Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millennium

Honest To Jesus is all that the reviewers describe. It is a comprehensive look at contemporary scholarship, techniques and thinking about Jesus, the person. Although it can be heavy-going at times because of all the information included, it is worth persisting because the rewards are considerable. If Funk's anger is clear at times, so is his sensse of humor and proportion which he applies to himself as well as others. For a look at the pre-Easter, historical, and always challenging man known as Jesus I strongly recommend this book

HONEST TO JESUS is a book about a topic that may be among the more important ideas of the early 21st century. It heralds a new chapter in the long, often obscure quest to verify the intellectual and moral integrity of the Christian religion. In recent decades millions have sat quietly in church pews across the Western world with a growing realization that many of the doctrines to which they have been told to ascribe are at best suspect, at worst morally bankrupt. This consternation has been a key contributor to a dramatic decline in church attendance. For a growing minority, Christianity is no longer relevant at all. More often than not westerners hold a world view superficially anchored in the mythology of pop culture, which often promotes a steadfast denial of organized religion. 'God is dead' has been a cry often heard in the past one hundred years, a response to scientific advances on all fronts which systematically explode traditional Christian mythology. HONEST TO JESUS covers a religiously charged topic with intellectual detachment, that is until Funk introduces his central idea. Easter and the apocalypse, he argues, have little, if anything to do with Jesus. They are, rather, merely what organized religion has encased him in, principally for the sake of power and popular appeal. According to Funk the first thing Jesus had to say was a word against religion. Religion, Jesus must have declared, is defined by one's relationship to one's neighbor. Jesus of Nazareth led a life you could emulate if you cared to, but, unlike organized religion, there are inherently no rules to follow in so doing. For Jesus, Funk observes, 'God's domain' is already with us. It is not a place we go to after we die, but a frame of mind built in the context of selfless love. Life is to be celebrated as you would the sudden discovery of a cache of coins in a field. The needs of neighbor are the measure of everything while spontaneity and unselfconscious love are the hallmarks of a life well lived. The radicalism of these ideas are at once apparent, even today. There is a smoldering anger in HONEST TO JESUS. In his comments in the Forward, the author indicates that among the expected readers of the book are a first group 'who are bitter from an initial deception by parent, clergy or the church. 'They once thought they were instructed in the truth, only to discover that their parents and the church had misled them. They had asked for bread but were given a stone. The bitterness and pain of that initial deception lingers on. They are the walking wounded.' Funk may or may not put himself in this class, but as the book goes on, his anger at the intellectual deceptions of modern Christianity becomes increasingly clear. The great religious leaders of the 21st century will likely draw inspiration from Funk's body of work. To be successful, those leaders will have to capture hearts and minds without the beguiling and easy foment of Christian fundamentalism. That is a task t

In HONEST TO JESUS Robert Funk describes the methods used by biblical scholars in their quest of the historical Jesus. He shows how the Jesus Christ of the Nicean Creed of the fourth century can be traced back to the humble Jewish sage of Nazareth and then retraced on a return trip to Nicea where he is resurrected after three centuries of promotion by his gentile admirers to full divinity as the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. Funk also uses a good part of the book attempting to describe the historical Jesus using what the author considers to be the likely authentic words and deeds of the real Jesus.Funk believes that public knowledge about the ancient gospels is woefully inadequate. Mainline churches do not address the questions people in the pews are asking about Jesus. Biblical scholars may know many of the answers to these questions but the scholars are only talking to each other. The aim of the quest of the historical Jesus is to liberate Jesus from this prison and especially from the captivity of the church creeds.Christianity took its conclusive shape with the formation of church creeds and canons at church councils held in the fourth century C.E. Progress in this area was aided by the support and guidance of Roman Emperor Constantine.World dominance of Christianity is at an end, according to Funk. It is not, however, the end of Christianity but actually a great opportunity to begin anew. Our understanding of the origins of the Christian religion is constantly changing. Funk believes a new perception of Jesus is possible if we place him back in his modest beginnings in Nazareth.We have forgotten many things about Jesus that must have been obvious to his contenporaries, according to the author. For instance, Jesus was a social deviant who practiced an open table. He also criticized public displays of piety and certainly did not support the use of brokers in one's relationship to God.

Robert Funk has done a great intellectual favor to all rational people who seek for biblical truth with honest and open minds, many of whom might well be described by Bishop John Spong as members of the "Church Alumni Association". In this ground-breaking work Funk has stripped away layers of centuries-old dogma and sectarianism from atop the New Testament writings, added some pertinent information from previously banned works (EG, Gospel of Thomas from the Nag Hammadi library collection), satisfied himself only with what tough-minded scholarship can accept, and in the process given us what I think is a far more accurate look at a first century preacher who never intended to start a new religion, but rather was concerned with saving his own from the stranglehold of Pharisean fundamentalism. Jesus, no different than many so-called "liberal" scholars of today, was repelled by the "us only" mentality of his day. Likewise, were he alive today I suspect that Jesus would have pointed to the travesty of the Taliban in Afghanistan as the Muslim version of a problem that afflicts all of the great religions of our own times, especially those of the monotheistic variety. The real import of Robert Funk's "Honest To Jesus" is that it launches us forward with a new mindset that, analogous to the scientific method, holds biblical truths to be provisional and subject to change by new discoveries---a wholly rational and progressive approach, especially by comparison to the mindlessness that accompanies an acceptance of the literalist view. To be sure, this approach has angered and outraged many conservatives who would rather we accept their teachings without question, and who typically describe Funk and the Jesus Seminar as unscholarly apostates. Last time I checked, the fellows of the Jesus Seminars were composed of no fewer than a dozen PHds from Harvard alone, and several each from schools like Princeton, Oxford, Union Theological, Duke, and Yale..Are these unscholarly schools who turn out incompetents by the dozens? Not hardly, unless your point is to discredit anyone and everyone who disagrees with your dogmatic view of things.Read this book and take a walk on the reasonable and openminded side of biblical scholarship, where learning is still considered a dynamic experience and questioning is still the essence of "questing" for the ever-evolving truth..

Honest to Jesus is a no nonsense book that will delight the serious reader and quester for the historical Jesus. Out with mythology, out with theology, out with canonical boundaries. The There will be none of these in Funk's historical journey back to Nazareth to recover the identity of the real Yeshua. Bob Funk, biblical scholar and founder of the Westar Institute which sponsors the Jesus Seminar project, has written a book that gives the layperson an inside look at what critical scholarship has unveiled thus far about the man we today know as Jesus. Funk avers that the Jesus whom Christianity has appropriated as its founder, god, messiah, savior, redeemer, miracle worker, etc. is hardly a good picture of the man who lived almost two millennia ago. The Christian Jesus/Christ is larger than life, a theologized and mythologized version. Funk asserts that the Apostle's Creed glaringly points to the importance the Church has placed on the life of Jesus--there is no mention of his life at all apart from his virgin birth, death and resurrection. The Creed turned Jesus into a god-man. Funk's quest is to find the Jesus before all the layers of mythology and theology were piled on top of him. The quest for the historical Jesus is to determine what Jesus really said and did, what his vision of God was, what Jesus was trying to direct our attention to. Ultimately Christianity is not about Christ or Jesus but about God....