Review: Catholic Social Thought – The Documentary Heritage

For anyone interested, I just completed a review of David O’Brien and Thomas Shannon’s Catholic Social Thought: The Documentary Heritage, a cheap and enormous yet accessible “must-have” for anyone interested in social ethics.

Click here to read the review.

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff

My interest in Christian Apocrypha has lately encouraged me to start reading more recent lives of Jesus. My most recent conquest has been Christopher Moore’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal. Without revealing too much, here is a brief review.

This book came out shortly before I entered seminary in 2003, and I now regret not having read it sooner. In the beginning of the book, Biff, Jesus’ childhood friend and later disciple, is resurrected by an angel in order to write a new gospel. The majority of the plot centers around Jesus (called Joshua) and Biff as they wander about in the first-century. Jesus is aware from a young age that he is in fact the messiah, but he is not sure exactly what being a messiah entails. At the advice of his mother, Jesus and Biff head out on the road when they’re 12 or so to find the three men (Balthasar, Melchior and Gaspar) who came to visit Jesus at his birth. They make it all the way to China, and they spend several years learning various skills and arts from each magus. They return to Galilee when they’re about 30, and then Jesus begins his ministry.

Biff is really quite the character. Along with the rest of the disciples, he doesn’t really seem to “get” what sort of messiah Jesus is claiming to be. He provides much comic relief at various points in the book, and I suppose it is worth mentioning that those who offend easily may take issue with his occasional crude sexual comments and pursuits. He is in love with Jesus’ mother (as are others in the book), and at one point he claims to have invented the pencil. He spends a good part of the first half of the book tantalizing the angel that is watching over him. Consequently, the angel is also quite the character…he is stupid, watches soap operas, and refers to the Soap Opera Digest as “the prophecies.”

It is clear from this book that Moore has done his homework. He effectively weaves together material from the canonical gospels, fairly recent scholarship, other first century texts as well as his own imagination. There are certainly aspects of the plot that don’t fit with the first-century milieu, but Moore acknowledges as much in the Epilogue. Also, Moore does take up the whole “Jesus travelled to the East and learned everything he knew from Buddhists and Hindus” theme and runs with it. Some are persuaded by this thesis…I have always found it somewhat fishy…nevertheless, it provides for an excellent story in this case!

In my opinion, this book represents a nice balance between humor and reverence…often, it seems, authors feel as if they are forced to choose one over the other, especially when their topic is as sensitive as this. In Lamb, however, Moore is able to present a quite moving passion narrative, while at the same time allowing for his Jesus to say of his disciples, “Those are the dumbest sons of bitches on earth.”

Matthew Commentary Review

There are many advantages to writing book reviews for online venues. In no particular order:

1. Saves paper
2. Broad readership
3. Fast turnaround

If you’re interested in reading my review of a new Matthew commentary (mentioned here), click here.

*my apology if this has shown up twice in your reader…something in the blog is on the fritz.

The Shadow of the Galilean (review)

I just finished reading Gerd Theissen’s The Shadow of the Galilean. Truth be told, it is one of the finest books on Jesus that I’ve read.

Just a note, the following post is intentionally vague at points, to avoid spoiling the book.

The subtitle of the book (The Quest of the Historical Jesus in Narrative Form) may lead one to believe that it is yet another fictitious account about what Jesus might have done as he roamed around Galilee. To be sure, such narratives do in fact have value, when they’re attentive to questions of historicity and when they don’t completely ignore what was probable (or even possible) in first century Palestine.

Theissen’s book, however, is of a different breed; the book itself has much to do with Jesus, but Jesus himself never appears directly on any pages of the narrative. The main character, Andreas, sees Jesus once (he tells the reader in retrospect), but throughout the book he cannot avoid constantly running into Jesus’ “shadow.” While traveling around Galilee and the surrounding areas, Andreas meets people who have been influenced by Jesus, people who are supporters of Jesus, and people who think that Jesus is a troublemaker. Through these encounters, Andreas learns of those things that Jesus did and said.

In this regard, Andreas’ task is not unlike that of the modern historian whose focus is the historical Jesus. A quote from the beginning of chapter 14 sums the matter up nicely: “I never met Jesus on my travels through Galilee. I just found traces of him everywhere: anecdotes and stories, traditions and rumours. He himself remained intangible. But everything that I heard of him [fit] together. Even quite exaggerated stories about him had a characteristic stamp. They would not have been told about anyone else in this way.”

Throughout the narrative, Theissen also introduces characters that will be immediately recognizable to those who have done work in 1st century history; Philo, Pilate, Bannus (from Josephus, Life 2, 11), Barabbas, etc. all make at least cameo appearances. Generally, when Theissen is introducing a new character who actually (or probably) existed, he will footnote them; the same is true regarding his citation of extra-canonical texts.

The book is also accented by Theissen’s side of a correspondence with a certain “Dr. Kratzinger,” who throughout the book aims to keep Theissen’s narrative grounded in some sort of historical reality.

This book can be both helpful and enjoyable to anyone interested in knowing more about 1st century Palestine. I have studied much of the material covered in the book for years, and I found myself unable to stop reading it. That is to say, this book is not simply for a common audience, although I imagine that even those not terribly familiar with the political, social and religious structures of this time period will still find the book quite enjoyable and informative.