Date/Time
Date(s) - 12/03/2014
6:30 pm - 9:00 pm

Location
St. Paul's Episcopal Church

Categories

• Public

The Interfaith Peace Project
An Interfaith Connections Program

THE INCARNATION
SUMMARY OF CRUCIAL ELEMENTS FOR THE HISTORICAL JESUS

 … Christianity after the destruction of Jerusalem was almost exclusively a gentile religion; it needed a gentile theology. And that is precisely what Paul provided. The choice between James’s vision of a Jewish religion anchored in the Law of Moses and derived from a Jewish nationalist who fought against Rome, and Paul’s vision of a Roman religion that divorced itself from Jewish provincialism and required nothing for salvation save belief in Christ, was not a difficult one for the second and third generations of Jesus’s followers to make. Two thousand years later, the Christ of Paul’s creation has utterly subsumed the Jesus of history. The memory of the revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering an army of disciples with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, the magnetic preacher who defied the authority of the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, the radical Jewish nationalist who challenged the Roman occupation and lost, has been almost completely lost to history. That is a shame. Because the one thing any comprehensive study of the historical Jesus should hopefully reveal is that Jesus of Nazareth— Jesus the man—is every bit as compelling, charismatic, and praiseworthy as Jesus the Christ. He is, in short, someone worth believing in.

Aslan, Reza (2013-07-16). Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
(Kindle Locations 3349-3358). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.