Quotes from Darrell L. Bock

What these writers share to one degree or another is the recognition that Jesus' message was tightly rooted to his Jewishness and operated in a more messianically inclined direction, pushing them into the Christianity side of the spectrum.

However, Jesus' stress in his teaching was a reorientation of the heart before God, as opposed to the expression of these ideas in as raw a political form as their work suggests

It is this significant disjunction between the Jesus-as-prophet view and Jesus' disciples' claim that Jesus is the Christ that makes Jesusanity's view of Jesus so difficult to accept historically. But we are jumping ahead.

In Jesusanity, it is Jesus' teaching that matters and not his person or work beyond the example it sets.

In other words, where Borg and Crossan stress the critique of large political structures with the values of justice and nonviolence, Jesus' teaching appears to address the local structures of relation-ships, neighbors, and manner of worship before God, while under-scoring love of one's neighbor and calling for just treatment of others.

One contributing factor is the plethora of books about Jesus from this perspective since the 1980s. Jesus studies is a growth industry today.

historical skepticism, (2) new information, (3) cultural factors that have changed how we assess things, and (4) the innate desire in people to seek, cope with, or understand the spiritual.

One factor is skepticism about institutional religion of all sorts

Second is the rise of higher criticism

the role of "myth," embellishments of Jesus that make him comparable to various divine-human figures in the larger culture (such as the Caesars) so that he can compete with them for greatness. We will have occasion to explore such questions in more depth as we proceed.

A fourth factor is a larger sea change in the way we view history.With

The result again is that the christological point of the passage goes missing, attributed to alternate influences. Christianity becomes Jesusanity, but only because the passage's teaching has been divided and conquered.

decided that good scholarship demanded taking the losers' point of view, and that made the revision of claims about historic fact inevitable.

First, while direct access to the new sources from other perspectives has opened up our understanding of the historical debate, it doesn't necessarily alter significantly the resultant history.

This is because, second, sometimes the winners won for reasons other than the mere

exercise of power or simple social reasons. Sometimes the position of one group over another was inherently more persuasive or had a stronger claim to historical roots than other options, and so the group won because of factors rooted in the origins of the movement.

A fifth and more cynical factor is a selective appeal to ancient evidence that highlights features in line with a modern ideological concern at the expense of being fair about the complexity of the ancient evidence.

Jesus' meal practice was about inclusion in a society with sharp social boundaries.