Sabbath School Lesson Podcast

The Fascination Continues: Part 2 The so-called Historical Jesus movement was founded on the belief that we still can find in the Gospels sufficient data to reconstruct the portrait of Jesus as a historical figure, notwithstanding the theological tampering by the early church (as alleged by Enlightenment thinking). The new approach to studying Jesus was seen by its advocates as scientific, and thus in keeping with the mood of the times. The trend held sway until the twentieth century, when new studies helped undermine this whole movement, showing how this historical Jesus idea was utterly unscientific and subjective. Studies exposed the entire rationalistic enterprise as a miserable failure. The history of Jesus studies are long, winding, and complicated; and they need not detain us further, except to mention the so-called Jesus Seminar, a contemporary group of radical scholars determined to succeed where other historical quests before them failed. Their goal is to "'rescue Jesus from the spin doctors' wh