The Jesus Dynasty / James Tabor

I just arrived in California for the Scripture and Skepticism conference this weekend at University of California at Davis. Judging from the program and backgrounds of the participants it looks to be a very thoughtful and interesting group with lots of diverse perspectives. It is open to the public so maybe I will run into some of my Blog readers. Even though the program is weighted toward Jesus and Christian Origins there are significant contributions dealing with the issue of a critical approach to Islam and the Koran. This might indeed prove to be one of the more interesting aspects of the conference.

For me it is a time to see some old friends, hear some whom I have never heard, and contribute some small token of well deserved analytical remembrance to the work of Albert Schweitzer on the historical Jesus. My topic is: “Standing in the Shadow of Schweitzer: What Can We Say About an Apocalyptic Jesus? As readers of The Jesus Dynasty know, my book was published on the 100th anniversary of the publication in German of Schweitzer’s monumental work, titled (in English) The Quest for the Historical Jesus. I have read Schweitzer’s work a half-dozen times over the years but yesterday I took advantage of my five hours in flight from North Carolina to California to read through my MacMillan 1955 edition yet again. As we landed I closed the book with a refreshed awe and respect for the sharp and keen insights Schweitzer expressed in 1906. We have come a long way since Schweitzer in the study of Chistian origins, but there is another sense in which we have been dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s of many of his major insights. He had no Dead Sea Scrolls, no complete editions of the Pseudepigrapha, no Nag Hammadi texts, and shared none of our more sophisticated and nuanced understandings of the diverse forms of Judaism in the wider contexts of the ancient Mediterranean world. Yet instinctively he seems, in my view at least, to be “right on target so direct,” on issue after issue.

I will post some updates and reports on the conference through the weekend including a summary of my own paper on Schweiter. Stay tuned, more to come…