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
Alex Good 