The Last Week - What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus's Final Days in Jerusalem - Softcover

Marcus J. Borg; John Dominic Crossan

4.21

2,213 ratings by Goodreads

9780281059836: The Last Week - What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus's Final Days in Jerusalem

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0281059837 ISBN 13: 9780281059836

Publisher: SPCK Publishing, 2008

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What was the last week of Jesus's life about? And what does it mean for us now? Two of today's leading experts on Jesus, Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, offer what they believe is the real story of Jesus's final week in Jerusalem. Using the Gospel of Mark as their guide, they present a day-by-day account of Holy Week - the most sacred time of the Christian year. The Last Week reveals a radical and little-known Jesus who gave up his life to protest against power without justice and to condemn the oppression of the poor by the rich. Indeed, the Jesus uncovered here is far more dangerous than the one enshrined in the church's traditional teachings. In The Last Week we do not simply meet the Jesus of history but a passionate and engaging Jesus who invites us to follow him today.

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About the Author:

Marcus J. Borg is Canon Theologian at Trinity Cathedral in Portland, Oregon. His many books include Jesus (2011), Meeting Jesus in Mark (2011) and with John Dominic Crossan: The First Christmas (2007), and The First Paul (2009), all published by SPCK. John Dominic Crossan, Professor Emeritus at De Paul University, is widely regarded as the foremost historical Jesus scholar of our time. He is the author of several bestselling books, including The Historical Jesus and Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Taking Mark, the earliest Gospel, as their guide, Borg and Crossan "retell a story everyone thinks they know too well and most do not seem to know at all." So doing, they offer an alternative passion of the Christ, the primary feature of which is not suffering (Latin passio) but passion understood Anglophonically as "consuming interest, dedicated enthusiasm, or concentrated commitment." Jesus' passion was the kingdom of God declared in terms of God's justice, they say, and the fact that such declaration was seen, despite Jesus' nonviolence, as a threat to the system of domination by Rome and its wealthy Jewish collaborators led to his suffering. Borg and Crossan parse Mark's reportage (so to speak) on the days from Palm Sunday to Easter to demonstrate the challenges Jesus made to Roman and Herodian-temple rule. They point up Jesus' insistence on justice, especially equitable distribution of necessities, and such too-little-noticed matters as Jesus' great popularity, attested by the crowds who hang on his words and his adversaries' fears of angering those crowds; so fearful are they that they must find a traitor, seize Jesus at night, and whisk him through the courts. Written with Crossan's scholarly scintillation rather than Borg's sometimes plodding earnestness, this is politically concerned analysis of Christianity at its best. Ray Olson
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