I had a difficult time wrapping my head around historical Jesus studies—and truth be told, sometimes I still do! However, what scholars of Jesus and the historical Jesus find is that language centered on the Jesus of history and on the glorified Jesus actually convey ideas rooted in ethnic identities and nationalism, doing harm to those who do not possess Aryan lineage or come from a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant background. Baur was under the influence of German idealists like G. W. F. Hegel, who believed there was a pure, authentic culture that could be found not only within the biblical text
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