Just wondering why you think these are mutually exclusive positions. Do you believe the historical Jesus was rejecting a life centered on compassion and spiritual practice? Or is it possible Jesus understood so deeply and so unquenchably what compassion is that his life – his historical life – aligned completely with God’s Heart and Mind and created a way for the rest of us to know God as God really is?
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Excuse me?
It wasn’t me who said:
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Archbishop Michael Ramsey’s view of the Resurrection, drawn from his published writings, sermons, and theological essays:
Ramsey insisted that Christianity begins with the Resurrection, not merely as a doctrine but as the event that made all Christian belief possible. In his book The Resurrection of Christ (1944), he writes:
“It is both historically and theologically necessary to begin with the Resurrection. For from it, in direct order of historical fact, came Christian preaching, Christian worship, and Christian belief.”
For Ramsey, the Resurrection is not a later mythic embellishment of Jesus’ life — it is the origin of the Church’s proclamation. Without it, the entire structure of faith collapses.
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He said that the problem is identifying Jesus with God. He then proceeded to tell me that I lack humility and quoted Matthew 25, implying that I don’t care about the poors. But I can hardly be surprised: someone with the discernment to declare that Christians have believed a lie for 2000 years would no doubt also feel fully entitled to judge my lack of humility and my supposed indifference to the poor, without knowing absolutely anything about my life. Evidently, dismissing 2000 years of Christian teaching while making assumptions about other people’s lives and inner motives (even implying that they don’t care about the less fortunate) is entirely compatible with humility. Ubi maior, minor cessat, as they said in ancient Rome.
We live in interesting times indeed.
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I would ask you why
Why should this be opposed to the truth that He is our God and our Lord? I fail to see any connection between accepting this and rejecting His divinity and seeing Him as a mere enlightened mystic, which would be a complete negation of the Christian faith, of the faith that Christians have held from the beginning.
I mean I don’t see why charity, love and compassion should be set in opposition to truth.
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It’s also literally the most ancient testimony we have.
“This tradition, we can be entirely confident, was formulated as tradition within months of Jesus’ death.” -James D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), pp. 854–55.
“It goes back at least to what Paul was taught when he was converted, a couple of years after the crucifixion.” - Michael Goulder, “The Baseless Fabric of a Vision,” in Gavin D’Costa, ed., Resurrection Reconsidered(Oxford: Oneworld, 1996), p. 48.
“The most likely source and time for his reception of that tradition would have been Jerusalem in the early 30s …” - John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts(San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), p. 254.
“The conviction that Jesus had risen from the dead had already taken root by the time Paul was converted about 33 C.E. … the time for development was thus two or three years at most.” -Robert W. Funk and the Jesus Seminar, The Acts of Jesus (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1998), p. 466
The dating ranges from a few months to at most two or three years after the event, making it by far the earliest testimony we possess concerning His resurrection. To insist on calling it a later construct, when the evidence points so clearly in the opposite direction, is to do precisely what they accuse Christians of doing: imposing a later construction on a genuinely early tradition.
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