Life of Jesus: Introduction to the Course

Due to the fact that an online course provides no classroom time and since this course will require an explanation of methodological issues and my evaluation of the various readings and how they fit into the history of the study of the Life of Jesus, a personal blog seemed the best way to make my lecture information available to you.

The most important thing to keep in mind as you begin this course, is that the focus of this course is the Life of Jesus as interpreted by scholars within a modern secular academic environment. If you have not yet noticed, much of modern secular academia is permeated with strong sense of skepticism when it comes to any kind of traditional religious beliefs. You will find that to be true with the authors who have written the books used in this course. The choice of these books by Borg, Ehrman and Fredriksen was based on the fact that the Religious Studies department at UNO endorses the historical critical method of Biblical interpretation. If you have already taken a college course in Religion at UNO, you probably have been exposed to this method and mindset. Both Ehrman and Borg offer their defense of this approach and make every effort to make it sound like the historical critical method is the only way a sensible modern American could approach the Christian New Testament. Now you may choose to disagree with them, and that is most certainly your right. However, be forewarned that this course is as much about the historical critical study of the life of Jesus as it is about the historical Jesus himself. A related caution would be that the modern study of the historical Jesus excludes anything that might have to do with Jesus that was not part of his earthly life. To call Jesus Lord or Savior is categorized as responses by others to Jesus, but not some thing that could be claimed to be a transcendent truth about Jesus. Therefore, in order to make sense of what might seem to you a rather truncated evaluation of the person of Jesus, it is important to understand how the methodology works.

The reason why the methodology plays such a central role in how one goes about studying the historical Jesus is the fact that there are certain presuppositions about the nature of reality and the nature of the Biblical texts that influence the entire interpretive process. Coming up shortly you will see a series of four Blog postings that will present you with the historical development of the historical critical method. I encourage you to take the time to read them, so that at least you will know why Borg, Ehrman and Fredriksen say what they do about the historical Jesus, even though you may not be wish to agree with them at all.