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Jaroslav Pelikan

Jaroslav Pelikan Biography

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“In principle, to be sure, the Reformation idea of the universal priesthood of all believers meant that not only the clergy but also the laity, not only the theologian but also the magistrate, had the capacity to read, understand, and apply the teachings of the Bible. Yet one of the contributions of the sacred philology of the biblical humanists to the Reformation was an insistence that, in practice, often contradicted the notion of the universal priesthood: the Bible had to be understood on the basis of the authentic original text, written in Hebrew and Greek which, most of the time, only clergy and theologians could comprehend properly. Thus the scholarly authority of the Reformation clergy replaced the priestly authority of the medieval clergy.”

TheologyReformationProtestantismThe BiblePhilologyPriesthood Of All BelieversChristian HumanismAuthority In ChristianityBiblical Languages
Book:Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture
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“The apostle Paul often appears in Christian thought as the one chiefly responsible for the de-Judaization of the gospel and even for the transmutation of the person of Jesus from a rabbi in the Jewish sense to a divine being in the Greek sense. Such an interpretation of Paul became almost canonical in certain schools of biblical criticism during the nineteenth century, especially that of Ferdinand Christian Baur, who saw the controversy between Paul and Peter as a conflict between the party of Peter, with its 'Judaizing' distortion of the gospel into a new law, and the party of Paul, with its universal vision of the gospel as a message about Jesus for all humanity. Very often, of course, this description of the opposition between Peter and Paul and between law and gospel was cast in the language of the opposition between Roman Catholicism (which traced its succession to Peter as the first pope) and Protestantism (which arose from Luther's interpretation of the epistles of Paul). Luther's favorite among those epistles, the letter to the Romans, became the charter for this supposed declaration of independence from Judaism.”

LawChristianityTheologyDoctrinePeterJudaismGospelMartin LutherPaulRoman CatholicismBook Of Romans
Book:Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture
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“To invoke a Kierkegaardesque figure of speech, the beauty of the language of the Bible can be like a set of dentist's instruments nearly laid out on a table and hanging on a wall, intriguing in their technological complexity and with their stainless steel highly polished--until they set to work on the job for which they were originally designed. Then all of a sudden my reaction changes from "How shiny and beautiful they all are!" to "Get that damned thing out of my mouth!”

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Book:Whose Bible Is It?: A Short History of the Scriptures
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“Unlike most readers in Antiquity who read their books aloud, we have developed the convention of reading silently. This lets us read more widely but often less well, especially when what we are reading-such as the plays of Shakespeare and Holy Scripture-is a body of oral material that has been, almost but not quite accidentally, captured in a book like a fly in amber.”

WellsHas BeensBookPlayBodyReadingMaterialsReaderHolyScriptureConventionsCapturedAntiquityAmberHoly Scriptures
Book:Whose Bible Is It?: A Short History of the Scriptures
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“Both Socrates and Jesus were outstanding teachers; both of them urged and practiced great simplicity of life; both were regarded as traitors to the religion of their community; neither of them wrote anything; both of them were executed; and both have become the subject of traditions that are difficult or impossible to harmonize.”

JesusDifficultChristCommunityTeacherImpossibleSubjectsJesus ChristTraditionSimplicityOutstandingTraitor
Book:Jesus through the centuries: Mary through the centuries
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“Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide. Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition.”

ShouldFirstsDoneProblemPastRememberNeededConversationFirst TimeTraditionSolveTestimony
Book:Orthodoxy & Western Culture: A Collection of Essays Honoring Jaroslav Pelikan on His Eightieth Birthday
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“Regardless of what anyone may personally think or believe about him, Jesus of Nazareth has been the dominant figure in the history of western culture for almost twenty centuries... It is from his birth that most of the human race dates its calendars, it is by his name that millions curse and in his name that millions pray.”

ThinkingBelieveHumansMayHas BeensCultureJesusNamesReligiousPrayerRaceMillionsCenturyFiguresPrayingBirthTwentiesWesternCurseHuman RaceDominantTheologianCalendarsCursingWestern CultureNazareth
Book:Jesus through the centuries: Mary through the centuries
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