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James 4:7-10 contains a list of commands and prohibitions, with an occasional promise. Here is the text, and you can read it and see if you think here is a discernible structure:

Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.

Let me define historical Jesus studies as the attempt to get behind the canonical Gospels to discover what the real Jesus was like. Inherent to the historical Jesus discipline is the belief that the canonical Gospels and the Church got Jesus wrong or are biased -- or should I say that the Church believes too much about Jesus and that the real Jesus was less than the Church's Christ. In other words, historical Jesus studies attempt to construct an image of Jesus in distinction from the canonical Gospels and the Church's beliefs.

Example: Is that what you think Jesus looks like? This is what a BBC program sketched for what a 1st Century Jewish male looked like. The jolt of this image with your image is what historical Jesus studies attempt to do.

I participated in this discussion for the better part of 15 years. Much fruit has come of historical Jesus studies, most notably the sharper profile of Jesus in his Jewish context. But the enterprise makes no sense until we see it as the attempt to construct an image of Jesus more accurate than what we find in the Gospels.

Let me say this one more way: Yes, historical Jesus studies try to get back to what Jesus was really like but involved in that is the belief that the real Jesus and the canonical Gospel Jesus are not the same. I know some conservatives conclude that virtually everything is authentic and conclude that the canonical Gospel Jesus is the same as the historical Jesus. But I don't think such studies really are historical Jesus studies. Critique of the Church's belief about Jesus is inherent to historical Jesus studies.

This is a 5-part series we will post this entire week at about this time. It will unpack a "partial preterist" view of Jesus' eschatology. Oddly enough, I was interviewed last week by CBS TV in Chicago about 2012. Evidently, some folks are getting riled up about the imminent return of Christ. (I think the interview will be at 10am Wed or Thurs.) Here goes ...

Because my life's story finds itself wrapped around the various poles of Christian thinking about eschatology, I have in the following allowed my own story to govern the shape of my thinking about eschatology. In short, along with many other theologians, my thinking has moved through several "either/ors": either pre-tribulation or post-tribulation rapture and either literal or metaphorical interpretation of eschatological language. By a strange twist of fate, my own thinking moved to the metaphorical hermeneutic while many popular evangelical preachers were packaging once again the older notion of the pre-tribulation rapture. To adjudicate between the literal and the metaphorical, one needs to examine prophetic language honestly and fairly; furthermore, as will be shown below, one needs a firm grasp of what Jesus was speaking of when he gave the address now recorded in Mark 13 (and Matthew 24 and Luke 21). I have not footnoted the paper but have left it in its original public lecture format.

It is fashionable today to see the Christian religion as a massive cover up and the real story is supposed to have gone something like this: Jesus was a pious, Torah-observant Jew whom Paul got hold of and cranked up a few notches into a God-like deity, called him the Christ, and then handed on to the Gentile world a new religion. By the time of Constantine and Nicea, the original vision of Jesus was wiped off the map. That's the common story. Good grief, Thomas Jefferson's views were about the same thing. Barrie Wilson is the most recent proponent of this story. (See How Jesus Became Christian ).

I will make a brief case that this author debunks orthodoxy by ignoring contrary (and expert) opinion. Where else do you see this?

One of the questions I used to ask students in a Jesus class was "Do you think Jesus made mistakes learning Hebrew or mathematics or Israelite history?" This question, so I learned, was a good way to get students to think about the humanity of Jesus. It was also a good way to get some riled up. It was also a good way to get students to think about how the deity of Christ and the humanity of Christ interface. These discussions led me to a firm conclusion: most Christians who affirm the deity of Christ have no idea how to think about Jesus as a human. For this reason I like what Dan Russ has done in his new book Flesh-and-Blood Jesus.

Is there a rise in interest in the humanity of Jesus? What are the pros and cons of this rise? Do you think most Christians embrace the full humanitiy of Jesus?

Here you will find a sustained, gentle, accessible, and reflective attempt to explore not only that Jesus was human but what Jesus' humanity can teach us about living as humans. Most don't want to think about this topic, but Russ convinces me that it can be done -- that it can be done without doing too much speculation and can be done in a way that does not become sentimental.

His topics: Jesus as a "manger wetter" (one I had not heard of), finding our place in this world, living with mother's guilt, the problem of authority, the failures of Jesus (without sinning -- just in case you are tempted to toss down your hat and stomp on it), Jesus' need for friends, the dysfunctions of Jesus' family, Jesus and sex, good and angry, doubt and fear, how to die, scarred for life, and learning to eat between meals.

I'd recommend this book for local church Bible studies, for small groups, and for lay folks who want to begin to explore the humanity of Jesus.

There are two things I really like about Nick Perrin's new book, Lost in Transmission. The first is that Nick gets it when it comes to the level of books the church needs more of. Evangelicals, in the 70s and...

This is the time of the year when many professors are thinking about textbooks for next year, and I've come across one for Jesus of Nazareth classes. I'm wondering, in particular, if anyone out there has used this book in...

... a book comes along and you make a decision about its importance. This book, you decide, ends the need for a dozen or so other books on your shelves. You go to your shelf, pick up those books, put...

Every generation needs to examine for itself the reliability of the Gospels. Is the depiction of Jesus accurate? Can they be trusted? Are they reliable enough for us to anchor our faith in Jesus? There are now "three bears" in...

This has been a good week of conversation about historical Jesus studies, but it is worth our time just to put together some of the leading ideas that need to be kept in mind. Above all and over everything in...

The historical Jesus debate, as we have seen, has three (or four) phases: the old quest (Reimarus to Schweitzer), the no quest of Bultmann and the new quest following Bultmann, and then what Tom Wright dubbed the "third quest" of...

Bultmann unleashed a set of criteria that were used to determine if what is attributed to Jesus in the Gospels really came from him. Now once again let's remind ourselves of something: the historical Jesus quest is about discerning what...

More people say bad things about Bultmann than who have read him (1884-1976). Bultmann was escorted into the theological world in the day of Schweitzer's famous Quest. Bultmann, a faithful church-going organist-playing son of the Lutheran church, knew that one...

Go to your local Barnes and Noble or Borders or any bookshop of fine taste and you will find a section on Jesus, and the books about Jesus make one subtle or not-so-subtle promise: the book will reveal who the...