Recommend a reputable book on the historical Jesus?

August 17, 2015 3:13 PM

So a friend suggested I read the recent Reza Aslan book "Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth", but some of the reviews suggest there are much better (more scholarly reliable) books on the same topic. There seems to be so much crank pot literature about it out there. How do I avoid that stuff?

Should I just read Albert Schweitzer's 1906 critique?

or start with Ernst Käsemann's October 20, 1953 lecture titled "The Problem of the Historical Jesus"?

I suppose I'm coming from a more political-philosophical standpoint, rather than theological.

I am interested in some of the debates about St Paul's role in guiding / distorting the "teachings of Jesus". I was recently reading some of Joseph Taubes and Giorgio Agamben's stuff on St Paul and it was rather interesting. Also Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise on the Bible was pretty good.

posted by mary8nne to Education (11 answers total)

The late Geza Vermes's 2011 book Christian Beginnings would be a good place to start; this review by Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, gives you a sense of what it's about and some potential limitations of Vermes's approach. I'd also recommend looking at the relevant chapters of Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First 3000 years (published in the US as History of Christianity because apparently we need that pointed out to us) and following up on the references and suggested reading. (Here's Williams's take on that book.)
posted by brianogilvie at 3:19 PM on August 17, 2015

Dale Allison is a very highly regarded New Testament scholar and has written a number of books on the historical Jesus, including Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History and The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus.
posted by jabes at 3:34 PM on August 17, 2015

E. P. Sanders provides a thorough and balanced overview in The Historical Figure of Jesus.
posted by earth by april at 3:52 PM on August 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

I'm not sure how much I'd trust that review. For example, it says that Aslan does not discuss the Resurrection at all; however, he does.
posted by thelonius at 5:44 PM on August 17, 2015

Bart Ehrman is a respected academic and a lot of his works for a general audience deal with the development of early Christianity alongside the historical Jesus. I really enjoyed his polemical Did Jesus Exist? answering in the affirmative against (what he claims to have discovered to his surprise) is a common view outside New Testament scholarship--the "mythicist" position that any single historical Jesus did not exist.

Ehrman's How Jesus Became God is good for charting a development of Jesus in the early church, which argues that Jesus was viewed as divine very, very soon after his death and not just as a wise teacher ... but the emphasis in the book is on what "divine" actually meant then and among different audiences.
posted by Gnatcho at 6:59 PM on August 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

Seconding Ehrman.
posted by dawkins_7 at 7:37 PM on August 17, 2015

I would second MacCulloch's Christianity - the chapters on Jesus are excellent, the rest of the book (three thousand years' worth!) is also excellent.
posted by jb at 7:42 PM on August 17, 2015

Allison and Ehrman are also good sources. The thing is, this is one of those historical questions that is not merely historical because of the contemporary importance of Christianity/the Jesus movement. Geza Vermes and Paula Fredriksen were pioneers in pointing out the obvious historical fact that Jesus and his followers were part of a broad spectrum of Jewish religiosity in the early 1st century CE, but there is a very long history of Christian apologists who wish to deny that history and posit that Jesus—unlike Hillel and John the Baptist—was doing something fundamentally new.

Schweitzer's approach was, in fact, not that different from Marcus Borg's: to say that after the Resurrection, the "historical Jesus" had only historical importance. His conclusion was that it was bad for Christians to focus too much on Jesus as a historical (i.e., dead) figure; they should direct their attention to the living Christ. As an inspiration for humanitarian work, that attitude has a lot to commend it, but it's fundamentally opposed to a historical approach.

Ehrman's take, as a former fundamentalist who turned away from his upbringing, is a nice complement to Vermes and Fredriksen.
posted by brianogilvie at 8:29 PM on August 17, 2015

For the other side of Ehrman or Aslan, read something by NT Wright (the most well-regarded orthodox NT scholar today) or Ben Witherington (eg What Have They Done With Jesus?).
posted by persona au gratin at 3:32 AM on August 18, 2015

Response by poster: Thanks for the tips - I bought the Penguin version of Geza Vermes's "Christian Beginnings" and it it exactly what I was looking for - something not too heavey that discusses the more historical / philosophical / literary issues around that first 300 years.

I've also been watching a few of episodes of the PBS Frontline From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians documentary that covers similar material. (it's on Youtube).
posted by mary8nne at 7:34 AM on August 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: I have also been watching some Bart Ehrman lectures on youtube and he seems to be rather entertaining, but also well respected.
posted by mary8nne at 11:32 AM on October 24, 2015 [1 favorite]