Searching High and Low for the Real Jesus of Nazareth
John P. Meier is the guest lecturer for University of California Television’s (UCTV) Burke Lectureship on Religion & Society lecture series. Here, Meier discusses the subject of Jesus the Jew–But What Sort of Jew?
Meier is a Catholic priest and a professor of New Testament at the University of Notre Dame. He is perhaps the foremost biblical scholar of his generation. His work represents the first time an American Catholic biblical scholar has attempted a full-scale, rigorously scientific treatment of the “historical Jesus.”
Meier’s critically-acclaimed 4-part series A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus employs tools of historical-critical research to delineate who Jesus of Nazareth was and what he intended. Meier suggests that such research might admit agreement of Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and agnostic scholars.
The tetralogy covers:
- Volume 1 (1991) differentiates the historical Jesus from the Biblical Jesus. It analyzes sources, including the New Testament and non-canonical works. For deciding what comes from Jesus as distinct from early Christian tradition it proposes these primary criteria: the criterion of embarrassment, of discontinuity, of multiple attestation, of coherence and of rejection and execution.
- Volume 2 (1994) is in three main parts: Jesus’ relationship to John the Baptist (as ‘mentor’), Jesus’ message of the kingdom of God and accounts of Jesus’ miracles in ancient and modern minds.
- Volume 3 (2001) places Jesus in the context of his followers, the crowds, and his competitors (including Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Samaritans, scribes, and Zealots) in first-century Palestine.
- Volume 4 (2009) deals with the ministry of the historical Jesus in relation to Mosaic Law, such subjects as divorce, oaths, and observance of the Sabbath and purity rules, and the various love commandments in the Gospels.
Watch below as Meier discusses the results of his extensive research into discovering the historical Jesus:
July 5, 2009 at 9:57 am
Search in the Netzarim website, especially the History Museum pages, and you will find a wealth of historical documentation and scientific analysis not found elsewhere.
July 5, 2009 at 10:27 am
Along the same lines, I preferred The Religion of Jesus the Jew by the Jewish scholar Geza Vermes. Vermes locates the New testament sayings of Jesus squarely in the middle of documented Second Temple Judaism and the tradition of Hillel.
Larry Hurtado’s Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity also does a really impressive job of examining how the earliest Christians, in a fiercely monotheistic culture, managed to integrate the man Jesus into their concept of God; he does it by looking at how they describe their own worship – really a fascinating book.
July 5, 2009 at 12:58 pm
Thanks for the recommendation, Silouan. I’ve been quite interested lately in how much the Jewish culture and tradition may have influenced Jesus the man.