Jesus, the Unprecedented Human Being. Giosuè Ghisalberti

are: Michael Baigent. The Jesus Papers: Exposing the Greatest Cover-up in History. San Francisco: Harper, 2006. Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino. The Jesus Family Tomb: The Discovery that Will Change History Forever. London: Harper Element, 2007. Robert H. Eisenmann. James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls. New York: Penguin, 1998. Barbara Thiering, Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Unlocking the Secrets of His Life Story. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1992.

8 Fredriksen, Paula. From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Jesus. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988, 3.

9 Perrin, Norm. Jesus and the Language of the Kingdom: Symbol and Metaphor in New Testament Interpretation. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980, 132.

10 Charlesworth, James Hamilton. The Historical Jesus: An Essential Guide. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2008, 63.

11 Dibelius, Martin. From Tradition to Gospel. Tr. Bertram Lee Woolf. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935, 3.

12 Crossan, John Dominic. In Parables: The Challenge of the Historical Jesus. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1973, 45.

13 Rhoads, David and Michie, Donald. Mark as Story: An Introduction to the Narrative of the Gospel. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982, 2.

14 Hengel, Martin. Studies in the Gospel of Mark. Tr. John Bowden. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985, 32.

15 Funk, Robert W, Hoover, Roy W. and the Jesus Seminar. The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Sayings of Jesus. New York: Harper Collins, 1993.

16 Oeming, Manfred. Hermeneutics: An Introduction. Tr. Joachim F. Vette. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, 74,

17 Achtemeier, Paul John. “How Adequate is the New Hermeneutic?,” 101–119 in Theology Today, Vol. 23, No. 1, April 1, 1966, 111. For an early discussion, see The New Hermeneutic edited by James M. Robinson and John B. Cobb Jr. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1964.

18 Bultmann, Rudolf. “The Gospels (Form)” in Twentieth Century Theology in the Making, Vol. 1: Themes of Biblical Theology. Ed. Jaroslav Pelikan. London: Collins, 1969.

19 Ellis, Edward Earle. The Making of the New Testament Documents. Leiden: Brill, 2002, 5.

20 Collins, Adela Yarbro. The Beginning of the Gospel: Prologue of Mark in Context. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992, 2.

21 Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953, 45.

22 Kümmel, Werner Georg. Introduction to the New Testament. London: SCM, 1975, 37.

23 These three aspects of the work are outlined by Paul Ricoeur in “Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics,” 95–110 in New Literary History, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Autumn 1974).

24 Tuckett, Carl. “The Present Son of Man,” 58–81 Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 14 (1982), 58.

25 McCracken, David. The Scandal of the Gospels. Jesus, Story, and Offense. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, 83.

26 Kermode, Frank. The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979, 40.

27 Léon-Dufour, Xavier. Life and Death in the New Testament: The Teachings of Paul and Jesus. Tr. Terrence Prendergast. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986, xxvi.

28 Borg, Marcus Joel and Crossan, John Dominic. The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem. New York: HarperOne, 2006, 157.

29 Girard, René. The Scapegoat. Tr. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986, 102.

30 Perrin, Norman. Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, 23.

31 Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Tr. edited by Garrett Barden and John Cumming. New York: Crossroad, 1986.

32 Habermas, Jürgen. “A Review of Gadamer’s Truth and Method.” Tr. Fred R. Dallmayr and Thomas McCarthy, 213–244 in The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur. Ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990, 230, my emphasis.

33 Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Tr. Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.

34 Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1962, 44. The quote is from the section “the task of destroying the history of ontology.”

35 Vattimo, Gianni. After Christianity. Tr. Luca D’Isanto. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, 112.

36 Ricoeur, Paul. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, action, and interpretation. Ed. and Tr. John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, 56. See especially “The Task of Hermeneutics,” 33–62.

37 Latourelle, René. Finding Jesus Through the Gospels: History and Hermeneutics. Tr. Aloysius Owen. New York: Alba House, Society of St. Paul, 1978, x. He adds that Jesus “deciphers the human condition in all dimensions and accomplishes it beyond all that was foreseen,” xi, my emphasis.

38 Moltmann, Jürgen. The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993.

39 Nietzsche,