Rating: 
Summary: Interesting
Review: Paula Fredriksen's book starts off with pointing out the one fact we know about Jesus: that he was crucified. Because we know he was crucified, we also know that he was executed by the Romans, which means he had to be executed for a reason other than a theological dispute with Jesus' fellow Jews. But none of Jesus' followers were also executed. This would be very odd if Jesus was a genuine rebel or insurrectionist. But if Jesus had predicted say in the last week of his life that the world faced imminent destruction, that this was the last Passover before the coming of the Kingdom, Pilate would have executed him just to remind everyone that this was not the case. Once that was done Pilate could ignore Jesus' basically apolitical followers who, however, in the apocalyptic fervor of the events imagined that Jesus had been resurrected in spiritual form. (This is the impression one finds in Paul's letters, while the physical details of a bodily resurrection in the Gospels appeared decades afterwards.)This is not implausible, though one might think given the brutality of Roman occupation in general that Pilate would have killed several of Jesus' followers just to be on the safe side. Fredriksen provides a useful discussion on many matters. For a start, she points out how much more attention Josephus pays to John the Baptist than to Jesus. She notes how the urgent apocalyptic themes in Mark, the earliest Gospel, are softened in later ones. Mark, after all states that there are those alive today who will see the world's end, a theme tactfully underplayed in later gospels. Fredriksen is also good on Jesus' attitude towards the law, which he was a reasonably faithful observer. The quarrel that arises in Mark 7, for instance, is with the Pharisee minority, not Jews per se. And Mark's claim that Jesus "declared all foods clean," (7:19) is clearly an editorial gloss, since if Jesus had said this, the Apostles would not have quarrelled on the issue later in Acts. She is also useful on Jewish traditions of inclusiveness towards Gentiles, allowing them to attend synagogues, speaking of their eventual redemption. One problem that I do have with Fredriksen concerns her opinions about the social-economic context. A theme of this book is that alternative portraits of Jesus as a non-apocalyptic figure who would be more ameneable to Christian sensibilities today are wrong. And there is no good reason to believe that Jesus was a proto-feminist, and it is unlikely that he represented a hellenistic cynicism. (Quite the contrary, Jesus' mission in Galilee is noteworthy for the way it ignores the large cities that the Romans built in the area). And a thorough understanding of Jesus's support for the purity codes undermines the idea that his opposition to them was the basis for a political and populist challenge to the Temple orthodoxy. Yet Fredriksen goes on to argue in her notes that not only do scholars disagrees about the state of the Judaean economy, that the most likely consensus seems to view Judea and Galilee as a world with large markets, which "created a web of reciprocal, and usually mutally beneficial, economic relations." (286) I find this misleading for a variety of reasons. First off, it is anachronistic to talk of markets and and the supposedly benign effect they have today and transfer them back too millenia in an overwhelmingly rural world ruled by a brutal and despotic empire that was fundamentally based on slavery. Second, it strikes me as naive to believe that an imperial power that would in 70 and 135 CE brutally murder and exile much or most of the population would somehow not stoop to economically exploiting them as well. Third it does not follow that because there was no "exploitation" there could be no indenpendent peasant politics, we simply do not have the sources available to make such a judgement, given the religious biases of the few literate people who wrote. In this respect, G.E.M. De ST. Croix's The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World is more convincing.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting
Review: Paula Fredriksen's book starts off with pointing out the one fact we know about Jesus: that he was crucified. Because we know he was crucified, we also know that he was executed by the Romans, which means he had to be executed for a reason other than a theological dispute with Jesus' fellow Jews. But none of Jesus' followers were also executed. This would be very odd if Jesus was a genuine rebel or insurrectionist. But if Jesus had predicted say in the last week of his life that the world faced imminent destruction, that this was the last Passover before the coming of the Kingdom, Pilate would have executed him just to remind everyone that this was not the case. Once that was done Pilate could ignore Jesus' basically apolitical followers who, however, in the apocalyptic fervor of the events imagined that Jesus had been resurrected in spiritual form. (This is the impression one finds in Paul's letters, while the physical details of a bodily resurrection in the Gospels appeared decades afterwards.) This is