From Amazon.com
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You can take or leave Wilson's secondhand scholarship; that sort of thing is outdated before it gets printed.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.
