Bücher von Robert W. Funk

Can the authentic words and deed of Jesus identified by the Jesus Seminar furnish a sufficient basis for a credible profile of the Jesus of history? That is the challenge faced by the contributors to this volume. Their efforts have resulted in a unique collection of studied impressions of Jesus. Here readers will see not Jesus the icon of myth and creed, but a provocative young man of first-century Palestine whose vision and determination to live the vision gave birth to a new form of faith and changed the course of history.

Jesus saw the extraordinary in the ordinary. His extraordinary vision comes to us in bits and pieces, in random stunning insights, embedded in the everyday language of his parables, aphorisms, and dialogues. In A Credible Jesus, Robert Funk sorts and assembles these fragments and examines ways in which the vision they preserve can serve twenty-first century people searching for meaning in a very different world than the one Jesus inhabited. The resuslts and both unsettling and reassuring.

The voice of Jesus has for centuries been obscured and his vision skewed even by well-intended gospel writers, who transmitted his words to serve their own concerns. The Gospel of Jesus frees Jesus' voice from the accretions of time and lets his challenging wisdom stand out as never before.

A concise and readable introduction to the parables for all readers, this first report of the Jesus Seminar reviews the authenticity of all gospel versions of the thirty-three parables attributed to Jesus. Individual versions of each parable are grouped together and arranged for easy reference and comparison.

Many ideas once thought to be foundational to Christianity are now known to be false due to scientific discoveries regarding the nature of the universe and historical findings about how Christianity began. Is Christianity doomed to irrelevance or even extinction? How might Christianity reinvent itself so that it can address the real concerns of people in today’s world? This collection of essays from such leading thinkers as Karen Armstrong and John Shelby Spong addresses questions such as life after death, the meaning of God, apocalypticism, and the significance of Jesus’ death.Contributors: Karen Armstrong, Don Cupitt, Arthur J. Dewey, Robert W. Funk, Lloyd Geering, Roy W. Hoover, Robert J. Miller, Stephen J. Patterson, Bernard Brandon Scott, John Shelby Spong