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Jesus
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Below is one of our free research papers on Jesus. If the term paper below is not exactly what you're looking for, you can search our essay database for other topics.
The purpose of this essay is to examine what has remained an enigma for scholars of religion and believers alike since the eighteenth century. The problem is that Jesus comes to us across over two thousand years of history during which many ideas have been formulated with regard to Jesus’ identity.
All those raised in the Christian faith will be familiar with the Jesus who is the Messiah; of his infancy, life and the Easter story. These ‘truths’ have been held and passed on from one generation to another since the story began. However, since the Age of Reason, the world of innocent belief was turned on its head and all that mattered was examined in minute detail under the microscope including the Gospel story. What is evolving out of the heated debate that has issued forth is a distinct division of humanity’s understanding of the identity of Jesus. In terms of what the earliest German scholars in the debate defined as the difference between ‘historisch’, the historical Jesus as opposed to the historic ‘geschichtlich’ Christ. This distinction was made by M Kahler in 1964. (1) I shall attempt to show with the help of biblical scholarship how these arguments have helped to bring us to an increased understanding of the dichotomy of the Personhood of Jesus and in so doing peel away the layers of history to better understand the Jesus of the first century CE. I shall confine myself to basic details as a topic of this size warrants a dissertation as opposed to an essay ...
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