aa5874

You are PRESUMING that we are dealing with historical accounts when it has NOT ever been established that Jesus of the NT was a figure of history.

May I remind you, because HJers keep forgetting, that Jesus of the Canon is regarded as Non-historical and that is PRECISELY why there is a QUEST, a SEARCH, a PROBE into an Historical Jesus.

Do NOT jump the Gun.

The Search is still ON--No human Jesus of Nazareth, baptized by John and Crucified under Pilate has ever been found in the ENTIRE history of MANKIND.

A hundred years ago, Albert Schweitzer, claimed an historical Jesus is either LITERARY FICTION or an ESCHATOLOGICAL Concept.

Please, you MUST provide corroboration for ALL characters in the Canon, especially, the God of the Jews, Gabriel, Satan and Jesus.

I am NOT a Christian so I cannot accept the NT as an historical source by FAITH.

You RIDICULE people for their BELIEFS about Jesus as described in the NT but you yourself USE the very books as History and do so WITHOUT a shred of corroboration.

Some thing is radically wrong--why are you NOT a hypocrite with Double Standards???

LegionOnomaMoi

You may want to read the work before talking about what it claims. Schweitzer absolutely thought Jesus was a historical person, but thought that the "liberal lives" which dominated historical Jesus research prior to his von Reimarus zu Wrede simply made Jesus in their own image, while in fact "der historische Jesus wird unserer zeit ein Fremdling oder ein Rätsel sein." Not that he didn't exist (far from it), but that whoever he was, by virtue of his time, culture, worldview, etc., he was of necessity not the sort of individual the authors of the so-called "liberal lives" argued he was. That (combined with his influential argument that Jesus' mission was an eschatological one, not that Jesus was an eschatological concept), was one of Schweitzer's most important contributions.

aa5874

Now, I will NOT allow to make unsubstantiated claims. Please IDENTIFY where Albert Schweitzer stated that that was an actual Historical Jesus in the RESULTS of "The Quest for the Historical Jesus".

Please, this is a very serious matter. You must be held accountable for your claims and produce the evidence.

Please show where Albert Schweitzer did think Jesus was absolutely historical AFTER the Quest.

LegionOnomaMoi

You realize I actually quoted Scheitzer in my post, right?

What does this sentence mean? What do you mean RESULTS? Which part of the book counts as results? The last chapter ("Der Ertrag der Leben-Jesu-Forschung")? The last paragraph? The last several pages? The whole book?

After what quest? You mean after his analysis? Where he ends by saying it is a good thing that his analysis has revealed the Jesus of the liberal lives is a fiction, and that the actual historical Jesus was quite different? He practically closes on this: "Darum ist es gut, daß der historische Jesus den modernen stürzt, sich wider den modernen Geist erhebt und auch uns nicht den Frieden sendet, sondern das Schwert. Er ist nicht ein Lehrer und Grübler, sondern ein Gebieter und Herrscher." (p. 401). If Schweitzer closes by saying how good it is that the historical Jesus topples/brings down the "modern" Jesus, and that he was not a teacher but a socio-political would-be monarch, how on earth do you conclude that Schweitzer believed Jesus wasn't historical?

By the way, you are aware that after Schweitzer's book Von Reimarus zu Wrede and the 1910 English edition (The Quest of the Historical Jesus) became widely known, several other works (in particular Binet-Sanglé's La Folie de Jesus) were published which used Schweitzer's work to assert that Jesus was mentally-ill, and Schweitzer published a response (Die psychiatrische Beurteilung Jesu) in which he stated that Jesus was not mentally ill or insane, and that his conceptions of himself as a messiah and "son of god" were not meant to imply a claim to divinity but that this was projected onto him later. In other words, Schweitzer wrote an entire monograph (as his MD thesis, actually) defending Jesus against the charge of insanity, in which he repeatedly refers to the mental state of the historical Jesus.

aa5874

You realize that I actually quoted the FINDING of Albert Schweitzer in chapter 20 of "The Quest for the Historical Jesus", RIGHT?

Please, cut the rhetoric!!!
Just show me EXACTLY where in "The Quest for the Historical Jesus" did Albert Schweitzer claim Jesus was absolutely historical??

Albert Schweitzer did NOT find the Historical Jesus AFTER his QUEST.

It would appear to me that you are NOT prepared to SUPPORT your erroneous claims.

Albert Schweitzer wrote that " the historical Jesus was either a Literary Fiction or a Eschatological concept".

Albert Schweitzer appears to believe in a Spiritual Jesus..

Diogenes the Cynic

Here's the entire book.

You can pretty much look at any random page and see that he thinks Jesus was historical. What was controversial was his conclusion that Jesus was mistaken about who he was. That he was an apocalyptic prophet who was wrong (this is Bart Ehrman's view too, by the way).

LegionOnomaMoi

No, as I haven't read the English translation.

Rhetoric? Again, Schweitzer published his MD thesis defending Jesus' mental state. Die psychiatrische Beurteilung Jesu was in response to claims (the most influential of which used Schweitzer's work) that Jesus was mentally ill. Did Schweitzer respond "no, he wasn't mentally ill, he didn't exist" ? No, he didn't. Instead, he claimed that Jesus was neither paranoid (because, according to Schweitzer, he was socially adept and stable enough to gain followers) nor insane (because, although he did make messianic claims, these were not claims of divinity but eschatological/political claims, and were only interpreted differently after he, Jesus, failed).

Under your view, Schweitzer wrote Von Reimarus zu Wrede and claimed that Jesus wasn't historical, only to write a monograph a few years later which defended the historical Jesus against claims that he was mentally ill or delusional. So either you haven't a clue what Schweitzer argued in his initial work on historical Jesus research, or Schweitzer somehow went from arguing that Jesus was only a concept or a myth to claiming that he was a mentally stable individual. Which makes more sense?


I already did. I quoted him for you. But the entire book is about his claims concerning a historical Jesus. Which is why you might want to read it. It is not a critique of the historical Jesus or the view that Jesus was a historical person, but a critique of previous approaches to this historical person. So, for example, on p. 390-1, he criticizes Wrede for his focus on Mark alone as the source for understanding Jesus. Rather, "man kann das Leben Jesu nicht aus der Ordnung eines Evangeliums gewinnen, sondern nur aus der in den beiden ältesten Synoptisern besser oder schlechter erhaltenen Tradition." (one can not extract the life of Jesus from the arrangement of a single gospel, but only on the tradition preserved, more or less, in both the oldest Synoptics).
What "Quest"? The "Quest" in the title of the English is not Schweitzer's. It's those who came before him, whose approach he is criticizing.



Well that's a translation of part of what he wrote, but ripped out of context. I don't have the English translation, so I googled your "quote." I found the translation online here.

Schweitzer is talking about what future historians must realize. The historical Jesus will never be the theological Jesus that his predecessors sought. They tried to make a man who lived 2,000 years ago into something modern, and were bound to fail. The Jesus of history, according to Schweitzer, is a stranger to our time, so much so that an accurate historical depiction "of the personality and life of Jesus will not be a help, but perhaps even an offence to religion."

His approach throughout is not to claim, or even suggest, that Jesus never existed. Far from it. In fact, so certain was he that Jesus did exist that when his work was used to argue that Jesus was insane, he wrote a monograph defending Jesus' mental state.

stephan huller

Why are you wasting your time engaging a mashugana?

aa5874

Well, that is EXACTLY what I suspected. Please go and read it. Based on your own words " You may want to read the work before talking about what it claims".

GakuseiDon

Shouldn't that be "a mashuganaa5874"? He's like a Walking Trilemma, but without the "Lord" option.