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Review Summary: How much you care about Jesus?! |
Date: 2008-11-27 |
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Details: Well, if you care about Jesus at all, that is, about the "historical" Jesus, then you should buy this book! If you are a Christian who cares. and truly cares about Jesus, then you should buy this book and study it!
If you are a "hardcore", or "just" a Christian, one who has "faith" above anything, even above common sense, then forget it, go to your Bible school, be grateful that Jesus loves you and somehow "has had mercy on you" (and not on millions of Jews or Gypsi gassed, or Tutsi killed, or 8000 Muslim boys and men killed in Sarajevo, or on those with Parkinson, Cancer, aids etc.), and be grateful that you live in your Disneyland, where you can meet the prince whenever you have enough money (oh, sorry, it's called "heart" and "faith"!) to get to Disneyland (sorry, again, I meant "the spiritual realm").
Don't forget about Sheehan, Stanford University, Itunes, Historical Jesus, and many, many others...
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Review Summary: From Jesus Christ to Jesus |
Date: 2008-01-16 |
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Details: Over reviewers have summarized the book. I am not an expert in xianity, but I am a decent judge of evidence. While not an easy read by any means, this is a very intelligent book, with the feel of a very stiff and merciless cross-examination of the gospels and xianity. By the time she finishes, the reader is left with Jesus, not Christ. To not read this book is to carry on with your head buried in the sand--perhaps comforting, but not really interested in the true nature of things. |
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Review Summary: Scholarly but Accessible Work, One of the Best for Introducing the Problems of History and Interpretation of the New Testament |
Date: 2007-12-25 |
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Details: Paula Fredriksen's "From Jesus to Christ" is a minor gem in the field of New Testament criticism. Following primarily on the work of E.P. Sanders (whose "Jesus and Judaism" ought to be required reading for any reader interested in the Historical Jesus), Fredriksen gives a forthright and convincing analysis of the various images we get of Jesus in the four gospels and the letters of Paul. Her survey paves a healthy middle path between skepticism and generosity, always critical but also gentle and approachable. The progression of the image from fiery preacher of the imminent end to a heavenly stranger unconcerned with eschatology is well laid out and, refreshingly, its anachronisms are also presented (why should the two accounts most distant on the timeline, Paul and John, have such similar and disproportionate interest in the spiritual meaning of the risen Christ?). I am currently reading Fredriksen's follow-up, "Jesus of Nazareth: King of the Jews," which presents another 11 years of research and decidedly different results from this work. We should be glad that scholars of Fredriksen's honesty and critical receptiveness have had such crossover scholarly-popular success. |
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Review Summary: Rice's Jesus is one that Fredricksen would not recognize |
Date: 2006-10-14 |
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Details:
"The quest for the historical Jesus has claimed many, many victims." Shaye Cohen
"Every Christian sooner or later has to ask the question, "Who was Jesus really?" And we ask this in our age in a special way because we are very historically oriented." Wayne Meeks
"Yet in some respects Rice's Jesus is one that Fredricksen would not recognize, as Rice is perfectly clear in her portrayal of Jesus as both divine and human, and most definitely as the only begotten Son of God born of the virgin Mary." Ben Witherington
Paula Fredriksen's first book, 'From Jesus to Christ': The Origins of the New Testament Images of Jesus, was followed by Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity, and, 'Jesus, Judaism, and Christian Anti-Judaism: Reading the New Testament After the Holocaust,' spell her agenda to which she is devoted.
In expressing 'Some Thoughts,' in Society of Biblical Literature Forum, Dr. Fredriksen wrote, "The point, of course, is that the Gospels themselves are no more 'anti-Semitic' than are the Dead Sea Scrolls, or Isaiah or Jeremiah ..., once they are in full voice. ... they are read through the 'contra Iudaeos' tradition. This reading, enshrined in centuries of church teachings and Christian interpretation, ... forgets that the historical Jesus was a first-century Jew engaged in disputes with other first-century Jews over issues important in first-century Judaism. Later Gentile Christian retrospect turned the theological Jesus into the founder of the Gentile Christian church. [His native Judaism thus shifted from being his historical context to being his theological contrast.]"
