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Summary: A marvelous review of the current state of NT studies
Review: As a former Biblical studies student (M. Div. from Yale Divinity School) turned philosopher, I read this book with the greatest of interest. The primary reason I forsook my OT and NT studies was a despair at how irrelevant and superficial and sceptical the entire discipline had become. Despite the constant hawking of new discoveries and new breakthroughs in Biblical studies, I felt myself as both a human being and a Christian completely alienated from the vast majority of scholars working on the Biblical materials. (I should add that I gave up Biblical studies before arriving at Yale, but I do believe that Brevard Childs is an exception to all of this. Had I not already been burned out, I would have profitted from having studied with him.)Timothy Luke Johnson does an absolutely marvelous job of analyzing how and where things went wrong in NT studies. Had he just set out to criticize the Jesus Seminar (and easy undertaking--the vast majority of important NT scholars on both the left and right of the theological spectrum look askance at their efforts), it would have been an entertaining exercise in debunking. But what I didn't expect was a balanced and incisive analysis of where things went wrong in Biblical scholarship. I do recommend this book as an important corrective to the misguided and rather silly efforts of Robert Funk and his cohorts, but even more I recommend it as an analysis of where things went wrong and as a guide to how we might get ourselves back on track. After having plowed through tedious and uninsightful works by Funk, Crossan, and Pagels in recent months, I found this book to be a complete breath of fresh air.
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Summary: I call it a masterpiece of Christian writing
Review: As a writer myself--the Wall Street Journal once called me the Louis L'Amour of computer books--I really appreciate those writers who display excellent craftsmenship in their writing and who supply deep, rich content. In this book, Prof. Johnson succeeds wildly on both counts. This book is really well-written.
Perhaps a bit of hypothesizing about the divergence in reviews. I suspect that those who like THE REAL JESUS are mainstream Christians. (We'll define mainstream Christian here as someone who agrees with the statements made in the Nicene Creed.) And I suspect that those who hate the THE REAL JESUS aren't mainstream Christians according this definition.
I'd recommend the book to any Christian who'd like a thoughtful rebuttal to the Jesus Seminar. I would also caution any fundamentalist Christians about the book. This is a great book. But I think it'd be biting off a bit much for many, especially new, fundamentalists...
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Summary: A guide to the real Jesus
Review: Dr.Luke Timothy Johnson has written contesting many of the biblical scholars in the US and he has been successful. To understand Jesus it is not enough to read Father John P.Meier, Prof.James Charlesworth, Burton Mack, John Dominic Crossan. There's a lot more in the box. Remember : On no other person have so many books been written. Nietzche, Freud, Jung and so on could not get rid of Jesus. Dr.Johnson has grasped the Real Jesus!
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Summary: Wow - The skeptical critics have yet to respond
Review: For readers who only have a passing awareness of the current group of modern skeptical scholars such as Crossan, Mack, Borg, etc. need to read this book. Mr Johnson briefly summarizes the viewpoints of the skeptical critics and then proceeds to demonstrate their frequent inconsistencies. I've read a great deal of traditional scholarship and some of the more radical (Crossan, etc.). This book was written 3-4 years ago and the skeptics have yet to answer Johnson's charges. If you want to know why you should be wary of swallowing this new school of Jesus research, then you should read this book. I challenge any supporter of Crossan, Borg, or Mack to read this book and then to honestly answer Luke Johnson's questions that he poses to the radicals. The silence is still deafening.
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Summary: Is Jesus Christ who he claimed to be?
