[.ca] A Marginal Jew: Volume 2 (ISBN 0385469926)

The Best Book in The Marginal Jew Series So Far:
In this second volume of John Meier's "A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus" series Meier gets down to the meat of his subject. Here Meier tells us about Jesus relationship to John the Baptist (Mentor), his enunciation of the "kingdom of God" (Message) and his great deeds (Miracles). The first two parts here I regard as solid stuff, building a picture of Jesus as an eschatologically minded individual following after John the Baptist who talks about God's domain on earth. This is a very (exclusively) Jewish Jesus. But then with the miracles Meier gets a bit silly. Apparently "what happened" with the miracles is, for Meier, an "unhistorical" question to ask; it is beyond history's bounds to investigate. Faith, of course, may have its opinions but that is not history and history is what Meier repeats that his study is about. I think Meier cops out here. Its precisely the historian's business to say what they think happened and why. Meier, in effect, has his faith considerations which he intends to keep but not talk about. Maybe he finds caution a virtue. Funny, though, that Meier can write several hundred pages about things he claims not to be able to expedite! This is one place in this book where I sense that Meier is being too uptight about what "history" is. Meier seems to me to be at his best when he's doing history rather than talking about it. However, that is but a little fault in a largely professional and standard volume on the historical Jesus.

Profound scholarship made accessible:
Meier takes you as far as you can go into historical Jesus research without knowing Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic. The book summarizes and evaluates the current state of research using a well-defined methodology and comes to its own conclusions. It's not easy to read: footnotes are about equal to text, and the print is uncomfortably small, but if you really want to know as much as you can about Jesus, you need this book.

Excellent Continuation:
Excellent continuation - my sole criticism is he seems intent on bringing in EVERY bit of scholarship (rather like German theology professors) that has ever been written, which can sometimes cause him to loose the flow of his argument, and diminish the force of his explication.

Excellent Continuation!:
This second volume of Meier's proposed trilogy follows Jesus from young adulthood into the early days of his ministry as an itinerant evangelist and wonder-worker in rural, first-century Palestine. Using historical and literary criticism, Meier reveals a Jesus who, after his encounter with the apocalyptic activities of John the Baptist, develops his own message about a coming kingdom of God and then reveals it through a variety of miracles from healings to exorcisms. The Jesus of Nazareth who emerges from this study is neither the cosmic Christ of Matthew Fox nor the sanitized Savior of the New Age. He's an eschatological preacher and miracle worker. Meier's brilliant scholarship sparkles on every page of this book. Indeed, because of its narrative power and its deep insight, Meier's trilogy is likely to become the standard against which other lives of Jesus are to be measured.

A must own:
This book studies John the Baptist, Jesus' message, and Jesus' miracles. Meier goes through every passage and extracts history from them. He manages to go through every miracle story and determine whether the passage is historcal or not. You just can't find such an in-depth study in too many places. For this reason I think anyone interested in the historical Jesus should own this book (and probably the rest of the series).