You may find what you’re looking for here: www.westarinstitute.org/
This is the home of The Jesus Seminar, an attempt to definitively authenticate the sayings of Jesus by a group of renowned religious scholars. Or google on “Jesus Seminar.”
Does anyone hear pounding on the windows, and a sort of muffled shouting from outside? (Dio?)
But Dio is already on record as insisting Jesus never existed.
So, HIS take, naturally, is that Jesus never said anything at all, and it’s pointless to try to figure out which of “his” sayings are authentic.
Okay, Dio’s objections are noted in absentia. He has nothing else useful to add.
That’s not correct. Dio’s position was that he was inclined to believe Jesus DID exist but that the argument’s against his existence could not be dismissed out of hand. He was agnostic on the historicity of Jesus, you might say.
Whatever one’s belief about the existence of Jesus, a book that zeroes in on the quotes attributed to him and explains the context, their significance to early Christians, etc. could make for fascinating reading.
I didn’t say the Gospels were historical accounts. I’m saying that there are no historical accounts of Jesus, and the various writings atributed to various authors that are collected in the Bible are the best you’re going to get.
The Apocryphal writings are much later than the stuff that was included in the Bible, with the possible exception of Thomas, but not the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which is a different work by a different author.
Kinda this.
My goal would be to study Jesus more as a philosopher. He was Jewish and Jewery was the medium in which he expressed himself. But it seems he diverged enough from his roots that it was felt his views were no longer compatible with the old religion. I’d also like to see how faithfully Christianity actually reflects HIS teachings, as opposed to the dogmatic influence of the church leaders who purported to revere him.
Which is why I want to know: What did he actually say? And what did it mean to him and his contemporaries as opposed to someone removed from context by 2000 years of cultural and technological change, several linguistic translations, etc. And I know he didn’t have apersonal scribe and that everything we have will have been transcribed from oral tradition, so the best we’re going to get is “close and hopefully accurate in spirit.”
Excellent info so far, by the way. Thanks all.
I would just like to note something in passing – while First and Second Century people did not have many of the modern tools for sorting fact from fiction, they were not universally superstitious yokels. The leading Christians of the time identified the four canonical Gospels as together painting a coherent picture of the Jesus whom they followed – and there was no reason known to them why He should not have committed the described miracles. Each tells His story with a different emphasis. The pseudopigraphical gospels depict someone who is significantly different in persona from them.
In particular, note that “Gnostic” is not just a pejorative – it had a distinct meaning, of the pursuit of enlightenment/salvation through mastery of a compendium of arcane knowledge and practice. And such a concept is precisely antithetical to the theology taught by the Jesus of the canonical Gospels.
There are, admittedly, issues with this – the apparent (and often real) contradictions between the four Gospels being one large one. I don’t propose to stand in defense of them against all such issues here – I’m simply saying that there is a criterion by which degrees of reliability can be assigned.
Your question reminded me of a book I remember reading about that was put together by the scholars involved in the Jesus Seminar. I think this might be something like what you are looking for - The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus. I haven’t read it but I immediately thought of it when I read the OP.