Hurtado embarrassed by the Kirk's thesis

[Diogenes the Cynic]

With the proper dating of the Gospels (c. 40-45 AD) this is a non-relevant argument.

70-100. 40-45 is ludicrous.

[Bernard Muller]

That is not against Paul.

Right, Paul never said Jesus did not appear as a physical human on earth; on the contrary: http://historical-jesus.info/6.html

Cordially, Bernard

[Giuseppe]

It seems that, according to Kirk, there would be evidence of the evangelists claiming to correct the high-christology of Paul by mitigating it with their stories: frankly, this anxiety and this embarrassment of a too-high-Christ is more expected under the minimal mythicism.

[neilgodfrey]

I wonder if the best way to read not only Hurtado but Kirk, too, is to sift out the raw data, the source material they use, and to study those sources for ourselves with our own questions. Neither Kirk nor Hurtado is doing history. Both are doing theology. Their research is into a theological question: Should we think of Jesus as more god or more man? Each scholar is digging into history to find the answer to justify their theological perspective on the nature of Jesus Christ.

Kirk in his Introduction explains this theological point of his study:

If I have one fear in the midst of the onslaught of "early high Christology” studies it is that an increasing focus on the ways in which Jesus is shown to be divine will lead to an ever-increasing tendency to bypass Jesus’s humanity as its own biblically and theologically significant reality. As this study shows in some detail, by "Jesus’s humanity” I do not simply mean that Jesus has a body so that he can die. Nor do I simply mean, a la Anselm, that humanity has gotten into such a terrible hole that the only way for God to be paid back is for someone else to get into the terrible hole with us and from there offer restitution to the Divine. Nor, again, do I mean that we need to demythologize the Jesus of the Gospels in order to discover the true Galilean peasant hidden behind. Instead, I am talking about apprehending the stories in the Synoptic Gospels as narratives of "a man attested by God" (Acts 2:22). This is the contribution that the Synoptic Gospels have to make to our understanding of what it means for Jesus to be human.

The Synoptic Gospels offer a rich depiction of idealized, eschatological human agency in the person of Jesus. This is not merely a portico into some deeper mystery of Jesus’s identity hidden in the texts, but is its own many-roomed house. Because these texts do not depict Jesus as God, they consistently depict Jesus and God as separate characters: God in charge, Jesus subordinate; God as father, Jesus as son; God as all-knowing, the son as limited in some ways; God remains in heaven, not intervening, while Jesus is crucified on earth below. Because Jesus is an idealized human, he is the demonstration that God is with God's people; he enacts God's own authority to forgive sins; he exercises dominion over even the wind and the waves — as well as the spirits that are hostile to humanity. Through Jesus's hands the creative power of God is at work to feed thousands in the wilderness. Through Jesus’s submission to the father, the father brings redemption to Israel.

That's theology and searching for rationales to justify a theological view of Jesus' nature.

The theological view Kirk is countering is the one that views Jesus as more god than man:

Indeed, one wonders if the resurgence in early high Christology is not, at least in part, fueled by the sentiment that to speak of the humanity of Jesus is to engage in a colossal exercise of missing the point. But if we recognize that jesus in his humanity is the subject matter of these canonical lives of Jesus in ways that profoundly signify the Christology being deployed, then we have to step back and reassess this posture. It might be that the only way to truly make sense of these narrated Christologies is to recognize that in them the human Jesus is precisely the point.

[andrewcriddle]

I wonder if the best way to read not only Hurtado but Kirk, too, is to sift out the raw data, the source material they use, and to study those sources for ourselves with our own questions. Neither Kirk nor Hurtado is doing history. Both are doing theology. Their research is into a theological question: Should we think of Jesus as more god or more man? Each scholar is digging into history to find the answer to justify their theological perspective on the nature of Jesus Christ.

Kirk in his Introduction explains this theological point of his study:

If I have one fear in the midst of the onslaught of "early high Christology” studies it is that an increasing focus on the ways in which Jesus is shown to be divine will lead to an ever-increasing tendency to bypass Jesus’s humanity as its own biblically and theologically significant reality. As this study shows in some detail, by "Jesus’s humanity” I do not simply mean that Jesus has a body so that he can die. Nor do I simply mean, a la Anselm, that humanity has gotten into such a terrible hole that the only way for God to be paid back is for someone else to get into the terrible hole with us and from there offer restitution to the Divine. Nor, again, do I mean that we need to demythologize the Jesus of the Gospels in order to discover the true Galilean peasant hidden behind. Instead, I am talking about apprehending the stories in the Synoptic Gospels as narratives of "a man attested by God" (Acts 2:22). This is the contribution that the Synoptic Gospels have to make to our understanding of what it means for Jesus to be human.

The Synoptic Gospels offer a rich depiction of idealized, eschatological human agency in the person of Jesus. This is not merely a portico into some deeper mystery of Jesus’s identity hidden in the texts, but is its own many-roomed house. Because these texts do not depict Jesus as God, they consistently depict Jesus and God as separate characters: God in charge, Jesus subordinate; God as father, Jesus as son; God as all-knowing, the son as limited in some ways; God remains in heaven, not intervening, while Jesus is crucified on earth below. Because Jesus is an idealized human, he is the demonstration that God is with God's people; he enacts God's own authority to forgive sins; he exercises dominion over even the wind and the waves — as well as the spirits that are hostile to humanity. Through Jesus's hands the creative power of God is at work to feed thousands in the wilderness. Through Jesus’s submission to the father, the father brings redemption to Israel.

That's theology and searching for rationales to justify a theological view of Jesus' nature.

The theological view Kirk is countering is the one that views Jesus as more god than man:

Indeed, one wonders if the resurgence in early high Christology is not, at least in part, fueled by the sentiment that to speak of the humanity of Jesus is to engage in a colossal exercise of missing the point. But if we recognize that jesus in his humanity is the subject matter of these canonical lives of Jesus in ways that profoundly signify the Christology being deployed, then we have to step back and reassess this posture. It might be that the only way to truly make sense of these narrated Christologies is to recognize that in them the human Jesus is precisely the point.

The question as to whether Jesus was primarily human or primarily divine is, as you say, theology.

However the question did the synoptic writers present Jesus as primarily human or primarily divine is an entirely legitimate historical enquiry. (Although the answer may be unclear.)

Andrew Criddle

[neilgodfrey]

The question as to whether Jesus was primarily human or primarily divine is, as you say, theology.

However the question did the synoptic writers present Jesus as primarily human or primarily divine is an entirely legitimate historical enquiry. (Although the answer may be unclear.)

Andrew Criddle

I was thinking about this, and I do agree with you in one sense, but is it not also evident that Kirk's approach to the historical question is theological. . . He expresses some concern that with the works of Bauckham, Hurtado and others that there is a "risk" of "losing sight of the humanity" of Jesus Christ, so that he is wanting to bring readers' focus on the humanity of Jesus because he believes this is a most necessary part of faith as a Christian. His historical inquiry is deployed in service of his theological intent.

We don't think of historians who write to prove the goodness or greatness of their countries of birth, or the virtues of an ideology, as the most professional of historians.