Page 133 - Prophet Jesus (Pbuh): A Prophet Not A Son, Of God

HARUN YAHYA 131

In his important work The Birth of Christianity:
Discovering what happened in the years immediately after
the execution of Jesus, another Biblical scholar, John
Dominic Crossan, quotes Marcus J. Borg and Barry
Henaut about the authors of the Gospels:
How are the Gospels to be used as sources for
constructing an image of the historical Jesus? ...
The Gospels are literally the voices of their authors.
Behind them are the anonymous voices of the com-
munity talking about Jesus. And embedded
within their voices is the voice of Jesus, as well
as the deeds of Jesus. Constructing an image of
Jesus—which is what the quest for the historical
Jesus is about—involves two crucial steps. The
first step is discerning what is likely to go back
to Jesus. The second step is setting this material
in the historical context of the first-century
Jewish homeland. 27

The Oral phase of the Jesus tradition is now forever
lost. The spoken word is transitory by nature and
exists for but a moment. It lives on only in the
memory of the audience and its recovery is en-
tirely dependent upon the accuracy of that
memory to bring it back into being … Even the
written tradition continues to be edited and im-
proved. This warns us against assuming that
the Gospels offer a directly transcribed orality:
the tradition may have been thoroughly textu-
alized and altered in the transmission process, a
process that did not end with the synoptic
evangelists! 28