not implausible, though one might think given the brutality of Roman occupation in general that Pilate would have killed several of Jesus' followers just to be on the safe side. Fredriksen provides a useful discussion on many matters. For a start, she points out how much more attention Josephus pays to John the Baptist than to Jesus. She notes how the urgent apocalyptic themes in Mark, the earliest Gospel, are softened in later ones. Mark, after all states that there are those alive today who will see the world's end, a theme tactfully underplayed in later gospels. Fredriksen is also good on Jesus' attitude towards the law, which he was a reasonably faithful observer. The quarrel that arises in Mark 7, for instance, is with the Pharisee minority, not Jews per se. And Mark's claim that Jesus "declared all foods clean," (7:19) is clearly an editorial gloss, since if Jesus had said this, the Apostles would not have quarrelled on the issue later in Acts. She is also useful on Jewish traditions of inclusiveness towards Gentiles, allowing them to attend synagogues, speaking of their eventual redemption. One problem that I do have with Fredriksen concerns her opinions about the social-economic context. A theme of this book is that alternative portraits of Jesus as a non-apocalyptic figure who would be more ameneable to Christian sensibilities today are wrong. And there is no good reason to believe that Jesus was a proto-feminist, and it is unlikely that he represented a hellenistic cynicism. (Quite the contrary, Jesus' mission in Galilee is noteworthy for the way it ignores the large cities that the Romans built in the area). And a thorough understanding of Jesus's support for the purity codes undermines the idea that his opposition to them was the basis for a political and populist challenge to the Temple orthodoxy. Yet Fredriksen goes on to argue in her notes that not only do scholars disagrees about the state of the Judaean economy, that the most likely consensus seems to view Judea and Galilee as a world with large markets, which "created a web of reciprocal, and usually mutally beneficial, economic relations." (286) I find this misleading for a variety of reasons. First off, it is anachronistic to talk of markets and and the supposedly benign effect they have today and transfer them back too millenia in an overwhelmingly rural world ruled by a brutal and despotic empire that was fundamentally based on slavery. Second, it strikes me as naive to believe that an imperial power that would in 70 and 135 CE brutally murder and exile much or most of the population would somehow not stoop to economically exploiting them as well. Third it does not follow that because there was no "exploitation" there could be no indenpendent peasant politics, we simply do not have the sources available to make such a judgement, given the religious biases of the few literate people who wrote. In this respect, G.E.M. De ST. Croix's The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World is more convincing.
Rating: 
Summary: Research Lacking Faith
Review: Paula Fredriksen's latest work provides a compelling look into the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth. The research is complete, detailed, and not lacking for specific theological information. However, there is a definite attempt in this book to seemingly strip away the most important and vital element of Christianity itself: FAITH. If one examines the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus without faith, it quickly becomes a fruitless effort. If, however, we preach Christ crucified and resurrected, we have the core of our Faith. Modern theological research has, for the last 30 years, sought to divorce faith from scriptural analysis, thus producing the quest for the "Historical Jesus." I believe this search is empty and not worthy of pursuit. However, it must be said that Paula Fredriksen presents a complete and worthy attempt to uncover this "Jesus of history." I am left only with one question: does Paula Fredriksen believe Jesus is just a man or the Christ?
Rating: 
Summary: Ignore personal attacks
Review: Please ignore the review by Boston University student who wasn't too pleased with Prof. Fredriksen's style of dress. I was also one of her students. She was probably one of the best professors I have ever had. The aforementioned student must have been one of the many who tenaciously clung to her beliefs and thus was unable to digest Prof. Fredriksen's brilliant lectures. This book is a fine work of scholarship. Personal attacks, I would think, don't belong in a review. I'm sorry to have had to come to the rescue.
Rating: 
Summary: much promised, little delivered
Review: Publishers and readers must wonder whether yet another book on theHistorical Jesus is justified. What more, in the absence of newevidence, can be said about this topic? Fredriksen and her publisher promise much -- a new interpretation based on the fact that Jesus' disciples were not pursued by Roman authority. Yet her conclusions, that Jesus was made an example by a cynical Pontius Pilate and his Jewish collaborators, are as old as the Gospels themselves.
