By the Passionist order priest and scholar Donald Senior. It is in the lastest edition of the Jesuit magazine America.
I heard Aslan interviewed a few months ago by Don Imus, who read and loved the book. But I won't be reading it; nor will I be reading Bill O"Reilly's book Killing Jesus. I just prefer real scholarship (calling the late Fr. Raymond Brown!).
The entire review is 17 paragraphs.
... sad to say, the end result could easily be assigned to fiction. Here is a summary of Aslan’s basic thesis. The portrayal of Jesus in the four Gospels and the writings of Paul completely mask the true historical Jesus, a Galilean peasant consumed with zeal for God’s kingdom who advocated the overthrow of the ruling powers (this included the high priests in Jerusalem as well as their Roman overlords) and who saw himself as the God-appointed king of this new realm.
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How did such a distortion happen? Aslan’s explanation of the process is mind-boggling, to say the least. The first step was that the earliest followers of Jesus were ignorant, illiterate peasants who made the mistake of erroneously applying Old Testament Scriptures to Jesus, beginning the process of idealizing him. Then came the need to get along with Roman authorities, particularly on the part of Greek-speaking Jewish Christians spread throughout the Roman Empire. The revolutionary intentions of the real Jesus had to be muted and his mission made spiritual and harmless.
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How is one to assess an effort like this? The attempt to drive a wedge between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith is not a new enterprise, but Aslan’s proposal is particularly stark and radically reductionist. Most scholars who hold this thesis have nuanced their argumentation, noting an evolutionary process in which the resurrection faith of the early community gradually idealized its portrayal of Jesus.
Aslan rolls through any nuances without hesitation: the writings of Paul and the Evangelists are simply contrived. Little is mentioned about the preaching, teaching and worship of the early community as an important conduit for the early church’s traditions about Jesus. And their motives, it should be noted, are base: Aslan repeatedly characterizes the early church’s portrayal as a “flat-out fabrication,” as a “desperate” attempt, as “convoluted,” as a “concoction” (referring to Mark’s passion narrative), as an effort for which “factual accuracy was irrelevant.” The accumulation of such descriptors gives the impression that the early church’s distortion of the real Jesus was something akin to a modern Washington cover-up rather than a serious and sincere theological and religious process rooted in the community’s historical memory of Jesus and his mission.
Similarly, the author’s characterization of Judaism is also disturbing. Aslan rightly contends that the Jewish Scriptures and traditions would have influenced Jesus of Nazareth, but the God he has in mind—one who legitimates Jesus’ revolutionary mission—is summarized as follows: The God of the Hebrew Scriptures is “the same God whom the Bible calls, ‘a man of war’ (Ex 15:3), the God who repeatedly commands the wholesale slaughter of every foreign man, woman and child who occupies the Land of the Jews, the ‘blood-spattered God’ of Abraham and Moses, and Jacob and Joshua (Is 63:3), the God who ‘shatters the heads of his enemies,‘ bids his warriors to bathe their feet in their blood and leave their corpses to be eaten by dogs (Ps 68:21–23). That is the only God Jesus knew and the sole God he worshipped.” To say that this vengeful God is the “only” image of God Jesus could draw from his Jewish heritage is an irresponsible distortion.
In fact, Aslan’s whole book has an exaggerated and tendentious tone. In an age when there were a number of messianic claimants, Aslan describes Judea as “teeming” with them; in an age when healers were recognized, Aslan claims there were “untold numbers” of them, “as well established” as the profession of a “woodworker or mason”—and better paid. There are also strange, out-of-focus and inaccurate observations about the topography of the land in Jesus’ day. Jerusalem is situated “between the twin peaks of Mount Scopus and the Mount of Olives” (these mountains share one ridge and are to the east of Jerusalem); Sepphoris is a “day’s walk” from Nazareth (it is only five miles away, a little over an hour’s walk); Nazareth is built on a “gently sloping hill” (in fact it is situated on very steep bluffs facing the Jezreel valley); the lands near the Sea of Galilee were nurtured by “cool salt breezes” (remarkable for a fresh-water lake).
The whole review is worth reading; hit the link above.
what other kind of god could jesus have known other than described in the old testament. OT does not have a kind and forgiving god
Posted by: Manny Cherukara | Saturday, December 13, 2014 at 12:38 PM