Review: For those who believe-we know that for those who do not, asking the question: Is Jesus Christ who he claimed to be? And asking this question objectively, with complete humility, is the wisest thing a human can do at any point in time during one's doubt or disbelief. Contrary to this-and in complete denial of Christian Truth-the past decade has delivered in publication a plethora of "scholarly works," which attempt to dismiss the orthodox view of the life of Christ and His deity. About two years ago I gave a well reviewed, and well researched Protestant apologetic to the antithesis of this view to a colleague who in questioning my faith also questioned the authenticity of the Gospels and the Bibles' reliability in general. The book I gave my friend in a cogent fashion outlined reliable modern scholarship both from an archeological basis and a textual basis and was from the best efforts of strident evangelical zeal. It pretty much back fired. I was told several months later that all it did for him was to make him angry-and I was told this in not so bland of terms. There is a current among Apologetics of the past decade that seems to share the same ground of ramming the truth of the Gospel of Christ Jesus down the throats of unbelievers. Such efforts don't work very well. Of course the truth of the deity of Christ Jesus really comes to us all when the blessed Lord Himself comes to us. I sincerely believe that having the truth of His deity presented in cogent fashion cultivates a field of understanding for this-and done in a loving manner there can be a spiritual harvest later on in space and time. Luke Timothy Johnson, a Catholic Christian scholar and detractor of the current media notion of the "Historical Jesus," has given us an excellent apologetic. While it is not devoid of the authors' seeming distaste for having to write such a book in the defense of our faith, it succeeds possibly where others might fail in thoroughness in that the reader is given a background of the current cultural assault on the Gospel. By showing us the holes in the logic and scholarship of attempts (like the "Jesus Seminar,") to rewrite the Gospel into a tame deconstructionist humanist, philosophy, pungent only with historical anecdotes and void of the any of the everlasting fruit of the Tree of Life, Johnson does Christendom a great service. The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels by Luke Timothy Johnson, 1996 HarperCollins; is a cogent and astute work which bridges scholarly jargon and cuts to the quick to publish serious challenges to a number of the affronts to orthodoxy. "Whatever the character of the ministry of Jesus or the "Jesus movement" before his death, it is the experience of the transformed Jesus as Lord that begins the "Christian movement." The resurrection is the necessary and sufficient cause of the religious movement, as well as the literature that it generated and that reveals everywhere the perception of Jesus given by the experience of his transforming power and the conviction that he "sits on the right hand of God" as Lord. If this understanding of the resurrection is fair to the evidence in the New Testament, and I submit that it is, then in what sense can it be called "historical?" If the resurrection were simply the matter of the empty tomb, then it would be "historical" in a straightforward way, though perhaps difficult to negotiate. If the resurrection were a matter of visions and locutions of a dead person experienced by some followers, then it would be "historical" not as part of the history of Jesus, but as part of the story of his followers, although once again hard for the historian to verify. But if the resurrection means, as defined here, the passage of the human Jesus into the power of God, then by definition it is not "historical," in the sense of a "human event in time and space." By definition, the resurrection elevates Jesus beyond the merely human; time and space no longer define Him-although available to human beings in time and space! The Christian claim concerning the resurrection in the strong sense is simply not "historical." The problem in this case is, however, not with the reality of the resurrection. The problem lies in history's limited mode of knowing. Yet, to make one final turn, the resurrection of Jesus in this strong sense can be said to be "historical" as an experience and claim of human beings, then and today, that organizes their lives and generates their activities. That is, the resurrection has a historical dimension as part of the "resurrection community" that is the Church. The Real Jesus : The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels by Luke Timothy Johnson, 1996 HarperCollins; pp135-136. Luke Timothy Johnson goes after the "gang of several," in the "Jesus Seminar" in a manner that gives a halt to any serious notion that their effort has given scholarly work of the life of Christ any new objective reality. Johnson goes as well after many other recent works which proffer only deconstruction instead of the Gospel. James Ross Kelly
Rating: 
Summary: There is yet another side to the story....
Review: I am recently of the opinion that the Jesus Seminar (which Johnson so vehemently denounces) didn't go far enough. That's because of an announcement made in a recently published book that is very credible. It points out that the prophesied messenger is not the Christ but our "brother and fellow servant who has the testimony of Jesus" (Revelations 19:10). That fact, along with many others, show that those who believe in a "second coming" have been misled.
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Summary: Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?
