How Can We Know God?

There are four possible answers to that question.

Some people claim that great thinkers – Plato, Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Dawkins and so on can give us insight into God and what he is like. Some of what they say is right, some of what they say isn't, but as mere mortals we can never fully understand God, so whatever we say will always be incomplete. Because of this, the wiser followers of great thinkers are always open to add new ideas into what they already believe.

Others claim that we can know God because he has been revealed, often by angels, visions and so on to specific prophets – particular people in history like Moses, Mohammed or Joseph Smith. But when we look at what those prophets say, they agree on some important ideas like God being powerful, but disagree dramatically on others, like who God's chosen people are.

It therefore seems that the wisest course is agnosticism - the belief that we just can't know; we don't have enough information to make a good decision. That's pretty much David Mitchell's view...

But the apostle John tells us another way.

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us.
1 John 1:1-3

John makes the startling and incredible claim that he can speak about the ultimate reality – the one from the beginning, the one who is eternal life - because he has known him not as an abstract concept or a vision or a trance, but as a man he had seen and touched and eaten with and followed.

The incredible claim at the heart of Christianity is that the God who made everything became a man – Jesus Christ – so that we could know him. And it is attested to by eye witnesses – people like Matthew who knew Jesus, like John and Peter who were close friends with him, like Luke the Greek historian who researched carefully and even Jesus' mum Mary became convinced that he was god. Not just a god in some kind of trendy manifestation of the spiritual, but the one true God, uniquely become human.

How good do you have to be to convince your best friends and even your mum that you are God? Even when they've watched you die?

Brian couldn't do it in Monty Python's mostly magnificent satire, because his mum knew that he wasn't the Messiah; he was a very naughty boy.

The Roman Emperor Caligula couldn't do it, even though he tried to convince everyone he was a god. His own bodyguard assassinated him.

But Jesus convinced his friends and family that he really was God, so much so that they travelled around the world and were willing to give their own lives to say that he really is and that therefore we can know God as he reveals himself to us in Jesus.

Zeitgeist

There's a popular internet movie called Zeitgeist. It's basically a hodge podge of conspiracy theories, but it's one of the main ways they spread. Today an ex-pupil asked me about it, so I thought it worth putting this response from an Aussie historian up here. Good on conspiracy theories and so on...

There's a longer interview available via audio here.

The Word Became Flesh

The sermon in church this morning was on John 1:1-18. Being a bit greeky-geeky now, I followed along in Greek. One (random) thing I thought was interesting and shocking in the passage was the use of the word εγενετο (egeneto), but it's completely hidden in pretty much every English translation. Let me explain...

εγενετο is quite difficult to translate into English. It means something along the lines of "happened" or "came to exist" or "came to be". And it comes up quite a lot in the passage.

Verse 3:
Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. (NIV)
All things through him εγενετο; without him εγενετο not one thing (literal).

Verse 6:
There came a man who was sent from God; his name was John. (NIV)
εγενετο a man, sent from God, his name John. (literal)

Verse 10:
He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.(NIV)
In the world he was, and the world through him εγενετο, and the world did not know him.(literal)

Verse 12:
Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God (NIV)
But to those who received him, he gave the right to become (same word as εγενετο) children of God, to the ones who believe in his name.(literal)

Verse 14:
The Word became flesh (NIV)
The word flesh εγενετο. (literal)

εγενετο in John 1 is clearly used of the act of creation. In verse 3, we see it used of the creative action of the Word in making all things - every single thing that came to exist (εγενετο) was through the Word. That includes John (v6) - one of the key emphases of the beginning of John's gospel is that Jesus is greater than John the Baptist, which has led some people to think that it was written to people who liked John the Baptist. But John was created by the Word, just the same as everything else. It includes the whole world (v10). It even includes the act of re-creation in the life of the Christian (v12) - that is described with εγενετο as well. The Word makes those who believe him into children of God by his creative action.

But then there is v14, and it is a shock. The Word, the one who makes every single person and thing in the entire universe, the Word εγενετο flesh. The one who was with God and was God in the beginning (v1-2), the one who created everything, himself becomes one of the things that he has created. The Word became flesh. If you aren't amazed by that, you haven't understood it. If you think you understand it, you aren't even close to understanding it.

Jesus is amazing - the one who made everything, himself made flesh. The creator of everything is himself created as well as being creator and uncreateable. Wow.

What if Oxford stopped teaching Theology?

