Painting Fakes

While writing my earlier reviews of the Lives of Jesus, I realised that my reading was getting a little dated - almost nothing after 1995.  So it's time to do something about that - starting with Stephan Huller's The Real Messiah: The Throne of St Mark and the True Origins of Christianity. Apart from the title, two things about this book let us know immediately that we are reading a work of pseudo-history.  The first is the biographical note, which informs us that after graduating with a degree in philosophy, Huller pursued a career in the circus.  The second is the point on Page 2 where he cites The Da Vinci Code as evidence of a groundswell of awareness that something is wrong with the traditional view of Christianity. The rest of the book does not disappoint.  All the tricks of the pseudohistorical trade are here - characters with multiple names, coded messages, fortuitous discoveries of previously hidden evidence, and of course the inevitable Cath...

I was thinking of calling this last article in my Lives of Jesus series the Conclusion, but that would seem to imply that I was about to give you the answer.  Sorry.  You'll have to work that one out for yourselves.  But what I'd like to do is share some thoughts that have been developing over the last three months as I've read or re-read the various books one after another. The single statement that impressed me the most was this one from Albert Nolan . We cannot deduce anything about Jesus from what we think we know about God; we must now deduce everything about God from what we know about Jesus....  To say now suddenly that Jesus is divine does not change our understanding of Jesus, it changes our understanding of divinity.... If we claim to be Christians - followers of Jesus as the Christ - then he should be at the centre of our faith.  Everything else should flow from him.  Yet so often Christianity starts somewhere else.  Most of...

At last, at the end of this little series of reviews , we get to a writer evangelicals can feel safe with.  Not too safe, though! Philip Yancey is more a journalist and writer than a serious scholar, although he's no fool.  He's a popular writer of books on spiritual issues - Where is God When it Hurts about the problem of pain, What's So Amazing About Grace? about...yes, you guessed it, and so on.  His books can be found in great numbers in conservative Christian bookshops.  He has an easy, popular writing style, free of jargon, but he reads widely and deeply and brings insights from a diverse and often surprising range of sources.  The Jesus I Never Knew was published in 1995, around the same time as Marcus Borg's Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time and Robert Funk's Honest to Jesus , in the midst of the ferment caused by the work of The Jesus Seminar.  You'd hardly know it.  None of the controversy is mentioned, and a brief (out of ...

In moving, in a sense, from left to right on the theological spectrum in our adventures with the Lives of Jesus , we have finally arrived at writer who holds an essentially orthodox view of Jesus, although one which has been criticised strongly by some conservative church leaders.  Nicholas Thomas Wright  was until recently Anglican Bishop of Durham in the north of England, and is a celebrated and prolific New Testament scholar.  In this capacity he walks a fine line, on the one hand upholding many of the building blocks of Christian orthodoxy while on the other challenging conventional views of what this theology means.  Many people find him confusing.  He doesn't say what they are used to hearing, but at the same time it's impossible to brand him a "liberal".  In a sense, he sees this confusion as part of his mission.  He says: If church leaders themselves spent more time studying and teaching Jesus and the Gospels, a good many of the other th...

So, this exploration of the the Lives of Jesus has finally got through the deconstructionist forests of The Jesus Seminar (via Funk and Borg ) and we are ready for something closer to a traditional understanding of who Jesus was and is.  Not too close, though.  In Albert Nolan's Jesus before Christianity we have a classic work of liberation theology.  I first read this book quite a few years ago, and its a delight and an inspiration to come back to it after all this time and find its message still fresh and challenging. Those unfamiliar with liberation theology should look elsewhere for a full explanation, but it emerged in the second half of the 20th century in Catholic communities in the poorer parts of the world - especially in South and Central America, but in Nolan's case South Africa.  Their major contribution to Christian theology was to assert the central importance of the social and political dimensions of Jesus' teaching. Albert Nolan...

While I'm on the subject of The Jesus Seminar , the various members of the Seminar are a great illustration of how it is possible to start at the same point and yet end up somewhere radically different.  Enter Marcus Borg , Hundere Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University, prominent member of The Jesus Seminar and advocate of "progressive Christianity". Borg's Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time was published in 1994, just before the Jesus Seminar publication The Five Gospels (with whose contents Borg was intimately familiar) and two years before Robert Funk's Honest to Jesus .  Borg shares with Funk the basic presuppositions that drove the work of The Jesus Seminar - that the gospels are layered works in which it is necessary to peel back later additions to arrive at the true Jesus; that the earliest layers are those involving Jesus' distinctive parables and aphorisms, while later layers include his references to himse...

