Richard Landes wrote:
> > Surely comparing the old and the new is one way to do this? It may
> > be pointless to look for a politically subversive Christ in
> > medieval theology, but it's worth asking why we won't find him there.
>
> exactly. or, differently put, if he's there, but not in the texts that
> are preserved, copied, and edited by modern historians.
I think this is a new question, rather than a rewording of mine. (Not
that it's uninteresting.)
What I was trying to say is that while it may be wrong to study old
texts in the expectation that they may contain modern ideas, it is
valid to ask why these modern ideas came about, and why these ideas
never occurred to the original authors.
> Alan Bernstein
> has some excellent material on the difference btw what an ecclesiastical
> figure might say in a sermon *coram populo* and what he wd right in a
> theological tract.
Ahem. Surely any speculations about Christ the revolutionary would
have been strictly confined to written tracts. Publically (or even
semi-publically) preached sermons would have been far less likely
to rock the boat.
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