DNF files: The Last Week

/ Alex Good

The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem

By Marcus J. Borg and Dominic Crossan

Page I bailed on: 126

Verdict: This is a good book. I just didn’t feel I was learning much from it. And stuff I didn’t know anything about, like Mark’s narrative “framing technique” or how exceptional Caiaphas was at remaining high priest for so long, weren’t the kinds of things I’m likely to remember long. But you never know.

I think you’re in good hands with Borg and Crossan. What they’ve written here is a commentary on the events of Holy Week, using the account from Mark (because it was the earliest Gospel and the one that sticks most closely to a timeline that can be easily followed) as a spine. It’s basically the historical-critical method, though they address the meaning and significance of what happened from a Christian perspective, not as historians.

I had some issues with the amount of time spent repeating the passages they subjected to close reading, and while I usually like it when points of translation are gone into they seem to have been excessively nit-picking here. I guess it’s sort of interesting that the frequency of the Greek word hodos is concealed in English translations where it’s variously rendered as “way,” “road,” or “path,” but I didn’t find it all that important. And I couldn’t understand the point being made about the Greek lutron being misleadingly translated as ransom, and how it didn’t mean vicarious atonement, because it isn’t used in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible in that way, but rather participation in Jesus. My understanding is that the idea of vicarious atonement in the Christian sense was something new, so why would it be used earlier in that sense? I got the feeling a particular theological interpretation was what was being argued here more than an objective reading.

If you’ve read other books by Crossan (I’m not as familiar with Borg) you’ll know that his Jesus is the prophet against empire, very much a political figure, and that’s the route taken again here. It starts with contrasts drawn in the opening pages between “God’s passion for distributive justice” and Rome’s for “punitive justice,” and then two entries into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday: Jesus on a donkey and Pontius Pilate as part of an imperial procession.

Borg and Crossan aren’t wrong in emphasizing this. The fact is that the region was a hotbed of political turmoil at the time, and Jesus was executed for what were political reasons. I did wonder though about how much they were leaning on the idea of Jesus standing against the “domination systems” of the time. This is a pretty broad idea, and while Jesus did oppose the contemporary political and religious power elites, I don’t know if he was against political and religious power structures as such. Few rebels are, and I think this is probably reading a lot back into him. But then I’m a cynical sort of guy.

A good book that I’d even recommend for a lot of people, and I feel a little bad about including it in the DNF files. But I didn’t finish it, so.

The DNF files

16 thoughts on “DNF files: The Last Week”

  1. The only religous text I require is Donald Trump’s God Bless the USA Bible. It’s only $59.99 and even though it’s not gold plated or anything, it’s the only serious way to consume this text today. Why waste your time with other interpretations? No-one knows what Jesus went through better than Trump; even he says so!

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    • I think these guys are pretty reliable. They’re not doing anything particularly revisionist, which is the problem with a lot of history writing today, especially if it comes out of the academy. Most popular history has to keep its feet on the ground. This is a good book but it’s pretty basic.

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      • I don’t think so, at least in the period leading up to the fourth century. They (pagans worshipping traditional Roman or local gods) were just the elite party in power and then you get to Constantine and his realization that they weren’t anymore.

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      • I hadn’t thought of Pagans as an elite party. Also isn’t ‘pagan’ a catch-all derogatory phrase made up by christians to depict polytheism? The peasants and little people of the middle ages worshipping their many deities certainly were not an elite party.

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      • OK, we’re talking about different time frames. For the first 300 years Christianity was mostly seen as a fringe minority cult, and you could even find yourself in trouble with the authorities for sticking to its teachings too strictly. The official/traditional/mainstream religion of the empire was what we now call paganism, though that wasn’t a label that got attached to it until later. All of the ruling elites were pagans. This was just the idea that there are many gods (even the emperors became gods) and you need to respect them in the hopes they might not get angry at you. Then at the beginning of the fourth century a tipping point was reached and Christianity became not just an accepted religion but the official religion of the empire, and the elites all switched over. In the middle ages (we’re talking a lot later) pagans were fringe figures who worshipped nature gods or stuff like that. That’s a short version of the story. Before Christianity took over, everyone (except the Jews basically) was pagan, then pagans became a group to be marginalized and driven to extinction.

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