When doubting the resurrection got you fined, imprisoned and dead

From Phil Jenkins, here:

'Between about 1690 and 1740, the British Isles were home to several quite brilliant scholars and thinkers who applied critical scholarship to the Bible and Christian tradition generally. I stress “British Isles” because some were Irish or Scottish as well as English. We know them collectively as the Deists. Major figures included John Toland, Thomas Woolston, Thomas Chubb, Anthony Collins, and Matthew Tindal. Their assault on orthodoxy was many sided, but they ranged widely over both the Old and New Testaments. ...

'It was in the early eighteenth century that there came into existence a culture with the critical tools and the relative freedom to examine this question, and the Resurrection soon came under attack.

'In England, this was a central issue in the pamphlet wars known as the Deist Controversy (c.1725-35). Woolston wrote (1727-29) an attempted demolition of the literal Resurrection, together with most of the Miracle stories. The resulting legal reaction led to Woolston dying in prison . . ..'

From the Wikipedia entry, here:

The Discourses, 30,000 copies of which were said to have been sold, were six in number, the first appearing in 1727, the next five 1728-1729, with two Defences in 1729 1730. For these publications he was tried before Chief Justice Raymond in 1729. Found guilty of blasphemy, Woolston was sentenced (28 November) to pay a fine of £25 for each of the first four Discourses, with imprisonment till paid, and also to a year's imprisonment and to give security, for his good behaviour during life. He failed to find this security, and remained in confinement until his death.

Even N.T. Wright Has Occasionally Come Close To Saying Jesus Was Nuts

My case has been, and remains, that Jesus believed himself called to do and be things which, in the traditions to which he fell heir, only Israel’s God, YHWH, was to do and be. I think he held this belief both with passionate and firm conviction and with the knowledge that he could be making a terrible, lunatic mistake. I do not think this in any way downplays the signals of transcendence within the Gospel narratives. It is, I believe, consonant both with a full and high Christology and with the recognition that Jesus was a human figure who can be studied historically in the same way that any other human figure can be. Indeed, I have come to regard such historical study not just as a possibly helpful source for theology but a vital and non-negotiable resource: not just part of the possible bene esse, but of the esse itself. Partial proof of this drastic proposal lies in observing what happens if we ignore the history: we condemn ourselves to talking about abstractions, even perhaps to making Jesus himself an abstraction. Fuller proof could only come if and when systematicians are prepared to work with the first-century Jewish categories which are there in the historical accounts of Jesus and which shaped and formed his own mindset.

-- Jesus' Self-Understanding, N.T. Wright (2002)

Western orthodoxy has for too long had an overly lofty, detached, high-and-dry, uncaring, uninvolved, and (as the feminist would say) kyriarchical view of god.  It has always tended to approach the christological question by assuming this view of god and then fitting Jesus into it.  Hardly surprising, the result was a docetic Jesus, which in turn generated the protest of the eighteenth century and historical scholarship since then, not least because of the social and cultural arrangements which the combination of semi-Deism and docetism generated and sustained.  That combination remains powerful, not least in parts of my own communion, and it still needs a powerful challenge.  My proposal is not that we understand what the word “god” means and manage somehow to fit Jesus into that.  Instead, I suggest that we think historically about a young Jew, possessed of a desperately risky, indeed apparently crazy, vocation, riding into Jerusalem in tears, denouncing the Temple, and dying on a Roman cross—and that we somehow allow our meaning for the word “god” to be recentered around that point.

-- Jesus and the Identity of God, N.T. Wright (1998)

When his family heard what was happening, they tried to take him away. "He's out of his mind," they said.

-- Mark 3:21