Jesus of Nazareth
by Pope Benedict XVI
|
List Price: Our Price: $11.63 You Save: $14.37 (55%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $2.13 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Jesus of Nazareth
Book Review: Just buy it
Summary: 5 Stars
Exactly how do you go about reviewing a book by a scripture scholar and theologian of the magnitude of the Holy Father? Well the task is easier than I thought it would be. For one this isn't a book addressed to a limited audience of scripture scholars and exegetes, but one that everybody can benefit from. I have read several of his books and I found this one the easiest to read. I am tempted to say something as cliche as "If you only read one book this year ..." if I didn't find this phrase personally quite scary and I suspect the Holy Father would have the same view on this.
"Jesus of Nazareth" is not a life of Jesus in the style of Romano Guardini's "The Lord", Frank Sheed's "To know Christ Jesus", or Archbishop Sheen's "Life of Christ." The Pope does not set to piece together the Gospels and present the story of Christ in specific chronological order. After the foreword and introduction the first of ten chapters deals with the Baptism of the Lord and ends with the Transfiguration and discussion of Son of Man, Son of God and Jesus' I Am statements. After reading the introduction and getting to the last chapter I was surprised to find that it is obvious that the Holy Father will be continuing the subject in a subsequent book. He mentions a part two in the introduction and I had originally thought that this was a delineation in his current book.
The main part of the book runs 358 pages and over the four days I read it I stayed up late into the night because I did not want to stop reading it. The foreword and introduction covers information such as his approach in writing this book and how problematic many previous works attempting to get at the "real Jesus" have been in the past. Throughout the book he comments on approaches like what the Jesus Seminar took and there is even one rather humorous short quip towards the end of the book on this that made me laugh when I read it. In the foreword he says "they are much more like photographs of the authors and the ideals they hold." No doubt you will not be surprised to learn that the Pope believes the "Jesus of History" and the "Jesus of the Gospels" are not two separate things.
"...The main implication of this form my portrayal of Jesus is that I trust the Gospel. Of modern exegesis tells us about literary genres, about authorial intention, and about the fact that the Gospels were written in the context, and speak within the living milieu, of communities. I have tried, to the best of my ability, to incorporate all of this, and yet I wanted to portray the Jesus of the Gospels as the real, "historical" in the strict sense of the word. ..."
My own humble opinion is that is has achieved this in spades. At another point he writes "This book is my personal search 'for the face of the Lord.'" and he certainly has illuminated the face of Jesus in his writing. One of the common themes in this book and really in his whole life is "listening" to the scriptures. Those who know him have reported that he is a good listener in that he allows others to make a case. His listening of scripture is not just to a specific verse, but all of scripture and throughout the book he shows this capability in showing specific scriptures as being in harmony with the whole. He has criticism of some theories that fail to pass this test where exegetes try to pass off a theory that just doesn't fit the whole of scripture. At the Transfiguration God the Father instructed the three Apostles, and really all of us, to listen to his Beloved Son. Pope Benedict takes this seriously as he fleshes out Jesus of Nazareth.
This book is packed with information and his insights into scripture. He is also quite willing to use modern biblical scholarship and tools such as the historical-critical method when it is properly guided and not used as an end to themselves to justify a exegetes original pretext. He is also quite willing to take the insights of some he identifies as liberal scholars and he take the good of what they have to offer and in many cases to tease the truth of their idea and to more fully develop it. In the chapter on the Sermon of the Mount he talks about the book A Rabbi Talks with Jesus by Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner which he says he was greatly helped by and he also tries to answer some of the questions raised. Over and over again it is quite evident he is quite aware of the modern currents of biblical studies and accepts some hypothesis where he thinks they are plausible and also to critique those ideas which are false.
The chapter on the Our Father prayer is worth the price of the book alone. This is not just an academic exegesis of the Our Father prayer line-by-line, but a deep meditation into this prayer. Often we can repeat a prayer so often that it looses its freshness and his meditation on this prayer can shock us back into reality of what the prayer that Jesus gave us really means and indicates. The chapter on the message of the parables starts out by working through the definition of a parable and what it is and then he focuses on meditations on three specific parables. Also fascinating is the chapter on the principle messages of John's Gospel. Up to this point he had been mostly working with the texts of the synoptic Gospels and he principally explores the use of water in John's Gospel and then then explores other elements.
What is wonderful about the Pope Benedict's book is the way he combines scripture scholarship, meditation, and insights. Often he laments the problems of poor translation of the original texts and then explores the actual meaning giving a greater depth to verses that you might normally pass by. The book is soaked with scripture references as you would expect and I often resorted to my Logos Bible Software to be able to note these references and his translation of some of the words.
