Customer Reviews

Rabbi Jesus: An Intimate Biography

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(26)

 

 

Bruce Chilton displays his considerable familiarity with ancient languages and texts, but his "intimate biography" disappoints because it relies too extensively on the author's suppositions rather than his scholarship. Chilton writes: Jesus grew heavier over the years until he left the area in 27 C.E. Capernaum brought him times of plenty, and-- as his message became more and more popular--little requirement for manual work. The emerging paunch only strengthened his voice, however, and his thick black beard and thinning hair made for an impression of *gravitas.* Shorter than the norm, overweight, and tending to baldness, nothing about Jesus in physical terms (from what is attested about his appearance and from what we can gather from the likely results of his lifestyle) can explain his magnetism. (138)

Readers who are satisfied with categorical statements and 'evidence' of this type may find Chilton's book appealing. For those who prefer substance, Crossan's _Jesus, A Revolutionary Biography_ would be a better choice.

What one would have assumed by the title and subtitle was something on the order of the hebraic and jewish foundation of the teachings of Jesus- something I have spent much time studying. This was not such an attempt. A clear attempt to rewrite the gospels as a clever mask for the "real" Jesus as Chilton sees Him- a lazy, illiterate, drunkard who learns new age meditation from John the Baptist during His silent years and later uses and teaches these methods until His untimely death. His virgin birth is questioned and His "obvious" ..relationship with Mary Magdalene is snickered at. This is hardly a work of scholarship, but it serves the purpose of showing how one's own unusual spirituality can be inserted into history, resulting into a Jesus that suits your taste. He is certainly not the first to do it, nor the last. Read this only if you have a solid understanding of what you already know of Jesus and His Jewishness- but be ready to throw out the authors suppositions and conclusions for which he gives no support.

Bruce Chilton, the author, tells us that everything Jesus did was "as a Jew, for Jews, and about Jews." Jesus, he says, was a short, plump, balding, illiterate, revolutionary rabbi whose objective was to purify Judaism in the expectation that God would then reward the Israelites by expelling the unclean Romans and other Gentiles from their land. This suggests that Jesus would be appalled if he had known that the fruit of his labor was to be the creation of a new religion: Christianity.

Chilton has written a fascinating and controversial biography of Jesus. I'm not an expert and, thus, I don't have the background to judge whether this book should be taken seriously or considered a work of surmise and imagination. Chilton accepts some parts of the biblical account of Jesus' life as factual and rejects others as fabricated or inaccurate. His authority for deciding what is true and what is untrue is often uncertain - as is his reasoning.

The book was worth reading, however, for the vivid picture Chilton paints of life in the Roman provinces of what we call the Holy Land. One of the best passages is in Chapter 11 in which Chilton describes the Great Temple of Jerusalem and the barbaric - I guess everyone was a barbarian in those days -- animal sacrifices carried out by the high priests. But Jesus protested against adherence to the rituals which the priests demanded - and profited from. Chilton's Jesus makes a quantum leap forward in religious philosophy by believing that "purity" comes from inside a person, rather than through sterile observance of a ritual, form, or formality of religion. That, at least, is my interpretation of what the author is trying to convey of Jesus' philosophy. As a speculative history this book is outstanding; better informed persons than me will have to judge its accuracy and religious merits.

Bruce Chilton has added his voice to the neverending story. Weighing in on the Jewish side of Jesus, Chilton here presents Jesus as a troubled bastard son which weighs heavily on him and throughout the entire tome. Where Mr. Chilton is at his best is where he relies on his scholarship[placing Jesus birth in anothe bethlehem],presenting an interesting take on the infancy narratives. Where Geza Vermes relies on scholarship, Mr. Chilton edges at times toward flights of fancy,literally putting thougfhts in Jesus head{risky at best} entering the Kaballah into the fray{riskier],and putting unsubstantiated conjecture on the "missing years' of Jesus life. Where Mr. Chilton does well, is in putting a new look on old {the last supper]. Where he does not, is in trying to explain what he cannot support. Interesting, a decent read,though Geza Vermes and John Meir cover the same grtound, and in far better books.