[ETA - this is entirely my own opinion and in no way represents the opinions of any institutions or organisations with which I may be affiliated or associated]

An idea that some people in Oxford have been batting around recently is the idea of stopping teaching theology at the university.

On one level, it would mark an important stage in the development of the university. Oxford was the first university in the English-speaking world (if you can call England English-speaking in the 1100s), and it was founded to teach theology. Theology led to the other subjects, to revolution via the Reformation, and then eventually the university dropped theology. Some would say it would mark a coming of age. Some would say it marked the beginning of the end. The highest knowledge that we can have is the knowledge of God.

On another level, I think there's a very good argument for dropping theology. The way that subjects are studied now is via investigation, via the power of the mind. On a fundamental level, theology should not be like that because we cannot put ourselves over God to investigate him, though that doesn't stop a lot of people trying.

On yet another level, I think it would be enormously beneficial. If funding for academics studying theology was cut, theology would be done mainly by the Church, and I think that's right. It also tends to get better results when theologians actually believe what they are investigating. There are exceptions (MacCulloch for one), but I expect bits would get absorbed into History, Philosophy, Literature, etc.

Selfishly, as I'm doing a theology degree at Oxford, it would be a pity. On the other hand, it is generally the tutors who are paid either by churches or to study history who are the best at what they do, and I don't suppose I'd cry much if people who have devoted their lives to trying to argue that Jesus never existed suddenly lost their funding. But Jesus loves them anyway, so I suppose I should.

So abolish theology as an academic subject at secular universities, and leave studying theology to the Church? Yeah - why not?

Hermeneutics and 1 Corinthians 10:11

There's a verse in 1 Corinthians which tells us a bit about how to understand the Bible. It is interesting that what it says actually goes against at least two commonly held beliefs by some people who teach theology and stuff. Of course, there are about as many opinions as there are theologians...

Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come.
1 Corinthians 10:11, ESV

False Statement 1 - Theology and History are Separate

"These things" refers back to what Paul has just been writing about - specifically details of the Exodus and the Israelites wandering in the desert that had happened over a thousand years before. There is a tendency in liberal theological circles, thankfully starting to die out now, to say that if something has theological value, it doesn't also have historical value. So people argue that because Jesus turning water into wine is a picture of him replacing the temple (which it is), that means it didn't happen, because the theological point is a good enough reason to record the story.

That is of course complete rubbish, because the theological truths also need to have a correspondence to reality. If Jesus did not rise bodily from the dead, then the "theological point" that is made by the accounts of his resurrection is false. In order for the theology to be valid, the history needs to be valid as well. (Yes, there's a whole load of stupid arguments among some German scholars ages ago about what the meaning of history is. They are stupid. I'm using "history" in the sense of "events that really happened in the past".) That's a point that has been well made in a lot of the New Testament stuff by NT Wright, and others.

Paul's point here is that the events of the Exodus took place as examples. They took place. And they did so as examples - both the theological and historical are true, and indeed need to be true in order for them to be valid examples. Yes, there are cases (Jesus' parables for instance) where things do not have to be true in order for them to be valid examples. That isn't the case here.

False Statement 2 - The Importance of Original Meaning

One of the most commonly taught ideas in the whole area of how to understand the Bible is the idea of the importance of original context and original meaning. The main meaning of a passage is what it meant for its original recipients.

The problem is that what Paul says contradicts it. It doesn't contradict the idea that original context is often very important for understanding the passage, or that the original significance for the readers is important. But Paul says that the events recorded in Exodus happened and were recorded "for us". Why? Because the "end of the ages" has come - which in Paul's theology refers to the fact that Jesus has come - that all the ages were pointing to what happened in Jesus. Paul sees the main significance of the events of the Exodus as being for people living after Jesus, because he sees them as being fulfilled in Christ. That of course clashes with the conventional view (in many circles) of how to understand the Bible. The main significance of the passage is found in Jesus and for those who seek to follow him. It doesn't bother Paul that it was originally written 1000 years before the events that give it its main meaning.

Peter also agrees that the main significance of passages in the Old Testament wasn't understood until Jesus. Furthermore, he even argues that the writers knew that they didn't fully understand.

Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories. It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look.
1 Peter 2:10-12, ESV

I therefore conclude that the main significance of a Bible passage is the one that takes into account the original context and significance, but which points through them to Jesus. To my mind, if an Old Testament commentary doesn't do that, it is missing the main point.