Review: I give this book five stars for its historical significance of bring one of the first books to seriously challenge the findings of the Jesus Seminar and other critics of the historic understanding of Jesus. This is the first book that really opened my eyes to the fact that the dogmas of the Jesus Seminary are those of only a minority of schoalrs, and not representative of the field of Biblical studies as a whole. I don't think Johnson can be accused of having a conservative bias. A former monk and priest, he is a "Catholic" Modernist, in no way sympathetic to orthodox Christian teaching. This is clear in his tendency to, in my opinion, over-spiritualize the Resurrection of Jesus, not giving due importance to the corporal quality of the event. A delightful presentation of scholarship and piety, this book is an absolute must-read for those wanting a response to radical criticisms of the traditional Gospels, and a good concise introduction to books on the same theme.
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Summary: Will the real Jesus please stand up?
Review: I had the privilege of having Luke Timothy Johnson as my professor in various Christian-themed courses when I was an undergraduate at Indiana University, and hope that I am counted among the 'wonderfully responsive classes of undergraduates at Indiana University' to which he refers in his preface. (p. xiii) -The Jesus Seminar and Other Charlatans-
As the word 'charlatan' derives from the Italian cerretano, meaning an inhabitant of Cerreto, a village near Spoleto, Italy, famous for quacks, perhaps Johnson would not object to using the word in connection with the Jesus Seminar, a 'village' as it were of historical Jesus research quackery. Johnson finds the Jesus Seminar lacking in integrity in both method and conclusion -- he finds irritating 'its indulgence in cute and casual discourse'. (p. 15) He finds their hunger for media exposure damaging to the overall enterprise of scholarship, and is deeply distrustful of the intention of their research and conclusions. The manner of determining historicity (the use of a coloured-ball voting mechanism, etc.), the exaggeration of prominence of the group of scholars who comprise the Jesus Seminar (a small amount given the large number of scholars in the world), and the tendency to depart from the stated purposes of finding an historical Jesus without theological taint and bias make the project a dubious enterprise for Johnson. 'The Seminar has not consistently followed the very criteria it established.' (p. 26) Their tendency toward rejecting anything canonical (and often completely ignoring Pauline and other epistolary sources), and instead elevating non-canonical sources to prominence, strikes Johnson as being as non-objective as the Seminar's members tend to make accusation of the canon. Following his discussion of the Jesus Seminar, Johnson illustrates several recent offerings in the field of the historical Jesus (not necessarily by members of the Jesus Seminar) who illustrate current and popular trends. These authors include Barbara Thiering, Bishop Spong, A.N. Wilson, Stephen Mitchell, Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, and Burton Mack. Johnson identifies patterns in each of these, many appearing as subtle trends rather than direct statements made on the part of the authors, such as rejection of the canonical Gospels and other scriptural sources as the most reliable source of information, as well as each seeming to have a theological agenda behind the 'historical' development. Because these are not explicit, the average reader in schools and pews will likely not notice, or only slowly notice, the bias in these so-called more objective works. -Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up-
At the beginning of the year 2000, John Maclaughlin held on one of his broadcasts the 'Awards for the Faux Millennium'. Without getting into the debate over when the millennium really begins (or indeed if that is truly important), it was an interesting look back at the history of the millennium. However, I was intrigued by the award for the most influential religious figure of the past 1000 years. After several people on the panel offered opinions, the last person said that, in fact, the winner of the award should be Jesus Christ, who is just as real and alive today as 2000 years ago. And Maclaughlin agreed. Johnson would have found this discussion edifying and consistent with his view of Jesus. Johnson throughout his career has devoted much effort toward defining what the word 'real' means. It simply is not the case that a Jesus that can be portrayed by a group of scholars as undiluted and well-researched by methods of historical criticism can in a definitive way be considered more 'real' than that Jesus who has been of influence and guidance to the church and world for the past 2000 years through scripture, creed, and inspiration. When the whole enterprise of finding the 'real' Jesus began in earnest in the scholarly sense, 'both the attackers and the defenders had accepted the same definition of truth...that empirically verifiable truth, in this case historical truth, was the only sort of truth worth considering'. (p. 60) Much of what is real escapes historical knowledge, Johnson argues, and much of what we consider to be the most important aspects of a person, event, etc. are those intangible qualities that can in no way survive into historical quantifiability. -One Problem-
