Very Man: Two good books on seeing Jesus
By Stephen Noll, Contending Anglican:
Twenty years ago, I gave a lecture titled “Seeing Jesus: Who Did Jesus Think He Was?” Here is the way I began it (updated a bit):
When I became a Christian in college, I remember the excitement of opening the Bible for the first time as a believer and reading it to find out about this mysterious stranger who had reached out to me in love. Before I knew it, I was in seminary and learning the dogmas of “higher criticism” of the Bible and the “backward development of Christology.” The two theories interlock: by picking apart the Bible, one can reconstruct a “historical Jesus” for our time. You know, Jesus Christ Superstar!
According to the backward development theory, we begin deconstructing the “high” Nicene Christology of John’s Gospel, where the Word was in the beginning with God and the Word was God and the Word became flesh in Jesus Christ. The Jesus of John’s Gospel can say quite explicitly: “Father, glorify thou me in thy own presence with the glory which I had with thee before the world was made” (John 17:5). But John’s Jesus, so the theory goes, is a very late, and maybe even idiosyncratic, product of the Church’s preaching and reflection. Moving backward in time, we next come to Matthew and Luke, where He becomes Son only at His birth. But even these Gospels are fantasies of the early church. From there we continue back to Mark’s Gospel where Jesus is acknowledged Son only at His baptism. But even here… you get the picture.
The backward development of Christology was standard-issue dogma in mainline seminaries twenty years ago, inspiring the so-called Jesus Seminar, whose “fellows” voted to grant eleven authentic sayings to the historical Jesus and claimed:
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