Enough of this frivolity!  After the bizarre speculations of Thiering and Pullman it's almost a relief to come to something as scholarly as Robert W Funk's Honest to Jesus. Robert Funk was a serious American scholar, lifelong academic and biblical historian.  His biggest claim to fame is as the driving force behind The Jesus Seminar , the work of which I have already alluded to in discussing James Robinson .  However he is also the founder and during his life the director of the Westar Institute , "a member-supported, non-profit research and educational institute founded in 1986 and dedicated to the advancement of religious literacy. Westar's twofold mission is to foster collaborative research in religious studies and to communicate the results of the scholarship of religion to a broad, non-specialist public" as it's own website says. The first and most famous (or notorious) publication of The Jesus Seminar, edited by Funk, was The Five Gospels , a critica...

Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ wasn't part of my original plan for reviewing Lives of Jesus.  It just leapt off the library shelf and into my hand, so I had to take it home and read it.  Spooky! Pullman is, of course, not a noted Bible scholar but a famous novelist, best known for his fantasy writing.  He is also known for his distinct lack of enthusiasm for organised religion.  So of course he is the perfect choice for a secular publisher to commission to write a book about Jesus.  As Pullman himself says , "no-one has the right to go through their life without being shocked". Having read a lot of Lives of Jesus, I have to say that I wasn't as shocked as Pullman may have been hoping.  More bemused.  Pullman is in fact rather timid compared to, say, Jim Crace's daring fictional treatment of the subject in Quarantine .   In general, he has stuck fairly closely to the structure of the life of Jesus as outlined in th...

After the heady intellectualism of Schweitzer and Robinson , it is almost a relief to review something as plainly absurd as Barbara Thiering's Jesus the Man. Barbara Thiering is an Australian biblical scholar whose speciality is the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls.  For those who have spent the past 50 years in isolation, the Scrolls (discovered in the 1950s) are the large and intensely fascinating library of a strict Jewish Essene religious community based at Qumran on the banks of the Dead Sea.  As well as manuscripts of various Old Testament books, the documents include unique and previously unknown writings of the community itself, many referring to a struggle between a character called the Teacher of Righteousness (the community's leader/hero) and his opponent dubbed the Wicked Priest or Man of a Lie. Thiering's idea is that the events of the Gospels and the life of Jesus describe the other side of this conflict, and that Jesus is the Man of a Lie.  To arrive...

James M Robinson's A New Quest of the Historical Jesus is not so much a life of Jesus as an essay about the possibility of writing such a life.  It is also a serious scholarly work, which means I am completely unqualified to make any judgement on it.  However, because it is a reflection on the possibility of the Quest, and because it was written in 1959, 50 years after Schweitzer's work and before the more populist Lives I will review from here on, it provides a useful bridge between these works. Robinson is an American bible scholar but recieved part of his theological education in Germany and at the time of writing this book was immersed in German theology.  His starting point is that Schweitzer's The Quest of the Historical Jesus marked the end of a stream of historical research.  This stream was based on a Enlightenment view of history as an objective pursuit of "what really happened".  While Schweitzer critiqued the various attempts at this task...

Albert Schweitzer is the interpreter of all the " lives of Jesus " which came before him, and godfather of all that came after.  His book The Quest of the Historical Jesus , written in German in 1906 and first translated into English in 1910, not only gave its name to a whole genre of theological writing, but  set the terms in which the subject would be approached.  Any "life of Jesus" you pick up today has its counterpart in the works reviewed by Schweitzer, or in his own views.  Reviewing such a work is like humming a Beethoven symphony. Schweitzer was 30 years old when the Quest was published, already working as the Principal of the theological college of St Thomas in Strasbourg.  This is a scholarly book, but warm and lucid as hot coffee. In approaching the task Schweitzer makes use of the idea of the distinction between "the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith".  The core historical problem is that virtually all the records of Jesus...