Wednesday, December 12, 2007

historical Jesus

The infant Jesus in Adoration of the Shepherds, Gerard van HonthorstThis article is about Jesus the man, based upon historical methods to reconstruct a biography of his life and times. For disputes about the existence of Jesus and reliability of ancient texts relating to him, see historicity of Jesus. For theological perspectives, see Jesus, chronology of Jesus, genealogy of Jesus, etc.

The historical Jesus is Jesus of Nazareth as reconstructed by historians (i.e. not necessarily and usually not Christian historians) using historical methods. These historical methods use critical analysis of gospel texts as the primary source for the biography of Jesus, along with non-biblical sources to reconstruct the historical context of first-century Judea. These methods do not include theological or religious axioms, such as biblical inerrancy. Though the reconstructions vary, they generally agree on these basic points: Jesus was a Jewish teacher who attracted a small following of Galileans and, after a period of ministry, was crucified by the Romans in the Iudaea Province during the governorship of Pontius Pilate. The quest for the historical Jesus began with the work of Hermann Samuel Reimarus. Eusebius of Caesarea (~275–339) is an example of an early Christian historian and Flavius Josephus is an example of a 1st-century Jewish historian.

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