Explore the vast range of titles available.

Historical research on the person and life of Jesus of Nazareth undoubtedly has great significance for theology and the Christian faith. One of the specific issues that exegetes and historians who deal with Jesus have been discussing is his self-awareness. The question of who Jesus considered himself to be is of course not entirely resolvable. However, it is possible to derive from a critical reading of the New Testament texts certain directions of thought about what Jesus’ Christology could have been. This article, analysing the results of the Jesus Quest research, attempted to answer the question of whether Jesus saw himself as the final messiah and what significance this has for theology. The first part of the article analyses the view that Jesus did not consider himself to be the final messiah, while the second part analyses the view that he considered himself to be one. The third part will show the theological significance of Jesus’ Christology.ContributionTheological reflection on Jesus’ self-awareness is an element of building bridges between the historical approach to the origins of Christianity and systematic theology. These reflections can inspire theological development in the context of the challenge of a critical-historical reading of Scripture. There is considerable scholarship on the self-awareness of the historical Jesus and the roots of belief in Jesus’ messianic nature. This article, however, takes a theological, not merely historical, perspective. It seeks to consider whether and how Jesus’s views about himself might be relevant to Christian theology. The fundamental contribution of these considerations lies in reframing messiahship through praxis rather than title, and in its reflection on the theological implications of Jesus’ mission.

The purpose of this paper is to present arguments to disprove Thiering's claim that documents like the New Testament, Dead Sea Scrolls, the writings of Josephus, etc. might reveal the actual historical Jesus. Her use of the pesher technique is also discussed critically. It is shown that Thiering's pesher technique is a misconception of the pesher used in the Qumran commentaries and that she overestimated the importance of pesher as a method of text interpretation. The evaluation of Thiering's attempt to equate Christianity and Essenism, as well as the so-called similarities between the Qumran community and early Christianity, will follow logically.

Abraham Geiger’s reclaiming of Jesus for Judaism is part of a counter-discourse and counter-history developed in the 19th century by representatives of the “Wissenschaft des Judentums“ (Jewish Studies) theologians, and Jewish religious philosophers. This scholarly approach aimed to contribute to Jewish emancipation efforts, support the renewal of Judaism in the modern era, and, not least, refute the Christian claim of Judaism’s inferiority. By claiming Jesus and his early followers, including Paul, for Judaism, Geiger not only highlights the gaps in contemporary Life-of-Jesus’ research but also exposes the rupture between Jesus and his religious practice on the one hand and the religion that later invoked his name on the other. This finding has not been fully addressed by current dogmatic or Christological models.

This is a response to Fernando Bermejo-Rubio’s arguments that the original Testimonium Flavianum was a negative text. Bermejo-Rubio’s textual analysis ignores a great number of caveats and counterexamples that in the end render it far from certain or probable that the Testimonium Flavianum had a negative disposition towards Jesus. To the contrary, most of the terminology does not even appear to be problematic for a Christian scribe to interpolate. As a result, it is concluded that scholars are still stuck in the quagmire of attempting to arbitrate what is or is not authentic in the Testimonium Flavianum.

This article examines the ‘King Jesus Gospel’ concept proposed by Matthew Bates and Scott McKnight, which frames the biblical gospel as a proclamation of Jesus’ kingship. It addresses the ‘Failure Objection’ that Jesus was merely a failed apocalyptic prophet who died without fulfilling his predictions. Drawing on N.T. Wright’s work, this article constructs the ‘King Jesus Hypothesis’ and evaluates it using evidence from religious transformation, cultural values, and human progress. Employing the Criterion of Predictive Power, it argues that historical religious innovations (drawing on the work of Larry Hurtado), Western moral values (drawing on the work of Tom Holland), and measurable human flourishing (drawing on the work of Steven Pinker) are best explained by Jesus successfully inaugurating God’s Kingdom through cultural transformation rather than apocalyptic intervention. Through this analysis, the article demonstrates that compelling evidence supports Jesus’ kingship despite the Failure Objection.

