Jesus - Softcover

A.N. Wilson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0712606971 ISBN 13: 9780712606974

Publisher: Pimlico, 2003

Synopsis

The Jesus of faith and the Jesus of history are two different beings. In this study, A.N. Wilson has tried to rescue Jesus from the tangles of Christian mythology and to present the reader with a portrait of Jesus the man. It traces the story of how the Man of Galilee - famed and popular as a healer and teacher - came to be arrested and killed in Jerusalem. In the course of telling his story, A.N. Wilson confronts the stranger story of the origins of Christianity. He expounds how easy it is to make false readings of the Gospels, which are the only source-material for the life of Jesus' birth in Bethlehem, his life as a carpenter in Nazareth, or, towards the end of his life, his betrayal by Judas or his institutions of the Christian Eucharist. Wilson also entertains some striking theories about the part played in this story by Saint Paul.

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Review

Noting that Matthew, Mark, and Luke "claim that the Eucharist was instituted during or after the traditional Jewish Passover meal," A.N. Wilson says that the stories concluding the synoptic gospels, "the arrest of Jesus, his trial, his execution, must be [works] of fiction, since it is unthinkable that the Jews would have broken their most sacred religious observances in order to put a man on trial."

In Jesus: A Life, A.N. Wilson spends most of his energy on such demythologizing. Like Renan, Schweitzer, and Crossan before him, this biographer strives to tell a story about the "historical reality" of Jesus' life. To that end, Wilson summarizes scads of contemporary biblical scholarship, sifts through loads of archeological evidence, liberally cites the Dead Sea Scrolls, and, most productively, attends his finely-tuned literary ear to the biblical texts.

You can take or leave Wilson's secondhand scholarship; that sort of thing is outdated before it gets printed. But you cannot deny the power of his original literary observations. He thinks the most trustworthy clues for answering the question of who Jesus really was are to be found in the Gospel passages that resist or rupture neat theological readings. "Almost in spite of the Christ of the theologians, Jesus has survived: a man doodling in the dust with his finger ...; a man who could liken the love of God to a fussy Jewish mother searching a house high and low for a lost coin...." This is trustworthy writing. For some readers it will be emotionally upsetting. But it's hard to imagine anyone for whom it wouldn't be ethically edifying. "We can accept some Church version of Jesus, or if it makes more appeal to us, we can accept a 'heretic' version; or we can make one up by ourselves," Wilson writes. "A patient and conscientious reading of the Gospels will always destroy any explanation which we devise. If it makes sense, it is wrong. That is the only reliable rule-of-thumb which we can use when testing the innumerable interpretations of Jesus' being and his place in human history." --Michael Joseph Gross

From the Publisher

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About this edition

• Publisher: Pimlico
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0712606971
• ISBN 13: 9780712606974
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288