Lexington Books / Fortress Academic
Pages: 196
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9
978-1-9787-0246-2 • Hardback • June 2019 • $95.00 • (£73.00)
978-1-9787-0247-9 • eBook • June 2019 • $90.00 • (£69.00)
Paul Laffan teaches literature and writing at the City Literary Institute in London.
1.Introduction
2.Jesus’ Relationship with John the Baptist
3.Jesus’ Messiahship
4.Eschatology and Exorcism
5.Jesus’ Prophecies of his Death and the Short Passion Narrative
6.“I Will Destroy this Temple”
7.The Last Supper
8.Desertion, Agony, and Arrest
9.Trials and Crucifixion
10.The Resurrection
11.After Eschatology
Laffan's book on the Gospels is written in the spirit of Hermann Samuel Reimarus and Wiliam Wrede. Those who accept the skeptical view that the Gospels offer little historical material will not be disappointed. Laffan uses the “assured results” of form and source criticism to good effect. The spirit of the book can be summed up in Laffan’s comment that “Far from being historical, Mark was now (after a university education) as brittle as burned toast and emphatically not history.” The author uses “Miss Peters”—a Baptist teacher he had during his undergraduate years—as a straw man representing the uncritical and benighted representative of the ignorant reader. He takes Wrede’s comment that "Mark does not make sense, not as history” to be the North Star of his entire approach to the biblical text, and he repeatedly beats the drum that the Gospels are the product of pure fabrication—hence the title of the book. Those looking for a text that holds that view need look no further. Well written and researched, Laffan’s diatribe more than adequately fulfills the expectation of books of this genre.
Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
— Choice
This book is a powerful exercise in the hermeneutics of suspicion. Laffan observes the scene in the canonical Gospels and finds there clues to what has taken place behind the scenes, in the world of the historical Jesus. The resulting reconstruction of the decisive events in Jesus' life is not unprecedented in biblical scholarship, but the case has seldom been made with such vigor and intellectual honesty.
— Kari Syreeni, Åbo Akademi University
Scrutinizing the texts of the Gospels from historical and literary perspectives, Laffan confronts the pious image of Jesus that he was taught in school, but also biblical scholarship based on theological presuppositions. The resulting picture is of a Jesus who is alien to modern sensibilities: The historical Jesus was a failed reformer, not the victorious Messiah of the Gospels. This is a book that will keep biblical scholarship honest!
— Halvor Moxnes, University of Oslo, emeritus