The parables of Jesus are often susceptible to patriarchal, androcentric interpretations. By using a realistic reading and social-scientific criticism, this article will investigate the voices, roles, and presence of women in the parable of the Good Samaritan, and how the 1st-century audience of the parable would most likely have understood women to be present, even if not mentioned in the parable. Women played critical roles in terms of hospitality, travel, innkeeping, and healing. These roles and voices of women are often ignored by modern interpreters and exegetes. This article not only emphasises the valuable roles that women fulfilled in the time of Jesus but also critiques the lack, or absence, of women as a point of discussion, acknowledgement, and study in most biblical commentaries and books concerning the parable of the Good Samaritan. The aim of this research is to contribute to the unhiding of women voices in patriarchal, androcentric texts thereby reconstructing and deconstructing gender paradigms within biblical scholarship.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implicationsThe interdisciplinary nature of this article contributes to the debate on the roles and importance of women in the church by investigating the value that women had in the parables of Jesus. By reading women as present in the text, emphasis is given to the voices of women in the Bible and the importance of their representation today. This research is also in line with the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5: Gender equality and women empowerment.

The present article continues the study of The Cyclopes of Christ, published in the Saeculum Journal in the fall of 2020, and presents the vision of liberal theology on the Christian religion. This article aims to take into account rationalist theology. According to it, between reason and faith - that is, between the two faculties that guide and express the person of each human subject - is a profound divergence in receiving and interpreting the truth of reality, phenomena and events that occur and make up human history. Therefore, in order to understand a revelatory message, a demythologized and, more recently, a secularized theological approach is needed. In his essay, Isus al meu, the Romanian thinker Gabriel Liiceanu initiates such a debate. This article proposes, in turn, its own perspective and is a response to the author already mentioned, as well as to the enthusiastic or vexed readers of his book.

The parables of Jesus have historically been attributed with a plethora of interpretations. The first hearers of the parables of Jesus had native (emic) knowledge of the social realities embedded in the parables told by Jesus, that is, cultural scripts present in the parables that might not be apparent to modern readers. Because of this, the modern reader of a parable might not be aware of all the different cultural scripts in a given parable, especially if these scripts are not specifically mentioned or explained by the gospel narrators. Using the parable of the Prodigal Son as an example, this study argues that there are voices in the parable most probably heard by its first hearers that modern hearers might not be aware of. These ‘muted’ voices not heard by modern readers of the parables often include the voices of women and other minority figures. In this study, a case is made for the possible value that a ‘realistic reading’ of familial parables could bring to the interpretation of the parables.Contribution: It is suggested that this reading can contribute to feminist biblical scholarship’s deconstruction and reconstruction of gender paradigms of Christian theology if the voices of women are ‘exhumed’ from or ‘unhidden’ within, patriarchal and androcentric texts.

This article uses a typology of action framework to analyze a selection of the gospels’ parables. It does so by connecting these parables to A. G. Haudricourt and C. Ferret’s research on the “anthropology of action”. After summarizing Haudricourt’s and Ferret’s results, I relate modes of action to types of emplotment. I select four parables as the basis of my analysis, using J. P. Meier’s findings as a guide for selection. I discern in these four parables four modes of emplotment, which enables me to insert them into larger narrative networks found within the gospels. I locate the corpus of narratives determined this way in the context of Jesus’ time so as to better appreciate how the four modes of emplotment combine into a typology of action shaped by a specific social and cultural context. Within this typology of action, I put a spotlight on the way our corpus’ modes of emplotment make use of “discontinuous actions” (coined by Ferret). “Discontinuous actions” decisively initiate or correct a specified course of events. The stress on this dimension of action applies to the relationships occurring between humans and the natural world, within the social world, and between humans and the supranatural world, thus connecting one order of reality with another.

The aim of the article is to examine the meaning of references to laughter in the Synoptic Gospels and a number of Gnostic texts. Whereas Jesus is depicted as an object of ridicule (Mk 5:40 par.) and as condemning those who laugh in the Synoptic Gospels (Lk 6:25), it is he who often laughs derisively at the ignorance of others in Gnostic texts. The meaning of laughter in the Synoptic Gospels and a number of Gnostic texts is examined in the light of the general Greco-Roman attitude towards laughter and, more specifically, in regard to the archetypical distinction between playful and consequential laughter in Greek culture.