The text of the book is the most important part, but I was also quite happy with the physical printing of this book. The paper is very high quality as is the binding and cover of the book. In short this is a great book that will be fruitful for anybody. In the meantime please pray for the Pope and for him to have sufficient time to write its follow up.
Book Review: DISENGENUOUSLY HE STATES ANYONE IS FREE TO CONTRADICT HIM, YET, AS I DO, YOU ALL VOTE IT UNHELPFUL! WHY?
Summary: 3 Stars
While generously he early claims this is not an official statement of dogma, and nearly mockingly openly states that any are free to contradict him, his track record for decades heading the secretive proceedings of the CDF and his present pontifical office indicate clearly otherwise. Given the track record and the present state of affairs, who dares question or complement?
In fact, careful readers may recall the earlier monumental typically Dominican and scholarly two volume work by the Reverend Father Edward Schillebeeckx entitled Jesus: An experiment in Christology and Christ: The Experience of Jesus as Lord, who reveals what better be said, and how, and more comprehensively and with greater and truer and more open Faith, Hope and Charity. Read them while waiting for the second volume of this present set, which may admittedly never appear, and get a more complete vision of our own orthodox Christology. Ratzinger in fact appears here in his volume to wish to emulate to arduous academic labors of the Reverend Father Edward Schillebeeckx, O.P., and his unequalled, irreplaceable, comprehensive two volume study Jesus and Christ, upon which he eariler tried to cast cold waters without extinguishing that great and brilliant Fire.
In fact we may observe here and in the really remarkable closing dozen sections of Sacramento de La Caridad: Sacramentum Caritatis the urgent agony of those who silence others to awaken an echo of a shadow of a ghost of those whom he has silenced, as now lonely and without dialogue he palely imitates and dimly outlines their finest work.
While Ratzinger furthermore claims this as a record of his personal search for the face of God, apparently this is a record of a young lad who left (or not) his interesting political youth group to enter the seminary as a pre-teen, into the world of books and study far from pastoral concerns, and never looked back. This reads therefore like a review of the reading of a cloistered seminarian with an excellent if outdated library card. We find therefore no record of a personal spiritual struggle and conversion such as Siddartha, such as Saint John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul. We read of no Seven Story Mountains, no Little Ways. Rather we read a former Theology professor's conclusions from various academic readings which stress the glorious Divine Incarnation in the person of Jesus Christ rather than the preaching of the Gospel to the Poor as declared by Jesus at the initiation of his public ministry, quoting the prophet Isaiah as a year of Jubillee and debt forgiveness.
Ratzinger also promises to emply "new methodological insights" but seems to fall down on this point as well, as the methodology employed is not the now out-dated historico-critical, not cultural-historical, not Lacanian literary, but rather an early literalist reading of certain select passages, without any comparative meta-analyses of contemporary criticisms and its methodology, nor an indication in which ways threse are superseded by his "new" improved methodology.
For him to say simply that Jesus brought us God is like saying Dunkin's brings us Donuts. The incarnational realities bring us as humanity greater religious and moral and social obligations, not relinquishment. To whom much is given, much will be required. Jesus remains a mystery of Liberation, as this Pope correctly states in Sacramentum Caritatis: el Sacramento de la Caridad: una Exhortacion Apostolica Postsinodal.
Thus we might find here the expressed aims of the author: at transparency and openess to the normal academic peer review process (and writing theology as a powerfully centralized Pope, whom may we call his peers?); at new methodologies, and at recording his journal of a soul, as Pope John XXIII did so admirably and warmly and readably in Journal of a Soul: The Autobiography of Pope John XXIII, have not been met and thus we may reward this work a mere three stars for its effort, and send it back for a rewrite after further research, not only of contemporary methodologies and studies, not only of submission for earnest peer review through the normal professional theological publication journals and not the papal presses, but moreso for some indication of an in-depth record of soul searching as promised. That would make for some worth while reading. For instance, how did he feel, in the light of the message, and faith and hope and charity, of Jesus Christ, about causing his former Theology professor, the Reverend and influential theologian Father Hans Kung, to whom he owes his own professorship, to crawl across the Vatican carpet?
My own idle ramblings in this regard can never match the excellent and comprehensive review by the learned Jack Miles published today in the great Roman Catholic magazine Commonweal, readable on-line and available through this mighty amazon.
