The Roots of the Problem and the Person

This is the best book on Biblical scholarship I have yet read. Everyone from Anne Rice to Harold Bloom cites John P. Meier as the foremost authority on the "historical Jesus." Meier, a Roman Catholic priest, begins his work by explaining that the "historical Jesus" is not the "real Jesus," and vice versa. One cannot write an accurate "biography" of Jesus (understood in its modern sense) because there is just too little information. What he can do however, is assess the information that we do have, and see what everyone - "Catholic, Protestant, Jew, and agnostic" - can agree on. Make no mistake; this is a work of genuine scholarship by a university professor - not some book of pop pseudo-science or conspiracy theory, such as Holy Blood, Holy Grail. As such, the casual reader MAY find it a bit dry; it is heavily footnoted and Meier makes reference to all the previous researchers in the same field. However, if you are fascinated by the subject-matter (as I am) it is a genuine page-turner. Although it is listed as being 496 pages long, in reality it is much shorter than that as a lot of the book is taken up by supplementary material - such as footnotes - which I simply skipped. This is the first volume of an ongoing series of books, and they arrive at an important time. As is often pointed out, most "scholarly" works on Jesus or Christianity (such as Albert Schweitzer's, or the recent disappointing work by Harold Bloom) approach the subject with an openly hostile attitude; they write from emotion and not from fact, rendering their "non-fictional" works unattractive and unconvincing. Now - with the Da Vinci Code movie opening shortly - people are willing to believe just about anything. How refreshing then is it for Meier to try to tackle the problem without seeking to AFFIRM OR DENY anyone's faith! The result is sure to offend fundamentalists and atheists alike, but it is surely a fascinating read.

Why even bother trying to learn about the historical Jesus? Why try where so many others have given up or gotten bogged down in disagreement? In his great, academic book, Fr. John Meier recalls Plato: "The unexamined life is not worth living." For the Christian, some things are sacred, but nothing about Yeshu the "marginal" Jew is forbidden in a proper historical examination. And Fr. Meier does just that in this, the first of three volumes. Was Jesus an illegitimate child? Could he read? Did he have brothers and sisters? Why was he "marginal"? What was his early life like? The scarcity of the evidence can at first be discouraging, but Fr. Meier takes us through the centuries of scholarship and the best available modern evidence to paint us a picture of the young son of Mary and Joseph. Faithless and faithful alike may be unhappy with Meier's conclusions, but his arguments are well-researched and presented. You can read the text and skip the chapter endnotes for a decent academic presentation, or you can delve into the notes and branch off into the cutting edge discussion on the Jesus of history. Most interesting to me was the fact that the book bears the Imprimatur of Bp. Sheridan, but does not have the Nihil Obstat, or the approval of the Church's censor office. Normally the two go together. Fr. Meier's message may not be popular among modern Christians, Catholic or otherwise, but he's not been censured either. It's a testimony the the impeccability of his scholarship and the validity of his message: The historical Jesus is not the Jesus of faith. He is also not the "real" Jesus, irrecoverable now after 2000 years. He is simply the Jesus that we can recover from "purely historical sources and arguments."

John Meier's "A Marginal Jew" is the leading study of the historical Jesus of our time. Notwithstanding three sizeable volumes the work is still incomplete, but this reputation is clearly well-deserved. The first volume only deals with the basic contours of his life, but it is the most intelligent discussion of these questions available. Meier, a Catholic priest, reminds us that the historical Jesus is not the real Jesus. For a start we have a radical shortage of information of information about all but a few people in classical times, and Jesus is not one of those lucky few. What he has presented is what a spectrum of theologians and historians would conclude about Jesus if they were forced to provide a basic consensus. So Meier starts with the sources for Jesus' life, which basically consists of the Gospels. There is a long, thorough discussion of the reference to Jesus in Josephus, from which Meier agrees with most scholars is mostly genuine, with several obvious Christian interpolations. He then discusses other sources, which reveal a very meagre crop. There is Tacitus' reference to Christians, nothing of value in the Talmud, as well as a thorough deflation of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas. Thomas consists of sayings, many of which resemble those in the Gospels. But Thomas' sayings are simpler, and many have concluded that they are more primitive and therefore earlier than the canonical gospels. Meier disagrees. He points that one reason Thomas' order of sayings does not resemble the synoptic gospels is because many of them were remembered orally, not because they proceeded them. He also points out one reason Thomas' sayings appear simpler is because the Gnostic concerns of the author/editor has pared away those elements of the original Gospel saying that were too clear or too eschatological for the author's taste. We then get a discussion of the criteria for deciding what comes from Jesus; embarrassment, discontinuity, multiple attestation and providing a motive for Jesus' execution.We then turn to Jesus' actual life himself. We start off with a discussion of his name, and then we have a discussion of the infancy narratives. Notwithstanding the fact that Meier is a Catholic priest, by the time he is finished there is not much left of them, or the doctrine of Jesus' virginal conception. The narratives are inaccurate about precisely those childbirth rituals that Mary, the presumed source, would have to know. Both Matthew and Luke use questionable historical elements (the Massacre of the Innocents in Matthew, unattested to by any other source, the census in Luke that could not have happened at the time Luke gives) and give clearly different routes of Joseph and Mary to and from Nazareth and Bethlehem. Even more disconcerting is Meier's later discussion of Jesus' siblings, of which there were at least four brothers and two sisters. For centuries Catholics, seeking to preserve both the eternal virginity of Joseph and Mary, ha

He begins what was at the time a 2 volume book (now up to 4) with a lot on Methodology, which actually helps to describe the work of the Jesus Seminar and modern christological and New Testament thought & research. Most people I know found that section A Drag.However, once he actually launches into the birth narratives and begins talking about Jesus, what happened, when, and why, it's as fascinating as a detective story, and as hard to put down.This book is for intelligent readers with open minds; those who believe God wrote the Bible and it has been handed exactly as God intended should keep looking.

This book maintains solid research and well thought out arguements, while being fun reading. Of all the modern books on the historical Jesus, this is both the most scholarly and best written. My only criticism is that which has already been mentioned: you have to read the text in the chapters and again in the endnotes (which are at least as long as the chapters) to get the full value.