Bruce Chilton's work, "Rabbi Jesus" reads like a novel as it takes Jesus from his childhood as a "mamzer" of questioned legitimacy to his death on the cross. In the process Chilton develops a very human Jesus who was deeply a part of his Jewish and Galilean environment. Using translations of Aramaic and Syriac texts, Chilton often puts a different twist on exactly what Jesus tried to accomplish and who he believed he was. He shows that Jesus went through a steady development as to his purpose and goals.

Chilton takes Jesus' very Jewish vision and relates it to the sacrifices at the Temple in Jerusalem. It then becomes clear as to why Jesus raided the Temple and went to Jerusalem in the first place; his attempt to purify the Temple and impose a more Galilean form of sacrifice.

The most fascinating parts of the book are the development and changes in Jesus' religious thinking, the relationship of this thought to his Jewish environment, the political interaction between Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas, and Herod Antipas that results in Jesus' capture and death, and Chilton's insightful interpretation into Jesus' meaning of his "blood and flesh" that became the basis of the Christian Eucharist.

Like any Biblical scholar, Chilton picks and chooses which sources to believe are genuine and which are to be rejected. It would seem at times he is too willing to accept the miracles of Jesus and his followers at face value. Often this does not seem consistent with the more human picture he has drawn of Jesus. However, this is a fascinating portrait of Jesus and one that seems very plausible (for the most part). It gives us much to consider regarding this Galilean and what he tried to accomplish. By placing Jesus within the context of his Galilean and Jewish heritage it seems far more real than most others.

I purchased this book because, as a person from an indigenous group of the Middle East/North Africa region who has studied at an institutional level the three Abrahamic-desert religions, I was interested in learning more about the Jewish culture and traditions of Yesua'/Yeshua/Jesus. I expected and hoped to read an account that placed Jesus and his Jewish followers, friends, and family in their original Middle Eastern cultural context. However, in Bruce Chilton's Rabbi Jesus, I got far more than I bargained for.

Here is a breakdown of Chilton's goals and methods: Chilton is not only, like me, interested in highlighting Jesus' indigenous Jewish culture, but in challenging the veracity and alleged biases of the four canonic Gospels and their writers--indeed, in redefining Jesus' ministry and theology in a manner that refutes "traditional" (his word) Christian teachings. His sources include non-canonical early Christian writings and the written and oral Rabbinic literature (Mishnah, Talmud, and Targumim) of the fourth and fifth centuries A.D./C.E. Note that Chilton's "creative" (publisher's word) depiction of Jesus and his teachings contradicts the basic tenets (as expressed in the Nicene Creed) of all major Christian denominations, whether Orthodox (both Eastern and Oriental), Catholic (both Roman and Eastern rite), or Protestant (both "mainstream" and Evangelical). For example, Chilton categorically rejects Jesus' virgin birth, divinity, and (literal, that is, corporeal) resurrection.

It is not so much the contradiction itself that I find at fault; I'm always ready to debunk a long-held supposition or two. And, in fact, Chilton does succeed in fully orienting Jesus in an indigenous Jewish culture, hence the two stars. The reader predisposed to endorse (or dismiss) Christianity as a "White man's religion" and Jesus and his followers as Hellenized Mediterraneans will be left in no doubt of the religion's deep roots in Middle Eastern and Judaic beliefs and practices. Chilton states in his acknowledgments that he never meant for this to be a scholarly book, but rather, a popular one. In fact, he has written other works that are scholarly and include due citations and academic references.

But good heavens, he has taken this reader's sizable stores of charity and, not only depleted them, but strained the very limits of my credulity.

