Kenneth Baily tells us that we need, "a re-evaluation of the life and teachings of Jesus… to rethink deeply held attitudes toward Jesus as a teacher and to see him as a serious theologian; … the fact that his intellectual acumen is no less significant than the matchless quality of his ethics. For if Jesus is an uneducated young man who tells stories primarily for children and simple fisher folk, then one set of perceptions apply as we examine his teachings. But if he is the first mind of the NT (Paul being the second), and if Jesus’ teachings are to be considered as serious theology, offered primarily to intellectuals, then a quite different set of assumptions and perceptions come into play for the interpreter. This brief study is an attempt to take Jesus seriously as the major theologian of the New Testament and to follow his theological thinking as that thinking is set forth in the trilogy of stories in Luke 15.
This book provides an earlier look at Baily's work with Luke 15 and deeper background to his thinking that later resulted
in his well known, The Cross and the Prodigal.
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