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Book Review: Jesus and the logic of history ::
The historical nature of Christianity is under attack from all quarters – Paul Barnett’s new book help us fight back.
Source: Perspective Vo5 No3 © Perspective 1999
Author: Paul Barnett
Published: Apollos, 1997
Reviewer: Phil Campbell
The historical nature of Christianity is under attack from all quarters – Paul Barnett’s new book help us fight back
Lately we’ve had a barrage of books that tell us that the Jesus of the Gospels is a historical fiction, and that the gospels themselves are either a coded “peshur” waiting to be understood, or a message of a pre-scientific day that we must translate for our more ‘enlightened’ world. A.N Wilson, Barbara Theiring and John Spong are the new heroes of the popular press, whose ideas are immediately taken up, implicitly endorsed, and given huge airplay.
These onslaughts against the historical nature of Christianity impact us in three ways. Firstly, non-Christians immediately sense that the message we proclaim – Jesus – is historically discredited. Secondly, Christian confidence is dented. We not only have a Christian community that is afraid to witness, but one for whom the vitality of Christian living is constantly being sapped by doubt. The third impact is on preachers. If preachers withdraw from the gospels, then the gospel we preach will tend to be two dimensional, and the Jesus we speak of will be “other worldly” – a “spiritual figure” with no basis in the real world.
Into the breach steps Paul Barnett with his book, Jesus and the Logic of History. This is not a book that will help you preach on a particular text – rather, it’s a book that will encourage you to preach the gospel of Jesus and him crucified with a renewed confidence, knowing that we have a sound historical basis for our faith.
Barnett’s process for evaluating the historical evidence is significant. He argues that all the available evidence must be used – so consigning Paul and other New Testament writers to the corner for being irrelevant to the “quest for a historical Jesus” is methodologically flawed. Why? Because their incidental references, that is, those comments that are gratuitous, or simply asides, are valuable as an indicator of shared historical “givens”.
They are not like the gospels which are self conscious histories of Jesus, but they are built on historical assumptions that show through in places where you least expect it.
Paul Barnett’s methodology helps us to see that the gospels have two sorts of integrity. Firstly the snippets of information we can sift from the non-gospel material of the New testament gives us an ‘identikit’ picture of Jesus that is recognisably the Jesus of the gospels. This shows us that the gospels are not totally theological in conception or composition, but are based firmly on the Jesus of history. Secondly the gospels have integrity precisely because they do not have Jesus dealing with the issue of the inclusion of the Gentiles which was the predominant debate of the early church. This shows us that the writers of the gospels were principled and disciplined in their work and not mere propagandists.
This is a book preachers should read. You’ll preach better – not because of any new exegetical insights, but because you’ll be more convinced than ever of the trustworthiness of the text.
Phil Campbell