Meeting Jesus For the First Time – Marcus J. Borg

This book drove me nuts. First off it is only 139 pages including all the notes which are utterly useless. Borg takes his time picking apart Christology, a subject that in my rejection of Borg I would claim he knows nothing about. Borg attempts to attack basic Christian assumptions about Christ (a term in this book that Borg would disagree with) however he doesn’t lay his own assumptions out, in fact he is quite hypocritical of his own practice. The primary example is that Borg refuses to use a lot of passages in the Gospel for explanation of Jesus because Jesus wouldn’t have had anything to do with them. However in a later part of the book when speaking of Paul (yes our earliest Christian documents) he quotes a verse and acknowledges that Paul didn’t say it but that it was Pauline in nature. If you can use something that wasn’t Paul’s to prove your point, something that may have been redacted in, or written later after the gospels than why can’t you use what is presented in the gospel text?

Honestly I appreciate what Borg is trying to do; I personally use some of his interpative methods to look at different texts in the bible. Unlike Borg I deem it unnecessary to discount Christian tradition. I also think we make a mistake when we decide to pick and choose what goes with our Christology and what doesn’t. In the end I don’t recommend picking up this book, go with “The Historical Jesus” by John Dominic Crossan, while he has some of the same issues as Borg I find his interpretation better. In the end I am less of a fan of the Jesus Seminar than when I first started his book. While some of the principles are good this is definitely the worst Christian book I’ve read in a while.

Comments

Keith H. McIlwain said…
The book drove me nuts as well. I find the Jesus Seminar fascinating, but this book was too "theology-lite" for me, and really demonstrated the shortcomings of Borg's methodology.
9:51 AM
wes said…
I appreciate the conceptual ideas of the Jesus Seminar. For me it has helped to foster understanding of some difficult passages. But it is seriously lacking as a theology of life, in fact it just doesn't work.
10:50 AM
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