You probably know the English novelist AN Wilson's book on Jesus. He deals easily with the textual issues, scraping away accretions to find the plausible figure of an original character. In the scene where Jesus kneels down and draws a circle in the sand (for no obvious reason) he comments that here he feels in the presence of an original witness. Convinced me!
BobW
--- Michael Smith <mjs at smithbowen.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-08-02 at 19:49 -0700, Robert Wrubel
> wrote:
>
> > However, if there was only a crazy Hasid who came
> in
> > from the country and was killed, the later writers
> > certainly created an effective fictional character
> > around him. The angry, driven,
> fearless/vulnerable,
> > compassionate, riddling mystic they created is a
> lot
> > more interesting to me than the sententious heroes
> of
> > Greek tragedy.
>
> Yeah, he's an interesting character, and harder to
> understand because we
> don't really 'get' the milieu. Some of his
> contradictions -- as we see
> them, anyway -- may well go back to the historical
> Hasid; others have
> perhaps been introduced in the processes of
> redaction and reflection.
>
> To me personally the history of the texts is at
> least as interesting as
> the bare-bones historical original. Not that the
> latter is dull -- but
> look what was *made* of him! A fascinating,
> inexhaustibly fascinating
> story.
>
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