Christmas Reading

I eagerly read Thomas Sheehan's The First Coming when it was hot off the press back in 1986. While it was gratifying to have my own understanding of the New Testament confirmed by the latest scholarship, I was also disturbed by the realization that the Christian churches would continue to peddle the same old legends as historical fact regardless. I also wondered how Sheehan managed to keep his job at Loyola University of Chicago (he would subsequently move to Stanford). In any case, the book deserves to be accounted a classic in the historical Jesus genre.



John Shelby Spong's The Fourth Gospel was published in 2013. One should read Sheehan's book first and then Spong's. Reading the latter, one can see how the latest scholarship may be employed to arrive at a new appreciation of Jesus--through the eyes of a Jewish mystic (not Spong, who is the retired Episcopal bishop of Newark, N.J., but the anonymous author of the fourth canonical gospel).