Word: tubingen
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...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 studies of Jewish culture in 1st century Palestine shed fresh light on the historical Jesus...
...Tubingen's Rainer Riesner contends, for instance, that like most rabbis of his day, Christ probably preached in a pithy, aphoristic style that was likely to be faithfully remembered and recorded by his followers. "There is evidence that Jesus taught his disciples to recall his teachings by heart," says Methodist Thomas Oden of New Jersey's Drew Theological School. "We have the ipsissima verba, the exact words of Jesus. Why should they have been reported if they hadn't been actually remembered...
...deeply ingrained 1st century Jewish belief in the imminent arrival of a Messiah-like figure and the need for spiritual renewal -- teachings that anticipate Christ's message. "After the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, you could no longer say there was no historical Jesus," says Theologian Otto Betz of Tubingen, once a redoubt of Bultmannian doubters...
Among the latter is Peter Stuhlmacher of Tubingen, who was trained by one of Bultmann's followers. Says he: "As a Western Scripture scholar, I am inclined to doubt these ((Gospel)) stories, but as a historian I am obliged to take them as reliable." He now tells his own students, "The biblical texts as they stand are the best hypothesis we have until now to explain what really happened...
Roman Catholicism has just begun to grapple with the awareness that liberal scholarship may pose a threat to dogma. "Sometimes I ask my Catholic counterparts why they must make all the same mistakes in 20 years when we Protestant theologians needed over 200 years," jests Tubingen's Hengel. Conservative Catholics hope Ratzinger will strike at this threat, but the Cardinal is said to oppose a return to Rome's earlier proclamations on the Bible's complete historical reliability. He seems to prefer intellectual counteroffensives to decrees and crackdowns...