Christine Jacobi Joins the Jesus Blog!

Today we welcome the first of our new bloggers to the Jesus Blog—Dr. Christine Jacobi.  Christine is wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and is a perfect addition to the Jesus Blog because she is an innovative scholar working in the area of Jesus tradition in the writings of Paul.  As is standard in the German system, she is currently writing her second doctorate (Habilitation) under Prof Dr Jens Schröter, whom readers of the Jesus Blog will recognize as one of the leaders in recent historiographical shifts in Jesus studies.  Christine also wrote her PhD in Berlin under Schröter, which was published as Jesusüberlieferung bei Paulus? Analogien zwischen den echten Paulus-Briefen und die synoptischen Evangelien (de Gruyter, 2015).  In this study, Jacobi argues that restricting consideration of Paul’s knowledge of the Jesus tradition to mining his epistles for words and sayings of Jesus from the Synoptics is ill-conceived.  One must, according to Jacobi, be more attuned to Paul’s own conceptualization of Jesus and the Jesus tradition.  Focusing particularly on his usage of “in the Lord,” she demonstrates that Paul “receives” “Jesus” as more of a hermeneutical sphere or orientation toward the past than anything else, and thus his reception of Jesus and Jesus tradition amounts to much more than simply repeating some words that Jesus may have said.  This study is one of the first applications of the emerging “memory approach” to the Pauline epistles, and is thus groundbreaking in that and many other ways.  We could not be more pleased to have Christine join us and we look forward to her contributions.  I (Chris) should also mention that I’m particularly pleased to be working with Christine as a co-editor (along with Helen Bond and Jens Schröter) of the forthcoming 750,000-word Reception of Jesus in the First Three Centuries (Bloomsbury T&T Clark).  She is also the co-editor (with Jens Schröter) of the forthcoming Jesus Handbuch (Mohr Siebeck, 2016).

We will soon get her picture and books on the sidebar, but for now, welcome Christine!  We look forward to your first post!