It is kind of funny though that when our mainstream media do reviews of recent books on Jesus, the focus can fall on such “experts” as the director of the Hollywood Film “Basic Instinct” and his recent book on Jesus, accompanied by high-praise of Ehrman and Crossan. I think these latter two know how to market themselves. This review from the magazine
The New Yorker on recent Jesus books seems to follow a similar script (I think even the “Jesus dynasty” is analyzed
uch
The article by Adam Gopnik on “Searching for Jesus in the Gospels” starts off:
When we meet Jesus of Nazareth at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, almost surely the oldest of the four, he’s a full-grown man. He comes down from Galilee, meets John, an ascetic desert hermit who lives on locusts and wild honey, and is baptized by him in the River Jordan. If one thing seems nearly certain to the people who read and study the Gospels for a living, it’s that this really happened: John the Baptizer—as some like to call him, to give a better sense of the original Greek’s flat-footed active form—baptized Jesus. They believe it because it seems so unlikely, so at odds with the idea that Jesus always played the star in his own show: why would anyone have said it if it weren’t true? This curious criterion governs historical criticism of Gospel texts: the more improbable or “difficult” an episode or remark is, the likelier it is to be a true record, on the assumption that you would edit out all the weird stuff if you could, and keep it in only because the tradition is so strong that it can’t plausibly be excluded. If Jesus says something nice, then someone is probably saying it for him; if he says something nasty, then probably he really did.
So then, the scholars argue, the author of Mark, whoever he was—the familiar disciples’ names conventionally attached to each Gospel come later—added the famous statement of divine favor, descending directly from the heavens as they opened. But what does the voice say? In Mark, the voice says, “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased,” seeming to inform a Jesus who doesn’t yet know that this is so. But some early versions of Luke have the voice quoting Psalm 2: “You are my Son; today I have begotten you.” Only in Matthew does it announce Jesus’ divinity to the world as though it were an ancient, fixed agreement, not a new act. In Mark, for that matter, the two miraculous engines that push the story forward at the start and pull it toward Heaven at the end—the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection—make no appearance at all. The story begins with Jesus’ adult baptism, with no hint of a special circumstance at his birth, and there is actually some grumbling by Jesus about his family (“Only in his home town, among his relatives and in his own house, is a prophet without honor,” he complains); it ends with a cry of desolation as he is executed—and then an enigmatic and empty tomb. (It’s left to the Roman centurion to recognize him as the Son of God after he is dead, while the verses in Mark that show him risen were apparently added later.)
The intractable complexities of fact produce the inevitable ambiguities of faith. The more one knows, the less one knows.
Read more:
newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/05/24/100524crat_atlarge_gopnik?currentPage=all#ixzz0q8chC0vJ
Well, at least if a Hollywood director is to be taken seriously on writing about Jesus, at least Gopnik could have reviewed Catholic historian’s Paul Johnson’s recent book on Jesus. But it seems the Crossans and Ehrmans now are the go-to guys on Jesus in much of the press, while people like LTJohnson, Father Meier, E.P. Sanders, and N.T. Wright are not so popular for some reason. Which is sad, because a Catholic like myself could enter a big bookstore some 10 years back and find standing there taking up a whole shelf, A.N. Wilson’s revisionist
Jesus, as if he, no biblical scholar, were the go-to-guy on Jesus. Now, most buyers of books on Jesus in my local bookstore seem to be consuming Tom Harpur’s The Pagan Christ which denies the existence of Jesus as we know Him I believe. It seems the more insane the theory of Jesus argued for in a book, the greater its distribution and popularity among the general public.
