Due out on 1 March is Bart Ehrman's latest book, sure to provoke controversy,
Jesus Before the Gospels.
From the publisher's website:
"Many believe that the Gospel stories of Jesus are based on eyewitness testimony and are therefore historically reliable. Now, for the first time, a scholar of the New Testament, New York Times bestselling author Bart D. Ehrman (Misquoting Jesus; and Jesus, Interrupted), surveys research from the fields of psychology, anthropology, and sociology to explore how oral traditions and group memories really work and questions how reliable the Gospels can be."
The Kindle version is just under US$10.
And while we're talking about books Rod Meredith will never read, that troublesome Episcopal bishop emeritus, John Shelby Spong, is preparing to launch a new book of his own with the intriguing title
Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy.
"Using the Gospel of Matthew as a guide, Spong explores the Bible’s literary and liturgical roots—its grounding in Jewish culture, symbols, icons, and storytelling tradition—to explain how the events of Jesus’ life, including the virgin birth, the miracles, the details of the passion story, and the resurrection and ascension, would have been understood by both the Jewish authors of the various gospels and by the Jewish audiences for which they were originally written. Spong makes clear that it was only after the church became fully Gentile that readers of the Gospels took these stories to be factual, distorting their original meaning."
The release date is mid-February.
And while we're talking about books Rod Meredith will never read, that troublesome Episcopal bishop emeritus, John Shelby Spong, is preparing to launch a new book of his own with the intriguing title Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy.
And, as always, nobody can prove a thing, including whether or not there really was an historical Jesus.
ReplyDeleteIt's all Quantum Mechanics -- purely statistical probability, waiting for observation at which it may or may not become real.
The good news is that my cat is still alive... at least, the last time I observed him -- thanks to Dr. Erwin Schrödinger. I'm flushing the poison down the toilet just to be sure there is no next time.