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Introducing the Person of Jesus
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The Person of Jesus
In this course Dr James Carleton Paget (University of Cambridge) examines the identities associated with the person of Jesus. In the first module, we introduce the person of Jesus by providing some historical background, and assessing the nature of the documents containing accounts of Jesus. After that we look at Jesus’ authority, with special reference to precedent and the relationship between Jesus’ identity and his authority. In the third module, we examine the wisdom of Jesus by investigating the substance of his teaching. Then we discuss the idea of Jesus as a liberator - both a political liberator and liberator from evil, before moving on to examine Jesus as the Son of God. Finally, we take a look at Jesus’ uniqueness, in terms of his teaching, the hypostatic union, divine revelation and salvation.
Introducing the Person of Jesus
In this module, we offer some introductory remarks about Jesus’ identity, focusing in particular on (i) the controversy surrounding who Jesus was in his own time, as presented in the Gospels (ii) disputes throughout Christian history concerning the presence of humanity and divinity within Jesus (iii) the issue of the historical reliability of documents about Jesus, including post-Easter convictions of the Gospel writers (iv) comparing and contrasting historical and theological interpretations of these documents (v) variation between the accounts of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels and in John’s Gospel (vi) the significance of early Christian conceptions about Jesus being related to the divine.
Hello.
00:00:06My name is James Garden Padgett,
00:00:07and I'm, a lecturer in New Testament studies
00:00:09in the Faculty of Divinity in the University of Cambridge
00:00:12and also a fellow of Peter House, its oldest college.
00:00:16Today I'm going to lecture to you on the person
00:00:20of Jesus,
00:00:24and I'm going to begin
00:00:25with some introductory
00:00:28observations
00:00:30in the middle of Mark's Gospel,
00:00:33which some holds be the earliest
00:00:35gospel written.
00:00:38Jesus asks his disciples whom do people say that I am
00:00:41and a number of
00:00:48answers are given,
00:00:49and it's only at the end where Peter
00:00:52states that Jesus is the messiah
00:00:55that Jesus approves.
00:00:57But there then follows an argument between Peter and Jesus
00:01:00about the nature of Jesus Masson is, um,
00:01:05now, I'm not here to talk about that argument,
00:01:09but I use this particular section of the Gospel to note that even in Jesus,
00:01:13his own lifetime, the question of his identity
00:01:18was provocative
00:01:23and caused controversy.
00:01:25And we know, as we move through Christian history
00:01:30that
00:01:34the nature of that identity
00:01:35has continued to cause controversy.
00:01:37So if we look at the question which perplexes many of the nature of the mix,
00:01:40as it were of the divine
00:01:47and the human in Jesus. We have
00:01:50somewhat different answers provided through that history
00:01:52conventionally,
00:01:56Some believe that Jesus is completely divine
00:01:58and completely human,
00:02:02and they argue that that summarises the situation
00:02:05reasonably.
00:02:09Others maintain, while this have maintained
00:02:11that Jesus
00:02:14only appeared to be human but was in fact completely
00:02:16divine.
00:02:20Others argued that while we could talk about the pre existence of Jesus,
00:02:22the existence of Jesus before he became a human being,
00:02:28in fact, there was a moment when the sun was not.
00:02:33There was a moment when God existed by himself,
00:02:36and then he,
00:02:40as it were, produced
00:02:42the sun.
00:02:44That controversy, some of you may know, is known as the Arian controversy,
00:02:45and we can go on
00:02:50through history in history, identifying
00:02:52these complicated disputes.
00:02:56And, of course, the disputes don't only
00:02:59pertain among Christians,
00:03:02but they pertain also among those who are not Christians.
00:03:04So some would want to claim that Jesus isn't divine
00:03:09at all,
00:03:12and that what's most important about him
00:03:14and even people who are atheists would want to argue. This is what he taught,
00:03:16and in that respect,
00:03:22some might say that Jesus is a kind of socialist revolutionary rather
00:03:23than someone whose identity as a divine person is of any particular relevance.
00:03:29And very early on. Jews who did not believe in Jesus argued that he was
00:03:37a magician, a fraud,
00:03:43someone you simply couldn't trust, someone who had misled
00:03:46the people.
