Faith, History, and the Meaning of Jesus The 2006 VeriTas LecTures aT uVa inside The Law Points to God The Divine in The Cinema
Praxis V10 N4
Winter 2007
Pr ax i s
2007 Reunions
By wes ZeLL Director of Undergraduate Ministries
C
ontemPorArY CULtUre is full of distorted portraits of Jesus. While current misrepresentations might be more creatively packaged than those of previous eras, the distortions themselves are not a modern phenomenon. many scholars, for instance, believe that the earliest surviving image of Jesus of nazareth is a cartoon from about 200 A.d. scratched into the rock of rome’s Palatine hill. the graffiti shows a man lifting his hand toward a crucified figure with a human body and a donkey’s head. the scrawling Greek inscription below the image
lectures on the topic of Faith, History, and the Meaning of Jesus. Carson is the research professor of new testament at trinity evangelical divinity school and the author or editor of more than 45 books on Biblical studies and theology. each lecture was attended by more than 300 students and addressed some of the most important questions about Jesus: “Are the historical sources about his life the product of conspiracy and conjecture, or might they be a reliable basis for faith, hope and love?” “is his reported resurrection just another ancient myth, or might it have something real to do with the suffering and experience of modernity?” “Can we ignore his claims without ignoring the most fundamental issues of human existence?” “What do we do with doubt?”
Donald Carson addresses UVa community at the university’s Newcomb Hall Theater photo by Eric Kelley
reads “Alexamenos worships his god.” the cruel joke about Alexamenos displays central features of ancient public perceptions of Christianity. Claims about an executed God were often mocked or ignored. though not evident in this particular graffiti, Christians were accused of cannibalism because they spoke of “eating the body and drinking the blood.” much of the culture simply didn’t know the basic elements of the Christian story and so constructed their own versions of it. two millennia after Alexamenos, our culture has its own set of rumors about Jesus, portraits that are as misleading as the one on Palatine hill. And while the claims of Jesus are sometimes rejected after hard study, more often they are simply not considered because the rumors are mistaken for fact. For this reason, the study Center recently hosted Biblical scholar donald Carson, who gave two public
Donald Carson speaks with students after an evening lecture photo by Carl Briggs
Carson demonstrated that faith and history were not at odds with one another; rather, Christian faith is rooted in the history of God’s work in the world. this, after all, is one central meaning of Jesus — that through the incarnation God truly enters space and time in order to redeem we who live here. in addition to his lectures on Grounds, Carson spoke to campus ministers, pastors, graduate students and community members at three different events at the study Center. one of those discussions — on the Christian mind — is among Carson’s talks available for download from the Center’s website. Faith, History, and the Meaning of Jesus was part of The Veritas Forum, a national series of conversations that began in 1992 at harvard University and has since happened at dozens of
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