Bible Review, Summer 2005

Thirty years ago, the historical Jesus was dead. By 1975, it was clear that scholars had very little to say about him. If students were assigned anything to read on the subject, it was usually Gunther Bornkamm’s Jesus of Nazareth from the 1950s1 or even Albert Schweitzer’s classic tome The Quest of the Historical […]

During the Enlightenment, the historian’s job changed dramatically. It was no longer enough simply to chronicle events reported in earlier, authoritative texts. Tradition and authority had become suspect, as investigation and reason became the new basis for knowledge. For the first time in history, historians were beginning to ask, What really happened? In religion […]

To the Editor: I just completed the book In Search of Paul: How Jesus’s Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom (Harper San Francisco, 2004), by John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan Reed. I was especially intrigued by the cover illustration of a sixth-century fresco of Paul and his faithful female disciple Thecla, from the […]

The first chapter of the first book of the Bible can be read as a treatise for measuring (or calibrating) time; the next two chapters as offering insight into the birth of death.