Jesus and Easter: Did God Raise the Historical Jesus from the Dead?

By Willi Marxsen

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0687199298
• ISBN13: 9780687199297
• Release Date: February 1990
• Publisher: Abingdon Press
• Length: 92 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Kerygmatic Faith or Objective Faith?

This book of Marxsen, together with The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, provides the reader with a fair insight into Marxsen post existential theology. Marxsen is one of the most famous pupils of Bultmann, together with Fuchs, Bornkamm, Käsemann, Ebeling and Robinson. Before beginning my review, I just want to recall that Marxsen was one of the leaders of the New Quest of the Historical Jesus, as Robinson labels it, because after Bultmann's Jesus in 1926, the issue was almost dead. Around the world scholars assumed that the research of the Historical Jesus was impossible and illegitimate. Marxsen contributed to change that view. According to Marxsen there are 3 ways we know something about the Historical Jesus: personal experience, what others tell us, and texts reading. Personal experience does not provide us with historical contents. If it did, all people in earth would know all the details of Jesus life prior any one told them. But we positively know that is not the case. What other tell us in sermons is very ambiguous. Usually, priests do not pretend to inform historically about what exactly happened to Jesus. Rather, they want to wake up our faith. But Christian faith told mainly by historical narratives. That is why we get confusing information: history mixed with faith. But, note it, the intention is to wake up faith, not to inform historically. Being the contents such interrelated is understandable, Marxsen says, that when someone questions the historical information, one feels his faith is under attack. Finally, textual reading, that is precisely what Marxsen wants to do and the only way to know something historically. For, how could we ever known what Jesus did and said if we hadn't had the texts? Yet there is a big problem with the NT and the Gospels: they are not an objective source. Again, what was the aim of the writers: to give a full and objective account of what happened to Jesus, or rather to wake up faith through Jesus history? For Marxsen the correct is the latter. Accordingly, we must be aware about what we are doing with the Gospels and Paul when we are asking them questions they are not prepared to respond. We are going to force texts and to make them fit our modern-objective minds. I beg to differ with other reviewers. To me Marxsen is a master in exegesis (as almost all luterans are) and I don't see any major mistake in his analysis in this point. Concerning the hermeneutic program of his exegesis, I don't think is problematic. He presupposes that the Gospels are explaining some facts that happened a few years before. The problem is that to reach back to this facts we are left only with the Gospels texts and, perhaps, Paul. It is not very much surprising that texts present minor discrepancies about the exactness of the facts they are narrating. If TV had existed we wouldn't had that problem. On the other hand, that is the same problem we are faced with all ancient documents. This book is not aimed to those seekin