Book Review: Pope Benedict XVI Confronts Historical-Critical Scholars
Summary: 4 Stars
This +374-page book merits reading whether one agrees or disagrees with Pope Benedict's Weltanschauung or Christusbild. Jesus of Nazareth is the first book written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in his role as Pope Benedict XVI. His endeavor in this work is "to restore" the "true identity" of the Jesus that one putatively can discover in the four NT Gospels. Pope Benedict does not approach the Gospels from a scientific, historical or critical perspective. Moreover, it is clear that his theology drives much of his quest for the "true identity" of Jesus. The book is what one would expect from the soi-disant "Vicar of Christ." Pope Benedict portrays Jesus as God in the flesh and suggests that Christ made statements to that effect. He discusses the baptism of Jesus, the temptation of Jesus, his message concerning the Gospel and Kingdom of God, the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord's Prayer, the Disciples of Jesus, the Lord's parables, the primary images of John's Gospel, Two Milestones of Jesus' Way and Jesus' own sayings regarding his identity.
To Pope Benedict's credit, he does not seem to make a hard and fast distinction between the Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ of Faith. While NT scholars like to categorize the "Son of Man" sayings found in the Gospels into three distinct categories (sayings concerning the coming Son of Man, sayings regarding the earthly work of the Son of Man, and the suffering and resurrected Son of Man), Benedict prefers to view the Son of Man sayings from a synthetic or holistic perspective. Taking exception with the common historical-critical tack, Benedict contends: "No, the greatness, the dramatic newness [of Jesus], comes directly from Jesus; within the faith and life of the community it is further developed, but not created" (page 324). And, on this point, Pope Benedict and I concur. It is madness to construct a conceptual dichotomy between Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ of faith. The hypotheses set forth by NT scholars, who argue for a Jesus/Christ dichotomy, are less than convincing and highly speculative. Benedict is spot on in his analysis of this aspect of NT studies.
But there are many places where I take exception to the book Jesus of Nazareth. I fault the methodology of the work for not being rigorous enough. Furthermore, I utterly disagree with what the Pope says about the "I am" sayings of Jesus (John 8:58). For example, Exodus 3:14 supposedly lends support to the Pope's interpretation of John 8:58. Yet, how does he handle this verse in his book? The answer is that he treats this passage in an extremely laconic way. The Pope writes: "The manifold interpretations of this statement ['I am who I am' in Exodus 3:14] need not occupy us here" (page 347). Well, these diverse interpretations should occupy the writer since he draws such sweeping conclusions from the Johannine text and "I Am" passages found in the so-called Deutero-Isaiah.
I am not picking on how the Pope just handles one verse: this kind of approach to Scripture appears throughout the entire book. To be fair, I know that books usually have certain foci and intended audiences. Nonetheless, when broad and sweeping universal claims are made, these claims merit careful attention to detail and strong evidence. But despite my criticisms of his work, I still found Jesus of Nazareth quite accessible and somewhat enjoyable. It is a recommended read, as far as I am concerned.
Edgar Foster
Author of Angelomorphic Christology and the Exegesis of Psalm 8:5 in Tertullian's Adversus Praxean: An Examination of Tertullian's Reluctance to Attribute Angelic Properties to the Son of God
Book Review: Lump of Neo-Orthodox Coal
Summary: 1 Stars
The reviewers who really get this book are those who stress that whatever it is, it is NOT a ringing defense of Gospel Truth in the Antimodernist tradition.
If anything, it is in the way of being the opposite. A gentle-as-possible introduction to the New Biblical Scholarship directed at Catholic "fundamentalists" who do not share the author's basically approving and oh-so grateful attitude towards what they (and not he) would call not modern but Modernistic scholarship.
"It does not repudiate or even much criticize this scholarship."
For better or worse, just so.
That's why it would NOT make a good gift for the "conservative" or "fundamentalist" Catholic on your Xmas gift list. Giving it to one such all brightly wrapped could really spoil his Christmas morning. Ratzinger may or may not take, say, the Infancy Narratives literally. He may or may not consider questioning their historicity a biggie. But either way, in this book he is basically embracing the persons of those who, among other things, do not, and inculcating sympathy and respect for their views and judgments.
This is revolutionary in a private Catholic author who in his spare time is the Infallible Vicar of Christ.
This book could only horrify and scandalize "fundamentalists" who are not accustomed to the way in which the neo-orthodox simultaneously demur from and break lances for their Modernist homeboys.
