Books on Jesus:
Deconstructing Jesus
If you look at the books written by liberal Christian theologians about Jesus, you'll
find a bewildering array of Jesuses with all sorts of agendas, ideas, and personalities.
Who was this Jesus supposed to be? A political revolutionary? A religious dissident?
Maybe a quiet mystic whose life got blown out of proportion? Perhaps he was a cynic
philosopher, or just a nobody who got confused with someone else? Read More...
The Jesus Mysteries
Did Jesus really exist? Most arguments by critics tend to be negative in nature
- they takes information internal to Christianity and argue how and why it does not
support the existence of a historical Jesus. This is complimented by Freke and Gandy's
The Jesus Mysteries, because they spend more time on positive arguments, examining
all of the amazing parallels between Christianity and pagan mystery religions. Read
More...
Hidden Gospels: How the Search
for Jesus Lost its Way
In recent years, there has been a plethora of writings about "lost"
gospels - documents of early Christian communities which are supposed to offer an
alternative perspective on the nature of Christianity and, perhaps, the nature of
Jesus. But do these "lost" gospels really offer us anything? Do they tell
us anything about the earliest years of Christianity, or does their popularity instead
tell us more about ourselves? Read More...
The Human Christ: The Search
for the Historical Jesus
Who was Jesus? Innumerable people - scholars and lay people alike - have wanted
to answer that question and have therefore embarked upon a "quest for the historical
Jesus." What has been the result of their efforts? According to Charlotte Allen,
not very much. Allen argues that these "quests" reveal much more about
the psychology and ideology of the questors and little or nothing about Jesus. Read
More...
The Messiah Before Jesus
Was Jesus really an innovative figure in Judaism, or was he instead the inheritor
of a previously established belief system about the nature of the role of a Messiah?
Traditional Christian opinions have ranged widely on this issue, with some saying
that Jesus claimed a unique Messiah role, and others arguing that this was only claimed
later by the Christian community, because it was totally unknown in Judaism. Knohl,
however, argues that such a figure was not only known, but was filled by others before
Jesus. He was not the first, and perhaps did not expect to be the last Messiah. Read More...
The First Messiah
About 100 years before the probable lifetime of Jesus, a man came to Jerusalem
who eventually came to be called "The Teacher of Righteousness." Given
the name Judah by author Michael O. Wise, this all-but-forgotten preacher and prophet
prefigured the stories surrounding Jesus in a startling number of ways. Equally messianic
figures, they both were were arrested and condemned by authorities due to their religious
claims. Read More...
The Homeric Epics and the
Gospel of Mark
Dennis MacDonald's argument is one which is novel and will surely anger biblical
traditionalists and literalists: namely, that the gospel of Mark was written as a
conscious and deliberate imitation of the stories in the Homeric epics. The goal
was to give readers a familiar context to discover the superiority of Christ and
Christianity over pagan gods and beliefs. Read More...
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