Reviews - Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible & Why We Don't Know About Them

149 reviews for:

Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible & Why We Don't Know About Them

Biblical scholarship is a vast field with any number of different interpretations on authorship and authenticity but there is a consensus in the academic field on this: the Gospels are a compendium of oral traditions written down by Greek scribes decades after the life of Jesus and thus are not a reliable historical source about the life of Jesus. So, where does one begin when investigating the historical details of Jesus?

Ehrman takes a good swing at this. Using the consistencies within the non-miraculous stories of the Gospels and the records from the Roman-Jewish historian Josephus, one can make an educated guess that Jesus was a Jewish apocalyptic priest who spoke of the coming of the Son of God (Jesus may have thought of himself as a messenger, not a messianic figure) and who, after stirring up a commotion at the temple in Jerusalem, was crucified by the local Roman authority Pontius Pilate.

A sad ending to that story if you ask me. When you're martyred, it's not like you can bask in the glory. You're just gone. Non-extant. You thus never witness your followers have fantastical hallucinations of your supposed resurrection that, within decades, spreads a rumor that places you at the center of a disorganized religious movement that becomes the adopted faith of the Roman Empire and eventually sweeps the entire world.

Sorry, Jesus. If only you had chosen to remain a humble carpenter instead of flipping over the money changers' tables at the temple in Jerusalem.

klturner722's review against another edition

4.0

hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

_linds's review against another edition

4.0

challenging informative reflective

classysmarta's review against another edition

4.25

informative reflective medium-paced

cierram's review against another edition

3.0

I enjoyed the first half of this book and felt like I was back in 2018 taking Hermeneutics. This was outside of what I would normally read now, so I struggled through the repetitiveness and skimmed the second half.