As I mentioned in an earlier blog, I do not believe it is possible to discover any historical Jesus beyond what we have in the Bible. Every attempt to discover the Historical Jesus who is seperated from the Jesus of Faith is founded on and built thoroughly on conjecture.
Let me explain in further detail. As I mentioned in past blogs, many of today's scholars separate the Historical Jesus (the man who lived and died on the cross) from the Jesus of Faith (using the bare details of Jesus' life the early church added stories and sayings about Jesus in order to serve the interests of the early church- this version is what we have in the Bible).
Various methods are used to discover who the real Jesus was, arriving at any number of different possibilities, one of which is this: Jesus was a political figure of his day, but for different reasons, the early church decided to take out most of the political side of Jesus to make Jesus a less politically offensive person. Supposedly, when Jesus faced the certain death, his hopes and dreams were destroyed. This would be embarrassing for the church to deal with, so the church instead recreated a less embarrassing Jesus who promised a spiritual kingdom.
Another view is that the church would have wanted to down play any part of Jesus that was offensive to the political powers for fear of persecution or for the sake of winning over the political players of that day.
I suppose there are other reasons why some assume that the Historical Jesus was far more political than the Bible tells us, but... short of some fantastic discovery in the Middle East, we will never know anything more about Jesus than what the early church passed down to us in what we call the Bible.
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