The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus

by Charlotte Allen

Traces the preoccupation with uncovering the true story of the human figure of Jesus Christ, describing the conflicting historical accounts that have emerged during the past three hundred years and focusing on the "life-of-Christ" industry built around them. 15,000 first printing.

Genres: Christianity, Spirituality, History

400 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1997

Reviews

[Avery · Rating 2 out of 5]

Charlotte Allen is a freelance journalist who has written deeply insightful reports on Silicon Valley and rural America. This is her only book, apparently based on three reports she wrote for the much-missed journal Lingua Franca. However, the only good part of the book is the ending chapter derived from her articles, and this has been toned down and sliced up to fit her extremely poorly thought out scheme of simply listing off the main figures of the quest for the historical Jesus and highly abbreviated summaries of their books. Allen seriously needed the guiding hand of an editor to shape this book, or at least a better editor than whoever she had. I advise the fans of her articles to hunt them down in archive form instead.

[Kenneth Litwak · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author could have spent a bit more time on theatrical lives of Jesus, but that's not a big deal. Much of this I knew from doctoral seminars and reading, as well as other sources I've encountered along the way. I personanlly think that a critique by someone who finds most of the ideas in the book--not the author but the people profiled--at the end of the book would have been good. A few times, it seems the author injects herself into the narrative, usually to make negative observations. Also, I'm not sure why the author only offered the views of authors who offered weird views of Jesus. For example, given the importance of N.T. Wright in current New Testament scholarship, talking about his perspective, perhaps primarily his argument in the Resurrection of the Son of God for Jesus' resurrection as an event in history. In fact, for view after view in the book, I kept thinking of something that N. T. Wright said. I don't remember the exact words, but he basically said, "You can assert anything as long as lack of evidence is not a problem." So, whether it's Herder in the late 1700s, Strauss in the 1800s, Rudolph Bultmann or Morton Smith in the 1900s, or Robert Funk or Dennis MacDonald at Claremont (not mentioned in the book I think), they've all propounded theories that they cannot defend with adequate evidence. I was a computer programmer for 25 years, and I can accept the miracles in the canonical gospels with no problem. The assumption that we live in a closed universe, in which the maker of that universe cannot act in it, is, to borrow from that great stateman of our day, Jabba the Hutt, "bantha fodder." I know many will object to this, but scientifically, all things have causes. So someone or something uncaused outside our universe caused the massively complex universe with at least 81 universal constants, to exist. Without these constants are very precise values, the universe could not exist. Don't plead multiverse, as that has the same basic problem. Something just doesn't come out of nothing. If there is a God, and that God made the universe, healing crippled people is nothing by comparison.

[Terese · Rating 3 out of 5]

Exhaustive book. A lot of it will be old news to those who have read about the origins of the Christian church or who have studied philosophy, but even for those who have there are a couple of more obscure names being dealt with in this book. By all meassures it should be a great book.

However it isn't.
I gave it three starts purely because of the amount of data gathered in here, the style of the writing would only have deserved one or at tops two.
The discussion is circular most of the time, the author goes off on tangents before returning where she started each chapter (by repeating a lot of what she has already said)so there's no real chronology as she jumps willy-nilly between time and people, which makes for a jumbled read.

In the introduction she warns that her own Catholic theological pressuppositions might color her work which it most certainly has and annoys.

The book is simply too packed with information to be a "fun" read and too disorganized and non-academic to be an intrestesting read or a reference book.