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what is the relationship between the historical Jesus and the Jesus that the Church that proclaims in the creeds

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no single criterion will give us a reliable historical Jesus

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imagine Martin Luther never wrote anything down

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that only his followers wrote down what he said

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and so we have to reconstruct Martin Luther from voluminous material

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we would ask, how would we separate that from early scholastic Lutheranism that arises fairly quickly

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you would get a distorted Martin Luther, since he still heard to the end of his life an Augustinian monk, he still hear confessions

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he practiced a number of Catholic pieties

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for Jesus we have to add another criterion

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the criterion of coherence

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balances the criterion of discontinuity and embarrassment

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other accounts of Jesus that make sense in his time and place

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used to broaden out the picture

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helps prevent an ahistorical picture of Jesus

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great Jews in history

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Spinoza

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stand out against their Jewish context

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but you do not understand them outside this context

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Jesus was acting within the historical context of his time

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Jesus' continuity with the Mosaic Law

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Jesus and all adversaries take the Mosaic Law as the given

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Jesus doesn't reject the Mosaic Law

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he reaffirms them

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he will even push them further

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radicalizing them

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deepening them

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not only adultery of the body but of the mind and spirit as well

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not only physical murder is wrong, but murderous anger that destroys the other person psychologically

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the fount of morality flows from within

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you need to purify the source of your moral actions

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does not revoke the Mosaic Law

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he creates new intriguing figurations

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scribe asks him in the temple what is the first commandment

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not one but two:

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love your Lord with all your strength

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you shall love your neighbor as yourself

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is engaging in a Rabbinic technique

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creates a new insight about the law

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this coheres with Jesus as teacher and prophet

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it's discontinuous at the same time

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does not occurs in the Jewish scriptures or anywhere else in the New Testament

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we have to wait until the Didache to see this kind of teaching again

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a first century text which constitutes the oldest extant written catechism, has three main sections dealing with Christian ethics, rituals such as baptism and Eucharist, and Church organization

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Jesus is creating a new gestalt for these two laws