Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews
A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity
by Paula Fredriksen
Knopf, 320 pp., $26
Devout Christians struggling with their faith would best steer clear of Fredriksen’s Jesus of Nazareth, as should liberal humanists who fantasize that God is at heart a Marxist. Neither an enemy of the Jewish religious hierarchy nor an egalitarian reformer, Fredriksen’s “historical” Jesus observed Jewish purity rituals, taught in the Temple, and never fomented rebellion against the Roman occupation. Nevertheless, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate had Jesus nailed to a cross during Passover, fearing that the crowds gathered in Jerusalem might grow riotous over the appearance of a man some called “messiah.” And that was the end of the matter, Fredriksen says. What? You heard Jesus was an all-powerful savior whose blood was shed for the remission of our sins but who still lives today? You can’t prove that by Fredriksen, a historian whose previous work, From Jesus to Christ, told how the various depictions of Jesus that were written after his death had already become largely interpretive. Jesus of Nazareth is a continuation of her archeological expedition to unbury Jesus from beneath two millennia of theological and political sedimentation. Some may be appalled at the puny Jesus that her account renders, but some may also be refreshed to find a Jesus who “comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside.”
This article appears in August 4 • 2000.