Från Jesusrörelse till Jesus själv. Gerd Theissens utveckling inom jesusforskningen

Abstract

The main lines of Gerd Theissen’s 25 years of research on the Jesus movement are presented here. It is shown that he has moved from a form-critical and fairly sceptical perspective, which focuses only on the tradition process and reads the gospels as mirrors of the early church (and hardly at all of Jesus himself) to a historiography guided by an awareness of the strong coherence between Jesus himself and both his Jewish context and the movement that developed out of his ministry. The methodology of his great book on the historical Jesus (1996) substitutes the criterion of plausibility for the earlier much-used criterion of dissimilarity.