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History and Silence
“It is so rare and refreshing to read a Roman history book which recognizes and celebrates the sheer difficulty of writing history” (The Times Literary Supplement). The ruling elite in ancient Rome sought to eradicate even the memory of their deceased opponents through a process now known as damnatio memoriae. These formal and traditional practices included removing the person’s name and image from public monuments and inscriptions, making it illegal to speak of him, and forbidding funeral observances and mourning. Paradoxically, however, while these practices dishonored the person's memory, they did not destroy it. Indeed, a later turn of events could restore the offender not only to ...
Parables as Poetic Fictions
Contending that Jesus narrative parables are more poetic than metaphoric, Hedrick argues that parables should be heard solely on their own terms. Hedrick s dissatisfaction with figurative and metaphorical approaches or those that argue for a particular meaning or a single interpretation diverges sharply from the modern consensus and breaks new ground in parable studies.
When History and Faith Collide
Hedrick explores the tension, or collision, that occurs when studying the Jesus of faith with the critical eye of historical scholarship. He outlines the nature of historical inquiry, gives a brief history of how scholars have understood Jesus, and indentifies the essential issues confronting the reader of the New Testament Gospel accounts of Jesus: discrepancies, contradictions, and the differences as well as strong similarities among different writers.
The Wisdom of Jesus
The aim of this study is to allow Jesus to speak for himself directly to readers, as nearly as possible in his own words without the theological explanations of his interpreters. The resulting image of Jesus that emerges is a complex picture of a first-century lower-class man who was not religious in a traditional sense. His discourse was the language of the secular world and addressed issues of common life.--Provided by publisher
House of Faith or Enchanted Forest?
Since The Renaissance of the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries, and particularly since the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, the ancient creeds of faith have been under serious fire, and the struggle has not gone well for popular religion in America. The rapid advances made by the physical sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the corresponding reliance on scientific accomplishments in American life have been matched by the growing influence of reason in the way Americans think about religion. Except for pockets of resistance, these developments have negatively influenced the practical role of traditional religion in American life. These essaysùpublished over ...
The Wisdom of Jesus
How would the image of Jesus appear if it were based only on sayings that scholars generally agreed originated with Jesus? And how would the wisdom of Jesus reflected in those few sayings compare to the wisdom of the sages of ancient Israel and the apostles of the early first-century church? To answer such questions historians face serious difficulties. Everything we know about Jesus comes from what later writers thought about him; none of the things they claimed he said came directly from him. ""Everything in the early Christian gospels is either derived from historical memory, or is borrowed, or invented,"" Hedrick claims. Even those few sayings receiving near-universal agreement from hist...
Unmasking Biblical Faiths
Unmasking Biblical Faiths aims to address many of the challenges to traditional Christian faith in the modern world. Since the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment, human reason, formerly tethered by the constraints of organized religion, has been set free to explore the universe relatively unchallenged. The influence of the Bible, on the other hand, weakened due to the successes of modern historical criticism, is found to be inadequate for the task of enabling the faith “once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3), in that it cannot adequately respond to the many questions about religious faith that human reasoning raises for modern human beings. In a series of short but tightly reasoned essays, Charles Hedrick explores the confrontation between traditional Christian faith and aggressive human reason, a conflict that is facilitated by Western secular education.
Parabolic Figures or Narrative Fictions?
Hedrick contends that parables do not teach moral and religious lessons; they are not, in whole or part, theological figures for the church. Rather, parables are realistic narrative fictions that like all effective fiction literature are designed to draw readers into story worlds where they make discoveries about themselves by finding their ideas challenged and subverted--or affirmed. The parables have endings but not final resolutions, because the endings raise new complications for careful readers, which require further resolution. The narrative contexts and interpretations supplied by the evangelists constitute an attempt by the early church to bring the secular narratives of Jesus under ...
Many Things in Parables
In this splendid introduction to the elusive rhetorical device central to the New Testament picture of Jesus, Charles Hedrick explores the nature of the parable and its history of use. He asks basic questions such as, what is a parable? is Jesus really the author of the parables? and what does a parable mean? and then reviews a range of sources--from Aesop's fables to modern New Testament scholarship--to answer them. He also surveys the various ways the parables have been approached in literary criticism throughout history, giving specific examples of each method and delineating their strengths and weaknesses.
Unlocking the Secrets of the Gospel according to Thomas
This translation of the Gospel of Thomas represents a departure from the usual literal English of previous publications. It aims at providing a reader-friendly translation of the original Coptic language in contemporary idiomatic English, while remaining true to the complexities of the Coptic. The commentary seeks to clarify each saying as it likely would have been understood in the historical context of the Coptic language during the period of Thomas's popularity in Egypt. The sayings in Thomas in this period are no longer sayings of the Jewish man Jesus of Nazareth, but they have become sayings of a revelation bearer, the living Jesus, who announces a radical faith for a new age of the church. The historical matrix that best serves to inform the text is found in a continuation, albeit in a radical direction, of the traditional faiths represented in the earliest Christian literature.
