The Shadow of the Galilean

"I’ve chosen this book by a contemporary. I knew him even before he was a professor, when he was teaching in a school and writing this book. He’s the most creative Biblical scholar of my generation, so he had to be on this list. The particular book I’ve chosen is amazing. Jesus never appears, it’s just the shadow of the Galilean. It’s getting at the truth of Jesus through a novel. But it’s absolutely loaded with scholarship and theological reflection. Some of the scholarship you’ll see in the footnotes. But those who know what to look for will see layers of theological reflection in there as well. It’s a wonderful book that one can go back to, and read at different levels. It’s a book I put in everyone’s hand when I get the chance. It’s a short novel about someone made to spy on Jesus by the Roman authorities, to see whether he really is a danger to them. In the course of that, it says a lot about the Judaism of that period and of the political situation between the Romans and the Jews. Theissen also manages to feed in some of the apocalyptic, the nightmare stuff. It’s the indirectness I like. Anyone who gives a direct portrait of Jesus is likely to be partly looking in the mirror. To try and get at him through an indirect method, of which this book is the clearest example, actually catches some things that a straight biography might miss. Everything Theissen writes is creative. Biographies vary, but they do try to give the meaning of the person. Where the meaning of the person is essentially religious, it’s very hard to describe directly. A picture of the outer history of Jesus doesn’t get at the inwardness of it all. Attending to someone else reflecting on him can get more of the inwardness of what is going on in Jesus, which Christians call God. Of the outward picture, a number of important facts are pretty clear. But even when all agree that a central theme was Jesus proclaiming the Kingdom of God, God ruling, God in charge, how Jesus understands that remains elusive. So I like to get different people’s perspectives on that and then make up my own mind. But you’ve got to be historically informed to do that responsibly. The thing about Gerd Theissen is that he’s a very good historian. He’s also a brilliant preacher. The book originated in a teacher entertaining the kids as well as informing them. To write something really good, yes. Any New Testament scholar can write a book about Jesus, it goes with the turf. You wouldn’t be competent if you couldn’t. But to write a good book about Jesus is difficult. I’m still trying. I’ve always been interested in the history of the interpretation of the Bible as a way of getting at what it’s all about. That’s become a big industry now, the reception history of the Bible: what people have made of it. When I was a student in Germany we spent a lot of time on the history of the interpretation, but that tended to be what theologians thought about it. Now we’re saying, ‘Let’s see also what artists and novelists and musicians and poets have made of it.’ All that is part of the impact of Jesus, and the impact is as important as how it all began. But how it all began is a good way of checking which bits of the impact are authentic, and which bits aren’t."