"...Thus, the family of Jesus is presented as having thought him out of his mind, to begin with, and as explicitly repudiated by Jesus. This is complemented by the contemptuous description of the Apostles, who also constituted, together with Upright Jacob [Jesus' brother], the core of the Jesist coterie in Jerusalem. They are constantly described as bickering over precedence and rewards..."
"... The counterposition of these two attitudes--that Simon the Rock recognized Jesus as Messiah but denied the salvational function of the resurrection--is no more than a way of indicating that the Jerusalem group headed by Upright Jacob did not believe in Jesus except as the Jewish Messiah [the bringer of the very terrestrial Kingdom of God that would simply restore Hebrew sovereignty and defeat the Romans]. His role as Lord of the Universe, of Divine Savior of Mankind, meant nothing to them. In short, the viewpoint of Paul is put forth in Mark in such a way as to take advantage of the Jewish debacle. The ground plan of Mark goes far beyod details; it has a profound apologetic aim..."
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2.
"... The counterposition of these two attitudes--that Simon the Rock recognized Jesus as Messiah but denied the salvational function of the resurrection--is no more than a way of indicating that the Jerusalem group headed by Upright Jacob did not believe in Jesus except as the Jewish Messiah [the bringer of the very terrestrial Kingdom of God that would simply restore Hebrew sovereignty and defeat the Romans]. His role as Lord of the Universe, of Divine Savior of Mankind, meant nothing to them. In short, the viewpoint of Paul is put forth in Mark in such a way as to take advantage of the Jewish debacle. The ground plan of Mark goes far beyod details; it has a profound apologetic aim..."
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2.
"After almost 2 centuries of the most painstaking, intense study by scores of thousands of able, conscientious scholars, the amount of information refined out of the sources can be contained in a few lines.
"There is no assurance of the most primitive facts about Jesus the man: the significance of the word "Nazarene," the date and place of his birth, his parents, his family, his milieu. All such information is summed up in a disconcertingly barren statement: in the words of Charles Guignebert, Jesus was 'born somewhere in Galilee in the time of Emperor Augustus, in a modest family that aside from him numbered a good half-dozen children.'
"Moreover, the paucity of information about the background and personality of Jesus the man is reinforced by the utter absence of any indication of original teaching; whatever Jesus thought about religion, and in particular about Judaism, his own ideas failed to survive his death. He could neither have foreseen nor desired the state of affairs that replaced the Kingdom of God he was promoting, and even though the genetic relationship between himself and Chrisitanity is evident, it can only be in the narrow sense that the new religion coagulated through speculations around the meaning of his death."
...
"Generations of higher critics have stubbornly disregarded the titanic fact staring at them from out of the desert of the documentation-- the causal connection between Jesus's initial emergence as a herald of the Kingdom of God and his execution by the Romans as an insurrectoinist-- and have accepted as plausible what was a mere apologia on the part of the believers of the first phase of the evolving faith [roman converts]."
...
"But once it is accepted that the thought of founding a new religion never even crossed Jesus's mind, it becomes obvious that Christianity derives not from anything Jesus did but from what happened after his death. Thus it was after his death that the germination and efflorescence of a new religion took place, rooted in the primordial vision of Jesus resurrected and glorified... 'If Jesus was not resurrected the faith was in vain.'
"But if this is so, it means that the entire vast library of literature on Christian origins, to the extent that it struggled to fling a bridge from the religion itself to the figure of its putative founder, was condemned to sterility... Jesus had originated nothing in the religion that sprang up over his dead body."
"There is no assurance of the most primitive facts about Jesus the man: the significance of the word "Nazarene," the date and place of his birth, his parents, his family, his milieu. All such information is summed up in a disconcertingly barren statement: in the words of Charles Guignebert, Jesus was 'born somewhere in Galilee in the time of Emperor Augustus, in a modest family that aside from him numbered a good half-dozen children.'
"Moreover, the paucity of information about the background and personality of Jesus the man is reinforced by the utter absence of any indication of original teaching; whatever Jesus thought about religion, and in particular about Judaism, his own ideas failed to survive his death. He could neither have foreseen nor desired the state of affairs that replaced the Kingdom of God he was promoting, and even though the genetic relationship between himself and Chrisitanity is evident, it can only be in the narrow sense that the new religion coagulated through speculations around the meaning of his death."
...
"Generations of higher critics have stubbornly disregarded the titanic fact staring at them from out of the desert of the documentation-- the causal connection between Jesus's initial emergence as a herald of the Kingdom of God and his execution by the Romans as an insurrectoinist-- and have accepted as plausible what was a mere apologia on the part of the believers of the first phase of the evolving faith [roman converts]."
...
"But once it is accepted that the thought of founding a new religion never even crossed Jesus's mind, it becomes obvious that Christianity derives not from anything Jesus did but from what happened after his death. Thus it was after his death that the germination and efflorescence of a new religion took place, rooted in the primordial vision of Jesus resurrected and glorified... 'If Jesus was not resurrected the faith was in vain.'
"But if this is so, it means that the entire vast library of literature on Christian origins, to the extent that it struggled to fling a bridge from the religion itself to the figure of its putative founder, was condemned to sterility... Jesus had originated nothing in the religion that sprang up over his dead body."
