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Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith
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Average Rating:  out of 89 Reviews
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Price: $14.95
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Sale: $5.00
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Manufacturer: HarperOne
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EAN (European Article Number): 9780060609177
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Paperback
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Author: Marcus J. Borg
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Publisher: HarperOne
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Dewey Decimal Number: 232.908
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Publication Date: 1995-03-03
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Reading Level: 160
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Description: All Christianity is, to some extent, idolatrous. Christian worship is a response to a worshiper's image of Jesus, and all images of Jesus fall short of his reality--in the same way that all biographies and portraits fail to depict a whole person. In Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, New Testament scholar Marcus Borg attempts to understand how popular images of Jesus connect Christians to their savior and isolate them from him. Borg writes about his own evolving ideas of who Jesus was, considers the scholarly and popular religious evolution of Jesus' public image, and investigates with special care the effects of Historical Jesus research on contemporary images of Jesus. Meeting Jesus Again is written in an affable, gracious, and unflinchingly honest voice. Borg's description of his own faith particularly exemplifies these qualities, and gives the reader a simultaneously safe and unsettling new perspective on the peasant from Galilee: "[T]he central issue of the Christian life is not believing in God or believing in the Bible," he writes. "Rather, the Christian life is about entering into a relationship with that to which the Christian tradition points, which may be spoken of as God, the risen, living Christ, or the Spirit. And a Christian is one who lives out his or her relationship to God within the framework of the Christian tradition." --Michael Joseph Gross
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Customer Reviews
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Review Summary: Great book |
Date: 2009-01-05 |
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Details: Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith by Marcus J. Borg try to give the reader a new perspective on Jesus. Borg's writings are characterized by the ease and friendliness of the books tenor. Borg believes that Christians live their life in a relationship with the Risen One. The book tries to present answers to religion and Jesus in a non-conventional way.
There is a beautiful new book about Jesus, God , faith and what you will do after death entitled "The Enlightenment, What God Told Me After One Million Prayers: A Message for Everyone," by John H. Eagan. I just finished it. It's really great and deals with God, the creator, Jesus' teachings, and His Passion. It brought me to tears. I think the readers of Borg's book will really enjoy The Enlightenment.
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Review Summary: A Man Far Ahead of His Time |
Date: 2008-10-30 |
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Details: Most of us (Americans) have been exposed to one or both of two images of Jesus, the popular image of God incarnate and the secular image of the great teacher. Marcus Borg asks us to meet the man those images were based upon, whom Borg also refers to as Jesus, but whom I prefer to call by his real name, Yeshua bar Miriam. (Greek has no /sh/ sound, so /sh/ got changed to /s/, then the Romans added the Latin inflection -us to make Iesus, pronounced yea-soose. By the time it entered Old English, the initial 'I' had been modified to 'J'. By our time the 'J' was no longer pronounced /y/, the Great Vowel Shift had changed /e/ as in 'yea' to the /ee/ of 'beet', the first /s/ had become voiced to /z/, and the /u/ had been shortened, leaving not a single sound of the original Aramaic 'Yeshua'.) It is Yeshua that Borg invites us to meet, and it is a rewarding meeting.
Borg calls Yeshua a "spirit person," which he defines as "one of those persons in human history to whom the Spirit was an experiential reality." This seems to me to be a pretty good description of the Hasidim, and I think that If Yeshua were alive today, he would be a Hasid. I have known two Hasisic rabbis, and both are delightful people, as I think Yeshua, too, would be.
I am not happy with the designation "spirit person," because the image it calls to my mind is of one who is not flesh and blood, but just of the stuff of thought. I realize that that is not what Dr. Borg is talking about, and I wish I could think of a brief phrase that would convey just the real phenomenon Dr. Borg is referring to.
Borg fleshes out one's picture of Yeshua, so that one can feel toward him more as a real man, someone you would like to have known and respected as a personal friend, rather than just a legend. Yeshua turns out to have been a truly remarkable person, with a keen mind and an extremely charismatic personality. He was so far ahead of his time that centuries after his death, the men in control of the Christian church invented and spread a scurrilous lie about his chief disciple, the "apostle to the apostles," to discredit her, because the fact that Yeshua had chosen her instead of a man was unacceptable to them. Apparently, in their view, God (incarnate in Yeshua) had no business choosing Miriam of Magdala as chief apostle just because she was the best qualified; God should have had the decency to ignore her superior understanding of His message and choose a male instead. To borrow a sentence from Bertrand Russell, 'this view strikes me as curious.'
The intended audience for this book is Christians and ex-Christians who find their faith challenged by modern knowledge of the universe, as Dr. Borg's was. Many who are open-minded enough to read beyond page 2 will find a faith they can accept. Others won't, but will still find (as I did) that the book is well worth reading.
watziznaym@gmail.com |
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Review Summary: Excellent |
Date: 2008-10-02 |
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Details: A great book. Makes you really think about where things have gone wrong regarding Jesus and where they need to go.
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Review Summary: Interesting Read |
Date: 2008-04-27 |
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Details: A very interesting view of Jesus. I highly recommend it if the old paradigm is not working for you. Who was Jesus really? What was the core of his message? Now what? This book answers those questions, and goes beyond. A great book on the historical,and spiritual, Jesus. |
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Review Summary: Meeting Borg's View of Jesus for the First Time |
Date: 2008-03-31 |
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Details: In 1995, when I was struggling with some of the latest historical Jesus research as a way of re-imagining Jesus, a colleague suggested that I should read this book by Marcus Borg. I was finding that much of the language used to describe Jesus had been imported by the gospel writers from language applied to the Roman emperors and, therefore, to be seen as adjectival descriptions, not ontological. I needed a new perspective for understanding Jesus. I trusted her enough to do exactly that and I was delighted with what I found. When I read about Borg's story, I felt as if his story was my story too. Who had told him about me??? My early faith journey was a replica of that of Borg. Childhood, college, seminary, ministry and beyond. Although I am not the writer he is, I could have set down much of what he says. But the most striking part of Chapter One is what he entitled "Beyond Belief to Relationship." This is true for me because I was raised on a brand of faith that emphasized correct belief. If you strayed from those guidelines then you had moved beyond the boundaries of acceptable Christian life. If dogma and correct belief are important to you then this book will be upsetting and disconserting.
But I think that my pilgrimage was one from "faith in the Book" to "faith in a person." If your perception is rooted in a book (whether that book is the Hebrew Bible, the Christian New Testament, the book of Mormon, the Constitution or the book of Islam and 'strict constructionism' or 'papal infallibility' or 'biblical infallibility') the person looks for the rules found in their book, moral guidance in statements, and becomes like that which is at the center of his values. In this case like a judge interpreting case law with a shaking head and a wagging finger of disapproval because some disobey their book. If, however, the center is a person then you look at the behavior of that person and who he associates with and what are his characteristics. When Borg points out the parallels between images of Jesus and images of the Christian life, he is at his best. His description of three "macro-stories" in scripture and how they shaped the message of Jesus helps anyone who is seeking a new grip on faith. In fact, since I have read other works of Borg, the move from what he calls "the earlier paradigm" to "the emerging paradigm" is exactly what has changed my vision of Christianity. I say to all who are on a quest for a vital and fresh perspective then this book is a helpful point to begin your pilgrimage. The book is 14 years old but it is an insightful read. |
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