Mythologizing Jesus

Download or read book Mythologizing Jesus written by Dennis R. MacDonald and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-05-07 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our culture is well-populated with superheroes: Superman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, and more. Superheroes are not a modern invention; in fact, they are prehistoric. The gods and goddesses of the Greeks, for example, walked on water, flew, visited the land of the dead, and lived forever. Ancient Christians told similar stories about Jesus, their primary superhero—he possessed incredible powers of healing, walked on water, rose from the dead, and more. Dennis R. MacDonald shows how the stories told in the Gospels parallel many in Greek and Roman epics with the aim of compelling their readers into life-changing decisions to follow Jesus. MacDonald doesn’t call into question the existence of Jesus but rather asks readers to examine the biblical stories about him through a new, mythological lens.

Download or read book Two Shipwrecked Gospels written by Dennis R. MacDonald and published by Society of Biblical Lit. This book was released on 2012-06-29 with total page 729 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With characteristic boldness and careful reassessment of the evidence, MacDonald offers an alternative reconstruction of Q and an alternative solution to the Synoptic Problem: the Q+/Papias Hypothesis. To do so, he reconstructs and interprets two lost books about Jesus: the earliest Gospel, which was used as a source by the authors of Mark, Matthew, and Luke; and the earliest commentary on the Gospels, by Papias of Hierapolis, who apparently knew Mark, Matthew, and the lost Gospel, which he considered to be an alternative Greek translation of a Semitic Matthew. MacDonald also explores how these two texts, well known into the fourth century, shipwrecked with the canonization of the New Testament and the embarrassment at outmoded eschatologies in both the lost Gospel and Papias’s Exposition.

Download or read book Questioning the Historicity of Jesus written by Raphael Lataster and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-07-01 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume moves beyond the mainstream scholarly scepticism over the Christ of Faith and considers if there is sufficient evidence to establish the existence of the more mundane Historical Jesus. Using the logical tools of the analytic philosopher, Lataster finds that the relevant sources are unreliable as historical documents, and that the key method of those purporting that the Historical Jesus existed is to appeal to sources that do not exist. Considering an ancient hypothesis suggesting that Jesus began as a celestial messiah that certain Second Temple Jews already believed in, and was later allegorised in the Gospels, Lataster discovers that it is more reasonable to at least be agnostic over Jesus’ historicity.

Download or read book The Rise of Modern Mythology, 1680-1860 written by Burton Feldman and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2000-04-22 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book on modern mythology

Download or read book Jesus from Outer Space written by Richard Carrier and published by Pitchstone Publishing (US&CA). This book was released on 2020-10-20 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The earliest Christians believed Jesus was an ancient celestial being who put on a bodysuit of flesh, died at the hands of dark forces, and then rose from the dead and ascended back into the heavens. But the writing we have today from that first generation of Christians never says where they thought he landed, where he lived, or where he died. The idea that Jesus toured Galilee and visited Jerusalem arose only a lifetime later, in unsourced legends written in a foreign land and language. Many sources repeat those legends, but none corroborate them. Why? What exactly was the original belief about Jesus, and how did this belief change over time? In Jesus from Outer Space, noted philosopher and historian Richard Carrier summarizes for a popular audience the scholarly research on these and related questions, revealing in turn how modern attempts to conceal, misrepresent, or avoid the actual evidence calls into question the entire field of Jesus studies--and present-day beliefs about how Christianity began.

Download or read book Jesus written by Jay Parini and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2013 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Profiles Jesus Christ as the human face of God, taking into the account the multiple ways his life has been viewed and retold, and dramatizing the transformation from a man to a myth.

Download or read book A Thematic Access-Oriented Bibliography of Jesus’s Resurrection written by Michael J. Alter and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2019-12-31 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The keystone of Christianity is Jesus's physical, bodily resurrection. Present-day scholars can be significantly challenged as they forage through voluminous documents on the resurrection of Jesus. The literature measures well over seven thousand sources in English-language books alone. This makes finding specific sources that are most relevant for specific scholarly purposes an arduous task. Even when a specific book is relevant, finding the parts of the book that are most relevant to the resurrection rather than other topics often requires additional effort. A Thematic Access-Oriented Bibliography of Jesus's Resurrection addresses these challenges in several ways. First, the bibliography organizes more than seven thousand English sources into twelve main categories and then thirty-four subcategories, which are designed to help you find the most relevant literature quickly and efficiently. Embedded are pro and con arguments which support efficient access through brief annotations and then annotate the diversity and complexity of the field of religion by including sources that represent a diverse range of views: theistic (e.g., Christian, Jewish, Muslim, etc.), agnostic, and nontheistic. The objective of this bibliography is to provide convenient access to relevant sources from a variety of perspectives, allowing you to browse or find the one source accurately and with ease.