Jonathan C P Birch
By academic education and training I am a philosopher and biblical scholar, and both disciplines inform my research in early-modern intellectual history. I work at the interface between religion, politics, and the Western philosophical tradition. I have a particular interest in the reception of the Bible in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a period marked by political revolution, scientific revolution, and radical religious diversity. I approach the modern reception of the Bible from a background in philosophy and religious studies (BA Hons, MA, PGCE), and a PhD on the reception of the Gospels by philosophers and other intellectuals during the European Enlightenment.
First and foremost I am an educator. I have 17 years teaching and learning experience, from secondary students through to supervising post-graduates. My teaching at the University of Glasgow over the last 10 years has ranged over undergraduate courses covering the history and philosophy of religion, biblical texts and their cultural reception, and the history of Christianity. I have convened the popular course The God Question at the University of Glasgow for the last seven years. At post-graduate Masters level, I have convened courses on the intellectual and political history of religion in the modern world, covering a variety of individuals and themes: individuals such as Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Ludwig Feuerbach, Albert Schweitzer, Karl Barth; themes such as early modern Platonism, Religion and the Enlightenment, idealism, the quest for the historical Jesus, and the racialisation of biblical scholarship during the Third Reich.
My first solo authored book is Jesus in an Age of Enlightenment: Radical Gospels from Thomas Hobbes to Thomas Jefferson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
Supervisors: Dr. Ward Blanton
Address: 4 The Square Square
University of Glasgow
Glasgow
G12 8QQ
First and foremost I am an educator. I have 17 years teaching and learning experience, from secondary students through to supervising post-graduates. My teaching at the University of Glasgow over the last 10 years has ranged over undergraduate courses covering the history and philosophy of religion, biblical texts and their cultural reception, and the history of Christianity. I have convened the popular course The God Question at the University of Glasgow for the last seven years. At post-graduate Masters level, I have convened courses on the intellectual and political history of religion in the modern world, covering a variety of individuals and themes: individuals such as Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Ludwig Feuerbach, Albert Schweitzer, Karl Barth; themes such as early modern Platonism, Religion and the Enlightenment, idealism, the quest for the historical Jesus, and the racialisation of biblical scholarship during the Third Reich.
My first solo authored book is Jesus in an Age of Enlightenment: Radical Gospels from Thomas Hobbes to Thomas Jefferson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
Supervisors: Dr. Ward Blanton
Address: 4 The Square Square
University of Glasgow
Glasgow
G12 8QQ
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questions of socio-cultural diversity), and some of the critical methods
employed by biblical scholars and historians of ancient Christianity. More
specifically, it offers a sketch of personalities and controversies in the his-
tory of modern scholarship, focussing on debates about the authenticity
of ancient religious texts, and the legitimacy and limits of religious diverersity
within a modern context. The essay will conclude with an appreciative
assessment of historical scholarship in this area, before offering some
sceptical, though not hostile, remarks on the modern tendency to appeal
to non-canonical sources in attempts to unsettle the religious certitude of
those who espouse religiously and socially discriminatory views.
questions of socio-cultural diversity), and some of the critical methods
employed by biblical scholars and historians of ancient Christianity. More
specifically, it offers a sketch of personalities and controversies in the his-
tory of modern scholarship, focussing on debates about the authenticity
of ancient religious texts, and the legitimacy and limits of religious diverersity
within a modern context. The essay will conclude with an appreciative
assessment of historical scholarship in this area, before offering some
sceptical, though not hostile, remarks on the modern tendency to appeal
to non-canonical sources in attempts to unsettle the religious certitude of
those who espouse religiously and socially discriminatory views.
In Part I of the thesis I outline my project, its themes and methods. In Chapter One I introduce the ‘quest for the historical Jesus’ as a major concern in modern New Testament studies, and a persistent source of interest in wider intellectual discourse. I then take the reader back into the eighteenth century, placing Reimarus’s seminal contribution to the discipline within the context of the wider publishing controversy in which it featured (the Fragmentenstreit). In Chapter Two I explain the historical, moral and political theological dimensions of my analysis; in particular, I define the relationship between my history of scholarship on Jesus, and the one offered by Albert Schweitzer in Von Reimarus zu Wrede (1906), the single most influential work on the rise of historical Jesus studies. In Chapter Three I outline my periodisation and interpretive stance on the main context for my study: the European Enlightenment.
Part II of the thesis concerns history. In Chapter Four I review a range of literature on the origins of historical Jesus studies, discussing the advances made since Schweitzer, and sketching the contours of a new, more comprehensive interpretation. In Chapters Five and Six I supplement that sketch with my own account of the emergence of the modern historical-critical conscience within European intellectual culture during the Enlightenment, and its application to the Bible. I profile some of the scholars who blazed the trail for Reimarus, showing where, and by whom, he was anticipated in some of his critical stances regarding Jesus and Christian origins.
Part III of the thesis addresses morality. In Chapters Seven and Eight I consider why for so many thinkers in the Enlightenment, including Reimarus, morality came to be seen as central to Jesus' historical mission and his most important theological legacy. I locate this ethical turn within a long history of Western philosophical and theological
disputation, with origins in antiquity, culminating in early modernity with the reassertion of moral-theological rationalism which was buttressed by an early modern Thomist revival. I also argue for the influence of a particular vision of Christian reform which prioritised freedom over predestination, and the moral example of Jesus and primitive Christian piety.
Part IV of the thesis concerns political theology. In Chapter Nine I consider this generally neglected dimension of Reimarus’ work, placing him in a tradition of Enlightenment intellectuals who drew upon Jesus and primitive Christianity, in conjunction with theological metaphysics, to give weight to their own particular arguments for religious toleration.
In my Conclusion, as throughout this thesis, I argue that some of the writers who paved the way of Reimarus’s writings on Jesus and Christian origins have their roots in much older, theological preoccupations, and often in heretical versions of Christianity. While these perspectives on Jesus and Christian origins constituted some of the most radical challenges to mainstream religious thought during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they do not submit to a vision of Enlightenment characterised by a straightforward process of overcoming theological worldviews through the emergence of a new secular critique. For the most part, this tradition of scholarship is best understood as a radicalisation of existing tendencies within the history of classical and Christian thought, which continued to understand Jesus, or at least his teachings, as either a path to personal salvation, or as a theologically authoritative court of appeal in the Enlightenment’s protest against religio-political tyranny.