Quote - Mascall on Critical Scholarship

The critical scholar is not committed, within the area of his research, to accepting the Church's presuppositions about Jesus, but he should not be committed to accepting naturalistic presuppositions either. If he does accept the latter, then the results of his research will in all probability contradict the beliefs of the Church, but this is because he has begged the question from the start. In examining, for instance, the evidence for the virginal conception [of Jesus], if he begins with the presupposition that such an event is impossible he will end with the same conclusion; if he begins with the presupposition that it is possible he may end with the conclusion that the evidence for it is good or that it is bad or that it is inconclusive. This is as far as scholarship can take him. The Christian will accept the virginal conception as part of the Church's faith.

In the rare cases where faith appears to be contradicted by scholarship whose conclusions have not been prescribed from the start, [the critical scholar] may be cast down but will not be destroyed. For he will know how temporary and mutable the conclusions of scholarship essentially are, and he will also be conscious that he himself may not have perfectly comprehended the Church's faith.

E.L. Mascall, The Secularisation of Christianity

Hat tip to CQOD.

The Historical Jesus - Lost in Translation?

The central problem of Christianity, from the point of view of non-Christians, is who Jesus was. CS Lewis famously summed it up in Mere Christianity by saying that either Jesus was a lunatic who thought that he was God when he wasn't, or he was a liar, who knew he wasn't God but claimed to be, or that he was Lord - he claimed to be God and he really was God. Lewis then goes on to show that the evidence is strongly against Jesus being either a liar or a lunatic, and therefore it is highly likely that he is Lord.

Various attempts have been made to get out of this. Some people try saying that those aren't the only three possibilities, and try to concoct a fourth, usually by mixing the ideas of liar and lunatic, which they don't notice still falls foul of the same evidence. An altogether cleverer way out is to question whether Jesus actually claimed to be God at all. The Bible clearly portrays him as doing so, but what if there is a difference between the Jesus of faith, as presented in the Bible, and the Historical Jesus - Jesus as he actually was?

(And yes, before people get penickety, I know that the Historical Jesus movement started a long time before CS Lewis, and that some of them (e.g. Borg) are coming from somewhere different to my description above. Borg, for instance, is trying to present a Christianity that fits in with his worldview where God can't act at all in history. I discuss that issue here.)

The evidence that they focus on tends to be things like the difference between different accounts in the gospels. If the accounts are too similar, they say they are copied from each other, and if the accounts are too different, they suggest it is because the writers are making things up. This is especially true with John, because John is very different to Matthew, Mark and Luke in lots of ways, so some people think it is mostly an invention, and that Jesus didn't say most of the things in John. (Incidentally, some good has come out of this too, as it has made people look more carefully at why the gospel writers structured things the way they did, and so helped us to see their emphases, main points, etc.)

I want to suggest that a lot of the questions that are being asked are actually irrelevant, that Jesus only said two things he is recorded as saying in the gospels, and that we can tell that the gospels provide true accounts of Jesus.

A lot of this is because of the simple problems of translation. The Bible we read today is in English. The gospels - the bits directly about Jesus - were originally written in Greek (well, some people argue that Matthew wasn't, but the earliest copies we have are in Greek). But Jesus almost certainly spoke Aramaic and Hebrew most of the time. So we know that what we have in the gospels is at best a translation of what Jesus said. There are two exceptions, where Jesus' words in Aramaic are recorded - "talitha koum" (Little girl, get up) and "eloi, eloi lama sabacthani" (My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?).

But it gets more complicated than that. Greek doesn't have a neat distinction between direct speech and indirect speech - you can't tell the difference between "He told me to get up" and "He told me: 'Get Up!'" So we can't tell whether what we have are the words of Jesus neatly translated into Greek, or whether it is the apostles reporting what Jesus said indirectly.

And it gets even more complicated. Greek and Aramaic aren't very similar as languages. It isn't possible just to translate straight from one into the other and keep the sense the same. It's like the problem of translating the Bible into English. Some people translate literally word for word and lose the flow of what is said and sometimes leave it incomprehensible. Other people translate so that it is the same meaning, but it's said quite differently. We don't know exactly how the people who wrote the gospels went about translating Jesus' words into Greek. I've suggested that Matthew, Mark and Luke may have gone for a more literal translation, John may have gone for a translation that aimed to convey the same sense, but not necessarily translating literally. (Of course, John might have been literally translating what Jesus said - I don't think we can know this side of heaven.)

Which rather leaves us with a problem. What we have in the Bible is a translation of either what Jesus said, or what he meant, quite possibly put into the authors' own words. How can we know they are reporting it accurately?

