Friday, June 22, 2007

Book Note: Reinventing Jesus

If you haven't seen it already, Tony has a very detailed posting reviewing the book Reinventing Jesus. I haven't read the book, so I can't comment except to say that Tony's analysis places it squarely in that camp of books that tries to use bits and pieces of scholarship to support an apology for the historicity of the canonical materials and the inauthenticity of the apocryphal materials. I must say this rhetoric is getting tiresome to me, although at the same time it is disconcerting how selective reading of scholarship and theories is producing this sort of apologetic work with an edge. Thanks to Tony for posting on this.

1 comment:

Jim Deardorff said...

Tony certainly pointed out some devastating criticisms of Reinventing Jesus, namely contradictions. One of these was "Regarding the Synoptic Problem, they [the authors] describe the Griesbach Hypothesis as maintaining that Luke was independent of Matthew (in fact Griesbach supporters believe Luke obtained his double-tradition material from Matthew). Another was: "in their discussion of apostolic attribution, they at once agree that the gospels were originally anonymous and that their current attributions are accurate." I'm afraid there were too many such gross mistakes for the book to be taken seriously