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| Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ | 
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (based on 11 reviews)
Sales Rank: 280522
Category: Book
Authors: Darrell L. Bock, Daniel B. Wallace
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Studio: Thomas Nelson
Manufacturer: Thomas Nelson
Label: Thomas Nelson
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.7 x 1.1
ISBN: 078522615X
Dewey Decimal Number: 232
EAN: 9780785226154
ASIN: 078522615X
Publication Date: November 6, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
New York Times best-selling author Darrell Bock teams with Daniel Wallace to help lay readers separate fact from fiction and help from hype in the recent best-selling Jesus books and television specials. There is a quest going on. It's the quest to reduce Jesus to a mythic legend or to nothing more than a mere man. Scholars such as Elaine Pagels and James Tabor are using such recent discoveries as the Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Thomas to argue that the Christ of Christianity is a contrived figure and that a different Christ-one human and not divine-is the "true" Christ. In his trademark easy-to-understand style Darrell Bock takes on these attempts to redefine Jesus in a convincing, winsome way that will help readers understand that the orthodox understanding of Christ and his divinity is as trustworthy and sure as it ever was. Joining Bock for the first time is fellow scholar Daniel Wallace.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 A Tale of Two Jesus Stories December 27, 2008
In the last few decades, and especially in the last few years, books about Jesus aimed at popular audiences have become quite common. The arguments presented vary, but there is a general picture that emerges. Whereas classical Christianity tells of a Jesus who as a divine Redeemer heals a broken relationship between God and man, who as Prophet, Priest, and King is properly an object of worship, what the authors call "Jesusanity" is the modern portrait that has a high regard for Jesus as a teacher who points the way to God, or more properly speaking, a way to God. He would belong in a religious hall of fame but he is not unique when compared to other religious leaders.
The authors engage six specific claims which appear in the various books on Jesusanity. Any of these claims, if true, would radically alter our understanding of not only Jesus, but also of God and mankind, of Creator and creation, of sin and forgiveness. I am going to focus on the first of the six claims, because if it turns out to be true, it is open season on traditional Christianity and there is no effective way to counter any of the other assertions brought forward in the spirit of Jesusanity.
The first claim is not really a new one, that the text of the New Testament as we have it now has so many mistakes and deliberate changes in it that we have no way of recovering what the original text said. What is new is that it is coming from the pen of a bona fide textual scholar, Bart Ehrman, who has written a huge bestseller, "Misquoting Jesus" in which this is his main thesis. And yet the point is made less by direct argument than by inference and misleading statements. Indeed, according to the authors, apart from these statements much of the book is an "extremely helpful introduction to the field of New Testament textual criticism."
He tells us that there are actually about 400,000 textual variants in the New Testament, and since there are around 138,000 words, this makes for three variants for every single word in the New Testament. But he is being very misleading in his use of numbers. To start with, 99% of all variants do not impact the meaning of the text: variations in spelling and word order make up the vast bulk of the variations. So actually we're talking about 4,000 meaningful variants, which translates to one every three pages.
Although this looks a lot better, the meaningfulness of the numbers still need to be clarified. It is important to realize that the more manuscripts we have, the more textual variants there are. So if we had only one manuscript, there would be zero textual variants, but we would also have no confidence that it would reflect what was originally written. There are 5700+ catalogued Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, the average of which is 200 pages long. That means there are approximately 1.2 million pages of handwritten text. 4,000 meaningful variants in 1.2 million pages of text - now you start to get the meaning of the real sense of the numbers. This actually reflects an amazingly accurate history of transmission.
Ehrman says "we don't even have copies of the copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals." This makes it sound like the text was transmitted in a manner similar to the "telephone game", a party game in which a message is whispered from person to person in a line, in order to see how garbled it gets at the end. But that is not how the New Testament was transmitted. Not only are written documents much less liable to corruption than things whispered in the ear, but more than a single line of transmission was involved. New Testament books were transmitted in multiple streams because they were sent to multiple locations. Mistakes in one stream can often be detected and corrected by comparison to other streams.
