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Intrigue. Politics. Lies. Power struggle. Sound like a thriller?
It's the Bible. In Jesus: God, Man or Party Label?, Chris Albert
Wells argues that the interpretation of the Gospels we have been
taught as Truth ignores a bitter battle of intra-community
conflicts and strategies. To discover the nature of the initial
split, Wells encourages us to give a new look at the Essene Dead
Sea Scroll Messiahs and then to Northern Syria, where the first
Gospels were written in a community called Essene before being
called Christian. The reader will discover here the background that
ultimately produced the Gospels and what they really meant to those
who wrote them. Within this community context, Jesus will be just
as alien to established Church traditions as to modern historical
portrayals or mythical castings forwarded by scholarly textual
criticism. Wells challenges us to question everything we have been
told, and to understand the story of Jesus in an entirely new
light. Chris Albert Wells is a university teacher, professor of
surgery and presently lives on the French Riviera. Publisher's
website: http://www.eloquentbooks.com/Jesus-GodManOrPartyLabel.html
We may smile to be told that, in some cultures, the eating of timid
or ugly animals is believed to make the eater timid or ugly. Yet,
equally fundamental misunderstandings of the relations between
things, words and ideas are rife among Western thinkers. In this
provocative essay, G.A. Wells identifies some influential mistakes
about language embedded in the empiricist philosophical tradition
of Locke, Russell and Ayer. Wells shows how these errors stimulated
a religious backlash, in which faith became coupled with
commonsense realism, in such writers as Keith Ward, Teilhard de
Chardin and Thomas Altizer. Similar misconceptions gave rise both
to the behaviourism of Watson and Ryle, and to the
anti-behaviourist Chomskyan reaction with its chimera of a
"universal grammar". Magical thinking, the writer claims, derives
from plausible errors concerning the efficacy of gestures and
words, and survives even though these errors have been refuted.
Wells illustrates the influence of misconceptions about language as
they manifest themselves in contemporary religious apologetics.
In this book, Professor Wells, one of the leading freethinkers of
our time, addresses the question of why so many people believe and
adopt the doctrines of religion. The work opens with a new attempt
to analyze the nature of belief, developing the theoretical
approach of the late F.R.H. Englefield. Wells rejects the view that
an idea is a definite image, and distinguishes between general and
abstract ideas. An account of the evidence for reasoning in
non-human animals rebuts the frequently-heard claim that language
is intrinsic to thinking, and a discussion of fairytales and
primitive thinking concludes that these are closer to modern modes
of thought than some philosphers have maintained. Moving to a
consideration of the Bible as a basis for religious belief,
Professor Wells describes the Bible's contradictory views of the
person of Jesus, and presents an account of the traditional Muslim
theory that Jesus was in fact saved by God from crucifixion. Wells
also appraises the significance of various modern attempts to
rethink the significance of the New Testament (Schweitzer, Hoskyns
and Davey, Sanders and Davies), and reviews Charlesworth's attempt
to salvage some historical evidence for Jesus from the Christian
interpolation in Josephus. "Belief and Make-Believe" also contains
explorations of conceptual difficulties in the New Testament view
of man, with special attention to bodily resurrection,
predestination, and eternal punishment, and analyzes recent
attempts to defend the Christian message by restating it in more
abstract terms. Finally, Professor Wells investigates the links
between poetry, arts, and religion and the prevalence of
make-believe in the arts and artistic criticism.
In this provocative book, noted scholar G. A. Wells tells the story
of Higher Criticism: the close study of the scriptures that reveals
difficulties and discrepancies. Wells traces the discipline's
German beginnings, exploring the problems in the New Testament that
prompted scholars to revise traditional theories of the scriptures'
origins. Wells then traces the development and reception of these
views from the 18th century to today. Drawing on current biblical
scholarship, Wells explains how the Jesus of Paul's epistles
differs radically from later versions and addresses conservative
Christians' attempts to reconcile them. He carefully analyzes what
the New Testament says about miracles, the Virgin Birth, the
Nativity, Jesus' conflicting genealogies, the Resurrection, the
post-Resurrection appearances, and the failed prophecies of
imminent apocalypse. Wells persuasively profiles the New Testament
as a fascinating but flawed collection of incompatible viewpoints,
revealing Jesus as a shifting, ambiguous, legendary figure who
reflected the evolving teachings of a fragmented, emotion-based
cultic movement.
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