Jesus the Rabbi Prophet : A New Light on the Gospel Message review:5 stars (A fresh look at Jesus the man) - I really enjoyed reading this book and discovering many aspects about Jesus the man and the sociological context in which he lived. I particularly appreciated that this book has no theological agenda. It presents conflicting views of Jesus'life, yet no sides are taken.
1 stars (A modern gnostic view of Jesus' life) - If you are not a Christian, this book would be a poor introduction to Christianity and will probably have little appeal to you since it does not present Jesus as a religious figure. If you are a Christian, the mere assumption that there are "literary creations" within the Gospels will draw you away from this book. Of course, if you're an atheist, this book will hold no appeal for you. So this book begs the question: who is it written for?
The writer tries his best to pretend to be impartial in his view of Jesus, but to say he comes up short would be a stretch. Rule number one of an impartial approach to any study is not to bring your own assumptions into your subject. But that is not what the author does. In fact, from page one he assumes that the Gospels are full of mere "literary creations", and that dooms the book from the start. Bottom line about any study performed on the figure, historical or otherwise, of Jesus is to approach the subject willing to consider that whoever wrote the Gospels was either a)inspired by the Holy Spirit as it is widely believed by Christians or b)that the authors had no need to embelish the life of Jesus since His teachings and works were pretty amazing of themselves. If you're not willing to consider any of these two possibilities, you will end up with the biased study contained in this book.
This book takes the gnostic approach to Jesus: that he was simply a man. A great man, whose teachings were intended to start a theological revolution much like Muhammad (Mohammed) or Confucius, but just a man. It casts doubt upon the veracity of the works of Jesus, including the many miracles He performed, by dumping them into the "literary creations" category. Sometimes this is subtly implied, but a lot of the times it stops short of actually denouncing Jesus' life and works as figments of someone's imagination. Instead, this books focuses more on Jesus' ministry being one of teachings in front of an audience, a teacher for the masses. It sort of turns Jesus into a jewish Dalai Lama, all style and nothing to support his claim of divinity. Furthermore, it does not even consider the posibility that the Gospels are reinforced by the Epistoles of Paul, who lived in Judaea during Jesus' ministry and who may or may not have been a witness to it. Certainly, if the Gospels erred (or incurred in "literary creations") chances are Paul or any other New Testament author, like John of Pathmos, would have at some point contradicted them. They never did.
Also, the author fails to acknowledge that in those first 100 years or so after Jesus' ministry, there was no organized church. Christians did not even decide on a time or place where they would meet again, they simply did (guided, Christians believe, solely by the Holy Spirit). We get this from pagan historians of the era (like Suetonius, Marcellinus or Tacitus), not from Christian historians. Therefore the assumption is that a pagan historian, since he has nothing to gain by advancing the early church's "agenda", must be telling the truth. When the early Christians met, it was not to decide on an "agenda" but to either share on the messages of Jesus' ministry or, like the Council of Jerusalem, to discuss differences of opinion on whether gentiles should be approached with Jesus' message and how. Early Christians were, simply put, organized only in the fact that they believed Jesus to be the Messiah and Savior.
Once you fail to take all those facts into consideration you end up with the erratic views expressed in this book. In the old Gnostic church, this would be a best seller. Today, it is merely an unscientific study of one man's life from the point of view of another without taking into consideration the overriding facts surrounding his subject. It pretends to sound scientific and from a historian's point of view, but it never ceases to be a pretender.
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