Ehrman appears to be more forthcoming in some places and less in others about the true state of textual variants. The authors observe that "one almost gets the sense that it is the honest scholar in Ehrman who admits that the meaningful textual problems are neither as meaningful nor as plentiful as he would want us to think, and the theological liberal in Ehrman who keeps such admissions to a minimum" (p. 60). The bottom line is that less than one percent of the variants are really significant, but even then never to the degree that a doctrine hangs in the balance. Whatever caused Ehrman to lose his faith, then, it was not the discipline of New Testament textual criticism. An interesting observation is that the man he considers his mentor, indeed, the man to whom he dedicated the book Misquoting Jesus, Bruce Metzger, has come to the opposite conclusion, seeing his faith strengthened by a lifetime of study in this area.
Bart Ehrman was twice a guest on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I'm pretty sure that Darrell Bock and Daniel Wallace, the two authors of this book, never will be. Modern portrayals of Jesus are much more attractive to the non-Christian world than what has traditionally been the message for two thousand years. For it allows mankind to reshape God and Jesus into whatever image is pleasing to him. Gone is any accountability of creature to Creator, and also any ability of the Creator to communicate to his creatures what he expects of them. Man becomes autonomous and sin, judgement, and the need for repentance and the Cross are done away with. Jesusanity is popular because it is easier, but if it is allowed to go unchallenged, it is absolutely fatal to biblical Christianity. Bock and Wallace have done a thorough job of meeting these claims head on and showing that they do not stand up under scrutiny.
Exposing Jesusanity August 7, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Dethroning Jesus is another excellent book among several recently released attacking those who seek to re-create the historical Jesus. Bock and Wallace do a good job of exposing the poor scholarship prevalent in many popular publications by these charlatans, who for fame, money, post-modernism, or whatever motive, want to revise history to remove the Divine Jesus of Christianity and replace him with an ordinary man, or even treat Him as myth. Bock and Wallace use interesting terms for the two competing viewpoint of the historical Jesus; Christianity vs. Jesusanity. Christianity is the claim that Jesus is the anointed One sent from heaven, who serves as a bridge between God and humanity. Jesusiaity presents Jesus as another prophet or teacher of religious wisdom, one of many, with no enthronement at God's side.
Bock and Wallace expose the errors of the misguided skeptical scholars like Bart Ehrman, J.D. Crossan, Funk, Marcus Borg, James Tabor, Simcha Jacobvici and others with their minimalist, revisionist and faddish Jesusanity. They group the claims of the Jesusanity proponents into those that claim the original New Testament text is corrupted (Bart Ehrman), that the Gnostic Gospels (Judas) show an alternative Christianity (Elaine Pagels), that the Gospel of Thomas alters our understanding of Jesus, Jesus was fundamentally political and social (Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan), that Paul altered the Jesus movement and created the exalted Jesus (Tabor) and that Jesus' tomb has been found and there was no resurrection and ascension.
The best parts, in my opinion, are found in the final two chapters. First where they expose historical errors in J. Tabor's Jesus Dynasty. Then the last chapter which challenges the absurd, illogical assertions of those (Jacobvici, Cameron, Tabor) who claim to have found the tomb of Jesus, exposing their faulty assumptions, faulty statistics, and faulty interpretation of evidence.
The true historical Jesus of Christianity is exciting and inspiring, and far more compelling than the minimalist revisionist Jesusanity version. This book does a good job of challenging the skeptics, although it is a little tedious in places (perhaps because I have heard the same arguments in similar books). Other good ones I recommend are Reinventing Jesus by Komoszewski, Sawyer and Wallace and Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels by Craig Evans.