Other reviewers have, quite rightly, chastised Chilton's many sweeping, poorly substantiated claims that amount to little more than conjecture. These claims range from the intriguing but ultimately unverifiable--Jesus and John the Baptist were engaged in a mystical study of "the Throne" and "Chariot" of God's Kingdom--to the stuff of unqualified fiction (e.g. Mary and Joseph were irresistibly attracted to one another and hopped in bed at first glimpse). Yes, they are the inferences of a clergyman who teaches and publishes at the university-level and who reads several Middle Eastern and Greco-Roman languages, but they are inferences and conjecture all the same.

But I won't lie to you: Chilton's breathless, energetic prose has high entertainment value, if only because it is often supremely silly. I needn't remind you that, having cheerfully resigned himself to writing a "popular" book, Chilton hasn't bothered with the usual line-by-line parenthetical or foot/endnote citations demanded by academia. The book instead is written in the immediate past-tense, third-person POV of popular English-language fiction. Chilton occasionally drops in the (MUCH-needed) qualifiers "it seems that," "it may have been that," and even "I have come to the conclusion that," but not often enough; if he qualified every unverified statement, ¾ of the book would consist of qualifiers!

Have a look at some of these prose-gems: "But when Caiaphas was in the zone, fully engaged in the sacrifical act, he hardly noticed the Pharisees yelling" (218, paperback); "[Jesus's] paunch was gone. He was fit, lean, his face etched by the sun" (225, in one of Chilton's myriad references to Jesus's apparently fluctuating physique); "[Jesus] had lucked into a sweet situation...He had come from the poor mud villages of Galilee and had jumped class" (120, and my personal favorite).

But what bothers me about Chilton's book in light of his current status as an Episcopalian/Anglican priest is the marked absence of any supernatural force, whether manifest in Jesus, or in the Judaic sacrifices at Temple, or even of a general godhead. I operate under the assumption that the world is "more than we know," and I take that approach when studying the claims of the various world religions. Chilton has, in this book, stripped the New Testament (and even ancient Judaic narratives) of every supernatural ascription: Jesus raised Lazarus from a "near-death" state that no one noticed before they before they wrapped him up and put him in a cave for four days; the many demon-possessed people Jesus exorcised of unclean spirits were all crazies; Jesus didn't calm the storm with his words--rather, the boat had "drifted into" a calm spot; the "more than five hundred" witnesses to Jesus after his crucifixion were all tapping into the same mystical visionary technique Jesus had taught them through transcendent Kabbalic meditation rituals. Likewise, Chilton's traditional (non-mystical) Jews appear as superstitious townsfolk making fervent, bloody obeisance to a remote non-deity--not the deeply spiritual faithful of G-d who pioneered the world's enduring monotheistic tradition.

It strains the limits of my credulity that a Christian clergyman could believe in so many earthly coincidences and en-masse psychosomatic maneuverings, none of which, in Chilton's "theology," have a supernatural source. (The same goes for people who say Muhammad didn't receive any teachings from Allah, and the Black Hills of South Dakota aren't really a spiritual center for the Lakota Creator--I don't have any insider info proving such accounts false, and in the case of Christianity, neither does Chilton). Further, it strains the limits of sound scholarship to, using cobbled-together bits and pieces of various texts and oral traditions, leap to inferences which, when we get right down to it, are no more than the author's own wishes or inventions.

Given Chilton's antipathy toward the idea of Jesus-as-divine savior of the world, it remains unclear to me why indeed Chilton is still pursuing a vocation as a Christian priest. From what I understand of the Messianic/Christian religion, Jesus's divinity and resurrection are the central rallying points. It seems apparent to me (there go my qualifiers) that Chilton would be better served by joining a liberal and/or mystical branch of Judaism that would accept Yeshua as one in a line of Jewish prophets, and as one who was trying to bring about a revolution in understandings of Jewish purity and ritual sacrifice.

