the rest followed. Grigory Deepdelver of Brockenboring^TalkTCF 20:55, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

• I hope nobody is seriously suggesting that single NT verses be used to support the claims of what secular scholars agree on ... --JimWae 20:59, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

If the sentence is coming primarily from the Jesus Seminar, perhaps we should mention what color beads they used. Grigory Deepdelver of Brockenboring^TalkTCF 23:25, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Weren't 19th century "higher criticism" types, like Strauss, along the lines of the "ethicist" tradition? john k 22:26, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Somewhat, yes. The search for the historical person of Jesus starts with the posthumous publication of the Reimarus essays in the late eighteenth century. Those works were attempts to use Enlightenment rationality to rid Christianity of supernaturalism. [1] Ultimately, the claim leads to a collapse of trinitarian doctrine, and a view that the importance of Jesus lies solely in his moral teachings.

By the 1790's it was fashonable in German schools of theology to write histories of Jesus. Hegel's first published work was a life of Jesus, for instance. The whole of Nineteenth century Christology, including Strauss, is dominated by the trend, and the Unitarian Church is born in this period. This so-called First Quest for the historical Jesus was finally ended in 1907 when Schweitzer published The Quest for the Historical Jesus, followed by the existentialist Christologies of Bultmann, Tillich and Barth.--Mrdarcey 02:05, 21 April 2006 (UTC)