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Friday, April 12, 2019

Jesus Before Christianity by Albert Nolan

Jesus Before Christianity by Albert Nolan,
I originally wrote this review in Sept. 2003. The original is still on my website - https://sites.google.com/site/carlscheider/carl-s-papers/booklist. I am updating it here because I want to give this book to someone dear to me, and I want that person to understand why I think the book is so significant. A simple note in the flap just won't do it.

As Harvey Cox says on the cover, "The most accurate and balanced short reconstruction of the life of the historical Jesus."

This is an outstanding book. I wish I had read it when it was first published in 1976. But it has literally improved and grown on me through these years. I was raised a Catholic, and the author of the book is a Dominican Monk. But you will not find much in the book or in this review that sounds like contemporary Catholicism.

I left the priesthood in 1969, after 13 years in a religious congregation, and 5 years as an ordained priest. When I left, I was persuaded that the deity was an idea with no value. I was of the mind that the carpenter from Nazareth may have had a few good things to say, but the institutional church that called him its founder had veered far from its original path. I had just finished 4 years of graduate study of theology in 2 Roman Universities - I got an STL at the Gregorian with the good Jesuits, and an STD (ABD) at the Lateran with moral theologians of the Redemptorist ilk. Bernard Haring was one of their leading authors at the time. The education was excellent - it was progressive - it was historical. I learned a lot. One of the things I learned was that this exalted role to which I had been elevated - that of a Catholic priest - was an institution created by clerical bureaucracy. And there  was no way I was going to earn a living by teaching theology without a deity to support it.

That said, this book has persuaded me that I am in fact a believer. The way this author explains the man Jesus, and the way that man explained God - I am completely on board with the idea. Nolan has taken the little that we know about Jesus from the synoptics, and using the best scholarship we have of the New Testament, he explains him in that culture and worldview. It reveals the shape and tenor of his time, and explains how he understood himself, and how his listeners heard him.

If you just read the gospels from our frame of reference, the impressions you form are simply not correct. You need to be there in that world, to hear the meaning of the stories, to understand the references. For a simple example, when Jesus speaks of the coming of the "Kingdom of God", most of us think he is referring to heaven. Or we think that "the coming judgment" refers to the end of time. Neither is true! And Gehenna is not a description of hell, but rather refers to the dump outside of Jerusalem. Lazarus is not in heaven when he confronts the rich man, but rather in Sheol, under the earth, together with the rich man. The "salvation" which Jesus spoke of was not to be delivered in the next life, but it was here and now. "Faith" is not a list of things to believe in, but a hope and trust in the ultimate victory of goodness and truth over evil. Jesus did not intend to establish a church of believers, but to fundamentally change the world.

The book is purely scripture driven. It offers no "theological" explanations, outside of some minor references to Greek influence in some of the later writers.

I particularly like how he explains what the early Jewish followers of Jesus must have meant by what we call the "Incarnation". Makes perfect sense to me. But you'll have to read the last chapter to find out what that is.

I liked this book so much I took extensive notes on it, so I could easily remember the significant parts, and refer to them. To further whet your appetite - you can get a copy of those notes here: Jesus Before Christianity Notes.

"To believe in God is to believe that goodness is more powerful than evil and truth is stronger than falsehood. To believe in God is to believe that in the end goodness and truth will triumph over evil and falsehood, and that God will conquer Satan." (P. 102-103.)

So, yes, I believe in God, because I have chosen to believe that goodness will conquer evil, that the universe has meaning and purpose. I can do no other.

For a world class review of the book:
https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/another-look-jesus-christianity

And here is one of the reviewer's quotes - near the end of the review.

Faith in Jesus is not a way of thinking or of speaking, it is a way of living. It is identifying with all people and begins with compassion for all. It begins with “reading the signs of the times” and recognizing that all the forces working against humanity are the forces of evil. Too many of us have for too long been basing our lives upon the worldly values of money, possessions, prestige, status, privilege, power and upon the group solidarities of family, race, class, party, religion and nationalism. “To make these our supreme values is to have nothing in common with Jesus.”

Faith is not adhering to ingredients in a creed. It is power! When persons thanked Jesus for healing them, he would respond that it was their faith that had saved them. Faith is the power of God in a motive, a drive, an incentive that can mobilize the world, that can make us willing to redistribute the world’s wealth and population, that can be strong enough to replace the profit motive. Faith power can resist “the system” and keep it from destroying us. It is the power of goodness and truth, the power of God. Faith in Jesus is a way of living, of choosing him to be our God.