The aim of historical Jesus research is to identify the authentic material from which the historical figure as a social type underneath the overlay is constructed. Pieter Craffert's anthropological historiography offers an alternative framework for dealing with Jesus of Nazareth as a social personage fully embedded in a first-century Mediterranean worldview and the Gospels as cultural artefacts related to this figure. This cross-cultural model represents a religious pattern that refers to a family of features for describing those religious entrepreneurs who, based on regular Altered State of Consciousness experiences, perform a specific set of social functions in their communities.
Pieter F. Craffert is Professor of New Testament and Chair of the Department of New Testament at the University of South Africa in Pretoria. His other published works include Meeting the Living among the Dead, Mediating Divine Power, and Illness and Healing in the Biblical World.
Part I: A ParadigmShift in Historical Jesus Historiography; 1. Historiography beyond Positivism and Postmodernism; 2. An Analysis of Current Historical Jesus Research; 3. A New Road for Historical Jesus Research: Cultural Bundubashing; 4. In the Beginning Was a Social Personage and Cultural Artefacts; Part II: A Model of Shamanic Figures; 5. The Shamanic Complex: A Social-Type Model; 6. Components of a First-Century (Shamanic) Worldview; 7. The Shamanic Complex and Ancient Societies; Part III: Jesus and the Shamanic Complex; 8. Baptism and Spirit-Possession Experiences; 9. Healing, Exorcism, and the Control of Spirits; 10. Teaching, Preaching, and Prophetic Activities; 11. Constituting a Galilean Shamanic Figure by Means of Infancy Narratives; 12. Afterlife for Someone Like a Galilean Shamanic Figure; Conclusion: Someone Like a Galilean Shamanic Figure?