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Jesus

Theological Liberalism and Christology

In the preface to Paul Between Damascus and Antioch Martin Hengel decried in the current scholarly scene ‘a radical form of criticism which in the end must be said to be uncritical, because it wants neither really to understand the sources nor to interpret them, but basically destroys them in order to make room for its own fantastic constructions’.

It is [Martin Hengel], perhaps more than any other NT scholar of his time, who has starkly (and in my view persuasively) underscored how little time there was between the death of Jesus and the flowering of a vibrant devotion to him that involved astonishing Christological claims and unprecedented devotional actions, including the phenomena of corporate worship. To cite one of his memorable statements, ‘one is tempted to say that more happened [in terms of this development in Jesus-devotion] in this period of less than two decades [ie. c 30-50CE] than in the whole of the next seven centuries’ [Hengel, Son of God, 2].

Over against both anti-critical conservatism of a creedalistic or fundamentalist nature, and over against the now-fashionable disdain of critical historical investigation in some so-called ‘post-modernist’ circles… Hengel’s body of work stands as a monumental refutation and inspiration.

Excerpts from Larry W. Hurtado, ‘Martin Hengel’s Impact on English-speaking Scholarship’, Expository Times, Vol 120 No. 2, p.71.

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