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88 of 96 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I should have seen it sooner!, March 20, 2008
This review is from: How Jesus Became Christian (Hardcover)
I was baptized in my early forties, and thought I understood the New Testament. After all, I believed I was a critical thinker... but now I can see how I completely missed the obvious.
The revelation started several years ago, when I started hearing sermons from well-intentioned pastors vilifying "the Pharisees". From reading works by Brad Young and others, it was apparent that your average preacher didn't know a Pharisee from a Sadducee (they pronounced the word sad-juicy) from a Zealot. Worse still, these "shepherds" were using the word "Sadducee" as a code-word for "those God-hating Jews". The second charged word I kept hearing, usually extracted from one of Paul's writings, was "The Law" usually associated with slavery, bondage, or worse.
After reading Heschel and others, I could not understand how the Hebrew Bible could be such a harsh task-master. One look at a photo of Rebbe Schneerson's eyes and you know this man did not suffer from the weight of the Torah. Then I was hit over the head three times: Flusser's "Sage from Galilee" Bart Ehrman's "James, the Brother of Jesus" and now "How Jesus Became Christian". There are others, but I loaned them to friends.
Barrie Wilson's book is not the most exhaustive, but it is the best balanced. It starts with the birth of two distinct movements in Rome in the early twenties AD. One based on those who actually knew and followed Jesus, and the other based on wild speculation by Paul of Tarsus after being thrown from a horse. Unfortunately, the competition was fixed early-on.
Paul had the advantage of being a Roman toady, whereas James et. al. was seen as a political liability to the stability of Rome (Pax Romana). Second, probably NOT by mutual agreement, Paul could travel wherever he wanted and cull "God-Fearers" from the Synagogues all over the Mediterranean while James' gang had to be constantly dodging the Roman occupation force.
Third, Paul offered a religion with no strict rules: faith was sufficient. Also, with Paul's declaration that most of the Hebrew Bible was useless, it would be easy to be up-to-speed in a short time. James, on the other hand, insisted that non-Jewish followers have to follow God's code given to the survivors of the Great Flood... the Noahic Code. Your priest will never tell you this, but FOLLOWING THE NOAHIC CODE WAS SUFFICIENT TO ACHIEVE EVERLASTING LIFE. For the Jew, it was business as usual: circumcision, no food offered to idols: no work on the Sabbath.
So why did Paul's religion win out when Jesus is the Son of God? Free Will.
In short, this is not a book for those with the "The Bible said it, I believe it, and that settles it" mindset. However, for those of us who just want to know what really happened two thousand years ago, I heartily recommend this book as a fresh perspective.
By the way, is there a proper way to dispose of Paul's and Luke's writings that I removed from my Bible? Just kidding.
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27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A better recovery of Jesus' Jewish message, May 16, 2008
Like many of us, Barrie Wilson wants to know "How did the Jewish Jesus of history become the Gentile Christ of faith? How did early Christianity become a separate religion from Judaism? What really accounts for Christian anti-Semitism?" He seeks answers partly by comparing different accounts within the scriptures -- Paul's own accounts compared with Luke's version of the same events in Acts, or Jesus' teaching about the Jewish law compared to Paul's. The results are fascinating, and come close to demolishing any justification for a wall between Christianity and Jesus' own Jewish faith.
Where Jesus pushed the spirit of the Torah beyond external deeds to deal with the inner conflicts behind deeds, later Christians presented Christ as invalidating the Old Testament law. Where Jesus urged "Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven" (Matt. 5:19), Paul, with his independent revelation, argued that the entire law of Moses was needless. Since Abraham had faith before the law appeared, everything which happened since (until Jesus) was irrelevant. Now, Paul claimed, anyone who continued to observe the Jewish law was "under a curse", and "No one will be justified by the works of the law" (Gal. 2:16). At least, as Wilson points out, Paul did not try to cite Jesus himself as the source of this teaching.
