getting acquainted with david flusser’s jesus

I’m working part-time at a retail chain location in downtown Chicago this year. One thing that means is that I get a little bus-commute time for semi-focused reading each week. (John Berger’s About Looking is commute reading I got into a bit in May and June — and hope to return to.) With me on the bus at present is David Flusser’s Sage from Galilee, the 30-years-on revision of well-known work titled simply Jesus as it first appeared in English translation in 1969.

Appreciated in its time as Flusser’s Jesus may be, I’m from the wrong part of the Christian world to have been exposed to it in younger years. Indeed I’m only recently acquainted with Flusser at all. I encountered him, I believe, in listening to talks by Boston U. emerita Paula Fredriksen last year and coming, eventually, to the one given at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities’ 2017 Flusser centenary conference, Judaism and Christian Origins. That event was helmed by Shaul Shaked, a conference remembering whom, held just five years later, I posted something about in January. Below, Shaked opens the 2017 event, recalling briefly Flusser’s large personality and legacy. (Followed by very interesting Loren Stuckenbruck lecture, the greater part of the video.)