Thanks to Jim W. for bringing this to our attention.
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The Jesus Seminar Squared
In an attempt to move beyond the work of the Jesus Seminar, which debated the acts and words of Jesus, a new project will attempt to discuss and debate whether Jesus really existed or not.
Internationally recognized biblical scholars are set to launch The Jesus Project, a new endeavour to examine the historical existence of Christ. Among those attending the conference are some of the biggest names in biblical studies today:
– James D. Tabor, chairman of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, and author of The Jesus Dynasty: A New Historical Investigation of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity.
– Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton University, who was awarded the Rockefeller, Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships.
– Van Harvey, professor emeritus of religious studies at Stanford University and author of The Historian and the Believer.
– John Dominic Crossan, leading member of the Jesus Seminar
Read all about it here.
(Via Dr Jim West.)
2 thoughts on “Did Jesus Exist?”
The movements, actions and miraculous labors of Jesus could well have been the dramatist’s efforts to portray histrionically the occult experiences of the soul in its evolution. Such features as the birth, the awakening of intellectual power at age twelve, the temptation or stress of conflict between the body and the soul, the development of the soul’s divine potency to heal the ills and weaknesses of the flesh, the overcoming and casting out of the demonic forces of the natural man by the Christly influence, the symbolic raising of the “dead” inert spiritual power to a new birth of life, the anguish at the height of the clash between the two poles of life–the whole experience of the soul under the long domination of the animal instinct being itself the essence of crucifixion on the cross of matter–then the final victory in the soul’s radiant transfiguration of the moral man by the spirit’s light, and the ultimate resurrection of the soul out of its “death” under the suffocating heaviness of the life of sense–what are all these but a dramatic rendition of the phases of the soul’s life under the duress of its incarceration in mortal body?
PEACE BE WITH YOU
MICKY