Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium

Rating:
Summary: Alternate conclusions are possible
Review: This work takes the position that Jesus was prophesying that the Hebrew Bible end time was occuring in his day and that God was literally going to establish His kingdom on earth before all who heard his message would pass away. Mark 9:1, Luke 21. Of course this did not happen. While the book has detailed argument for the position that the earliest Christians, based on Jesus's teachings expected the apocalypse in their lifetime, it does not offer what one is to do with this information. Thus alternate conclusions, very possibly influenced by presupposition, are possible. If one is looking at this work from a denominational or fundamentalist position that the Greek Scriptures are free of human error and divinely inspired, it would be difficult to conclude much else than those that accept the book's premise "while professing themselves wise, became fools." More likely though, such would not read this book in the first place. An alternate conclusion would be the opposite position: the prophesy did not occur, so Jesus fits the description of the false prophet of Deuteronomy and thus should be discarded. I believe an alternate approach is possible. Personally, I would not want to rush to judgement based on presupposition, but suggest to consider every argument individually and open mindedly consider that in as much as the synoptics were written at earliest "between 65 and 95 CE", thus some 30 years after the fact, and that the writers were far more interested in establishing Jesus as the Messiah than being true to historic fact (compare the accounts of Jesus birth in Matthew vs. Luke as the author reviews them for example, it is not inconcievable that sayings and overzealous theology could be attributed to Jesus which may be distorted or may not have ever been said by him at all. As the author states "there are accounts in the gospels that are not historically accurate as narrated. This does not necessarily need to compromise our appreciation of the new testament gospels." In the end, each will be convinced in their mind, but this should be coupled with a request for divine direction.