About the historical Jesus. ( )

The first examination of the implications of the new Historical Jesus research for contemporary faith.

Clear writer & thinker. I disagree with his assumptions about what could and could not have happened historically and about who Jesus was and is. ( )

I love this book. Borg lays out the difference between the conventional wisdom of the Roman Empire-dominated Mediterranean world in which Jesus lived, and the subversive wisdom of the teachings of Jesus. A book for both those who think the know Jesus and for those who truly do want to meet him "again for the first time." ( )

For many Christians, and perhaps even more people brought up in Christian families but now estranged from their churches, Marcus Borg’s book, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, will foster a sense of liberation. For many evangelicals and other conservative Christians, his work will be considered controversial, perhaps even heretical. Either way, reading the book will raise significant questions and clarify serious issues.

To begin with, Borg distinguishes between the pre-Easter (or historical) Jesus and the post-Easter (or theological) Jesus. At the very beginning, he admits that the pre Easter Jesus was most likely non-messianic and non-eschatological; those dimensions of the character of the Christ were developed in the Pauline epistles, in the written gospels, and in the teachings of the early church. To him, however, the pre-Easter Jesus was a spirit person and a mediator of the sacred; a teacher of wisdom, indeed of alternative wisdom; a social prophet, often in conflict with authorities and critical of the economic, political, and religious elite of his day; and the founder of a movement, a Jewish revitalization that eventually would lead to the early Christian church.

Borg begins his book with his own life story. He grew up Lutheran, in a conventional church. But as a college student and seminarian, he came to question his own belief and struggle with personal doubt. Then finally, he came to understand the centrality of God, or Spirit, in Jesus’ life. “I began to see Jesus as one whose spirituality—his experiential awareness of Spirit—was foundational for his life.” Summarizing what this meant to him personally, Borg concludes, “Until my late thirties, I saw the Christian life as being primarily about believing. . . . Now I no longer see the Christian life as being primarily about believing. . . . Rather the Christian life is about entering into a relationship with that to which the Christian tradition points, which may be spoken of as God, the risen living Christ, or the Spirit.”

The rest of the book examines in some detail the nature and meaning of that relationship—a relationship that the historical Jesus modeled and that his followers accept and work out in their own spheres. He emphasizes the compassionate Jesus, the political Jesus, and Jesus as a teacher of an alternative, even subversive, wisdom. Indeed, Borg insists that a prominent image in the New Testament is that of Jesus as the embodiment or incarnation of the Sophia, a Jewish feminine term for the eternal wisdom of God.

Borg’s final chapter develops the relationship of Jesus to three recurring macro stories in Hebrew scripture: the exodus, the exile and return, and the priesthood. But his most moving, most eloquent witness involves the journey as a metaphor for the Christian life. “Discipleship,” he says, “is not an individual path, but a journey in a company of disciples. It is the road less traveled, yet discipleship involves being in a community that remembers and celebrates Jesus.”

So to meet Jesus again for the first time is to love Jesus not less but more and to love others as oneself. It is to “Be compassionate as God is compassionate.” “It leads,” he continues, “from life under the lordship of culture to the life of companionship with God.”

It is, in fact, after all, to believe. “Believing in Jesus,” he has come to understand, “does not mean believing doctrines about him. Rather, it means to give one’s heart, one’s self at its deepest level, to the post-Easter Jesus who is the living Lord, the side of God turned toward us, the face of God, the Lord who is also the Spirit.”

At the very beginning, Borg says that his work probably should be given the title Beyond Belief, that is, beyond conventional belief in facts and doctrines, beyond a narrow moralistic world view: Beyond Belief to Relationship. By the end, I might give it the title, Beyond Belief to Belief, a new, alternative, spiritual belief.

I believe; help thou mine unbelief.