Word: testamental
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...Some portions of the Gospel of Thomas, a text that church authorities have always considered spurious, are earlier and more authentic than the four New Testament Gospels...
...Jesus never uttered any of the numerous denunciations of the Pharisees found in the New Testament. These sentiments were put in Jesus' mouth by 1st century church writers who considered the Pharisees their competition...
Protestant scholars in Germany took the lead in the early 19th century, similarly sifting the New Testament for evidence of the flesh-and-blood Nazarene beneath the "myths." Often their Jesus turned out to be an inspirational preacher who bore a suspicious resemblance to a 19th century German. But by the 20th century, the great Protestant critic Rudolf Bultmann of Marburg University had concluded that such quests were fruitless. The Bible is so much an article of faith, so laden with unprovable events and legends, he contended in 1926, that "we can now know almost nothing concerning the life...
...years since Bultmann, who died in 1976, scholarship has been sharply divided. His Protestant heirs continue to view the New Testament as a seriously flawed historical document. Even Catholic scholars have moved toward this theory since the Vatican modified its traditionally strict view of the accuracy of the Gospels with a 1943 encyclical and a 1964 instruction allowing broader use of higher criticism...
...same time, however, other scholars are going in the opposite direction, turning away from skepticism toward a renewed acceptance of much of what the New Testament postulates about Jesus and his teaching. The impetus comes in part from new evidence. As a matter of principle, Bultmann never visited the sites in the Holy Land and totally neglected the influence of Jewish culture on Jesus -- "a bad old German tradition with dangerous results," according to Martin Hengel of the University of Tubingen in West Germany. Hengel and his colleagues, and scholars elsewhere, are now reversing that anti-Semitic tradition, discovering that...