I think the answer to that is fairly simple, and often missed by the Historical Jesus scholars. The people who wrote it clearly believed that it was true. The people they wrote it for clearly believed it was true. They quoted what the apostles described Jesus as saying as being what Jesus said. And the people they wrote for included people who had known Jesus. The early church, while some of the apostles were still around, regarded the gospels as faithful records of what Jesus had said and meant. And they were in a position to know.

But that doesn't mean they were gullible. The gospels were all written before AD100. After then, other accounts of what Jesus said and did were written (and the Gospel of Thomas might have been earlier). A few people were taken in by them, but the church as a whole rejected them because they weren't saying what Jesus said - they were saying what the authors wanted Jesus to have said. They could tell the difference, and they did.

We can tell that the gospels provide a reliable account of the historical Jesus, even if it is in translation, because the people who were in a position to know what Jesus did say and do agreed with the gospels. And these were not academics or people just along for the ride. These were people who staked their lives on what Jesus had said and done, repeatedly, and in most cases were killed for it. Whether the gospels record something very close to what Jesus actually said and did, or whether they provide an interpretation of what Jesus said and did, they're still true.

And so the problem for non-Christians remains. The people who were following Jesus were willing to stake their lives not only on Jesus claiming to be God, but on Jesus actually being God. Who was he? Was he mad, bad or God?

The Last Temptation of Christ

I know this film is controversial, and I've heard a lot of stuff about it. So I thought I'd watch it and see what I thought. Here's an outline of the plot.

What is meant to be controversial about this film is the way that Jesus is tempted sexually - specifically to come down from the cross, enjoy a "normal" life, first with Mary Magdalene, then with Mary of Bethany (and Martha on the side with the argument that "there is only one woman in the world"). I don't have a problem with the idea that Jesus was tempted to avoid the cross, to live a normal life, to settle down and have kids, even to sleep with multiple women. If Jesus was "tempted in every way, just as we are", that temptation might well have included that sort of thing.

I guess the whole Judas storyline, with Judas being Jesus' closest disciple, the only one whom Jesus trusts enough to ask him to betray him, is also controversial. It doesn't fit with Judas being the one who was embezzling funds from Jesus though, so I don't tend to agree with it.

The film is meant to be struggling with the tension between the divinity of Christ and his humanity. But where the film goes wrong isn't on overemphasising the humanity of Jesus, but underemphasising his divinity. So the film presents a Jesus who thinks at one point that the voices telling him he is the Son of God are demonic, for example, and who doubts his own Messiahship for almost all the film. Despite what the Wikipedia page says, this Jesus frequently refers to stuff he's done wrong, so seems to be sinful too, as well as a pantheist. The Jesus of the film isn't a Jesus who could inspire his followers (not just Paul - the people who knew him during his life) to write the gospels.

This tension gets recognised as the film goes on. So in the long vision/temptation sequence where Jesus is tempted to avoid the cross, he meets Paul who is preaching Christianity and who ends up rejecting him because the Christ of faith is far more useful to him than the Jesus of history who (in this case) wasn't crucified. That just doesn't work. It doesn't explain Paul's conversion, or his willingness to die for what he taught, as well as using ideas that just didn't appear for another 1800 years or so.

In fact, in the film, the only way that Jesus is able to go through with the crucifixion is after the temptation sequence (and ironically after Judas accuses him of being a traitor) when he realises that he really is the Messiah and he really does have to die. The problem is that in order to inspire the reaction he clearly did inspire in those around him, he needs to have been less of a bumbling failure for the rest of his ministry.

I've studied a bit of patristics this term, which is a lot of debates in the early church, mostly about how best to explain who Jesus was. They concluded that Jesus was fully man and fully God from the start because that was the only conclusion that fit their historical data. It doesn't fit this film.

The Historical Jesus, Liberalism and Faulty Metaphysics

One of the topics I've recently had to do quite a bit of reading about is the so-called "Historical Jesus" movement. Basically, some people don't like Jesus claiming what the gospels claim he said and doing what the gospels claim he did. This is usually because they realise that if Jesus did what he did and said what he said, then they really ought to obey him, and they don't want to do that.

So they come up with all kinds of interesting but ultimately rubbish ideas for how to come up with an idea of Jesus who didn't say the things the Bible says he said or do the things the Bible said he did. Most of the ideas involve going against how historians say you should do history when working with sources and end up with a Jesus who often looks very like them and who couldn't possibly have given rise to the early church. The early church, of course, seemed to have as its core lots of people who were in a position to know what had happened with Jesus and were willing to die for the belief that he rose physically from the dead.

