Читать книгу The Origins of Christianity and the New Testament - Rebecca I. Denova - Страница 31

Ever since the Renaissance, Europeans had been enthralled with the rediscovery of the literature and art of ancient Greece and Rome. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, he brought engineers and surveyors to record the monuments. The discovery of the Rosetta Stone decoded the lost art of hieroglyphs and “Egyptomania” became all the rage in Europe.

In the 1850s, Darwin’s work on the theory of evolution motivated men and women to begin digging up the Middle East (sometimes in the hope of proving him wrong). Europe learned of the great civilizations of Mesopotamia, Sumer, Assyria, and Babylon. The rise of the social sciences (Anthropology, Archaeology, Sociology, and Psychology) provided new criteria for the study of humans and human civilization.

What is deemed the “first quest” saw the production of popular books under the category of the Lives of Jesus, applying the new historical methods in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The writers freely filled in details (e.g. his life as a carpenter), harmonized the differences among the gospels, and psychoanalyzed Jesus (“What was he thinking at various times?”). New literary approaches to understanding “myth” in the ancient world led a few writers to totally dismiss the miracle stories and supernatural elements of Jesus as “myth.” Each writer began with an overall portrait of Jesus (as a reformer, as a revolutionary) and anything that did not fit into this portrait was eliminated.