Person

Gerd Theissen

German New Testament scholar, professor at the University of Heidelberg from 1980 and now professor emeritus there. The British Academy, awarding him its Burkitt Medal in 2002, called him one of the earliest pioneers in applying the principles and methods of sociology to the study of the New Testament. His work runs from the social world of the Jesus movement and the Pauline churches to the miracle stories, the historical Jesus, and a theory of early Christian religion.

The codex cites Theissen as a critical scholar, not a conservative one. That is why his findings carry weight in historical argument: when a Heidelberg sociologist of early Christianity finds accurate local colour in Mark, the observation does not come from an apologist with a stake in the result.

Life

• Born 24 April 1943 in Rheydt, now Mönchengladbach, Germany.
• Studied theology and German at the University of Bonn, where he was an assistant to Philipp Vielhauer. Doctorate in 1968 on the Letter to the Hebrews; habilitation in 1972 on the early Christian miracle stories.
• Worked from 1976 to 1978 as a secondary-school teacher of religion and German.
• Professor of New Testament at the University of Copenhagen, 1978-1980, then at the University of Heidelberg from 1980.
• An ordained pastor of the Evangelical Church in Baden who preaches regularly and has published several collections of sermons and meditations.
• Member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Burkitt Medal for Biblical Studies, British Academy, 2002. Honorary doctorates from the universities of Neuchâtel, Glasgow, St Andrews, Lund and Aarhus, and from the Károli Gáspár Reformed University in Budapest in 2005.

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Major works

• Urchristliche Wundergeschichten (Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1974), the published form of his work on the miracle stories; English, The Miracle Stories of the Early Christian Tradition, translated by Francis McDonagh (T. & T. Clark, 1983).
• Soziologie der Jesusbewegung (Kaiser, 1977); English, Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity (Fortress Press, 1978), published in Britain as The First Followers of Jesus (SCM Press, 1978). He issued a reworked version, Die Jesusbewegung: Sozialgeschichte einer Revolution der Werte (Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2004).
• Studien zur Soziologie des Urchristentums (1979), sociological essays; The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity (T. & T. Clark), his study centred on the church at Corinth.
• Der Schatten des Galiläers (Kaiser, 1986); English, The Shadow of the Galilean (SCM Press and Fortress Press, 1987), a narrative presentation of historical-Jesus research which the British Academy called accessible to any intelligent reader but based on the strictest critical discipline.
• Lokalkolorit und Zeitgeschichte in den Evangelien (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht); English, The Gospels in Context: Social and Political History in the Synoptic Tradition, translated by Linda M. Maloney (Fortress Press, 1991).
• With Annette Merz, Der historische Jesus: Ein Lehrbuch (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht); English, The Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide (Fortress Press and SCM Press, 1998).
• With Dagmar Winter, The Quest for the Plausible Jesus: The Question of Criteria (Westminster John Knox Press, 2002).
• The Religion of the Earliest Churches: Creating a Symbolic World (Fortress Press, 1999).
• A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion (SCM Press, 1999).
• The New Testament: History, Literature, Religion (T. & T. Clark, 2003).

Method

1. Social history of early Christianity. Theissen read the Gospel traditions and Paul's letters for the social conditions behind them: the Palestinian Jesus movement in Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity, the Corinthian church in The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity.
2. Local colour and contemporary history. The Gospels in Context asks what the Synoptic traditions reveal about the places, politics and economic conditions of first-century Palestine, treating accurate local detail as evidence about where and when a tradition took shape.
3. The historical Jesus as a whole. The guide written with Annette Merz surveys the sources for Jesus and his historical and social context, then treats Jesus as charismatic, prophet, healer, teller of parables and ethical teacher, before turning to the last supper, his death, the Easter accounts and the beginnings of Christology.
4. Miracle stories. His habilitation and first major book studied the early Christian miracle stories form-critically, as a body of narrative tradition with recurring literary patterns.
5. Sociologist and theologian. The British Academy's citation stressed that he never ceased to be a theologian, always drawing out the theological as well as the historical significance of his sociological work, and that he has written directly on the meaning of faith.

How the codex uses him

• Mark's geography. Mark 7.31 Sidon Route Objection Defeater cites The Gospels in Context on the local colour of Mark 7:24-30: the Syrophoenician woman's exchange about the children's bread reflects the real economic tension between Tyre and its Galilean hinterland. That is knowledge of the region, which tells against the claim that Mark did not know Palestinian geography.
• The Testimonium core. Extra-Biblical Case for Jesus, Objections and Responses and Josephus name Theissen, with Meier and Vermes, among scholars who find typically Josephan idioms in the neutral core of Josephus's passage on Jesus, in support of a partial-authenticity reading. The vocabulary argument is best documented in John P. Meier's work; the attribution to Theissen in particular still needs checking against The Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide.

See also

• Mark 7.31 Sidon Route Objection Defeater, the defeater built partly on his work on local colour
• Josephus, where his reading of the Testimonium core is cited
• Extra-Biblical Case for Jesus, Objections and Responses, the hub for non-Christian evidence about Jesus
• Historicity of Jesus, the question his historical-Jesus guide addresses
• NT Geographical Reliability, the wider case on the Gospels' knowledge of place
• Miracles, the topic of his first major book