Isa

Promoted to the front page. Originally Posted on October 14th, 2008.

I am going to kick off my blogging here with something perhaps unusual for a Muslim site. I'm not going to talk about anything explicitly Muslim at all.

The Jesus Seminar was founded in the mid-80s by scholars of religion to make a first stab at understanding the Gospels from a scientific perspective: that is to say, as a text, how could it be teased out? As a person who rejected the divinity of Jesus, I was fasinated over the years as they teased out of the Gospels those things that were likely the words of the mad rabbi (as I think of him) as opposed to those of his later followers of varied socio-religious persuasions. Under the Jamesite, Pauline and other accretions were pithy teachings that were unlike anything encountered in texts of the time, truly revolutionary and often counterintuitive things that reached down and touched me.