Bücher von Charles W. Hedrick

This translation of the Gospel of Thomas represents a departure from the usual literal English of previous publications. It aims at providing a reader-friendly translation of the original Coptic language in contemporary idiomatic English, while remaining true to the complexities of the Coptic. The commentary seeks to clarify each saying as it likely would have been understood in the historical context of the Coptic language during the period of Thomas's popularity in Egypt. The sayings in Thomas in this period are no longer sayings of the Jewish man Jesus of Nazareth, but they have become sayings of a revelation bearer, the living Jesus, who announces a radical faith for a new age of the church. The historical matrix that best serves to inform the text is found in a continuation, albeit in a radical direction, of the traditional faiths represented in the earliest Christian literature.

What happens to faith when the creeds and confessions can no longer be squared with historical and empirical evidence? This book features thirteen scholars who take up the challenge to speak candidly about how they negotiate the conflicting claims of faith and reason.

What difference does scholarship on the historical Jesus make for the way we think about the meaning of Christian faith in the twenty-first century? In The Historical Jesus Goes To Church, biblical scholars--Fellows of the Jesus Seminar--speak directly to the ways in which new knowledge of the Jesus of history requires and enables us to think differently about the significance of Jesus and about the reliability and authority of the Bible. They also imagine what these new understandings imply for public worship, preaching, prayer and practice, and life in community. These articles evoke the spirit of Paul, Christianity's first theologian, who like us found himself standing at the intersection of two eras and knew that he had to let go of his past if he hoped to have a future.

In this splendid introduction to the elusive rhetorical device central to the New Testament picture of Jesus, Charles Hedrick explores the nature of the parable and its history of use. He asks basic questions such as, what is a parable? is Jesus really the author of the parables? and what does a parable mean? and then reviews a range of...