
The Wisdom of Jesus
Between the Sages of Israel and the Apostles of the Church
Charles W. Hedrick(Author)
Wipf & Stock Publishers
Published on 7. November 2014
Book
Paperback/Softback
246 pages
978-1-62564-909-6 (ISBN)
Description
How would the image of Jesus appear if it were based only on sayings that scholars generally agreed originated with Jesus? And how would the wisdom of Jesus reflected in those few sayings compare to the wisdom of the sages of ancient Israel and the apostles of the early first-century church? To answer such questions historians face serious difficulties. Everything we know about Jesus comes from what later writers thought about him; none of the things they claimed he said came directly from him. "Everything in the early Christian gospels is either derived from historical memory, or is borrowed, or invented," Hedrick claims. Even those few sayings receiving near-universal agreement from historians as sayings of Jesus can only be affirmed as probable rather than certain. The aim of this study is to allow Jesus to speak for himself directly to readers, as nearly as possible in his own words without the theological explanations of his interpreters. The resulting image of Jesus that emerges is a complex picture of a first-century lower-class man who was not religious in a traditional sense. His discourse was the language of the secular world and addressed issues of common life.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Eugene
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 15 mm
Weight
408 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-62564-909-6 (9781625649096)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
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E-Book
11/2014
Wipf and Stock Publishers
€29.49
Available for download
Person
Charles W. Hedrick is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Missouri State University. Among his many publications are The Apocalypse of Adam, Many Things in Parables: Jesus and His Modern Critics, and When History and Faith Collide: Studying Jesus. He is the co-editor of Gospel of the Savior: A New Ancient Gospel; Nag Hammadi, Gnosticism, and Early Christianity; and Ancient Fiction: The Matrix of Early Christian and Jewish Narrative.
Robert Hodgson Jr. is Dean of the American Bible Society Nida Institute for Biblical Scholarship.