Bible Review

N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992). Wright’s Jesus, unlike Borg’s and Crossan’s, is an apocalyptic figure; nevertheless, Wright’s Jesus, like theirs, articulates his fundamental convictions through a principled opposition to purity rules.

Jesus, Crossan argues, presented himself as the Temple’s “functional opponent, alternative, and substitute” (The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Peasant [San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993], p. 355); Jesus’ touching the sick and eating with sinners was intended to “shatter” boundaries erected by purity regulations, (p. 323). Crossan extends this argument in Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994).

Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 49. The opposition between compassion (Jesus) and purity (first-century Judaism, especially as associated with Jerusalem) is a leitmotif of Borg’s scholarship; see also his Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press, 1994).

In the Christian community, the title “kurios” is frequently used of Jesus, as in the confessional statement “Jesus Christ is Lord.” This, however, differs from the substitution of a term for the divine name.

See the explanatory footnotes to Exodus 3:15 in the Jewish Publication Society Version and the New Revised Standard Version.

Hyam Maccoby, The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity (San Francisco, 1986), pp. 110–118; and Paul and Hellenism (Philadelphia, 1991), pp. 90–128.

We wish to thank A.J. Levine, Zora Pryor, Harrison Wright and Robert Haak for their useful comments on a draft of this essay.

Compare Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “The Atrahasis Epic and Its Significance for Our Understanding of Genesis 1–9, ” Biblical Archaeologist (1977), pp. 147–155.