Rating:
Summary: Sabotaged by Reviewers
Review: Regardless of what one thinks of Fredriksen's hypotheses, this is serious scholarship and should not be belittled by an intemperate Jehovah screed or fatuous pedantry over the usage of "enormity". It seems to me that the questions of whether Jesus's message is apocolyptical or ethical, and whether or not the resurrection was contrived to explain away an unexpected crucifixion, boil down to the perennial debate about whether Cristianity should be represented by a cross or a crucifix. Frankly, I rather prefer to think of the Jesus who, being a prophet of the people chosen by God to deliver His message, preached that if we don't love, keeping all the other commandments won't get us to heaven. Now, I don't think this agrees with Mrs. Fredriksen's thesis, but it doesn't diminish my regard for this well reasoned, well researched and well written book.
Rating:
Summary: Allow One A Brief Rave
Review: The book is so extraordinary as to be almost unique among the Quest for the Historical Jesus literature. Whatever one may think of its conclusions, it is powerfully written and exquisitely argued. But its strongest accomplishment for me was that it recreates the Jewish milieu of the First Century with cinematic power. The grandeur of Herod's enlarged Temple, the multitudes in Jerusalem for the various feasts, the impact of ritual and sacrifice upon the life of Jews not only in Palestine but throughout the Roman Empire -- all of this is beautifully described. Of course Jesus is placed within it, and our sense of him as part of this complex Jewish world is greatly increased and deepened. The bibliography is rich. The ideas are challenging. I don't personally agreed with the conclusions at the end, but I keep the book nearby, checking it on any number of questions as to purity laws, customs, etc. I actually check other biblical scholars against it. I hope Fredriksen gives us more books. Her gifts are great. Is this still brief? Ah, well, it's a rave. I was true on that score. Anne Rice, New Orleans, La.
Rating:
Summary: Behold the Man
Review: The quest for historical Jesus has become a bit like that Saturday Night Live sketch in which a gaggle of girls at a slumber party breathlessly debates which film actor makes the sexiest Savior. Some scholars argue for Jesus the apocalyptic Jewish teacher, others for the existential religious thinker, still others for the passionate social revolutionary. Here Paula Fredriksen focuses instead on the one incontrovertible fact about Jesus' life--his death--and presents her readers with a murder mystery. Why, she asks, was Jesus crucified--a form of execution that Rome reserved solely for political (not religious) insurrectionists? She finds her answer, surprisingly enough, in the Gospel of John, perhaps the most stylish ("In the beginning was the Word...") but least "historical" of the New Testament's Jesus narratives. Most scholars discount John as history because its chronology doesn't "fit in" with the other gospels. Like any good mystery novelist, Fredriksen unpeels her story like an onion and throws in a few red herrings along the way. By the final chapter, the reader can't wait for her to stroll into the parlor like Hercule Poirot and tie together her threads of deduction. Meanwhile, Fredriksen presents a readable, pagan-friendly survey of modern Bible scholarship that presumes no prior knowledge of Scripture or religious history. Neophytes may want to keep a copy of the Good Book handy, though, as well as a dictionary to look up words like "eschatology."
