Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

by Darrell L. Bock and Daniel B. Wallace

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 078522615X
• ISBN13: 9780785226154
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson Publishers
• Length: 237 Pages
• Weight: 0.87 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.7" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Money

This book is right on the money. The authors do a fantastic job in explaining the difference between Christianity & Jesusanity... genuine belief in the deity of Christ - the Son of God who came incarnate to fulfill the Law & Prophets and redeem humanity via his sinless life, the Cross, and Resurrection... and the heterodoxy view of Jesus that he was merely a man who taught well and left us with a moral example. If you haven't read 'Mere Christianity' by C.S. Lewis - you should get a copy of that along with this. Lewis' arguments against what Bock calls Jesusanity are clearer than anything I've ever read elsewhere. ***** GREAT BOOK *****

A Tale of Two Jesus Stories

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 g

Exposing Jesusanity

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.

Rethroning Jesus

I will not hide my bias as I begin this review. I think it's always important to be honest about where you're coming from. Jesus is on the throne in my belief system and I feel this book may help put him back there for many others. I found the chapter that covers claim six, "Jesus' Tomb Has Been Found and His Resurrection and Ascension Did Not Involve a Physical Departure," to be the most useful brief rebuttal that I've seen. The authors clearly show, for example, that approximately 21 percent of Jewish women were called Mariamme (Mary) and that nearly 5 percent of men were named Jesus; therefore, the odds that the ossuary with the names Jesus and Mary on it being a family tomb of Christ are very slim indeed. I think the authors point out a very real issue when they say, "The fact that there is so little to this hypothesis (that the family tomb was found and Jesus did not physically resurrect) and yet it gained so much attention and created so much hype raises the question of whether our culture is truly ready and willing to come to grips with the claims of Jesus as they have been made over the centuries." It seems that many today are interested only in hearing what will make them feel better instead of the truth. Having read other even more in-depth critiques of the family tomb propaganda, it's clear that there is not truth there and that it's filled with illogical assumptions; yet I've encountered many who call themselves atheists in the past few months who refer to it as an example of the fallacies in the Christian faith. It's interesting that they say they've reached their position with rationality and logic. This book shows the weaknesses in the challenges. It does not focus on defending the positions of Christianity in an in-depth manner. If you're looking for that, you'll need to look elsewhere. However, if you're looking for a good book to read as you read the books that make the claims the authors deal with, I think you'll find this one the best on the shelf.

Jesus In Focus

January 10, 2008 It is not often that a book spans the great chasm that exists between scholarly and popular books. Dethroning Jesus does just that. Dallas Theological Seminary professors Darrell Bock and Daniel Wallace have teamed up to provide readers a fascinating introduction to some of the latest notions about Jesus which have permeated both the scholarly and popular realms. The authors are eminently qualified to write such a book. Bock is the former President of the Evangelical Theological Society and has written numerous scholarly books and articles. He is also the author of the best-selling book Breaking the Da Vinci Code. Wallace is highly respected for his expertise in Greek grammar and textual criticism. He is the executive director of The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, and the author of the highly acclaimed Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics. The Introduction is very helpful in that it lays the groundwork for the rest of the book. "Jesusanity" is a term used frequently throughout this book. It refers to the Jesus of much of modern scholarship and popular culture, but not the Jesus of traditional Christianity or the Bible. Proponents of Jesusanity make several claims about Jesus, and the authors do a nice job of stating these claims clearly and concisely, and then evaluating these claims in light of church history, archeology, and relevant background information. However, at all times, the scriptures are the primary means of evaluating all such claims. A number of the latest and most crucial issues in New Testament studies are touched on and briefly assessed. The body of this work lists six claims being made by advocates of Jesusanity, and then assesses these claims. In the interests of space, I will list here only four of these claims. Claim One: The Original New Testament Has Been Corrupted By Copyists So Badly That It Can't be Recovered Differing forms of this theme have been advocated by various writers over the years, but the most scholarly and well known of these proponenets has been Bart Ehrman in his work Misquoting Jesus. Ehrman's thesis is examined and found wanting. Along the way, the reader is given a mini-seminar in textual criticism. Bock and Wallace make the following statement refuting Claim One: Our fundamental argument is that although the original New Testament text has not been recovered in all its particulars, it has been recovered in all its essentials. That is, the core doctrinal statements of the New Testament are not in jeopardy because of any textual variations. This has been the view of the majority of textual critics for the past three hundred years, including Dr. Bruce Metzger (p.72). Claim Two: Secret Gnostic Gospels, Such As Judas, Show The Existence of Early Alternate Christianities. The reader is actually walked through the Gospel of Judas in summary fashion. In the process it becomes obvious to anyone familiar with the scriptures