Rating: 
Summary: A WELL WRITTEN UNSUCCESSFUL THESIS
Review: This book is a superb well written one with a brilliant exposition at a times of the Hellenistic influence in early Christianity, specifically in Pauline doctrine as well in John's Gospel. However judging in terms of its main aims the book is a failure: a clear example of religious factionalism disguised as academic presentation for the lay man.
It is possible to identify three central thesis at work:
a)There is nothing original regarding Jesus Christ message: everything is either explicit or implicit in the Jewish tradition.
b)Christendom of the first and second century is the one that felt threaten by Judaism not the other way round. Assuming this we can get a better understanding of the evolving Christ's image from Mark to John's Gospels.
c)The historical Jesus cannot be explained through the inner tensions at the core of the Jewish Second Temple Era doctrine but rather through the tensions between the Jewish world and the Non-Jewish one in the first century Palestine.Those thesis also requires a sort of radicalization of the well known Albert Schweitzer's seminal idea that the best way in approaching to the historical Jesus is seeing him as a first century apocalyptic Jew. That original thesis of course is sound but Fredriksen reductionism on this regard leave us before such an unidimentional ministry that it results impossible to comprehend how it stands the diversity of images and meanings that Fredriksen accounts for and that she explains as a result of an evolving context rather than by the interaction of the latter with the inherent complexity of the starting point that is the historical Jesus itself, his message and his death.
I'm not a believer but it is clear to me that the author by no means is willing to pose the question of why no other eschatological first century Jewish leader were subject of such a rich and complex interpretation, not to say remembrance.
In some extent Fredriksen's argumentation rises more problems than those she tried to solve. In denying Jesus Christ complexity and originality the only way left to understand his impact amongst his disciples and inner circle and how they recover after such a blow as his execution was is by no questioning the resurrection issue as a fact: an odd position indeed for a critical academic.
At the end Fredriksen misunderstood in the sake of zealotry which is the mission of an historian. On regard the original relationship between Christianity and Judaism it does not consist in making revisionism in which of them truly was the offended part but in identifying the key tensions of a cultural matrix of symbols, narratives and meanings that within a specific context sprang a religious mutation.
Rating: 
Summary: Sane and Erudite
Review: This book is basically too short to be an indepth study of the historical Jesus and the early church. Keeping this in mind though the book is pretty good. I'd recommend it to a person who is just beginning to learn about the historical Jesus.
Rating: 
Summary: Sweet & Short
Review: This book is basically too short to be an indepth study of the historical Jesus and the early church. Keeping this in mind though the book is pretty good. I'd recommend it to a person who is just beginning to learn about the historical Jesus.
Rating: 
Summary: Freshman's writes about Jesus using a Cliff's Notes Bible
Review: This book was given to me as a gift. I would not have bought it myself. It read like a freshman's first English paper in which the student didn't have time to read the book and decided to use the Cliff's Notes version instead. The author purports to examine the New Testament "images" of Jesus and to explain how He came to be the Christ. Unfortunately, she completely ignores obvious, textual answers to her questions and either comes up with one that is not in the text or cannot find an answer at all. Two examples are the reason for the execution of John the Baptist and why the Jews hated and wanted to kill Jesus. In the first, she says that John was killed because Herod thought it would please the multitudes. She doesn't even mention the two Gospel accounts (Mt 14:1-12 & Mk 6:14-29) of his adulterous marriage to his brother's wife Herodias and the dance her daughter Salome does which wins his granting of any wish - the wish turns out to be for the head of John the Baptist. In the second she goes on at length about why she could find no reason for the Jews to hate and kill Jesus. In John 10:30 Jesus is reported to have said, "I and the Father are One." The Jews try to stone Him and two verses later she would have found her answer in John 10:32-33: "Then Jesus answered them, 'I showed you many good works from the Father: For which are you stoning me?' The Jews answered Him, 'For a good work we do not stone You, but for blasphemy; and because You, being a man, make Yourself out to be God'. How much clearer can it be? Ms. Fredriksen has even more trouble with the spread of the Gospel and the fact that "the Kingdom" never came. She makes this out to be a huge problem for the disciples-turned-apostles and the early church. There is nowhere in the New Testament that supports that it was a problem or a great disappointment. The Kingdom, as God and Jesus planned it, DID COME with the day of Pentecost. She never even looks at Pentecost and the immediate growth of the church from 120 to 3000+. That kind of growth doesn't happen to a failed Kingdom. The rest of the book is more of the same. At the end she tries to explain in just 10 pages what "Christian tradition" says about Jesus. She obviously doesn't believe that anyone else could believe the Christian interpretation of the New Testament. Even if she doesn't believe it, she would have written a much more interesting and balanced book that really explored her subject if she contrasted what she and other "scholars" believe about Jesus and the New Testament with what the New Testament literally "says" in the text, which is what Christian tradition, and Biblical scholars have evidence to believe. On the basis of her major failure to examine all of the New Testament, I would give this paper an F.
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