Those people who say Jesus was just a normal bloke are pretty easy to disprove - Tom Wright does it very well (and at very great length), for example, in The New Testament and the People of God, Jesus and the Victory of God and The Resurrection of the Son of God. Alternatively, you could sit and think about it for a few minutes or have some fun and read CS Lewis's Fern Seed and Elephants.

But the people I'm more interested in are the Christians who go along with that kind of thing - like Marcus Borg. They tend to be coming from the point of view that Christianity is still in some ways true but that miracles don't happen.

The problem with that is twofold. The first is that it's really stupid to look at whether something happened by assuming before you start that it didn't, especially when it involves saying that God couldn't do something.

The second is that people usually say that you can have a genuine experience of God but that God can't intervene physically in the universe. That's a problem because if God can't intervene physically in the universe, there's no way of having a genuine experience of him. Our physical bodies can't just relate to something spiritual unless that spiritual thing has in some way some ability to control the physical. But if God doesn't have that, then we can't have a genuine experience of him.

I'm waffling now. I'd better stop.

Presuppositions and Miracles

One of the things that's coming up quite a bit at the moment in discussions and lectures is the presuppositions that we bring when we come to look at a text.

For example, there are plenty of accounts of Jesus performing miracles.

If someone looks at them with the presupposition that miracles can't happen, they will have to conclude that the account should not be taken at face value, but is either untrue or is using metaphor in some sense to communicate that truth. That's actually an underlying principle behind a lot of modern liberal theology.

They'll look at a passage from the Old Testament, for example, and notice that it has some straightforward historical accounts (which can frequently be verified archaeologically) and a scene where an angel turns up and does something. They'll then conclude that the passage they're reading is actually a composite made by combining a genuine historical document with a fictional account with angels in or something.

On the other hand, a Christian (me, for instance) could read the passage and say “Historical events, yep. Angel appearing, fine. No worries.”

I've got some sympathy with the liberals here. I think they're wrong, and often far too arrogant in stating their position, but I understand where they're coming from.

It looks the same as we might do with the Iliad. The Iliad is a long poem by Homer, about the Greeks attacking and capturing Troy. And again, the Greek gods do a fair bit of stuff. People used to think the account was totally fictional, until some archaeologist with a name like Schliemann or something discovered the ruins of Troy. So what classical historians do now is they try to keep the story, but take all the god-bits out of it. And it's reasonably possible to do – it turns out that the god bits are mostly back story – and you can end up with a story a lot like the one in the film Troy, except with the gay sex bits kept in.

So if that's ok with the Iliad, why isn't it ok with the Bible? The difference is in the role the “supernatural” bits play in the story. In the Iliad, the gods are mostly used to explain motivations (when there could have been other ones), to give ideas to people (which they could have had anyway) and so on. In the Bible, God does much more than that. He doesn't just slightly influence the course of battles, he strikes all of one side dead before the battle starts. He parts rivers to let people through. He brings people who have died in a very real, public and verifiable sense back to life. The Iliad can be rewritten without the god-stuff as the story of a great military victory, which it would make sense to write poems about. Without Jesus' miracles and rising from the dead, there isn't anything special about him for the whole religion to have started around.

So if we look at the Bible with the presupposition that supernatural events don't happen, what we are left with is an impossible puzzle. In the early apostles, we have a group of people who were clearly in a position to know what had happened, claiming not just that there were everyday events to which they attached a supernatural significance, but where the events themselves could only be explained supernaturally and where the events have a significance which is deeply uncomfortable.

It also raises the question as to what the correct presupposition is when we are looking at an alleged supernatural event, and I think I can explain this with reference to science.

Scientists argue about whether cold fusion is possible. Pretty much all serious scientists agree that it hasn't happened, most think that it can't happen either. But that doesn't stop people trying (mostly because it could make whoever discovered it very rich indeed). Suppose that someone claims that they've managed to achieve cold fusion, and that I, as a scientist, am asked to investigate.

What should I assume? Should I go in assuming that cold fusion is impossible, and whatever evidence comes up, keep on believing that it's impossible? No – what would be the point of either asking me to investigate or me investigating? I'd just conclude that it hadn't happened, whether or not I could come up with another explanation.

What I should assume is that it might be possible, and then look at the claims and at alternative explanations.

Stambaugh & Balch - The New Testament in Its Social Environment

Another book on New Testament background...