00:03:50So the controversy goes on
00:03:54and the controversy goes on,
00:03:57in part because the earliest documents that we have are difficult
00:03:59to assess because they are written by Jesus' own followers,
00:04:03so they have within them
00:04:09an inherent bias.
00:04:10And early on,
00:04:13we don't have alternative accounts of Jesus' life alternative accounts,
00:04:13which might be negative or alternative accounts
00:04:18that might be neutral.
00:04:21So when we come to assess Jesus, we have to assess Jesus in relation to documents
00:04:25that are written by his followers with all the difficulties
00:04:30that that brings with it.
00:04:34And we also have to take into consideration
00:04:37if we're interested in being historians,
00:04:41that the world that is assumed not only by the earliest Christians who wrote the
00:04:44text of the New Testament but also by later Christians
00:04:50we have to assume a world of divine intervention in
00:04:55which things like miracles and divine voices can be assumed,
00:04:59a reality.
00:05:05And yet historians assume
00:05:07a cause and effect world
00:05:11which
00:05:13pertains throughout history,
00:05:14and they find it difficult then to incorporate
00:05:18into any account a notion of divine intervention
00:05:20understood how the few miracles or indeed,
00:05:23through an understanding of a human being
00:05:26as divine.
00:05:28Conservative theologians have therefore argued that anyone who seeks
00:05:30to investigate the New Testament from a historical perspective
00:05:34is immediately going to fall foul of the documents because
00:05:39their assumptions differ from the assumptions of the documents.
00:05:42And the documents are true.
00:05:46The assumptions
00:05:49of historians faulty because they cannot incorporate divine intervention.
00:05:51And we have also to consider the fact
00:06:00that there is variation
00:06:02among the documents of the New Testament in the way they present Jesus,
00:06:04most famously between Matthew, Mark and Luke, who, broadly speaking,
00:06:08give a similar accounts of Jesus and John,
00:06:12who gives a much more vigorously and audaciously
00:06:15our high interpretation of Jesus. You remember.
00:06:19His gospel begins with those extraordinary words.
00:06:22The word became flesh
00:06:24and dwelt
00:06:26among us. Jesus is gonna vow ID Lee and clearly
00:06:27the son of God in a metaphysical sense
00:06:31in that gospel,
00:06:34and it would be more difficult, perhaps to claim that was the case
00:06:36in the other three.
00:06:39But that variation also pertains between what Paul says and what the gospel
00:06:41that the epistle to the Hebrews says
00:06:45and what the revelation of ST John the
00:06:47Divine says all documents within the New Testament.
00:06:50And then, of course,
00:06:52we have all the variant positions that have evolved through Christian history.
00:06:53One final point needs to be made before we move on to the main part of this lecture.
00:07:00And that is
00:07:05the extraordinary fact that relatively quickly,
00:07:06Christians came to think of Jesus as related to the divine
00:07:10Paul. For instance, when writing to the Corinthians
00:07:19can assert
00:07:24the parity
00:07:26of Jesus
00:07:28and God, you can speak about them in exactly the same terms.
00:07:29If you go to one Corinthians Chapter eight, Verse four. You'll see that.
00:07:32And what's very interesting there is that Paul
00:07:37doesn't feel he needs to argue for that
00:07:39now. Paul's only writing his letter probably 25 years or so after Jesus was alive.
00:07:42And yet he can make these kinds of assertions
00:07:49bold assertions about Jesus without arguing for them.
00:07:52So the claims about Jesus,
00:07:55which eventually find a formulaic expression in
00:07:57something like the Council of Calcitonin.
00:08:02The roots of those
00:08:05ideas in the New Testament are expressed
00:08:07relatively swiftly
00:08:11after Jesus' death,
00:08:13which raises interesting historical questions.
00:08:15
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Carleton Paget, J. (2022, March 14). The Person of Jesus - Introducing the Person of Jesus [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/the-person-of-jesus/jesus-as-liberator
MLA style
Carleton Paget, J. "The Person of Jesus – Introducing the Person of Jesus." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 14 Mar 2022, https://massolit.io/courses/the-person-of-jesus/jesus-as-liberator