This little book  (160 pages, lots of illustrations) is the easiest-to-read of any about Jesus and modern scholarship I’ve come across.

What follows is not a review, but a miscellany of quotes to whet your appetite.

We know for certain that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified… [and] we know that literally thousands of other Jews were crucified within fifty years either side of Jesus (p. 18)

[In Jesus Christ] the one true God acted to save and heal the whole world… To investigate that claim [by Jesus’ followers] it won’t do simply to look at it from the outside. There is no such thing as neutrality or objectivity at this point (21)

A man had two sons. The younger one asked his father for his share of the inheritance… In this sort of village, such a request is like saying ‘I wish you were dead’. It puts a curse on the father… [And] in that culture, someone in disgrace doesn’t go home… Not surprisingly, those who maintain traditional values are shocked. The older brother is furious; so much so that he, too, shames his father, by complaining at him in front of all their guests… This is a story of Israel going into exile, and then at last coming back again! This is the story about the kingdom of God, about Israel’s liberation  (39-41)… [It’s about] the shameless, reckless love of the creator-God [who comes] running down the road to embrace the whole world [65]

The oddest thing about Christianity is why it got going at all [65]. Jews regularly visited the grave of someone they had loved, to pray and to grieve… but there is no evidence that anyone ever went to Jesus’ tomb for this purpose – except on the Sunday morning immediately after his death, when they got more than they bargained for [70] [No Jews would ever imagine] that ‘the resurrection’ would ever refer to the rising to life of one person in the middle of history (71) [The resurrection-stories] are [more] like eye-witness sketches, with the details not even tidied up, than like carefully-drawn portraits (72)

I’m often asked ‘Can you, as a historian, say that Jesus is God?’ It’s a good question! But the trouble with it is that it’s the wrong way round… [Rather] God was, and is, fully present, and fully discoverable, in and as Jesus of Nazareth (78-9): the God with a human face: the face of Jesus of Nazareth (82)

We can quite easily make this Jesus, and this God, support our own favourite agendas. That’s an old game.  [Like: ‘[the stories] must be a later corruption’ (83)

Many scholars are skeptical of the ‘Jesus Seminar’ and its decisions… [which] seem to have as much to do  with the Seminar’s hatred of certain type of Christianity, not least fundamentalism, as with serious historical research… [They] think the Gospels were simply the expression of early Christian faith and experience, in which stories ‘about’ Jesus weren’t anything of the kind… We [actually] know a lot more about Jesus than we do about the early church (102-6)

Probably 70 per cent of NT scholars believe some version of the theory that Mark was written first, and that Matthew and Luke used Mark on the one hand, and on the other had a source, now lost, called ‘Q’ … the remaining 30 per cent either don’t believe it, or would say they’re not sure (108)

Oral tradition was very reliable in those days… Think of what would happen if someone took one of the songs of a cultural hero like Bob Dylan – say ‘Blowing in the Wind’ – and changed one of the lines… the stories of what Jesus had done and said were etched into [his followers’] minds (109)

The Jesus the Gospels describe doesn’t always fit with what the church at various periods has expected to find. He isn’t ‘gentle Jesus,  meek and mild’; he isn’t simply the teacher of lofty truths; he isn’t instructing people on how to go to heaven when they die; he isn’t teaching about a nonpolitical, non-earthly ‘religion’ or ‘spirituality’ through which people can escape the present world and experience a private religious glow inside. The Jesus of the Gospels – the original Jesus – is taking on the establishment and undermining it (123)

The scholarly efforts to belittle the story, to say that most of it was made up later, that Jesus was really just a great teacher or whatever, are simply part of the natural reaction to the fear that may come over us if we read the Gospels for all they’re worth and discover that it was true, that Jesus of Nazareth really was the Messiah of Israel, and hence the Lord of the world (124)

Two little notes:

* Why use the NIV?

* A quirky phrase I’ve only come across in Wright’s works – it’s there in just about all of them – is this: ‘putting the world to rights’ (49)

Rowland Croucher

January 1, 2011