Scholars' favorite theories:
"Scholars have trotted out their favorite theories, and theories come and go. My own approach, postulates Shaye Cohen, is to say that while we cannot possibly know the historicity of any single incident related in the gospels, we can't possibly know the authenticity of any single saying attributed to him. We can't possibly identify the truth of any given verse in the gospels, nevertheless, certain large patterns do emerge, and those patterns seem to me to likely to be true, or likely to have a certain amount of historical veracity, even if you might not be happy with the patterns as being too vague or too general, but at least here I think we can see a clear consistent pattern of evidence in all the four gospels. ... So what pattern do we see? He's a holy man, a miracle man, someone who gets in trouble with the authorities, whoever they may be - Pharisees, scribes, priests, elders, he is constantly in trouble with them as a free-spirited individual. Someone who apparently preaches in the synagogue. All of [these activities] I think are the function of his power, the power as he has as a miracle worker and a holy man. And in the final analysis this is what does him in." Shaye Cohen, Professor of Judaic Studies, Brown University
Jesus' Quest to Christ's:
Wayne A. Meeks, Woolsey Professor of Biblical Studies Yale University explains, "... we want to know what was Jesus really like. And that quest to understand what he was really like has turned out to be very disappointing. So how do we really get at that? We must, first of all, understand that in history facts always lie under interpretations and we never get to the facts. They're only interpretations. There is only an interpreted Jesus, there are many interpreted Jesuses. So where do we begin? We begin not with Jesus, we have no access to him. We begin with the responses to Jesus, by his followers, by outsiders who heard about him. We begin with those reactions as they're enshrined in the text we have. ... How did we get these texts? Who wrote these texts? Where did they get the ideas?" Surely behind the written text there were oral traditions, we know that. There were oral traditions that went on after the written text, and we have evidence of those being written down later. So we try to dissect those. We say, "What kind of traditions? How were they shaped? What kinds of stories did people tell about Jesus?" ... We have reports of what Jesus said. He told parables, he told stories, he told little epigrams. Those have a shape to them. Are they like any sayings that are attributed to other people at the same time?"
What extra canonicals add?
"One of the complications most recently is the discovery in 1945 of some other gospels that we didn't know about before. One of them, the Gospel of Thomas, is nothing but sayings of Jesus. It simply goes along and says, "Jesus said this, Jesus said that." Well some of these things that Jesus said according to the Gospel of Thomas are quite familiar. They're very similar to things in the canonical gospels, but not identical. And there are other things which are quite different from any of the things that he said in the canonical gospels. Then, even among the canonical gospels, the way Jesus talks in the first three, the so-called synoptic gospels, is very different from the way he talks in the Gospel according to John. Now, which is right? Which is the real Jesus speaking here? We discovered that there are several different portraits of Jesus enshrined in the shape of the traditions about him, and that these seem to go back to very early times... We have different portraits of Jesus because from the very beginning people tried to understand the mystery about him."
Important figures & multiple traditions:
"In my own view, adds Dean Hendrix, the earliest layer of evidence is still an interpretation, so what we can know is only the range of interpretations that we first encounter in Jesus' traditions. And that is really a plurality of Jesuses. A Jesus that's understood as a sage and wise man in some traditions, a Jesus that's understood as a superhero, a great performer of miracles in another, divine person in another tradition. A Jesus who is understood as primarily the sacrificed, now risen and enthroned savior in another tradition. One finds the plurality of Jesuses even at the earliest stage of interpretation. That's why as far as we keep going and excavating the tell of Jesus, the earliest stage is still interpretation." Holland Hendrix, Union Theological Seminary
Historians on Josephus Vs Gospels:
Speaking as a historian, Harold Attridge, Yale Divinity School, explains the problem, "... in understanding Jesus, as a historian, begins with the fact that we have rather limited sources for reconstructing his life. Those sources are primarily the gospel traditions that we have in the New Testament, some apocryphal materials from the early Christian tradition, and some sources external to the New Testament. Those sources external to the New Testament are particularly valuable because they're not directly statements of faith, the way the New Testament materials are. Chief among those external sources is Josephus, a Jewish historian who wrote at the end of the first century and who in book 18 of his "Antiquities of the Jews," has a small passage about Jesus. ... Professional historians, I think, try to assemble all of the evidence that's available for reconstructing an event. And they're concerned about the bias in any of those sources that they use. And at the first stage in reconstructing an event is to analyze the bias of sources. We had to do so both with the sources internal to Christianity as well as the sources external to Christianity. So the gospels, for instance, are clearly statements of faith and they have certain takes on who Jesus was and what he meant to his followers. External sources like Josephus don't have the same faith commitment, they may have some other axes to grind, but in any case you have to see what the biases of the sources are, and try to take those into account as you do your reconstruction."
Fredriksen Vs Rice's Christ:
In a recent review posted by Ben Witherington of Anne Rice's 'Christ the Lord - Out of Egypt,' he wrote, "Rice gets to critique liberal Jesus scholars, amongst others. Rice also tells us the story of her conversion and return to Roman Catholicism, which entailed a return to investigate questions which had haunted her all her life - how did Christianity actually come about? ...I would give myself utterly to the task of trying to understand Jesus himself and how Christianity emerged."