Rating:
Summary: An Historical Jesus Born of Common Sense
Review: The words that come to mind having absorbed the arguments of Paula Fredriksen in "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews" are "common sense". In her book she has not fallen prey (like so many in historical Jesus studies) to the predatory gaze of "method" neither has she been overly waylaid along the way by a need to pander to various "audiences" either contemporary or ancient. She has done history - Jewish history - and, in my opinion, done it well. Her Jesus is "a prophet who preached the coming apocalyptic Kingdom of God." She follows this tack not least because it enables Jesus to cohere with his immediate mentor, John the Baptist, and the movement that "sprang up in his name" - the first Christians. Fredriksen believes that in many ways what Jesus preached was revolutionary only in the sense that he talked about God's kingdom NOW rather than SOON - it was a matter of TIMETABLE and not CONTENT. Thus, Fredriksen contributes another Jesus to the current round of thoroughly Jewish Jesuses. A key and noteworthy aspect of Fredriksen's work is the insight that the itinerary of John, as against the Synoptic Gospels, may be closer to the truth. That is, Jesus was known in Judea and Galilee rather than just Galilee. This allows her to say that Jesus, being known in and around Jerusalem, could be seen as a one man threat in a sense, rather than the leader of a revolutionary movement or army. Thus, when the time came to do away with Jesus his followers were left alone since they were never perceived as the threat Jesus was. This threat was due to Jesus ability to galvanise the crowds with his imminent eschatological message, a message which at his final Passover may well have been tinged with a crowd more and more convinced of his possible messianic credentials. Thus Jesus was executed by Pilate as a political insurrectionist. So what other examples of scholarly common sense might we find in this book? Well, the insight that searching for the historical Jesus now requires knowledge of the historical Galilee and historical Judaism. Further, the suggestion that Jesus is not the all-seeing, all-knowing individual some scholars (and many readers) assume him to be. Why can't Pilate's action against Jesus have caught him by surprise, for example? Further, but by no means finally, that Jesus' messianic identity might well be in some way concretised in the consciousness of those following Jesus before the crucifixion and, indeed, act as a fatal impetus towards it. So here we have a book of eminent common sense which attempts what was seemingly becoming thought impossible - a reasoned and reasonable view of the historical Jesus which attempts to make sense of our historical evidence without fuss, bluster or fanfares of publicity. I judge that Fredriksen has done as good a job as we can expect against the current background of research - and in a way that is both readable and enjoyable. As a current postgraduate student specialising in the historical Jesus,I recommend this book to every reader interested in the subject.
Rating:
Summary: An Historical Jesus Born of Common Sense
Review: The words that come to mind having absorbed the arguments of Paula Fredriksen in "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews" are "common sense". In her book she has not fallen prey (like so many in historical Jesus studies) to the predatory gaze of "method" neither has she been overly waylaid along the way by a need to pander to various "audiences" either contemporary or ancient. She has done history - Jewish history - and, in my opinion, done it well. Her Jesus is "a prophet who preached the coming apocalyptic Kingdom of God." She follows this tack not least because it enables Jesus to cohere with his immediate mentor, John the Baptist, and the movement that "sprang up in his name" - the first Christians. Fredriksen believes that in many ways what Jesus preached was revolutionary only in the sense that he talked about God's kingdom NOW rather than SOON - it was a matter of TIMETABLE and not CONTENT. Thus, Fredriksen contributes another Jesus to the current round of thoroughly Jewish Jesuses. A key and noteworthy aspect of Fredriksen's work is the insight that the itinerary of John, as against the Synoptic Gospels, may be closer to the truth. That is, Jesus was known in Judea and Galilee rather than just Galilee. This allows her to say that Jesus, being known in and around Jerusalem, could be seen as a one man threat in a sense, rather than the leader of a revolutionary movement or army. Thus, when the time came to do away with Jesus his followers were left alone since they were never perceived as the threat Jesus was. This threat was due to Jesus ability to galvanise the crowds with his imminent eschatological message, a message which at his final Passover may well have been tinged with a crowd more and more convinced of his possible messianic credentials. Thus Jesus was executed by Pilate as a political insurrectionist. So what other examples of scholarly common sense might we find in this book? Well, the insight that searching for the historical Jesus now requires knowledge of the historical Galilee and historical Judaism. Further, the suggestion that Jesus is not the all-seeing, all-knowing individual some scholars (and many readers) assume him to be. Why can't Pilate's action against Jesus have caught him by surprise, for example? Further, but by no means finally, that Jesus' messianic identity might well be in some way concretised in the consciousness of those following Jesus before the crucifixion and, indeed, act as a fatal impetus towards it. So here we have a book of eminent common sense which attempts what was seemingly becoming thought impossible - a reasoned and reasonable view of the historical Jesus which attempts to make sense of our historical evidence without fuss, bluster or fanfares of publicity. I judge that Fredriksen has done as good a job as we can expect against the current background of research - and in a way that is both readable and enjoyable. As a current postgraduate student specialising in the historical Jesus,I recommend this book to every reader interested in the subject.
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