Bible. New Testament -- Criticism, interpretation, etc.; Jesus Christ -- Historicity
But perhaps those sayings and sermons of Jesus are of such a nature
that they could only arise from the "historical Jesus"? Of a great
number both of isolated sayings and parables of Jesus--and among
these indeed the most beautiful and the most admired, for example,
the parable of the good Samaritan, whose moral content coincides with
Deut. xxix. 1-4, of the Prodigal Son, [475] of the man that sowed--we
know that they were borrowed [476] partly from Jewish philosophy,
partly from oral tradition of the Talmud, and partly from other
sources. In any case they have no claim to originality. [477] This
holds good even of the Sermon on the Mount, which is, as has been
shown by Jewish scholars in particular, and as Robertson has once
more proved, a mere patchwork taken from ancient Jewish literature,
and, together with the Lord's Prayer, contains not a single thought
which has not its prototype in the Old Testament and in the ancient
philosophical maxims of the Jewish people. [478] Moreover, the
remaining portions, whose genesis from any other quarter is at least
as yet unproved, is not at all of such a nature that it could only
have arisen in the mind of such a personality as the theological Jesus
of Nazareth. At bottom, indeed, he neither said nor taught anything
beyond the purer morality of contemporary Judaism--to say nothing at
all of the Stoics and of the other ethical teachers of antiquity, in
particular those of the Indians. The gravest suspicion of their novelty
and originality is awakened at the Gospels' emphasising the novelty
and significance of Jesus' sayings by "the ancients said"--"but I say
unto you"; attempting thereby to make an artificial contradiction with
the former spiritual and moral standpoint of Judaism, even in places
where only a look at the Old Testament is necessary to convince us that
such a contradiction does not exist, as, for example, in the case of
the love of God and of one's neighbor. [479] Moreover, our cultivated
reverence for Jesus and the overwhelming glorification of everything
connected with him has surrounded a great many of the "words of the
Lord" with a glitter of importance which stands in no relation to
their real value, and which they would never have obtained had they
been handed down to us in another connection or under some other name.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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