Product Description
The Christian church bases much of its teachings and theology on reminiscences of a man who lived, preached and died in the Middle East. However, who was Jesus of Nazareth? What can be known about him, and how reliable are New Testament claims about his life? This book looks to discover Jesus the man, seeking to review available evidence for his existence and scholarly approaches to evaluating the depictions of Jesus the Messiah to be found in the New Testament. I shall ask the key question; did Jesus exist or was his life a myth developed in oral and written traditions? And how can we decide? This book looks to understand the conflict between the academic camps of Historical Jesus and the Jesus Myth Theory, examining evidence for the existence (or otherwise) of Jesus of Nazareth. It examines the events depicted of Jesus' life, ministry and death as presented in the New Testament gospels, seeking to establish where these events can be quantified using historical methods and the look at ways of establishing proof using accepted techniques before reviewing bible texts, the canonical gospels and the Letters of Paul to establish how much represents reliable fact and how much is embellishment arising through oral and written tradition. Jesus' story is the basis of the world's largest religion. However, questions remain: Is this based on a real individual who lived in the past, or a purely fictional character? And how can we evaluate both written sources, and the associated oral traditions to answer this question? The purpose of this book is to evaluate the New Testament evidence for the existence of Jesus as an actual historical person and to assess the value of some pertinent critical methods.
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