Salle 2, Site Marcelin Berthelot
Open to all
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The first part of this lecture deals with the hermeneutical challenge posed by philosophy of enlightenment and historical-critical interpretation of the New Testament. The view of Jesus as a human being in contrast to a divine figure called into question the Christian doctrine about the two natures of Christ. Moreover, the differences between the Gospels were taken as evidence that not all of them- perhaps even none of them - would provide a historically accurate portrait of Jesus' activity. The quest of the historical Jesus thus originated at a time when critical reason was established as the benchmark of the interpretation of biblical texts. This rational, critical view of Jesus and the Gospels raised the question of the most reliable sources about Jesus. To answer this question, Jesus scholars in the19th century developed the so-called Two-Source-Theory according to which the Gospel of Mark is the oldest Gospel, supplemented by a second source which was not preserved by itself. However, today it is widely acknowledged that the quest of the historical Jesus cannot be restricted to the New Testament Gospels or even to the Synoptic Gospels. Instead, the New Testament Gospels have to be integrated into a wider spectrum of early Christian texts about Jesus and used together with other remains - Jewish writings, archaeological and numismatic testimonies, as well as other early Christian texts - as sources for the historical Jesus. Moreover, the problem of the incompatibility of the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith raised by historical-critical Jesus research cannot be answered just by referring to the available sources. If Jesus was a first century Jew who addressed his fellow Jews with the call to conversion because of God's dawning kingdom; who healed the sick and disputed with the Pharisees and scribes and was eventually crucified by the Romans - how could he become the Messiah of Israel and the Son of God who was believed as resurrected from the dead and venerated as exalted Lord? This problem has concerned theologians and Jesus scholars since the raise of critical theology. Scholars have answered this question in different ways. David Friedrich Strauss argued that the historical contours of the Jesus figure would vanish in the mist of the interpretations of the Gospel writers who used mythological ideas, mainly from the Old Testament, to interpret Jesus' activity on earth. Other scholars maintained that despite the interpretation of Jesus' activity and his passion from the perspective of Christian faith it would be possible and even necessary to reconstruct the historical traces of Jesus in the pre-Easter period.