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Description of Jesus Beyond Nationalism

The link between historical Jesus studies and the broader cultural contexts has been largely lost in contemporary scholarship, with the heritage of the Jesus scholarship from the nineteenth century being detached from its cultural context and with the history of Jesus scholarship being buried as a topic in the development of methods and issues in New Testament studies. As a result most presentations of the historical Jesus are historiographically and hermeneutically naive, assuming an 'objective' posture, with little or no reflection on their ideological presuppositions. Therefore, consciously or unconsciously, they often represent hegemonic positions.This collection of essays starts from a different position, by questioning the use of presentations of Jesus to defend and protect hegemonic or mono-cultural contexts, and thereby explicitly or implicitly favour a development towards a more inclusive society for persons from different ethnic, racial, national, gender and sexual orientation backgrounds.
This collection of essays will look at the cultural and ideological beginnings of historical Jesus studies in the nineteenth century and expose the underlying presuppositions of hegemony in contemporary presentations of Jesus, viewed from the perspective of 'cultural complexity'.

Title Information

ISBN:

9781845534110

Pages:

256 pages

Format:

Paperback

Product Code:

337016

Publisher:

Equinox Publishing Ltd

Published:

01/03/2010

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About Halvor Moxnes (Editor) and Ward Blanton (Editor) and James G. Crossley (Editor)

Halvor Moxnes lectures in New Testament in the Department of Theology at the University of Oslo. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters and is active in international scholarly organizations. Among his numerous publications are Putting Jesus in his Place: A Radical Vision of Household and Kingdom (2003) and (ed.) Constructing Early Christian Families (1997). His main research interests include the New Testament and Early Christianity in the cultural context of the Mediterranean in Antiquity, the history of interpretation of the historical Jesus in modern societies, and gender and masculinity studies in religion.Ward Blanton lectures in New Testament in the Dept of Theology & Religious Studies at the University of Glasgow. He is author of Displacing Christian Origins: Philosophy, Secularity, and the New Testament (2007) and he is currently working on a book about political and mystical bodies in Paul, Schweitzer, and Bataille. His research interests include New Testament studies in relation to questions of religion, secularity and the political, particularly as these have been understood by continental philosophy and critical theory. James G. Crossley lectures in New Testament in the Dept of Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield. His publications include Why Christianity Happened: A Sociohistorical Account of Christian Origins 26-50 CE (2006) and (ed. with C. Karner), Writing History, Constructing Religion (2005). He has recently completed a book on New Testament scholarship in the context of Anglo-American foreign policy, Projects for a New American Century: New Testament Scholarship in an Age of Terror (forthcoming). His main research interests include early Judaism, historical Jesus, social history of Christian origins, the political contexts of scholarship, and the New Testament in contemporary politics and popular culture.