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In fact, the translating process has led the Jerusalem team to the unusual conclusion that the Gospel of Luke is the oldest and closest to Jesus' original words, whereas most conventional scholarship gives that distinction to Mark. Unlike most experts, they also believe that Jesus' sayings and actions were first recorded -- in a now lost Hebrew document -- within a few years of his death on the Cross, not put down by his followers decades later.
While the Jewish members of the school do not accept Jesus as the Messiah, they do believe that the man from Galilee might well have seen himself in that light. In fact, a number of lesser religious figures of Jesus' era also believed this about themselves. As for Jesus' death, Flusser interprets it within a motif of martyrdom that stemmed from the Maccabees, rather than from the belief that the Crucifixion would take away the sins of the world. "I am sure," says Flusser, "that there were many Jews, when Jesus was crucified, who believed this innocent victim of Roman cruelty would stop the anger of God against the people of Israel. 'They died so that we may live' is a common Jewish idea."
THE CLASSIC JESUS
A broad spectrum of scholars see no compelling intellectual reason to reject large portions of the Gospels, and find new inspiration in the lessons of Jewish studies and archaeology. For them, no single image of Jesus will do. These thinkers see Jesus as both apocalyptic prophet and reforming sage, as purifier of Judaism and builder of a new order. Advocates range from hard-line Fundamentalists and moderate Evangelicals, who all along have deemed the Gospels historically trustworthy, to moderate liberals who use higher criticism but have become skeptical about skepticism.
Among the latter is Peter Stuhlmacher of Tubingen, who was trained by one of Bultmann's followers. Says he: "As a Western Scripture scholar, I am inclined to doubt these ((Gospel)) stories, but as a historian I am obliged to take them as reliable." He now tells his own students, "The biblical texts as they stand are the best hypothesis we have until now to explain what really happened."
Scholars like Stuhlmacher make no excuses and seek no secularized explanation for the miracles of the New Testament. "The historian has to take into account that Jesus' opponents conceded that he did perform miracles," notes F.F. Bruce of Manchester University in England, a leading evangelical exegete. He adds that if Jesus was God, as he claimed to be, "miracles are what one would expect."
Conservatives also make a historical case for the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Dean John Rodgers of Pennsylvania's Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry points out that St. Paul's account of Jesus' appearances after his resurrection (I Corinthians 15) was written only two decades after the events and drew on prior accounts. Says Rodgers: "This is the sort of data that historians of antiquity drool over."
Wide differences over how to see the historical Jesus cause considerable friction in the academic world. The sniping often focuses on methodology. A favorite criterion for critics who try to sort out the supposed actual words of Jesus from the inauthentic is "dissimilarity," a principle canonized by Bultmann and widely used by the Jesus Seminar, the controversial group that puts the authenticity of Gospel sayings to the vote.