This basically reads like a non-narrative history textbook, which is probably because it is. It seeks to describe the social, political and economic structures of the Eastern Roman Empire between about 300BC and 100AD, with particular attention to the situation in Palestine.

And they're pretty good at that. Where they get ropey is when they try dealing with the gospels or letters and getting theology or history out of them. They don't seem to be especially good at dealing with subtlety, and would be better sticking with ancient history.

Generally pretty interesting on the historical background front.

Borg & Wright - The Meaning of Jesus

A very interesting book, this one... Marcus Borg (about as liberal as a Christian can get, if not more so) and NT Wright (fairly conservative) discuss who Jesus was/is, who he thought he was, what he did, etc

In general, Borg takes the line that Jesus was a man (but not God) who in some sense after his death became "the Christ of faith", and that most of the gospel accounts are actually metaphors written back into the life of Jesus by the early church. This includes basically most of his teaching, miracles, birth, resurrection, etc. Wright takes a much more normal line - that Jesus was the Messiah, claiming to bring about God's kingdom and the true return from exile, that he was born of a virgin, raised from the dead, etc. He doesn't exactly follow the standard evangelical line, but I'd agree with everything he said, even though sometimes there's more to say as well. But you can't talk exhaustively about Jesus in one non especially large book.

What I found most interesting about the book was the difference in approach taken by Borg and Wright. Borg's liberal position is the one that traditionally is seen as more "scientific", but time and again the only arguments he uses for his position are "I think that..." and "It looks suspect to me...". They're almost all subjective. By contrast, Wright's approach is heavily evidence-based, looking at how first century Jews would have understood what Jesus was doing, examining evidence for how oral tradition works, etc.

It's also interesting looking at Borg's presuppositions - some of them are fairly clear in what he writes. He presupposes, for example, that God doesn't or can't act in the world, as he cannot see any explanation for the Holocaust otherwise. But his argument then hinges upon Jesus as a mystic, who experienced God within the world. If God cannot or does not act in the world, we cannot experience him in the world. Borg's approach is logically inconsistent.

Another example would be Borg's assumption that if something has a metaphorical meaning as well as a literal meaning, it was probably written only because the metaphorical meaning was true, rather than both being true. So, for example, Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey fulfils promises about what God's king would do from hundreds of years before. So Borg seems to argue that the early Christians saw Jesus as God's king, so wrote that he had fulfilled this prophecy (even though he hadn't) as a way of pointing to his identity. Which does rather raise the question, as Wright points out, of how on earth they came to believe that Jesus was God's king if he didn't fulfil the prophecy.

Borg also makes strange assumptions which almost seem designed to reinforce his position. For example, he assumes that if three gospels carry very similar stories, that one of them was written first, that the other two copied the story and made up their extra details, only leaving one source. Which makes me wonder then how anything could ever be attested by more than one source...

In some circles, the controversy over this book was because Wright acknowledges that Borg is a Christian. I don't know Borg; Tom Wright does. I'm glad it's God making the call, not me.

All in all, an interesting read and a good introduction to the whole "historical Jesus" debate. Whether that debate is worth bothering with, except to refute the sceptics, is a different question altogether.

Borg & Wright - The Meaning of Jesus

I've read and written a review of Borg & Wright - The Meaning of Jesus. It's a debate between two prominent scholars who profess to be Christians, one of whom doubts most of the Biblical accounts of Jesus and one of whom thinks they're true. It's pretty interesting - I've said a lot more in the full review.

Gerd Theissen - The Shadow of the Galilean

A quick mention that I've reviewed Gerd Theissen - The Shadow of the Galilean on my other blog. It's a pretty readable introduction to the socio-political situation in Israel at the time of Jesus and to liberal "historical" criticism of Jesus' life and ministry.

Gerd Theissen - The Shadow of the Galilean

Onto New Testament background now...

Imagine a liberal socialist theologian, of the kind who might write this about the Resurrection:

There can be no doubt about the subjective authenticity of the appearances tradition.

Imagine him writing a novel to introduce people to the idea of the quest for the historical Jesus and the background to the gospels.

This is that novel. It follows a character who is give the task of investigating Jesus (and some others) to see to what extent they pose a threat to the Romans.

As an introduction to the social background, it's pretty good. I think it assumes too much on a liberal and anti-miraculous front, too much in terms of the extent of socialist theory and too much in terms of which liberal theories of what actually happened were circulating that early.

It also has the advantage that it's short and easy to read...