Category:Historical Jesus Studies--1920s

Historical Jesus Studies in the 1920s--Works and Authors

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Overview

The 1920s were characterized by the success of three very popular fictional works on Jesus--La storia di Cristo (1921 Papini), novel; The King of Kings (1927 DeMille), film, and Jesus, the Son of Man (1928 Gibran), poetry. There was now a global market that included authors of different countries, serving an international audience. Among scholarly works, the most significant contribution was that offered by Joseph Klausner. His Life of Jesus, written from the perspective of an observant Jew, was the first consistent attempt to reclaim Jesus from the perspective of the Jewish orthodox tradition. However, a general skepticism about the possibility and even the theological significance of the search for the Historical Jesus became dominant, supported by the authority of Rudolf Bultmann, who in his 1926 book on Jesus concluded that the only Jesus we can know is the risen Christ of the Christian faith. Besides his historical existence, virtually nothing can be recovered of the historical Jesus. The quest for the historical Jesus had therefore to be abandoned as both historically impossible and theologically superfluous.