An Informed Treatment June 4, 2008
I think that the first chapter is worth the price of the book. The chapter speaks concerning the claims that the New Testament we have is not the one that the first century Christians had - namely Erhman's claims. Bock/Wallace makes this claim look outrageous and down right ridiculous (which, by the evidence, it is).
Notably I felt that the last chapter on the Tomb of Jesus was good too. I feel that a great supplement to this chapter was the Discovery Channel special on this topic, especially the post-documentary segment. Ted Koppel does the job for the experts in tearing apart terrible journalism and documentary making. Bock follows this up (while he too was on that segment) with a good chapter on the flaws and assumption upon assumption the researchers made.
Since I teach I really appreciated the final note at the end of the book. Bock/Wallace commented on the loss of integrity that Ehrman has displayed in his conspiracy theory spreading. They note that even though he knows people are gravely misunderstanding him he not only doesn't do anything about it, as a good teacher/researcher would, but increases the paranoia by throwing out crazier unfounded claims on such places as NPR and Discovery Channel. Good note by a couple of responsible teachers/researchers.
Another good book on Gnosticism and The Gospel of Judas (which Bock, too, treats) is Judas and the Gospel of Jesus by N. T. Wright.
Brilliant. Well written. Tackles the current questions about the bible May 6, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
Bock and Wallace, well known scholars, take on the current crop of attacks on Jesus' divinity, and masterfully answer the accusations.
Library shelves groan from the weight of all the books on the Gnostics. So, are the accusers right? Was Christianity merely one of many alternative views of Jesus--and, in the eyes of Pagels and DeConick, a much, much better take on him?
Typical of these scholars who think the Gnostics were an early alternative to Christianity was the recent reaction when the Gnostic Gospel of Judas was found. Bock and Wallace point out that "Judas possesses a deviant, alternative expression of creation that is not even close to the view of the Jewish Scriptures that the earliest Christians accepted" (p 101). Like all the other Gnostic gospels, and with its wildly divergent beliefs about God and creation, it's clear that Judas "is late, alternative, and aberrant" (p 103).
The Gospel of Thomas is another example of a Gnostic work that has drawn much scholarly attention. The Jesus Seminar members have argued that Thomas is more reliable than Mark and Matthew. However, as Perrin and others have shown, it is not an early work, certainly not a 1st century work.
Two members of the Jesus Seminar, Crossan and Borg, have suggested that Jesus was a political figure, more interested in overthrowing the tyrants than in religion. Bock and Wallace point out that Jesus always speaks about God and religion. He all but ignores the political system. Bock and Wallace also point out that Crossan/Borg make at least one claim that is flat-out wrong: when they say that it was Anselm in 1097 who first popularized the idea that Jesus died for our sins. How could they have ignored all the evidence from Paul and the early church fathers?
Bock and Wallace also tackle Tabor's claims that Paul took over Christianity and twisted it to something new and strange. Tabor believes that there was a genuine split between Peter and Paul, and hence, in early Christian beliefs. But then, as Bock and Wallace point out, why will Tabor believe Paul's comments about the discussion, but refuse to believe Paul about the resolution?
Anyone interested in biblical scholarship, or in recent claims about Jesus, needs this book.
Worth contemplating April 27, 2008
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
This is the perfect book for Biblical literalists. Not only does it identify the revisionist culprits--Borg, Crossan, Ehrman, Funk, Pagels, King and others--it also cherry picks their writings and, in my opinion, skews, albeit subtly, what they have said.
But that's my opinion. You decide. Read widely and ask these questions:
When did the followers of Jesus write the sacred texts? During his life or after?
How celebrated was Jesus when he was alive? If he was a big deal, why are there scant references to him outside Christendom?
Who decided on the Biblical canon? What role did rulers--Constantine, King James, others--play in approving acceptable tests?
Form your own questions. Read every serious scholar and continue reforming your thinking as new information and interpretations appear.
For me, John Dominic Crossan's God and Empire is the best example of current thinking on the issue of Jesus and living.
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