Book reviews
A Credible Jesus: Fragments of a Vision
I've been reading Robert Funk's A Credible Jesus and I think it's the book I've been waiting for for years. It gives you exactly what the title says - a Jesus you can believe it! Funk's starting-point is a data-base of Jesus' sayings which he and the other Jesus Seminar scholars consider to be things Jesus actually said. That gives him just 86 sayings (I counted!). So instead of trying to make sense of all the material in the 4 gospels he confines himself to asking: Given that this is all we know for sure about Jesus, what can we infer, from this limited list of sayings, about the person who said such things? What I find fascinating is that Funk's radical approach yields not at all a shadowy figure but a sharply-drawn character who is utterly believable. It should be noted, too, that it's precisely the 'hard sayings' that scholars have traditionally puzzled over (and which seem to run counter to common sense and which have often been relegated to the margins in NT scholarship) that Funk makes central to his interpretation. He shows Jesus' sayings are full of humour, of poetry and of paradox, because he is consistently trying to point to a world of alternative values, where the last are first, where outsiders are inside, where enemies are like family, etc. - i.e. everything is upside-down and inside-out. What comes across is a man with a truly original vision, who we can imagine inspiring tremendous loyalty and love, yet equally would have got up the noses of anyone in authority who would have seen his ideas as irresponsible and dangerous. It is easy to see how Funk's Jesus would have got himself crucified. I have found Funk's book entirely convincing and his portrait of Jesus utterly compelling. I strongly recommend it to other members of CRC.
Wednesday 4th February 2004
Reviewer - Revd John Earwaker