Teaching the Historical Jesus Last year, David Barber was assigned as a teaching assistant to a philosophy course on contemporary historical Jesus research. The class was a learning experience for him. Not surprisingly, historians best accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus do not have much in common with the Sunday School stories of our youth. The class also served as a laboratory for the philosophy and psychology of religious belief. In his interaction with students from various faiths, David got glimpses into the structures of conflicts between individual faith and modern, secular thinking. These experiences will be discussed in the presentation, with a focus on the philosophical issues surrounding the attempts of various types of Christians to accommodate belief in a historical religion to new and problematic historical data.

David Barber