Albert Schweitzer – the musician turned philosopher-theologian turned doctor turned missionary turned anti-colonial critic/Nobel Peace prize winner and all-round tenacious guy – diagnosed this problem well in his appreciative critique of the Modern ‘Lives of Jesus’ tradition. Treating the Gospels as biographies to crack, these Modern scholars of the quest to know the ‘historical Jesus’ ended up failing to encounter the man who ‘comes to us as One Unknown, without a name’.6 Without that encounter to animate their work, however, they just kept reconstructing Jesus in their own image. Each time
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