This review article examines the late agnostic New Testament scholar Maurice Casey’s criticisms of the so-called mythicist position, which argues that Jesus did not exist. Casey’s volume Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? is viewed along with Bart Ehrman’s critique of similar ideas in his text Did Jesus Exist? We will highlight important objections raised by these agnostic scholars against those in the mythicist movement, including topics such as various idiosyncrasies leading to historically deficient methods, egregiously (...) latedating the canonical Gospels, claiming inspiration from earlier mystery religions, and positing textual interpolations. (shrink)

In the quest for the historical Jesus, memory studies are seen as an important breakthrough in the study of the historical Jesus and the way forward in establishing the historicity of the Gospel traditions. This article evaluates the claim made by memory studies by evaluating memory studies’ critique on the methodology of the criteria approach. In this evaluation attention is given to the methodological points of departure of memory studies, including an assessment of the few examples (...) memory studies thus far have produced in their investigation of the historicity of the Gospels and the historical Jesus. The conclusion reached is that memory studies are guilty of what they accuse the criteria approach, and thus far have not yet offered a viable methodological alternative to the current criteria approach used in historical Jesus research. (shrink)

Preliminary Note on Terminology: In Jesuit-related documents, the Latin term Nostri [“Ours”] is used to refer to Jesuits, to avoid unnecessarily using a word derived from the name of Jesus. The translations that follow retain the use of “Ours” in English following the Latin. The reader should remember that this term refers to members of the Society of Jesus. Also in the documents of Clavius (Historical Documents, Part II), the term scholastics is used, which refers to young (...) Jesuit seminarians who have pronounced their initial vows as Jesuits but have not yet completed their studies and have not yet been ordained as Catholic priests. Similarly, the term philosophers refers to Jesuit seminarians who have finished studying humanities, are currently studying philosophy, and have not yet started their study of theology. (shrink)

There has often been an adversarial relationship between the “search for the historical Jesus” and the Church. But Christian belief and practice must be correctly related to Jesus, so the search is important to Christianity. It is argued that the New Testament picture of Jesus is basically accurate and reliable. Paul’s statements about Jesus are examined. It is significant that Mark’s picture of Jesus was convincing to Matthew and Luke. Jesus’ self-understanding in the (...) Gospels is examined, and it is argued that he implicitly claimed to be divine. (shrink)

Radical form criticism has raised a roadblock on the way from the Jesus of history to the church's Christology. Are there alternative approaches to the problem? Or does historical criticism in itself bring an end to the direct relation between Jesus and the church's faith?

Name der Zeitschrift: Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook Jahrgang: 19 Heft: 1 Seiten: 135-152.

In order to contextualize the view of Jesus presented in The Anti-Christ as well as elsewhere, this chapter examines older examples of the critique of the “historical” Jesus before turning to the “quest for the historical Jesus” (as Albert Schweitzer called it) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ancient examples of the critique of the “historical Jesus” include Celsus, Porphyry, and Julian the Apostate, and it is argued that, despite the overlap between them (...) as exemplars of the tradition of anti-Christian writing and his own critique, Nietzsche does not mention them because, as a classical philologist, he could assume that his audience would be familiar at least with the existence of these works, if not with their specific arguments. The chapter then considers such significant staging-posts in the quest for the historical Jesus as Reimarus, Christian Hermann Weisse, and Bruno Bauer; A.F. Gfrörer and G.F. Daumer; and Ernest Renan, a figure in whom renewed interest has been shown since the appearance of Robert D. Priest’s study, The Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, & Religion in Nineteenth-Century France (2015). Although nowadays it can be hard to appreciate the extent to which Renan was a public intellectual, he exercised an important influence on such theologically divergent figures as Paul Claudel and Alfred Loisy, and Nietzsche drew on material from Renan’s Histoire des origines du christianisme (7 vols, 1863–1883) while nevertheless voicing (at times, acerbic) criticism of Renan. In its conclusion, the chapter considers some of the problems with Nietzsche’s instrumentalization or even “weaponization” of the discourse of philology against the discourse of theology (such as those highlighted by Anthony K. Jensen in his account of Nietzsche’s role in the “quest” for the historical Jesus). (shrink)

This essay advances an innovative perspective on war by defining it not as an extension of individual aggressiveness but as public intergroup violence, the product of collective intelligence and force. War is qualitatively distinct from interpersonal conflicts, since it presupposes technical and symbolic organization, shared memory and ideology, strategic coordination, and political legitimation. Thus, the naturalization of war and peace, through theodicies or anthropologies, is rejected, and its historical-cultural contingency is emphasized, as an epigenetic and technical process of human (...) sociality. By constructing a differentiated typology of violence (intergroup, interpersonal, hybrid, unilateral, pseudo-warlike), the essay offers a new philosophical taxonomy that clarifies the specific sense of war as a motivated, collective, and contingent phenomenon. Peace, in turn, emerges as an anthropological and juridical possibility rooted in civic self-critique, political deliberation, and cooperative capabilities. The original contribution lies in articulating the philosophy of war with cosmopolitan ethics and law, thus providing a conceptual reconstruction of the borders and relationships between violence, war, and peace. (shrink)

This article aims to study the origin, nature and development of eschatology and apocalyptic in the post-exilic Judaism over the centuries III and II BC. Its theoretical reference is based on two scientific analyzes about the two phenomena: the historical-critical analysis of Friedrich Dingermann and the analysis from the history of religions made by Johann Maier. As a method of approach is used the deductive method, whereby it is possible, from the main present theories, analyze each one within their (...) own ethos. Besides this one, it used as the procedure method the comparative method, through the intertwining of the studied theories that allows a glimpse at the evolution that the two phenomena experienced in the religious history of Ancient Israel and Judaism. (shrink)