Book Review

Jesus Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents the Historical Jesus
By: Michael Wilkins & JP Moreland

This book left a lot to be desired by way of real scholarship.

I checked out Amazon's feedback on this book left by customers/readers and not surprisingly there was a lot of "This is the best book ever written on the topic!!!" type comments left by literalists and "ye gods, people- wake up!!" comments from the apologist haters. (I'd leave a review along that last line myself but I'm too damn lazy to do so. I'd actually have to remember my Amazon log in information.)

This customer said essentially what I was thinking:

Circular Reasoning, September 5, 2000

By A Customer

I have to admit up front that I stopped reading this book after the first 100 pages or so (the first three essays). Despite the claims of this book that the Jesus Seminar's research starts with the assumption that the Jesus in the Gospels could not be the true Jesus, this book starts with the equally arguable assumption that everything in the New Testament is true (despite serious inconsistencies between the four Gospels) unless proven otherwise.

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Along the same lines as the "circular thinking" motif, I wonder if the authors realized just how asinine it is to call a 2,000(supposedly) year old collection of writings as accurate when they're using THE WRITINGS THEMSELVES to authenticate it.

*blog author slams head into keyboard*

Repeating a verse so many times doesn't make it true. Classifying and color coding verses into ratings of what the Jesus-they've-visualized would have said into nice, neat little piles doesn't make their fact finding mission true. Not when you've got asshats like Irenaeus at the helm of Christian orthodoxy so many centuries ago.

I know that sometimes I sound almost like an atheist in my arguments. But I'm not. I'm simply fed up with the pathetic cookie-cutter circular reasoning happening in the minds of worldly Christians. It's self defeating.

Gnosis is about using your BRAIN to come to a conclusion about a question. Not circular reasoning. Not by using the the subject matter itself to prove it's dogmatic worth when we really know crap about what happened 2,000 years ago. Anything of real worth that once existed to compare it to in order to find the truth- simply does not exist anymore. There were too many library burnings taking place. Once you get through the first few chapters of fluff where the authors spout off at how they're going to "prove the Jesus Seminar wrong" the book takes a decidedly apologetic turn- straight downhill.

Pure fluff for the brain-dead masses.