A Short Review of “Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet” by Dale Allison

Today I finished reading “Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet” by Dale Allison. I thought this book was okay in many respects. It’s primarily a new defense of the idea that Jesus was an eschatological prophet. It is a defense in the sense that Allison critiques and challenges the methods and conclusions of scholars such as John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, Stephen Patterson who reject such an idea in favor of seeing Jesus as either a Jewish Cynic or aphoristic sage. It is new in the sense that Allison qualifies Jesus’ eschatology as taking the forms of millenarianism and asceticism.


Allison’s critique of the methods of Crossan et al is both thorough and enlightening. In some places, it’s fun. I’ve never taken Crossan, Borg, and their ilk seriously, but it is amusing to see them taken to the scholarly woodshed.

While I do appreciate Allison’s defense of the eschatological nature of Jesus ministry, I am not convinced that Jesus and his fledgling pre-Easter movement can or should be categorized as millenarian. At the very least, that is too broad a term to be adequately applied to Jesus’ context.

On the other hand, Allison’s examination of Jesus asceticism was thoroughly enjoyable and highly thought-provoking. In particular, I was intrigued by the notion that Jesus ascetic practices of property, money, poverty, sex, and housing were a part of his belief in a “realized eschatology” that pointed back to a pre-Fallen Edenic world and towards a New Creation. Interesting.

The place where I find the biggest fault with Allison here is his adherence to the view that Jesus did indeed expect an imminent, catastrophic end of the world. His errors: 1) He dies not sufficiently understand the characteristics, purpose, and role of apocalyptic language and literature. 2) He underestimates Jesus’ grasp of the apocalyptic. 3) He seems to maintain that any supposed popularity of misinterpretation of a literary form during its lifetime negates an author’s intentions if holding true to that form. 4) Is a common era that would take too long to explain but involves incongruity between what some scholars think that the Gospel writers did with the predictions of Jesus and what one would have expected them to do if these same scholars are correct.

Still, a very good book.

A Short Review of “The Historical Figure of Jesus” by E. P. Sanders

Last night I finished reading “The Historical Figure of Jesus” by E. P. Sanders. I did enjoy the book – admittedly, some parts more enthusiastically than others. Some of his methodology is a little stale and he is hindered because of it. I really enjoyed his analysis of the political setting of Jesus’ life in 1st century Palestine, although I think he underestimates the Jewish perception of Roman oppression.

He’s too quick to dismiss the reliability of the confrontation scenes between Jesus and his “enemies” because of the weakness of “enemy” arguments and because of the theological arrangement of such scenes by the Gospel writers. I do think this leads Sanders to minimize the tension between Jesus and the Pharisees, which is puzzling since he ends the book with such a forceful (and, in my opinion, accurate) statement of Jesus’ self-conception of his role: Jesus regarded himself as having the right to say who would be in the Kingdom of God and he held that God was acting directly and immediately through him, bypassing the Law.

While he repeatedly states how important the Scriptures were to Jesus as a first century Jew and while he agrees that Jesus was enacting some of the Old Testament prophecies (particularly in his final week), except in a far too generalized fashion, Sanders shies away from exploring Jesus’ understanding of the Scriptures and prophetic traditions and how it influenced his conception of his ministry and mission.

This is perhaps one of the reasons Sanders makes the big mistake of rejecting the idea that Jesus understood the Kingdom of God has having a present as well as a future reality. In some places I believe he violates his own methodology in order to keep Jesus’ teachings of the Kingdom to be “at hand” and never “among you.”

Where I believe Sanders gets it very right is the reason Jesus was arrested. Namely, Jesus’ enacted parable of “cleansing the Temple” was seen and rightly understood as a prophecy predicting the Temple’s utter destruction by God.

A very well written and researched book.