Five portraits of Jesus by North American scholars published in the 1980s demonstrate the strength of the current resurgence in Jesus scholarship and disclose the central questions dominating the current discussion. These portraits (by E. P. Sanders, Burton Mack, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, the present writer, and Richard Horsley) demonstrate that, after decades of relative disinterest, a “third quest” for the historical Jesus is under way. Each portrait or gestalt is interesting in its own right as a construal of the traditions about Jesus and as an exercise in historical reconstruction. Taken together, they illustrate the range of options in contemporary Jesus scholarship and point to the likely focal points of Jesus research in the 1990s.
Later on in Matthew there is another conditional beatitude (xi. 6). The logical extension of this development is to have beatitudes expressed in future rather than in present terms, since their conditional nature implies that their conditions may be met at any time, present or future. And this occurs in Matthew xxiv. 46. Other examples are Luke xiv. 14; xiv. 15; James i. 25; 1 Peter iii. 14; and other conditional beatitudes not expressed in future terms are John xiii. 17 and 1 Peter iv. 14. It is easy to see how the conditional beatitude came about. In a sense all of the general beatitudes are conditional in intent if not in form. To say, as in Isaiah lvi. 2, 'Blessed is the man who does this' is to set up a condition which any man may fulfil by 'doing this'. To phrase the beatitude as 'You will be blessed if you do this' is merely to alter the style of expression, not the meaning of the beatitude. Yet the fact remains that the LXX translators did not use the specifically conditional phrasing and the NT writers did. The difference may be nothing more than the difference between literary and oratorial style, between writers who were writing to be read and writers used to addressing their audience face-to-face. But the difference is there.
“The picture of Jesus as a charismatic or ‘holy man’ vividly in touch with what the texts call ‘Spirit’ radically challenges the flattened sense of reality pervading the modern worldview and much of the mainline church. … Similarly, the picture of Jesus as a subversive sage undermining his culture's conventional assumptions, as a prophet calling it to change its historical direction, and as a revitalization movement founder seeking to create an alternative culture, all point to a deep involvement in the life of history.”
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