I recommend Rabbi Jesus to individuals already well-read in ideologically diverse academic studies of Christianity and Judaism and who will not take as "gospel-truth" everything they read either in religious texts themselves (Bible, Torah), or in alternative-creative reinterpretations (such as this one) of world religions. I cannot recommend this book to university students doing Religion or Divinity school research projects (unless it is on Jesus Seminar-type phenomena); nor can I recommend it to non-Christians interested in learning more about Christian doctrine or mainstream Christian beliefs about Jesus. Finally, there exist more measured, more adeptly written books for Middle Eastern Christians, Muslims, and Jews looking for reconciliatory literature stressing the three religions' common cultural roots--Feiler's "Abraham," for example.

How many ways can we parse what we think we know about the life of Jesus? Well, here's another way. The author asks some interesting questions and offers novel answers. For instance, was Jesus literate? If not, then Jesus would have known the Hebrew scriptures though the oral tradition. How would that have impacted his life and teachings? The author proceeds to speculate, all the way from his birth and childhood right through till the end. The book has a novelistic quality that makes it a compelling read. It's even quite moving in places. And you'll learn a lot about first century Judaism. There are even interesting speculations on the sources of the miracle stories.

But ultimately, doesn't all of this put the cart before the horse? Shouldn't we first make determinations about the documentary evidence from which the Jesus story is drawn - the age of these documents, their provenance, and their reliability? And from there take a close look at what the documents actually say, as opposed to what we read into them from Sunday school classes, Biblical movies, and the various tribes of scholarly thought? And if we do that, is there any one theory that compels our attention and provisional assent?

I believe there is, and I have only found such an examination and theory in one book, of the many I have read on this subject. That book is "The Jesus Puzzle" by Earl Doherty. I cannot speak highly enough of this book. I urge you to read it. And visit Mr. Doherty's web site, also called The Jesus Puzzle. It provides the antidote for nearly all that troubles this labyrinthine and contentious subject.

I read this book shortly after reading Chilton's Rabbi Paul. I thought it may help me to get a fuller perspective on Jesus the human being. I'm thankful that I didn't throw $20 down the toilet by buying this book.

I believe most people are way too unimaginative. William Blake is my favorite poet and "imagination" was probably his favorite word and is one of my favorite words. The average person is *way* too unimaginative. That said, imagination always works better when tied to reality. If not it is basically stillborn. I applaud Chilton's imaginative efforts in Rabbi Paul but found myself suspending disbelief so often in Rabbi Jesus that I couldn't really stay in the book as much as I diligently tried.

"Just hear him out...just hear him out" I kept saying to myself nearly with every page turned and each inaccuracy endured. Honestly, to really critique this book I would be writing all afternoon. I noticed as I scrolled down that at least one person did an, in his words, "honest" critique of the Rabbi Jesus. I'll leave such in depth critiques to people who have more time than I do. If it's a book I'm impressed with, I'll spend some time critiquing it. Rabbi Jesus is not one of those books; I was very unimpressed and disappointed with it especially after reading Rabbi Paul where Chilton is much less speculative and more historically accurate. I will offer one critique, though: Chilton's thesis that Jesus' "resurrection" was a psycho-spiritual phenomenon rather than a physical, bodily one is absolutely ludicrous and unsupportable by history or the Bible itself. Either he rose from the dead or not: the "psycho-spiritual" slant doesn't come from any reputable scholarship I know of, and I have a graduate degree in religion from one of the premier universities in the world. It was like he drew a rabbit out of a hat-"Hey! Where'd that come from?" "Never mind! Wasn't it amazing?!!" Unfortunately all magic is born of illusion, not substance. Chilton's taking of one instance where allegedly Paul speaks of his Damascus Road experience as being primarily psycho-spiritual rather than physical is like a fundamentalist taking a scripture in I Corinthians out of context and saying that all women should never speak in church. Really, I see the Jesus Seminar crowd and the fundamentalist crowd as being two sides of the same coin. They both have their agenda and their elitist "I know what the Bible really says" mentality. I can see how biblical illiterates can read Rabbi Jesus and say "wow, he blew that whole Jesus-is-Resurrected Lord thing sky-high didn't he?" Ever since Dan Brown made scads of money exploiting the biblically-illiterate with his con job farce of a book The DumbVinci Code, I'll never again over-estimate the basic biblical knowledge of the average American (speaking of imagination gone wild...) So, if narrow NT scholarship as offered by the minute amount of scholars of the Jesus Seminar will "do it for you", then, by all means, don't read any other scholarship which may challenge you. If you want to get at the accuracy of who Rabbi Jesus was, don't waste your time or money on this one.