To the reconverted Roman Catholic novelist quest, Witherington anticipated statement, seven years earlier was, "Where did all of this vast array of christological thinking come from? Ultimately, we have argued, it in many cases goes back to Jesus himself, or to the earliest Jewish Christian followers of Jesus."
Hebrew prophets Vs Fredriksen:
Christian doctrine, claims Witherington, interprets salvation as God's gradual self revelation to mankind through the Patriarchs especially Abraham, through Jewish prophets, and ultimately in the teachings of Jesus Christ. True faith of His love of mankind even to the extent of intervening into history as the only begotten Son, being tempted and suffering, as prophesied by Isaiah. The meaning of the life, death, and resurrection of the Christ, debated by the Jewish scholar, as the means of God's redemptive purpose, as foretold in biblical history, and revealed by the Hebrew prophets is refuted by Fredriksen.
Dr. Paula Fredriksen:
Fredriksen holds a Ph.D. in history of religions, ancient Christianity, and Greco-Roman religions from Princeton University and a theology diploma from Oxford University. She served as historical consultant for the BBC production The Lives of Jesus and was a featured speaker and historical consultant for "The Life and Times of Jesus. Specializing in the history of early Christianity, Paula Fredriksen is author of half a dozen books and a few dozen articles on early Christianity. Among her numerous awards and honors are a National Endowment for the Humanities grant and a Visiting Professorship of Ancient Christianity, at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She received the Yale Press Governors' Award for Best Book in 1988. |
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Review Summary: Paula's Daunting Question, Who wrote the Gospels? |
Date: 2006-02-17 |
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Details:
Paula's Daunting Questions:
Who was Jesus of Nazareth?
How did he fit into his native religious context, late Second Temple Judaism? Why does such a manifestly Jewish religious figure end up dying a political, Roman death? Does the unarguable fact that some of his close disciples were convinced that God had raised Jesus from the dead stand in any meaningful relation to the message he proclaimed during his lifetime?
How does the itinerant mission of an Aramaic-speaking Galilean Jew relate to the triumphant cosmic agent whose imminent apocalyptic return was so blazingly announced, within twenty years of his crucifixion, by his apostle, Paul? :Introduction
From Jesus to Christ:
In her study, Dr. Fredricksen who admitted avoiding an in depth treatment of the issues that occupied her Judeo-Christian mind, has initially focused her analysis of the of New Testament's variety portrayals of Jesus of Nazareth. Her attempt to give sound reasons for the early Christian surging movement, which she has attributed in her reconstruction, to a crafty adjustment to the surprising success among the pagans gentiles. As the Kingdom's realization suffered a serious delay, the new move failed to convince but too few Jews. This deduction could be proven wrong, based on the conversion of the largest and most informed Diaspora, the Jews of Alexandria, who led Egyptians into the new faith, and formed the core of leadership in the most important center Alexandria, as a parallel to Antioch.
Her version of the growth of different images of the historical Jesus himself, has played a central role in her views on images of Jesus of Nazareth, sifting through later Christian traditions that rendered him seriously more elusive, in her own judgment.
How did Jesus die?
In many ways the author owes to Duke's professor E. P. Sanders' Jesus as the eschatological prophet reconstructed as the obedient servent in Isaiah's prophecy, but while for Sanders Jesus was killed for undermining the temple priest's authority, Fredriksen thinks Jesus was executed because Caiaphas wanted to avoid Pilate's "itchy trigger-finger" when dealing with the acts of popular preachers. Her contribution to the historical-Jesus studies and should be considered by all interested in the field.
Has her mind really changed?
Since publishing From Jesus to Christ, Professor Fredriksen has confessed she changed her mind on several issues, writing a new introduction, to explain what she later came to think, and why she changed her mind. She concluded, "The end result, perhaps, was inevitable: I too have added yet one more book to the growing pile on the historical Jesus. Working on Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews (Knopf, 1999) created for me a critical promontory from which I could survey recent scholarship, critique my own, and see afresh the problems of evidence and argument that shape the field."
Who wrote the Gospels?
To the core question of her motivated study, and if they were Jews or Gentiles? She bluntly replies, "No one knows!" Though she was uncertain, contrary to scholars views, based on internal evidence, propose non Jewish identifications. The author of Matthew is universally regarded as Jewish; she says adding also the author of John. She assumed that at least Mark and Luke were Gentiles. Luke's author was fluent with the Septuagint, inclined her to suppose that he, too, was a Jew. Fredriksen has committed to a narrow unsupported argument on revelation that undermines Judaism because Moses was an Egyptian! The great Orientalist James H. Breasted has genuinely expressed his own feelings, "When that experience began, it was a dark day for my inherited respect for the theological dogma of revelation." |
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out of 15 Reviews