Bottom line: Ratzinger approvingly, if diffidently, cites Bible scholars who taken together constitute the Antichrist That Dissolveth Jesus for the Lamentabili crowd. (If you don't get the reference you have no business reading this book or recommending it in the name of the Lord.) I mean, Ray Brown, for heaven's sake. The noirest of all conservative American Catholic betes noirs for thirty years.
All should at least agree that this is no pious meditation on Particularly Inspiring Events in the Life of Our Dear Lord geared to the comfort and joy of lowly faithful who don't know Rudolf Bultmann from Timothy the Cat. Ratzinger is inviting the believer to walk a very fine line on very dark and deep and stormy theological waters. He is dealing with theories and names that even he recognizes as representing extreme danger for all believers. And he slips up himself. On one page he says that the contemporary church basically embraces Modern Biblical scholarship. On another he says without qualification that Modern Biblical scholarship rejects the notion that Jesus identifed Himself as the Divine Christ. This author famously dislikes Scholasticism. It shows sometimes.
So he embraces that denial? We should? We MUST if we are going to show ourselves as properly renewed and updated in the Biblical field? We can be generous and say that the man is simply conflicted about these complex and thorny questions. That this hapless private author is also floundering all over the place about the extent to which he wants to make like PRE-Vatican II popes in the Syllabus of Bible-Related Error department.
He said that we are allowed to disagree with him. O Joy. Christmas morning is no time for the starry-eyed ultramontane "fundamentalist" to get wised up for the first time about this shady world of clerical gamesmanship. Or to be made to start looking funny for the first time at the shepherds and the Wise Men in his little creche set as they turn to midrash in his mind. Which, being translated, is mish-mash. Or mush.
Book Review: The Jesus of Faith is the Jesus of History
Summary: 5 Stars
This fine work by Pope Benedict XVI, a.k.a. Joseph Ratzinger, is an instant classic. In this first of a two volume study, the Pope defends, in 370 pages, the position that the Jesus of Faith is the Historical Jesus.
It is absolutely crucial to read the 14 page foreword, as Benedict lays out his approach to the subject. The problem as the Pope sees it, is "... the impression that we have that there is very little certain knowledge of Jesus and only at a later stage did faith in his divinity shape the image we have of him" (xii). While discussing his methodology Benedict says "The main implication of this for my portrayal of Jesus is that I trust the Gospels" (xxi). He then makes the point that "Unless there had been something extraordinary in what happened... there is no way to explain why he was crucified and why he made such an impact. As early as twenty or so years after Jesus' death, the great Christ-hymn of the Letter to the Philippians offers us a fully developed Christology stating that Jesus was equal to God, but emptied himself to become man, and humbled himself to die on the cross, and that to him now belongs the worship of all creation..." (xxii).
The rhetorical question Benedict asks is, how could this understanding develop in only twenty years, if the Jesus of History was not the Jesus of Faith?
"Jesus of Nazareth" Benedict says "is in no way an exercise of the magisterium, but is solely an expression of my personal search for the face of the Lord. Everyone is free then to contradict me" (xxiii).
Following the foreword is an introduction, and then ten chapters, commencing with the Baptism of Jesus and going to the Transfiguration. It is not presented completely chronologically. For example chapter eight, at 69 pages the longest chapter by far, is titled "The Principal Images of John's Gospel." Benedict starts by discussing "The Johannine Question" - who was the author and how reliable is it historically? He then writes a section entitled "The Principal Johannine Images", going into the theology of the fourth Gospel.
Throughout the chapters there are extended sections which seem to be almost homilies. If I were a priest or deacon I would dig deeply into Jesus of Nazareth as a homiletical source.
The Pope makes use of many scholars, ancient and contemporary, Catholic and non-Catholic, as he builds his various analyses in the different chapters. For example, there is a wonderful dialogue in chapter four, The Sermon on the Mount, as Benedict compares the Catholic take on the Jesus of the Sermon, with Rabbi Jacob Neusner in his book published seven years ago "A Rabbi Talks with Jesus." It is captivating.
Benedict is masterly at relating the various biblical scenes under discussion to the total context of the Bible and to how they would be viewed from the perspective of the Judaism of the time.
The book is accessible to people with limited knowledge of scripture or theology. It is not a dense book - although certainly several sections require a close read - and the Pope shows quite a few flashes of humor.
So highly recommended. I am sure this work will stir discussion and debate amongst people interested in Christianity, but who don't want a heavy dose of dogma or scholarly minutiae. As a work aiming for a popular audience, Jesus of Nazareth succeeds admirably. I am looking forward to the second volume.