Customer Reviews

The Galilean Jewishness of Jesus: Retrieving the Jewish Origins of Christianity (Conversation on the Road Not Taken, Vol. 1)

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Bernard Lee has unhesitatingly placed Jesus squarely within the Jew religious spectrum. The reviewer who faults his emphasis on method is simply wrong in every respect on that point. Without revealing the methodology, a critic exposes his work to the justifiable criticism that his work is sheer speculation or worse propoganda. Whatever we think about the origins of Jesus of Nazareth, his Jewishness like the Irishness of Eamon deValera, the Frenchness of Charles deGaulle and the Britishness of Winston Churchill must be encontered and accounted for if we are to understand him.

In bringing Jesus' essential Jewish character into the Christological conversation, Bernard Lee has administered a much needed antidote to supersecessionist Christologies that have led to so much distortion of the image of Jesus. Once encountering the Jesus revealed in Lee's book it should be impossible to use Jesus as a guarantor of First World Political hegemony.

this book comes from a very liberal theological perspective, and assumes all the documentary source premise. That being said the historical critical research is well supported and the historical social bases is well developed. I believe this work is a must in establishing the cultural setting for the life of Jesus. Read wisely!

Bernard Lee has written a book on a much needed subject. Certainly, he is correct in wanting to explore the Jewishness of Jesus and the implications for the Church today. But, he should have done this. Instead the book is primarily about the process of doing this without ever seriously exploring the subject it talks about exploring.

A full third of the book describes the structure of the rest of the book which he then ignores in the rest of the book. I got the distinct impression while reading that Mr. Lee was wanting to explore the subject but never achieved enough of a grasp of the subject to know what he was exploring.

Don't waste your money or time.