Book Review/Summary: The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (Marcus Borg and N.T. Wright), HarperSanFrancisco, 1999.

Borg’s theologically liberal, and Wright’s conservative, and they’re both Oxford graduates in theology highly acclaimed scholars.

They’ve studied the New Testament documents, especially the Gospels, and have come to radically different conclusions about who Jesus is/was and his miracles, the resurrection and a host of other significant beliefs. In this and the next few posts we’ll try to figure out why.

First, a couple of quotes from Marcus Borg:

‘As a Christian, I see Jesus as the messiah, the Son of God, the Word of God, the Wisdom/Sophia of God/ That affirmation is a defining element of what it means to be a Christian: namely, Christians find the decisive revelation or disclosure of God in Jesus. But I doubt that any of these affirmations go back to Jesus himself. I describe Jesus before Easter in nonmessianic terms. (p.54).

‘There are four options for thinking about the relationship between Jesus’ own self-awareness and his messianic status.

1. Jesus thought he was the messiah, and he was right.

2. Jesus thought he was the messiah, and he was wrong.

3. Jesus didn’t think he was the messiah, and therefore he wasn’t the messiah.

4. Whether or not Jesus thought he was the messiah, he is the messiah.

‘Of these options, I choose the fourth, and Tom chooses the first. We thus share an important agreement: Jesus is the Christian messiah. We disagree about a particular historical judgment, namely, whether we can be reasonably confident that a messianic self-understanding was part of Jesus’ own self awareness.’ (p. 55).

More following.

Shalom!

Rowland Croucher

Note: these excerpts were posted originally in small ‘bites’ and could easily be found by looking at the Section Catalogue of our former website. To continue on this site, put ‘Jesus [15] The Meaning of Jesus (2) etc. into the google search. I’ll try to put them all together into one article sometime soon.

Related Articles:

• Jesus is all you need!
• Book Review: Simply Jesus
• The Jesus Driven Life: Reconnecting Humanity with Jesus
• Jesus’ disciples
• JESUS AS LIBERATOR (Richard Rohr)

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