Paul Barnett - Jesus and the Rise of Early Christianity (1)

Doubt is a funny condition. It can come as a result of bad teaching, ill health, life stress, and so forth. I wish I never doubted the existence of God, his goodness, his control, the love of Jesus and other things. But I do. There are a number of things that see me through a season of doubt such as listening to others talk about God working in their lives, praying with others, reading the Psalms, singing a precious hymn, hearing the Bible faithfully explained and ... well, the 'and' is what I want to post about. One of the most helpful things for me to do when faced with doubt is to be gripped by the historical rootedness of Christianity. That is why I read books by Paul Burnett. This year I am making my way through 'Jesus and the Rise of Early Christianity' (IVP, 1999). So far, it is a great book and I am wondering why it didn't read it 13 years ago. I have to admit that some chapters are a bit dry for my taste but on the whole I know this book is doing me good. I have been reading chapter 8, simply called 'Jesus of Nazareth'. Dr Barnett says:

We must recognise the problems for history created by Christian doctrine. From the beginning of the history of the earliest church, the followers of Jesus formulated statements of belief about him. That task continued through the eras of the fathers and the reformers and beyond, leaving a valuable deposit of creeds and confessions for the churches and their members. In consequence modern-day believers can easily perceive Jesus' mission to have been quite straightforward, namely, to establish his identity and mission as articulated in the subsequent creeds. The reader of the Gospels will naturally expect to find Jesus teaching such doctrines: that he was the second person of the Trinity, One who was fully human and fully divine, whose mission was to die for sins and be raised to life to open the kingdom of heaven to all believers. But does reading the Gospels through these doctrinal lenses make sense of the Gospel accounts, apart from selected proof texts that support these doctrines? Did Jesus behave and teach according to the creeds historically?

One immediate problem for this approach is that it has no explanation for Jesus' mission to Israel, except to declare that she willfully rejected the Son of God and the salvation he offered her.

Any historical reconstruction of Jesus, based on the Gospels, must answer at least two questions. First, is it a plausible version of Jesus' mission to Israel? Second, does it explain the belief structure of the early church?

So who was he and what did he come to do?

Why does this help with my doubts? It drives me back to the Gospels and forces me to ask fresh questions about them and I always seem to encounter a real, exciting, loving Jesus who is worth following.