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35 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A breath of life into a moribund field of scholarship, December 20, 2000
This review is from: Saint Saul: A Skeleton Key to the Historical Jesus (Hardcover)
Akenson's premise seems simple enough: The apostle Paul tells us more about Jesus than usually assumed. But he goes beyond this, claiming that Paul is actually our best source for understanding the historical Jesus. This is news, especially coming from a secular liberal who might be inclined to loathe and distrust Paul to begin with. But Akenson enjoins academics to accept the obvious: "Paul taught the history of the earthly Jesus to the churches he founded, and in writing his letters he took for granted that they had assimilated the basic facts, miracle-stories, and sayings. . . Paul actually tells us a lot about the historical Jesus, but he does so almost unintentionally."
Akenson minces no words with the academics who thrive on 2nd-century documents (Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Peter), hypothetical documents (Signs Gospel, Q), and an obvious forgery (Secret Mark) -- and who likewise have made a pseudo-science of "downward-dating" these documents so that they antedate 70 AD. Instead of dissecting Q, scholars would do well to consider that annoying apostle who preceded all of the above.
According to the author, Paul believed the following about the historical Jesus: (1) He never declared himself to be the messiah, and he did nothing in his lifetime which certified his messiahship. The resurrection did that. (2) His transformation into the Christ (the resurrection) was a cosmic and not a physical event. There never was a physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus, for "flesh and blood could not inherit the Kingdom of God" (I Cor. 15:50). (3) The only valid way of understanding his life on earth is to see him as the Son of God, but in a way incompatible with later "virgin birth" theology.
Admittedly, some of the author's arguments are hard to swallow. His understanding (of Paul's understanding) of the resurrection is only half correct, and it's curious that he doesn't engage Tom Wright, who has written much on the issue. He also overreacts against the criterion of multiple attestation: "In the entire New Testament there is no independent confirmation of anything. The New Testament is a single source, and by definition a single source cannot produce multiple attestations of anything." These statements are howlers. Akenson does offer a sobering reappraisal of some methodologies used by the "flaming liberal wing" of Jesus-questors, but he could stand a few lessons himself.
Donald Akenson is an engaging writer, simply incapable of writing a dull sentence. He can make you laugh, he can make you angry, but hopefully, above all, he'll make you think and reconsider a lot of the nonsense being touted these days about Jesus. Hopefully, too, he'll get you interested in that guy who went around Asia Minor and Greece preaching the real historical Jesus.
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24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great for the Jesus Seminar-debunking alone, March 30, 2001
This review is from: Saint Saul: A Skeleton Key to the Historical Jesus (Hardcover)
Akenson had a great idea here, to reveal the Historical Jesus through the oldest written documentation on him, the Epistles of Paul, but the best part of this book is in the early chapters, in which Akenson destroys the wacky notions of the Jesus Seminar. First, he proves Morton Smith's "Secret" Gospel of Mark to be an outright fraud - a fraud that the Jesus Seminar have yet to realize it for. Next he ridicules the attempts to backdate the writing of Gnostic texts such as the Gospel of Thomas to dates as early as Mark itself. This is something else the Jesus Seminar is quite fond of doing. Finally he tears into the overblown "Q Gospel" issue. Akenson writes with a great, biting wit throughout the book, and his debunking of current trends and myths in the Historical Jesus quest alone are enough to recommend the book. However, Akenson's writing also lacks a certain rhythm. Countless times he'll be writing about something, getting to the point, and then he'll go off into a tangent, either offering a short history lesson or a commentary on why he's come to believe what he does...then finally he will get to the point, several pages later. Also he stresses too much the destruction of Jerusalem's Second Temple; you only have to write that it was the equal of a nuclear blast once, Dr. Akenson. We get the point! Many scholars, Akenson included, believe that the Gospels are suspect because they were written after the Temple's destruction, which scattered the early Christians and no doubt affected their world-view. One thing I've never seen mentioned by any writer is that perhaps the Gospels were written precisely BECAUSE of the Temple's destruction; the early Christians realized that their flock was spreading, and so came to the decision that the life and lessons of their teacher needed to be written down, so that his word would be spread wherever his followers went. As for Akenson's actual dissection of Paul's letters, it takes him quite some time to get to it, and in all reality Akenson doesn't shed much new light on the Historical Jesus. Early First Century Jerusalem is a murky, far-away place, and we're never going to know all we want to about it, or the people who lived in it. But again, this book is recommendable not so much for the study of Paul's letters, but for Akenson's commentary on the problems with the current quest for the Historical Jesus.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Fresh Examination of the Jesus/Paul Relationship, December 24, 2002
