Reading List / Paul /May 6

This might sound a little boring, but you'll pick up my desire that we learn from scholars more liberal than us, and yet be discerning. I love to read widely and want to encourage that in our staff....you just don't want to get snuckered widely! I emailed this out to our trainers.

Reading List for seeJesus Trainers.

My goal with our current group of Trainers to be finished with the Love Course by August, 2012 and then start going through this reading list below sequentially during our monthly seeJesus Trainer meeting. In order to be part of those Trainer meetings you must be leading a cohort of 3-5 seeJesus Partners where you meet with them on a monthly basis.

My top 9 books on Jesus

1.      Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah by Alfred Edersheim. Edersheim is the first Jewish evangelical scholar since Paul the Apostle. That is, he knows Jewish history and writings, but he also knows the New Testament as well. So he was conversant in both the Talmud and evangelical scholarly writings. In the 1870s he taught at Oxford and then went on to Romania to become a missionary. This is the only scholarly sequential life of Jesus out there. I used it for my sabbatical where I discovered Jesus. (Our first group

2.      Poet and Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes by Ken Bailey. Ken Bailey is the first scholar to take seriously Near Eastern culture having lived in the Near East for some 30 years. His work on Luke’s Parables is second to none.

3.      Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes by Ken Bailey. This is a broader work than Poet and Peasant, so it covers more ground, but it is not as indepth on Luke’s Parables as Poet and Peasant is.

4.      The New Testament and the People of God by N. T. Wright. This is the first volume of Wright’s trilogy on Jesus. Wright spends lots of time on background, how people in the 1^st century saw the world. Wright’s principle lens are sociological and political/historical, and like most scholars he shies away from the psychological. At times he over-reads the sociological and political (i.e., his treatment of the Prodigal Son), but he is about 60% brilliant, 30% slightly odd and maybe 3% heretical. But he is a lion in the kingdom.

5.      Jesus and the Victory of God by N. T. Wright. This book is the heart of Wright’s case on making sense of the historical Jesus. Don’t be thrown by Wright’s seemingly distant, scholarly approach. He’s trying to establish common ground with the scholarly community so he will use the language of his community. His trilogy is making huge inroads in mainstream scholar’s view of Jesus.

6.      The Resurrection of the Son of God by N. T. Wright. This last book in Wright’s trilogy is a survey of Greco-Roman world’s views of resurrection. In a nutshell, the Greeks didn’t believe in resurrection and the Jews believed in a future resurrection at the end of the age, not one person getting resurrected now. Anne Rice became a believer after reading this book.

7.      IVP Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels. This is about twenty years old, but it is still the best summary of contemporary evangelical scholarship of the Gospels. I almost always consult this. It has some of the typical quirks of the post-World War II mainstream scholarship: Pharisees are not really legalists, Mark is the first gospel written, and cautions about the gospel of John and Acts.

8.      The Person and Work of Christ by B. B. Warfield. His essay here on “The Emotional Life of our Lord” is probably the only serious piece of evangelical scholarly writing on the person of Jesus other than Edersheim’s work. The sermon at the end, Imitating the Incarnation  is in the Person of Jesus manual and just discovered that my friend David Powlison is also using it in his classes at Westminster.

9.      Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Richard Bauckman. Bauckman is a British mainstream scholar like N. T. Wright. This book is just brilliant. He makes a strong case that the uses of names in the gospels reflects eye witness testimony. Last 1/3 is typical scholarly goofiness that gospel of John was not written by John but by John the Elder.

Other helpful books on Jesus and the Gospels.

10.  Sketches of Jewish Social Life by Alfred Edersheim. Great background on daily life in 1^st century Jewish communities.

11.  The New Testament World by Bruce Malina. Great background on what an honor/shame culture looks like. Sometimes he over-reads the shame/honor lens since the guilt/sin lens came out of Judaism and what triumphed in the west. I find Bailey’s practical feel for the shame/honor culture more helpful since it is so concrete, but still helpful.

12.  Matthew for Everyone; Mark for Everyone; Luke for Everyone; John for Everyone by N. T. Wright. I’d highly recommend these four books in his devotional series on the gospels. Wright applies his lens to all four gospels. You just have to remember that Wright is allergic to the over reading of the theological and the personal by evangelicals but he replaces it with his own over-reading the political and the sociological. And like mainstream scholars he tends to shy away from the simplicity of propitiation. But don’t throw him out just because he is odd at times. He can be very insightful.

13.  Conversion in the New Testament by Richard Pierce. A Fuller scholar. Great book summarizing the discipleship lens in Mark.