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A review by tinido
From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Christ by Paula Fredriksen
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
4.5
This is a really thoughtful, meticulous, but relatively easy to read reconstruction of the various versions of Jesus presented in the pauline letters and the four canonical gospels, and how they came to be. Fredriksen contextualizes the different texts in their religious, social and political history, and does a really good job at showing how different they really are from each other: from the mere biographical dates about Jesus' life and death given by each of the four (and Paul, who is genuinely uninterested in the biography of Jesus) to the christological positions they hold. Even if you're not interested in trying to find a glimpse of the real historical Jesus beneath all these layers on layers of tradition, this is a great book to learn how and in what circumstances a jewish apocalyptic group got transformed into a new religion: christianity.
The progressively worsening relations between the jewish community in Palestine and later in the diaspora and the evolving Church play a major role in Fredriksen's reconstruction. She makes it very clear that anti-judaism is practically baked into any "high christological" position: If you believe that Jesus is the Son of God and has himself the status of god, at least since the resurrection or even as in the Gospel of John since the beginning of everything, than you have to denounce the jewish religious beliefs as false, if not inherently evil (they were preached the true gospel of Jesus Christ, Son of God and Saviour, but didn't take it up). This, for me, is the most difficult knowledge I gained from reading this book: I'm surprisingly fine with learning that Jesus most likely didn't think of himself as the Son of God, or even as the messiah, but that seeing in him the Son of God makes anti-jewish propaganda practically inevitable for the writers of the gospels (and most of the NT canon), at least historically, throws some serious shade on the whole christian enterprise for me. Fredriksen tackles this problem openly in her last chapter: She argues that the detailed and as unbiased as possible reconstruction of the historical contexts of Jesus on his way to the trinity is something like a christian duty. She hopes that it opens up the way christians conceptualize their relationship to Judaism, but also to the orthodoxy of their own church(es). I will be thinking about this for a long time.
The progressively worsening relations between the jewish community in Palestine and later in the diaspora and the evolving Church play a major role in Fredriksen's reconstruction. She makes it very clear that anti-judaism is practically baked into any "high christological" position: If you believe that Jesus is the Son of God and has himself the status of god, at least since the resurrection or even as in the Gospel of John since the beginning of everything, than you have to denounce the jewish religious beliefs as false, if not inherently evil (they were preached the true gospel of Jesus Christ, Son of God and Saviour, but didn't take it up). This, for me, is the most difficult knowledge I gained from reading this book: I'm surprisingly fine with learning that Jesus most likely didn't think of himself as the Son of God, or even as the messiah, but that seeing in him the Son of God makes anti-jewish propaganda practically inevitable for the writers of the gospels (and most of the NT canon), at least historically, throws some serious shade on the whole christian enterprise for me. Fredriksen tackles this problem openly in her last chapter: She argues that the detailed and as unbiased as possible reconstruction of the historical contexts of Jesus on his way to the trinity is something like a christian duty. She hopes that it opens up the way christians conceptualize their relationship to Judaism, but also to the orthodoxy of their own church(es). I will be thinking about this for a long time.