Chapter 14 The Peril of Modernising and De-modernising Jesus: A Cognitive Perspective

In: “To Recover What Has Been Lost”: Essays on Eschatology, Intertextuality, and Reception History in Honor of Dale C. Allison Jr.
Author:
Gerd Theissen University of Heidelberg

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Abstract

The recent “memory approach” in Jesus research is a variant of a cognitive approach that is now widespread in many humanistic studies. One insight of the cognitive approach is that the successful spread of traditions is due to an optimal combination of counterintuitive and intuitive plausible motifs. The message of Jesus combines both characteristics: His ethics has a plausible centre in the double commandment of love that is expanded in the Jesus tradition by an appeal to the “mind” (or to “reason”) and is interpreted by universal maxims like the Golden Rule. But this plausible centre is combined with very radical demands. The whole human being should serve God. God is supreme to political power, to economic richness and the wisdom of the educated. Morality breaks ritual norms. This combination of the provocative and the intuitive explains the “success” of the Jesus tradition. Modernisation of Jesus in recent times has concentrated often only on some plausible traditions like the love commandment. But in our contemporary culture the provocative content of his message is sometimes even more “modern.”

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