Luke Timothy Johnson calls the bluff of the Jesus Seminar and other purveyors of trendy 'historical Jesus' marketing hype. This timely book offers an engaging account of what serious historical scholarship can and cannot say about the Jesus of history. Johnson refocuses the debate by posing fundamental questions about the relationship between history, tradition, and faith.

The author wrote this to counter many of the claims in books by members of the "Jesus Seminar”. I began reading the book expecting the author to directly counteract many of the contentions of the JS members; however, it took the author so long with so much background and very difficult text to work through that when he finally got to the meat of the JS errors, it was so far into the book. Not what I expected. And, realize this book will be a challenge for you to read if you are not a theologian/academic, with a very significant vocabulary. ( )

Johnson is an outstanding biblical scholar and biblical theologian - the two are not necessarily the same - and, while this book has been around for a good while now, it has not lost its punch or its importance. Indeed I could only wish it were at the forefront of reading for every theological college responsible for the formation of those in the ministry and/or priesthood of the Church.

Actually Johnson had me rolling with laughter during his much-needed hatchet job on some somewhat specious forms of biblical interpretations. I'm not sure Johnson would have approved, but as someone is constantly dealing with the aftermath of those whose belief in anything transcendent has been systematically dismantled by men and women in ecclesiastical teaching roles, it was a relief to be reminded that there are in fact some internal consistencies in belief in a God who is a little bigger than the small meanderings of human investigation. I know one or two people who assure me that the Jesus Seminar or John Spong have restored their faith, but I never hear any clear articulation of their newfound faith: faith in what, exactly, beyond a sort of "religionity" or perhaps aggressive anti-fundamentalism. Johnson is no fundamentalist - nor am I (and I distance myself from one of the previous reviewers of this book) - but neither does he inhabit a universe in which human investigation is the final arbiter of possibility.

Which is why this is a pastoral book - apart from the therapeutic benefits of side-splitting, belly-wobbling laughter. When I stand with parents at the bedside of their dead child I want to represent far more than the rather passé suggestion that Die Sache Jesu geht weiter (the cause of Jesus goes on), as proposed by that great (and gentlemanly) liberal theologian, Willi Marxsen (see 138). Marxsen and the Jesus Seminar and Spong and Geering and others are often tarred with the same brush: delightful gentlemen (and women), but given to confusing niceness with the gospel. Johnson's "real" Jesus isn't particularly nice, as such, but his is a narrative that has for two millennia entered into human darkness, including the darkness of those holding the limp body of a loved child, and breathed resurrection hope.

The key to understanding Johnson is that "if the expression the real Jesus is used at all, it should not refer to a historically reconstructed Jesus" (167). The problem with such reconstructions, as Johnson hints over and again, is that they too often culminate in a Jesus who resembles all too closely the interests of the re-constructors. A feminist Jesus, a left-wing Jesus, a right-wing Jesus (for, as Johnson notes, fundamentalists too are trapped in the myopia of post-enlightenment prejudice), a gay Jesus, a nationalistic Hitlerian or American or Australian or .... the reconstructed Jesusses are innumerable if the interpreters stand judge over the narratives of faith and dictate which parts are real and which are to be jettisoned. Johnson would prefer the myriad if piecemeal glimpses of Jesus available to us in the rich texture of canonical scripture be allowed to speak, as they have spoken to believers (for Johnson is not proposing a phenomenological approach!) for two millennia. Johnson reclaims a theology of canon, seeing in the very process of formation of the canon not the machinations of an oppressive cabal but a ratification of works that spoke to and transformed human lives in the formative centuries of faith. Johnson even, as if but not tangentially, reclaims the place of the creeds, but addresses that question more completely in his subsequent work The Creed.

This book, in turns humorous and deeply profound, should be essential reading for every Christian pastor, priest, prophet, indeed every Christian who reads the scriptures. ( )

Very helpful in it's discussion of historicity.

This is a very good book with only minor flaws in my opinion. First and formost it is a very good essay on methodology in Biblical research in general and in Jesus studies in particular. It is not quite as negative about 'Jesus studies' as the subtitle suggests, only about those which overemphasise the significance of their conclusions (first among which is the Jesus Seminar). John Meier gets a much more positive review. As the book was written in 1997 it canot take into acount the work of N T Wright and J D G Dunn in this area, both of whom are more methodologically aware and sophisticated than many of the authors he criticises, Dunn ('Jesus Remembered') in particular.

My only significant criticism is of Johnson's I think over sharp distinction between fath and history. Towards the end he almost begins to sound strangely like Bultmann in this respect. While Christian faith is not hounded on historical research. I think there are still ways in which the research feeds into faith, both generally (by showing the plausability of the Gospel story, even if it cannot demonstrate it in an absolute sense - no historical study can acheive that), and particularly in throwing light onto old questions, not to undermine but to enrich. ( )