Talk:How Jesus Became Christian

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Reviews

Note I have not copied them wholesale due to copyright issues, and they need to be read before being used.

Kirkus: "Wilson identifies many intriguing ambiguities in Christian scripture, but he is not the first to point them out, and his lurid prose detracts from his conclusions. Proclaiming that “Paul was obsessed with the foreskin” or comparing early struggles between forms of Christianity to marketing wars between Coca-Cola and Pepsi, he seems more interested in catering to readers’ thirst for sensationalism rather than in reviving their understanding of Jesus as a faithful Jew. The book is targeted to those who have not studied religious history. The author assumes that readers may not realize that Jesus and his earliest disciples were Jewish, something even the most unread pew-warmer usually knows.

Wilson’s self-important, overly dramatic approach overshadows the significant questions he raises."

United Church Observer

"Wilson’s account has undeniable strengths. In particular, the sections of the book that deal with the challenges facing the Jewish people in the ancient Greco-Roman world are quite insightful....

It is also clear that Wilson has a high regard for Jesus of Nazareth, offering a portrait of Jesus that rightly (if, perhaps, too one-sidedly) emphasizes his continuity with the Judaism of his times, especially the Judaism of the Pharisaic party. Wilson’s exploration of the Sermon on the Mount is especially helpful, reminding us of the characteristically Jewish emphasis that Jesus placed on actions rather than beliefs.

Alas, it is also in his portrait of Jesus that Wilson’s distinctive biases begin to intrude. Because he regards Saul of Tarsus — the Apostle Paul — as the great corrupter of the message of Jesus, rather than as an authentic interpreter of Jesus’ message, Wilson eliminates from his portrait of Jesus any possibility of continuity between Jesus and Paul. While the resulting portrait of Jesus nevertheless offers an important corrective to more standard portrayals, the resulting portrait of Paul — besides being scandalously unfair — fails to locate Paul as the profoundly Jewish thinker that he actually was.

Wilson, a convert to Judaism from an Anglican background, was obviously motivated to offer this book out of a commendable desire to address the church’s deplorable tendency to demonize things Jewish. Unfortunately, too much of his book sounded like a throw-back to the unfortunate inter-religious polemics of an earlier age. It appears that Wilson’s solution for building bridges between Christians and Jews is for Christians effectively to acknowledge that their religion is based on an ugly series of cover-ups and lies. To the ears of this thoroughly Pauline convert from Judaism to Christianity, that doesn’t sound like much of a solution at all."

Doug Weller talk 16:01, 19 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]