This book is not perfect, but its topic is remarkable. The author's life work has been to study and teach the Hebrew and Greek scriptures of the Christian Bible, and here he tells the story of how he arrived at the belief that there never was a historical Jesus. The Bible is essentially fiction.
Thomas Brodie is an Irish Catholic priest, and a member of the Dominican Order of the Catholic Church. Since the high middle ages, Dominicans have dedicated themselves to the study, teaching, and preaching of Catholic doctrine and theology. For one of them to take this radical, 3rd millennium perspective on the reality of Jesus is, quite simply, gobsmacking.
The Christ Myth theory is coming on strong in the 21st century, but it was basically unheard of in the late 20th century (perhaps one reason why academically conservative Jesus scholars like Bart Ehrman are so scornful of it). Whereas many scholars have sought to explain a mythical Christ by pointing to the cultural and religious diversity of the Alexandrian and Augustan age in the Mediterranean world (Egyptian, Persian, and Greek influences), Brodie looks mainly within the pages of the Christian Bible, and sees a profound modeling of the New Testament on the Old.
Brodie came of age during the enormous changes in the Church in the 1960s and 70s. In those years Catholics were rapidly assimilating and advancing in the historical-critical study of the Bible, which the hierarchy had only recently decided to allow. Early on, starting in the 70s, Brodie noticed echoes between the Greek of the Septuagint (the Alexandrine Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that was "the Bible" for authors of the New Testament) and the Greek of the New Testament. For example, the author of Luke-Acts borrows heavily from 1 Kings. And the borrowing is a subtle mix of words, episodes, and motifs. It is not something the amateur reader, especially in translation, would tend to notice. But the big idea of Brodie's lifetime of study is that the New Testament is a rewriting of the Old Testament, not a record of the lived experiences of its authors, nor a record of oral traditions about historical events.
The book recounts the author's struggle over many decades both to substantiate his insights in the respectable academic journals and universities, and to make sense of it in his life as a priest. It is not a page turner, but for those interested in advanced study of the Bible, it is not boring either.
The author criticizes the dominant paradigm of 20th century Jesus scholarship, form criticism, according to which the 4 gospel narratives came into being through a three-stage process: events, oral tradition, writing. Brodie is quite devastating about this model, noting that there is no evidence for it, it has no analogues in the ancient world or elsewhere, and it has produced poor results. In other words, there is no reason to think that oral tradition works in the way that historical Jesus scholarship generally requires it to work. Brodie picks apart the work of John Meier and Bart Ehrman.
It is hard to assess the strength of Brodie's literary theory of scripture as a lay reader. Some of the connections he draws between NT and OT texts seem a stretch to me. But it is a radical and unfamiliar thesis for all readers of the Bible in the modern West, and it will need to time to be assessed.
By itself this book does not successfully make a case for Christ mythicism, but that is not its goal. It is a remarkable contribution and a powerful, personal manifesto of the idea that scripture is a self-contained world.
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Peter Marchant
He has obviously shown great courage over his life to plough this lonely furrow
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 23, 2015Verified Purchase
Janet Trisk
Five Stars
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Patrick Ryan
Interesting Book
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 19, 2013Verified Purchase
