No Robots

You are misunderstanding "Maximal." Klausner, for example, certainly didn't hold that Jesus was god in flesh. "Maximal" simply refers to those who hold that there is sufficient evidence in the documents to construct a historically valid and relatively complete portrait of the central figure. Naturally, there exists within this group widely differing views of that figure, going from critical interpretation (Klausner) to literalist fideism (traditional Church doctrine).

hjalti

Right, and I don't see any significant difference between this "Maximal" Jesus and the "Historical" Jesus.

No Robots

I think that spin wants to use "Historical" as a synonym for what I would call "Minimal," ie. those who hold that, while there is a historical Jesus, we can never achieve any satisfactory certainty about him. William Arnal certainly fits this category, but I would also put include here Schweitzer and Bultmann.

mountainman

How extensive is spin's ignore list?

FWIW Spin secretly supports the unknown "Traditional Jesus" position as a safehaven for textual critics of the new testament who dont want to deal with the interpretation of the great and ignoble silence of the historical evidence.

hjalti

Yeah, there really doesn't seem to be a lot of difference between those two positions in my opinion.

Rich Oliver

I'd prefer heavenly rather than mythological for the type of Jesus.

I think there should be a category for Jesus being a real historical person, but the Gospels being deliberate falsification of his life. This is essentially what underlies the Da Vinci code and the endless "blood line" books.

jgoodguy

A problem with countering the Da Vinci Code et.al for theists is that it is difficult to use fiction to prove other fiction is fiction.

Rich Oliver

And also what about the traditional, Muslim view, is that not basically the same as the Da Vinci Code? - Jesus was a wise man, whose teachings were deliberately falsified in the Gospels.

Chili

It is quit a leap to call Jesus a man if he is never presented as a man in the Gospels, I think.

Chili

I wrote this to say that Jesus was everything we present him to be except a man until Pilate 'looked at the man' and allowed Jesus to be crucified but set the man free under the name of Bar-abbas. This so ended the dual nature of Jesus with the explicit removal of Judaism as the prime mover of this event in the mind of the human being they once called Joseph.