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Did the historical person Jesus really regard himself as the Son of God? What did Jesus actually stand for? And what are we to make of the early Christian conviction that Jesus physically rose from the dead? In this book N. T. Wright considers these and many other questions raised by three controversial books about Jesus: Barbara Thiering's Jesus the Man, A. N. Wilson's Jesus: A Life, and John Shelby Spong'sBorn of a Woman. While Wright agrees with those authors that the real, historical Jesus has many surprises in store for institutional Christianity, he also presents solid reasons for discounting their arguments, claiming that they "fail to reach anything like the right answer" as to who Jesus really was. Written from the standpoint of professional biblical scholarship yet assuming no prior knowledge of the subject, Wright's Who Was Jesus? shows convincingly that much can be gained from a rigorous historical assessment of what the Gospels say about Jesus. This is a book to engage skeptics and believers alike.… (more)
User reviews
In Wright's typically whimsical prose, his critique is all at once charming, humorous, and scathing! Putting the two elements of the book together, it turns into a fairly good defense of a more "traditional" portrait of Jesus (i.e. affirming his messianic identity and bodily resurrection).
Incidentally, while I read a lot of Wright, I don't agree with him on multiple fronts, including his general take on Paul. But I have few qualms with this book. If you're interested in reading something on "the historical Jesus," this isn't a bad place to start.