Carsten Peter Thiede's book is a glorious example of solid Biblical scholarship which is devout at the same time and written in plain English.

This is a work which will engage everyone, from non-religious researchers of other disciplines relying on the Bible as a bundle of historical sources, to evangelical Christians eager to know more about the background of their faith, to fans of ancient history who want an insight into the temples and theatres, homes and workshops of multicultural Hellenistic cities (like Sepphoris, where Jesus probably had a job for a while).

Professor Thiede shows that those who do not take the Bible seriously work against the principles of science and claims that even tiny details in the gospels can be underpinned by other evidence, whether written or in other material form. He gives dozens of detailed examples and includes recent excavations like the alleged tomb of James, brother of Jesus, and the supposed family vault of Caiaphas, the High Priest.

While it is common practice in non-evangelical theology to dissect the Bible, as if it were layers of tales made up by barely literate and painfully clumsy writers, C. P. Thiede holds the unfashionable view that the Gospel of Matthew, for instance, is actually written by a man called Matthew, and that this Matthew was the one who followed Jesus; that he took his own notes of the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus’ other sayings (in Aramaic); and that he constructed his book to the purpose and mastered Greek well. The latter was true for Jesus himself, so Thiede, again based on the dialogue reported and on historical research.

The author also proposes that the Canonical gospels were not a belated and underground product of the Christian movement but written and published in their entirety soon after Jesus died, and were in fact known in the pagan world. An ugly drunken scene in Petronius seems to be a parody of the Last Supper! The Cosmopolitan World of Jesus proposes that our simple and orthodox idyll of the New Testament is the myth, and an educated and sophisticated culture the reality, mixed of rural and urban elements, shared between Jews and Gentiles.

Christina Egan ( )