The God of Jesus: The Historical Jesus and the Search for Meaning
One thing seems to be missing from much of the written output of recent historical Jesus scholarship. Patterson (New Testament, Eden Theological Seminary) proposes to answer the question "So what?" by moving from the academy to the church, from scholarship to meaning. However, what he does mostly is present "a summary of scholarship ground out over several years by others," a large part of it the findings of the Jesus Seminar, of which he is a member. Patterson repeats what has been said many times before: first, that the canonical Gospels are not historically accurate or trustworthy, and second, that the Jesus portrayed in the Gospels is in reality the Jesus the young, growing, and struggling church of the second half of the first century needed to hear about. Unfortunately, on the issue of whether the Gospels are in any sense biographies, he ignores the work of Richard Burridge (What Are the Gospels?, Cambridge Univ., 1995). Left with a tendentious source of data, Patterson's reconstructions of the sayings and deeds of Jesus are based upon "likelihood" and "possibility." This work is a readable synthesis of liberal historical Jesus research but not the answer to "So what?"?Craig W. Beard, Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham Lib.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.