The Human Christ - Hardcover

Luke Timothy Johnson Candler School of Theology, Emory UniversityEngagingly written, "The Human Christ" combines impressive erudition in the history of biblical scholarship with page-turning cultural commentary and -- let's face it -- gossip. I stayed up all night reading it and had a wonderful time. Allen supplements Albert Schweitzer's classic study by extending it to contemporary fads and controversies. She supplants Schweitzer by showing how the search for a historical Jesus has never been only an academic enterprise. From the start it has had religious motivations that can only be understood within more complex cultural and intellectual contexts. Her subplot dealing with the disappearance and reappearance of Jesus the Jew is particularly fascinating. "The Human Christ" is required reading for anyone wanting a sense of how to evaluate current headlines dealing with the Jesus Seminar and the never-ending flow of new historical Jesuses.

The quest for the "historical" Jesus - the human figure who became Christ - has preoccupied the Christian world for centuries. Their conclusions have always revealed far more about themselves than the meaning of Jesus, and, as Charlotte Allen now shows in this book, they nearly always missed the most fundamental human reality of the man whom Christians call the Son of God: he was born of a Jewish mother into a Jewish community. The story of the search for the historical Jesus is a tour through the great and terrible ideas of modern Western civilization. The Human Christ is the first chronicle of this quest from its beginnings to the present day. In addition, Allen focuses on the huge "life-of-Christ" industry that has flourished in novels and films, revealing it to be a heady combination of piety, exotica, and even soft-core pornography. Finally, Allen explores the efforts of Jewish and Gentile scholars to locate Jesus' place in first-century Judaism, the environment in which he actually conducted his ministry. For generations, scholars, intellectuals, novelists, and filmmakers have set out to find the "real" Jesus and have come up with mirror images of themselves. Their efforts amount to an exercise in theology rather than history and one that tells more about the intellectual and popular fads of their time than it does about Jesus. While Allen debunks these rationalistic approaches to Jesus, she has not abandoned useful historical methods. Guided by an unwavering acceptance of religious mystery, she has exhaustively researched and referenced her work.