Rabbi Jesus challenged my tolerance for inaccuracy, bias and the limits at which imagination should go (which rarely happens.) Too bad Mr. Chilton was accuracy-challenged because with every page turned (and I did finish the book) his imagination became to me The focus of the book, not "Rabbi Jesus" himself.

Rabbi Jesus, a narrative that author Bruce Chilton calls, "an intimate biography" is all that and more. It is a bold and illuminating work that takes the reader on an eye-opening and startling journey with Yeshua throughout his 30 some years. Other authors have attempted to do similar thing, but as an author and Messianic Jewish evangelist, I can tell you that Chilton engages his subject with a vibrancy and candor that is the equivalent of standing under a cold shower. His revelations are just that, and the thoughtful reader will be not be disappointed. In short, if you want to meet the real Messiah and experience the dynamics that drove this man, then Rabbi Jesus is must reading. Among the many books on Jesus, this is one that will raise eyebrows, quicken hearts and yes, make your skin tingle. Be there with Jesus in the first century. Get on board for the trip of a lifetime!

I plunged into this book expecting to find new insights into the historical Jesus, something that would help place him squarely in the context of Roman-Empire Judaism, backed up with scholarship. What I found instead is an overblown, romanticized fiction that--even while ridiculing the legends that were tacked onto the Jesus story in earlier centuries--seeks to create an entirely NEW set of fictitious stories about what is essentially unknowable, the early years of Jesus' life. (We're told essentially as fact, for example, that Joseph came to Mary's parents' house in the spring to repair their house for them--and the time of Jesus' birth is thus to be reckoned from that meeting, so in the late autumn. And Jesus, rather than returning with his parents after the visit to the Temple, instead becomes a runaway: "Gone was the exclusion he felt from Nazareth's synagogue, as he stood at the heart of the sacred [...] Here was what he had been searching for. His heart was overflowing. Conversation was pointless in the din, but Mary caught his eye for a moment. 'What, my son?' 'The Kingdom of God.' He disappeared into the crowd, and she would not see him again for several years." Then we're told that Jesus was short and skinny because of malnutrition owing to the diet imposed on him as a follower of John the Baptizer.

Conjecture about Jesus' status as a ritually unclean bastard child (dealt with very effectively by other writers) is here inflated into an entire infancy narrative that culminates in some sort of unresolved Oedipal conflict with Joseph that spills over into Jesus' relationship with John the Baptizer. (One example: "An adolescent crisis with his father, precluded by Joseph's early death, was worked out in Jesus' deeply ambivalent relationship with John. That fraught relationship was never resolved.") Yet almost none of it reads as scholarly conjecture. Rather, it reads like a breathless, cheap novel laced heavily with psychobabble.

In fairness, Chilton does weave into the tale many interesting details about contemporary Jewish religious practice, as well as details about everyday life and attitudes, that provide strong context for understanding the historical Jesus. His translations and commentary on Aramaic texts are also thought-provoking. I just think he goes WAY over the line in seeking to fill in gaps in our knowledge of who Jesus was. Ultimately, his efforts to create a story are strangely less satisfying than the ones the early Church put forward.

The book could also benefit from a much more careful edit. The reference to Koine as "in their mouths a kind of pigeon-Greek" literally caused me to drop the book as I howled with laughter....Note to Ed.: That's PIDGIN, OK? I would expect better from Doubleday....

You're better off reading Crossan....