Word: gospelers
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...issue's achieving a sort of pop-culture critical mass. Christological chatter pervades even the Internet, and dozens of other volumes on the search for Jesus are either just published or in the works. This week the cable channel Cinemax 2 will be running a program called The Gospel According to Jesus, which features celebrities and ordinary people reciting from a custom-tailored Bible. It is based on Scripture assembled by author Stephen Mitchell, who deleted many of Jesus' sayings and most of the events in his life, noting, "We can't be sure of anything that Jesus actually said...
There are, after all, four Gospels, whose actual writing, most scholars have come to acknowledge, was done not by the Apostles but by their anonymous followers (or their followers' followers). Each presented a somewhat different picture of Jesus' life. The earliest appeared to have been written some 40 years after his Crucifixion. Which was most accurate? Even Luther had a favorite Gospel (John) and appeared to regard the rest as less essential. And starting with the 1835 critique The Life of Jesus by David Friedrich Strauss, apostles of the new scientific method raised additional questions with increasing urgency: Might faith...
Depressingly few, the so-called higher critics found. There are only two or three references to Jesus in six pagan or Jewish sources, providing precious little corroborating data. Even if the standard for authenticity were agreement between the Gospels, there is less of that than one might imagine: the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan are just two of several parables that appear in only one version. By 1926, Rudolf Bultmann of Germany's University of Marburg, the foremost Protestant scholar in the field, threw up his hands: he called for a halt to inquiries regarding the Jesus of history...
...detect the same Jesus. Harvard's Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, for example, has located a feminist paragon who saw God as Sophia (Wisdom) and himself as her spokesperson; Fiorenza contends the later church cloaked Jesus in the Christological garb as the Son of God. Crossan, relying heavily on the apocryphal Gospels of Thomas and Peter and the secret Gospel of Mark, has posited a "Mediterranean Jewish peasant...
...wisely and so well that the resulting sound is truly his own. "I'm interested in impure music," says Sting. "Pure rock, pure jazz or pure anything just doesn't interest me. This is the game I play." In that spirit, his new CD, Mercury Falling, draws on country, gospel and even Celtic music to create smooth, genre-blending, articulate pop. It's another bright entry in what has proved to be Sting's brilliant career as a solo artist...