Jesus : A Life [Hardcover]

A. N. Wilson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 17, 1992

"Extraordinarily entertaining....Learned, witty....Wilson [is] a gifted novelist and diligent biographer."—Newsday

What are the facts about the life of Jesus, as opposed to the myths, or unprovable tenets of faith surrounding the miracles, death, and resurrection? How and when did Christianity become a separate religion from the Judaism into which Jesus was born? To what extent was his power over contemporaries political rather than religious? A. N. Wilson's answers to these questions will fascinate readers of every shade of faith or skepticism.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Noting that Matthew, Mark, and Luke "claim that the Eucharist was instituted during or after the traditional Jewish Passover meal," A.N. Wilson says that the stories concluding the synoptic gospels, "the arrest of Jesus, his trial, his execution, must be [works] of fiction, since it is unthinkable that the Jews would have broken their most sacred religious observances in order to put a man on trial."

In Jesus: A Life, A.N. Wilson spends most of his energy on such demythologizing. Like Renan, Schweitzer, and Crossan before him, this biographer strives to tell a story about the "historical reality" of Jesus' life. To that end, Wilson summarizes scads of contemporary biblical scholarship, sifts through loads of archeological evidence, liberally cites the Dead Sea Scrolls, and, most productively, attends his finely-tuned literary ear to the biblical texts.

You can take or leave Wilson's secondhand scholarship; that sort of thing is outdated before it gets printed. But you cannot deny the power of his original literary observations. He thinks the most trustworthy clues for answering the question of who Jesus really was are to be found in the Gospel passages that resist or rupture neat theological readings. "Almost in spite of the Christ of the theologians, Jesus has survived: a man doodling in the dust with his finger ...; a man who could liken the love of God to a fussy Jewish mother searching a house high and low for a lost coin...." This is trustworthy writing. For some readers it will be emotionally upsetting. But it's hard to imagine anyone for whom it wouldn't be ethically edifying. "We can accept some Church version of Jesus, or if it makes more appeal to us, we can accept a 'heretic' version; or we can make one up by ourselves," Wilson writes. "A patient and conscientious reading of the Gospels will always destroy any explanation which we devise. If it makes sense, it is wrong. That is the only reliable rule-of-thumb which we can use when testing the innumerable interpretations of Jesus' being and his place in human history." --Michael Joseph Gross

From Publishers Weekly

Wilson, who has written biographies of Tolstoy and C. S. Lewis, here critiques the Gospels and offers a lucid and absorbing, if inconclusive, meditation on the historical Jesus: the " 'real' Jesus amid so much religion and folk-lore." In Wilson's interpretation, Jesus was a Galilean holy man, an heir to the prophetic tradition, who possessed charismatic healing powers; it is improbable that this monotheistic Jew ever believed himself to be the Second Person of the Trinity or that he instituted the Eucharist. Wilson proposes that the feast at Cana may have been Jesus's own wedding; that the woman who poured ointment over his feet and wiped them with her hair is a detail "too strange" to have been invented; that Jesus's cousin John the Baptist came to disbelieve that Jesus was the Messiah; and that the Stranger seen by Jesus's disciples after his death was probably Jesus's brother James. This biography also suggests that Judas was innocent of betraying Jesus, that "the Pharisees were among the most virtuous men who had ever lived," that Jesus was never tried by the Jewish Sanhedrin, and that Paul was the high priest's servant who supervised Jesus's arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First American Edition edition (September 17, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393030873
• ISBN-13: 978-0393030877
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,164,595 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Readable but Unpersuasive, November 24, 2001

By 

Sauropod (Tucson, AZ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jesus: A Life (Paperback)

Wilson starts off by telling us that everything in the four Gospels is mythological and none of it is historically reliable. He then spends the rest of the book constructing his own historical biography of Jesus, using (of course) the four Gospels as his sources. Isn't there a contradiction here? Some of his insights and observations are provocative, while others struck me as just silly -- e.g., that the apostles mistook Jesus' lookalike brother for their resurrected teacher, or that the "angels" in the empty tomb were other family members of Jesus who had simply moved the corpse for reburial! (When they said Jesus was going to Galilee, Wilson says, they only meant that his body was being transported there. If so, this is the most consequential misunderstanding in history.) The book is a quick, provocative read, but I think you'd be better advised to check out the works of Bart Ehrman (a skeptic) or Luke Timothy Johnson (a believer). Either of them offers more serious scholarship than Wilson's book.

45 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written, profound, but not very convincing., April 17, 2003

By 

Charles Calvert "charliecal" (Bellevue, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Jesus: A Life (Paperback)

This is a beautifully written, entertaining, and quite profound work. But I give it only three stars because the last chapters on the Passion and Resurrection are a more than a bit flaky.