This having been said, there becomes a problem for those of us with a more modern, scientific/verification-driven sensibility, to think that if the resurrection is not a verifiable event, in what sense is it 'real'? Indeed, can it be 'unreal' in the historically-verifiable sense and still be 'real' in the faith-ful sense? And, is this faith something of real value even if it is tied to something 'unreal'? While there is a diversity in the text of images of Jesus both before and after resurrection, and this diversity should not be flattened but rather embraced and explored to make Jesus and Christianity a much more universal an all-encompassing possibility for all, this does not in the end answer the very basic question -- How can I believe this? -- that drives, and will continue to drive, people (scholars, clerics, and lay persons) who want to know how to reconcile something that is seemingly untrue with that which one must take on faith to be true. -A Disclaimer-
I have never been offended or as off-put by the Jesus Seminar as has been Johnson, or indeed as have been many others. But then, I don't look to them for confirmation of my faith. Some Jesus Seminarians are good scholars and good writers, and I can find useful and valuable information from them regardless of whether or not I agree with their analyses or conclusions. Indeed, if my faith is such that it would be shaken by the Jesus Seminar or any such, then perhaps it deserves to be tested and shaken!
Rating: 
Summary: A provocative textbook
Review: I have used Johnson's book as one of the textbooks in my "Life and Teachings of Jesus" course this past year. Students have found it stimulating and provocative. They are initially put off by Johnson's elitist, arrogant attack on the Jesus Seminar, but because of the book's lively style (and with my assurance that Johnson is actually a qualified New Testament scholar) they persist and discover his elegantly developed explanation of the relationship between history and faith. Johnson's attack on the Jesus Seminar is not entirely fair. Of course, his slamming of writers like Spong and Thiering is much deserved. On the other hand, he primarily attacks Borg for making a name for himself and advancing his career doing historical Jesus research. I thought choosing an area of specialization, becoming a productive writer, and advancing in the profession was what all academics seek to do. Johnson first criticizes Jesus Seminar members for not teaching at Harvard, Yale, Duke, Emory, etc. (as if everyone could) then criticizes many of them for doing their graduate work at those same institutions. He needs to make up his mind. Johnson's critique of Crossan is valid at many points, but he dismisses Crossan's work much too easily. It is not fair to lump him together with Spong and Thiering. I suppose Johnson needed to get all of that venom out of his system before he could write productively, and that is why I consider his book to be worth the battle of getting through the first couple of chapters. In the end it serves as a great reassurance that the best way to discover Jesus is to read the canonical gospels, which is what I still spend most of the course doing.
Rating:
Summary: A provocative textbook
Review: I have used Johnson's book as one of the textbooks in my "Life and Teachings of Jesus" course this past year. Students have found it stimulating and provocative. They are initially put off by Johnson's elitist, arrogant attack on the Jesus Seminar, but because of the book's lively style (and with my assurance that Johnson is actually a qualified New Testament scholar) they persist and discover his elegantly developed explanation of the relationship between history and faith. Johnson's attack on the Jesus Seminar is not entirely fair. Of course, his slamming of writers like Spong and Thiering is much deserved. On the other hand, he primarily attacks Borg for making a name for himself and advancing his career doing historical Jesus research. I thought choosing an area of specialization, becoming a productive writer, and advancing in the profession was what all academics seek to do. Johnson first criticizes Jesus Seminar members for not teaching at Harvard, Yale, Duke, Emory, etc. (as if everyone could) then criticizes many of them for doing their graduate work at those same institutions. He needs to make up his mind. Johnson's critique of Crossan is valid at many points, but he dismisses Crossan's work much too easily. It is not fair to lump him together with Spong and Thiering. I suppose Johnson needed to get all of that venom out of his system before he could write productively, and that is why I consider his book to be worth the battle of getting through the first couple of chapters. In the end it serves as a great reassurance that the best way to discover Jesus is to read the canonical gospels, which is what I still spend most of the course doing.
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