Macquarie University students have a responsibility to be familiar with the Student Code of Conduct, and particularly with the Academic Honesty policy. (Links to both will be found under "Policies and Procedures" below.) Note particularly that any work found to be plagiarised will normally automatically receive 0%. The issue of plagiarism will be specifically discussed in the first seminar, but it is the responsibility of the student to be aware of University and Departmental policy on academic honesty.

Unless a Special Consideration request has been submitted and approved, (a) a penalty for lateness will apply – two (2) marks out of 100 will be deducted per day for assignments submitted after the due date – and (b) no assignment will be accepted more than seven (7) days (incl. weekends) after the original submission deadline. No late submissions will be accepted for timed assessments – e.g. quizzes, online tests.

If your assignment is going to be late, please contact your Tutor in advance!

ABOUT THIS UNIT

This Unit sets out to introduce students to the evidence, methods and some of the conclusions of modern “Historical Jesus” scholarship. It focusses on a close examination of the texts of the canonical Gospels, the most important historical sources for Jesus of Nazareth, and asks: what kind of historical evidence is this? What is a “gospel”, and how did they come to be written? How should an historian use this evidence, and what conclusions have historians in fact come to, when they have done so? The Unit will outline the various methodologies (source-critical, form-critical, redaction-critical, etc.) which have been developed with New Testament scholarship, and evaluate their results. The major underlying questions will be: how much do we know about Jesus of Nazareth, and with how much certainty do we know it?

For lecture times and classrooms please consult the MQ Timetable website: http://www.timetables.mq.edu.au. This website will display up-to-date information on your classes and classroom locations.

Class Times:

The class will normally be held on Tuesday evenings between 6 and 8 pm, in room W5C 234. The first hour will normally be a lecture; the second hour will normally be a more flexible seminar-style discussion. Both sessions will be recorded, and made available through Echo360, on the Unit's iLearn page. Any visual aids used during the lectures will be made available in PDF format on the Unit iLearn page.

The Unit weekly study guides will also be made available in PDF format on the Unit iLearn page.

Access to a computer and the Internet are required. Basic computer skills (e.g., internet browsing, use of the Library's online resources and skills in word processing) are also a requirement. You will need a copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader, since (as noted above) most Unit documents are provided in PDF format. This software is freely available on the Internet. Please consult the Course Convenor for any further, more specific requirements.

Books you may find useful:

There is no one text-book for the Unit. For preliminary reading, and to orientate you within modern scholarship in this field, I recommend:

several of the chapters in A. Nobbs & M. Harding, eds., The Content and Setting of the Gospel Tradition (Eerdmans, 2010), including my own survey of historical Jesus studies in ch. 10 of that volume,

and in more detail, Ben Witherington III's The Jesus Quest: the Third Search for the Jew of Nazareth (Downer's Grove, 1995).

Students wishing to do further preliminary reading should consider J.P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vol. 1, 1991, pp. 167-184, and D. Gowler, What Are They Saying about the Historical Jesus?, New York, 2007.

Weekly bibliographies, and required readings for seminar topics, will add considerably to this.

The Unit is based on the same lecture and seminar topics as it has been in previous years. Bibliographies are continuously updated. In previous years the Unit has been offered to a mixed group of MA students and MRes students. This year it is only offered to MRes students.