Akenson has done a good job of writing an informative, entertaining and accurate (inasmuch as the latter adjective can be at all meaningful here)book on Paul and Jesus for the lay reader. All in all, a very good hermeneutic reading of both concerned persons and a good illustration of their milieu. However, I have differences of opinion on several issues. First, the author is quick (and correct) to point out the highly suspect nature of Secret Mark. But he is also quick (incorrectly- this time) to proclaim it a forgery. While I certainly agree that Crossan and Koester have prematurely and somewhat naively antedated this document, there is, at the other logical extreme, no reason to insist that it is an obvious fabrication on the part of Morton Smith (its 'discoverer') or any other. Sure, its possible. But without real evidence, we can just as properly take the leap and say that the earliest fragments of Secret Mark come from C.E. 50. Not a very good approach, of course. Methodologically, the best response to this issue is a negative one; i.e. there is NEITHER evidence that Secret Mark should predate Canonical Mark, NOR any direct evidence that the former is a forgery rather than a very late and poorly documented piece of apocryphal literature. Second, Akenson seems to misunderstand the idea behind the Criteria of Multiple Attestation. Few biblical scholars (the Jesus Seminar included) believe that the extant Gospels are independent resources, in and of themselves. What they do believe is that there are strands of contradictory material within the Gospels that can be reasonably supposed to have come from a different source than that which they contradict. If some of these differing materials have thematically or theologically common elements, that constitutes a possible or probable independent attestation- not necessarily a definite one (though Akenson is quite right when he says that some scholars have too much faith in this device). Furthermore, Akenson does not delve sufficiently into the debate as to whether John ought to be considered dependent upon the synoptics. The concensus says no but, as Akenson points out elsewhere, others in biblical scholarship are only too willing to appeal to authority. In not dealing more fully with this issue, Akenson misses an important point that is pivotal in either making or breaking his case against the utility of the Criteria of Independent Attestation. Third, Akenson's treatment of Q seems to me to be too conservative (very much echoing other giants like John Meier and Richard Horsley). He does not seem to want to grant that Q is best explained as having been written in stages (or formative stratum, to use Kloppenborg's terminology). If Q were was orally transmitted, verbatim and near-verbatim agreements on Jesus' aphorisms in Matthew and Luke are hard to explain. If it was not written in various stages, its various thematic tendencies also become cumbersome. While it is clear to me that the 'Cynic Sage' thesis of Burton Mack and Leif Vaage is based on too liberal an approach to scant information, Akenson's (and Meier and Horsley's) methodological conservatism is also somewhat beyond the pale. Fourth, Akenson is correct to point out that liberal scholars are frequently sailing off the edge of the world in their conjecture. He is also correct to say that Paul is "the nearest thing we have to a witness." Unfortunately, this is not enough. In order for the Quest for the Historical Jesus to succeed to proceed substantively, we need more sources, and such sources as are not so scant in their mention of historical details. Akenson is skeptical of how we can so proceed with every other source being colored by the cultural response to the fall of Jerusalem in C.E. 70, thus most likely endearing himself to Luke Timothy Johnson and other like-minded (and admittedly articulate and respectable) theological conservatives who routinely lecture on the 'limitations of history.' My position is that because we have so very little to go on after C.E. 70, it does not follow that a careful examination of Gospel material cannot yield a reasonable amount of important, accurate and explanatory data. One previous reviewer has stated that "[e]arly First Century Jerusalem is a murky, far-away place, and we're never going to know all we want to about it, or the people who lived in it." That is a more extreme propounding of the non sequitur that lies behind the reluctance of some theological and methodological conservatives. Like the contemporaries of that revolutionary astronomer Copernicus, scholars should be ready to sail off the edge of the world before coming upon is spherical nature. The Gospels are certaunly problematic as sources, but not altogether impenetrable. Finally, Akenson does not consider the position that Jesus never existed. Paul's relative silence on historical details about him have led some toward that hypothesis- an hypothesis that has recieved too little attention. Ironically, Akenson has firmly grasped some ammunition that could potentially blow a few holes in the mythicist argument but does not feel trigger happy on such an important, albeit little addressed, issue. All of this aside, however, Akenson's writing ability and his approach to the subject matter as a non-specialist is quite commendable. There are always going to be disagreements in such a volatile subject matter, so my criticisms should not be mistaken for indictments. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in an insightful survey and series of arguments regarding those two great speakers whom we now wish could have written a bit more (though Jesus may not have been literate). A more than satisfactory effort, I recommend it highly.
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