For me, the major themes of Wilson's book are that Jesus did not set out to create a religion, and that he never claimed to be the Son of God. These themes (hobby horses?) don't get in the way much when Wilson is recounting the life of Jesus. But they prove to be a real impediment to his understanding of the Passion, Resurrection and Christ's role in creating the Christian religion.

While discussing Christ's life proper, Wilson sometimes goes out on a limb. For instance, he insists that Jesus was not born in a manger. His arguments for this point of view are substantial, but they aren't so convincing as to make us want to disbelieve the explicit testimony in Luke to the effect that Mary wrapped up Christ and "laid him in a manger." Luke repeats this detail two more times in the next few sentences of his Gospel. Why in the world should we believe Wilson who lived two thousand years after the event, and disbelieve Luke, who was a relative contemporary of Christ? No historical argument, no matter how cleverly couched, is more convincing that Luke's simple, straight forward testimony.

Nevertheless, Wilson is a good writer, who digs under the surface of events and sees much of what is important in the Bible. He writes beautifully and convincingly about the central import of love and forgiveness in the Bible, and is openly accepting of most of Christ's miracles.

The real problem comes in the end, when the discussion turns to the import of Christ's life. In these passages, Wilson insists that Christ is not the Son of God. But Mark opens his Gospel by saying "Here begins the Gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God." And there are numerous other references throughout the Bible to much the same purpose. Again, Wilson insists that there is no evidence for the trinity in the Bible, but in Matthew, Christ says his disciples should "baptize men everywhere in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit." And Wilson says that Christ never intended to create a church, but Jesus explicitly asks his disciples in Mark 16 to "Go forth to every part of the world, and proclaim the Good News to the whole creation."

Wilson is not a fool, and his problem is not that he misses these obvious passages in the Bible. Rather, he buys into a lot of contemporary scholarship which attempts to say which parts of the Bible are valid and which are not. This is a very risky business, as it is very difficult to convince a reader that contemporaries or relatively contemporaries of Christ did not know what they were talking about, and that some scribbler, no matter how intelligent or learned, living 2000 years after the fact does know what actually happened. Worse, Wilson often fails to tell both sides of the case. For instance, he cleverly says that Jesus never explicitly stated that he was the Son of God, but neglects to point out passages where Christ implies as much, or where other authorities explicitly state that he is the Son of God. To be convincing, you need to both present arguments for your side, and show why arguments to contrary are false.

In most cases, Wilson is a sympathetic and moving writer. But in some cases he has a tin ear for the facts. For instance, he can't understand why Christ should be worried about his upcoming death if he knows that he will be resurrected. Wilson uses this argument to try to convince the reader that Christ was not sufficiently all knowing to understand that he would be resurrected. I myself am a Christian, and believe that I will "live" after I die. This does not mean that I would be unconcerned to learn that I was about to undergo an ordeal as painful and humiliating as a Roman crucification.

Nevertheless, this book is beautifully written, often quite moving, and in spirit often close to what I believe to be Christ's actual message. It also contains a number of "fun facts" or interesting theories that made me smile or sent me happily thumbing through my Bibles.

If you are interested in a reading a series of books on Christ's life, I would recommend this one. If you are interested in reading only one book on Christ, then I don't think this would be a good choice. A reason to overrule my rating would be if you have found other book's on Christ's life to be hopelessly boring or heavy handed. This book is neither, and should keep you interested and involved throughout all but the last two or three chapters. You might also find this book interesting if you have never read a book on Christ by an intelligent skeptic before, and want to read an entertaining one just for the sake of rounding out your education. There may be other skeptics who have done a better job than this, but Wilson is way above the norm for the genre.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not for the faint of faith...or the closeminded., May 12, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Jesus: A Life (Paperback)

Wilson makes a convincing and careful case for his view of Jesus as man, versus Jesus as divine myth. Historically and logically he makes some grand leaps, but cautiously points out when he does so. He accomplishes two things: first, he separates the contemporary Jesus from the mythology that has been built up around him. This is perhaps his most solid contribution. Secondly, he peels away the Christ of the gospels from the biblical and historical evidence. This effort is less successful and much less likely to be well received by the more polarized believers and non-believers alike. For those of us in the middle--in the "maybe, maybe not" Agnostic camp--the result is more comforting. Wilson reassures us that we will never "know" the truth--as opposed to the Truth.

Engaging, easy to read and follow, I recommend this book to the historical reader first, the religious student last. Wilson's thorough research is not for the faint of faith. Those wavering on the edge are sure to be troubled. Anyone unwilling to explore the scholarly approach to the historical Jesus is wasting time and money. Wilson's book is not for either. Faith must always offer its own promise. Ultimately, I suspect Wilson's work is likely to be a litmus test for one's initial beliefs--which is the unstated theme that suffuses this book