Rating: 
Summary: Passionate, yet off-base
Review: Why does Christianity, alone among the world's great religions, feel compelled to prove itself by non-theological means? Why is there such an emphatic search for such items as Noah's Ark or the Walls of Jericho or the tomb of Jesus? Islam, Buddhism, Judaism nor Hinduism does this and one must at some time ask why. And why the obsession with "discovering Jesus"?This book is an attempt by the author to find the "real" Jesus. One would think that after 2,000 years of worshiping the man, he would be well known but the interest is greater today than ever. The Jesus Seminar with its scholars, archeologists, sociologists, linguists and historians have been trying to do the same thing for years. The problem here is that the author uses the New Testament as the basis for his studies. In one way that is entirely logical - they are the only writings that exist about Jesus. But one must assume that they are not only theologically but historically accurate in order to reach Yancey's conclusions. That means assuming that they were written for the purpose of history rather than theology and that has pretty well been discounted. It's like debating a skeptic by quoting Scripture. We have a review of Christianity's past along with all the requisite apologies. Then for some reason we veer into the subject of AIDS and world hunger, etc... But the heart of the matter is what Yancey perceives as the "real" Jesus as found in the New Testament words attributed to him. It should be noted that "Jesus Christ" is not a proper name and many of our ideas about him evolved slowly, emerging only after pitched battles between different groups. Christianity almost remained a small, Orthodox, Jewish sect that believed that Jeshua was a very human Messiah who had come to set up an Earthly Kingdom and would return soon.
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