Bible. New Testament -- Criticism, interpretation, etc.; Jesus Christ -- Historicity
If in all this it is shown to be possible, or even probable, that
in the Jesus of the Gospels we have not a deified man, but rather a
humanised God, there remains but to find an answer to the question as
to what external reasons led to the transplanting of the God Jesus into
the soil of historical actuality and the reduction of the eternal or
super-historical fact of his redeeming death and of his resurrection
into a series of temporal events.
This question is answered at once if we turn our attention to the
motives present in the earliest Christian communities known to us,
which motives appear in the Acts and in the Pauline epistles. From
these sources we know at what an early stage an opposition arose
between Paul's Gentile Christianity and the Jewish Christianity,
the chief seat of which was at Jerusalem, and which for this reason,
as we can understand, claimed for itself a special authority. As
long as the former persecutor of the Christian community, over whose
conversion they could not at first rejoice too much, [498] did not
obstruct others and seemed to justify his apostolic activity by his
success among the Gentiles, they left him to go his way. But when
Paul showed his independence by his reserve before the "Brothers"
at Jerusalem, and began to attract the feelings of those at Jerusalem
by his abrogation of the Mosaic Law, then they commenced to treat him
with suspicion, to place every obstacle in the way of his missionary
activity, and to attempt, led by the zealous James, to bring the
Pauline communities under their own government. Then, seeking a
title for the practice of the apostolic vocation, they found it in
this--that every one who wished to testify to Christ must himself
have seen him after his resurrection.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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