Jesus as example or historical person? : A comparative study of school textbooks from three decades showing changes in how the life of Jesus is presented

This bachelor thesis examines how three decades of textbooks in the subject religion for middle-school inform students about Jesus' life and to what level they conform to their decade's specific regulatory documents. The results are analyzed through an analysis schedule, showing if the texts are stating, explaining, analyzing, or normative in character and with the help of a secularisation theory determine if this is something that changes over time. The outcome of the analysis shows that textbooks written in the 1950s are both explaining and normative to their character and correspond well to the regulatory documents. This is also the conclusion for textbooks in the 1980s but these textbooks show an increasing amount of analyzing texts with just a few normative elements. Comparing textbooks from these decades to today's textbooks, the result shows that today's textbooks don't match the regulatory documents' requirements of emphasizing that students analyze and find their identity. Instead, these textbooks are to a wider range stating to their character but at the same time having no normative elements at all. An interesting result is also the fact that the textbooks from the three decades more or less include the same information about Jesus' life but, as written earlier, there are bigger differences over time in how the textbooks describe this information. The results support one interpretation of the secularisation theory, according to which a country's textbooks tend to be less normative the more secular the country is