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.