6) Who is Jesus? The “Jesus of history” or the “Jesus of the church”? Yesterday I listened to an interesting discussion of this topic called Der Mann aus Nazareth. It’s not surprising that this is a hot topic in Germany. And it was good to hear scholars calling us back to the biblical, core revelation about Jesus that is found in the Gospels. All too often German scholarship has concluded that the Gospels enshrine merely the kerygma of the early church. They are neither historical nor literary, but dogmatic and cultic – legends in which the Hellenistic mythological interpretation of Christ has been superimposed on the historical Jesus. I plan on returning to this subject in my book Godworld. In any event, I am convinced that it is unnecessary to separate the theological from the historical. The circumstances of the origin of the fourfold gospel will always be a matter of speculation, but historical evidence is not lacking (see my Why Four Gospels?).
(From Dave Black Online. Used by Permission)
