The Wisdom of Jesus: Between the Sages of Israel and the Apostles of the Church

How would our understanding of Jesus change if we abandoned our preconceptions and focussed on his words alone? How would this wisdom compare with that of ancient Israel and the early first-century church? Such questions pose serious difficulties. Everything in the early Christian gospels is either derived from historical memory, or is borrowed, or invented, argues Charles W. Hedrick. Of the many sayings attributed to Christ, historians can only agree on a few as having been spoken by him – and those few are far from certain.
In The Wisdom of Jesus, Hedrick overcomes these challenges, presenting a picture of Jesus as expressed through his own words. The Jesus that emerges is a lower-class man of the first century; a complex figure who cannot be considered religious in a traditional sense. Liberated from theological explanation and interpretation, his discourse is revealed as belonging to the secular world, and his concerns to be those of common life.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
1 The Problem of the Historical Study of Jesus
2 Jesus and the Language of the Gospel
3 Early Christian Wisdom
4 Surveying the Sages of Ancient Israel
5 The Sayings of Jesus: A Preface
6 Vestiges of a Discourse
7 Parables: Fictional Narratives about the Ordinary
8 A Case Study of a Parable: The Fired Manager
9 Jesus between the Wisdom Canons of Israel and the Church
Epilogue: Pondering the Unreliability of the Gospels
List of Abbreviations
Bibliography
Index of Ancient Sources
Index of Modern Authors