The book holds much more, but let me quote one among several conclusions: "What we have today in Christianity is largely Paulinity, a religion about the Gentile Christ that covers over the message of the Jewish Jesus of history. Second, it involved a hostile differentiation, with scathing attacks by the Proto-Orthodox on anything Jewish. Third, the cover up resulted in the entrenchment of anti-Semitism, directed against Judaism and the Jewish people" (p. 255)
In looking over Wilson's research, there's just one factor I'd like to add in explaining the hostile division of Gentile Christianity from Jesus' Jewish faith. That is the factor of war. Where Jewish nationalists rose in revolt against Roman colonial rule (twice, in the 70s and 130s AD), Gentile converts sought to prove their loyalty to Rome by distancing themselves from the rebels. While Rome crucified the Jewish nation, many Gentile Christians tried to deny they ever knew the accused.
--author of Correcting Jesus
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26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good summary of topic, especially for layperson, April 7, 2008
This review is from: How Jesus Became Christian (Hardcover)
As another reviewer wrote, most of this is not new material, but Wilson does a pretty good job summarizing it - particularly for the layman. What is also not new, but is controversial, is that he also pins Christian antisemitism very directly on Paul's theology - particularly the "Christifying" aspect (and the proto-orthodox writings of others). John Gager wrote more extensively about the origins of antisemitism in the early centuries of Christianity in 1983. Wilson's book is provocative, particularly in how much it positions Paul's theology as essentially a new religion.
I see three basic scholarly schools of thought in the new Paul research: 1) Paul is misunderstood by most Christian theologians as advocating supersessionism of Judaism, he actually meant those ideas to apply only to Gentile converts (Gager, based much on Lloyd Gaston); 2) Paul is fully supersessionist and dimisses the torah completely (Wilson, Macoby, et al); 3) Somewhere kind of in-between: N.T. Wright. I'm really intrigued by Wright, but don't fully understand his position (or maybe I'm just not convinced). He certainly seems to be "softening" the typical evangelical/conservative "justification by faith" position, but he still views Paul within the realm of torah is meaningful only as transformed by belief in Jesus.
Wilson's book lays out the issues and dilemma one faces when trying to really come to terms with Paul in history. I offer the previous three as a quick summary of the debate positions (I may not be fully accurate in them). I'm finding myself somewhere in between #1 and #2 - I have more reading to do by Dunn, Gager, Gaston, and Sanders.
Here's a few specifics on Wilson's book:
1) His analysis of Galatians is quite good, particularly on its exegesis in relation to Genesis (regarding the theological points) and Acts (regarding the historical inconsistencies). I was surprised, though, that he relied soley (essentially) on Galatians, but didn't touch Romans. I know as a layman's book, he can't touch it all, but Romans - being Paul's latest and most developed thesis - needs to be addressed. This does not diminish his legitimate criticisms of Paul's argument in Galatians (as some will try to claim), but it leaves the argument incomplete.
2) The Acts factor. Wilson is clear that Acts plays a pivotal role in transforming Paul's theology into a Gentile converting, empire winning formula. I certainly think that aspects of his Acts/Paul comparisons demand some serious explanation (there are some definite dissconnects in what Acts reports and what Paul himself claims), and I further agree that Acts paints Paul as the "hero" of Christianity, I'm just not sure that Acts can support the full weight of Wilson's thesis. I can imagine that Acts reflects the zeitgeist, but I think it may be too difficult to argue causality.
3) The main punch of his book - based on all of this - is that it explains the incessant Christian antisemitism throughout history. Basically, Christianity so usurped, dismissed, and deligetimized Judaism - at the expense of historical truthfulness to Jesus' original message - that the proto-orthodox leaders needed to completely disenfranchise Judaism.
Definitely a provocative book. His theses can certainly be challenged, but they should also certainly be looked at. As an non-trinitarian, I certainly think that the High-Christology of the first four centuries needs some serious challenging in its pagan, hellenistic roots and its complete deligitimizing of Jesus' Jewishness. In that, I agree with Wilson.
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