English title: Jesus of Nazareth - A Realistic Portrait
This book is soooo good. This book is so good that it makes you angry at other books for not being as good as this one. It should be our right to expect, whenever we pick up a book, that the contents be as insightful and well-researched and reasonable and communicative as this one.
I'm not a religious person and neither is Paul Verhoeven, but we both find the story of Jesus compelling. Verhoeven is world famous as the Dutch director for movies like Robocop, Basic Instinct and Total Recall, but he has also spent the last quarter century studying Jesus and his findings are in this work. Paul Verhoeven is the only non-theologian admitted to the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars dedicated to uncovering the historical Jesus.
He looks at the life of Jesus from an historical point of view, trying to piece together what things were really like through the fog of the heavily-edited gospels. He uses his experience as a movie director to find the real story behind the rescripted storylines everybody knows. He has a simple thesis: that Jesus was a real person, and that nothing impossible ever happened to him. He then re-examines period documents and two thousand years of criticism to piece together the real story of who this person was.
When you start with those ideas as a foundation for a book on Jesus, it means you're going to discount a lot of what is written in the Gospels. What, then, can an author do in this situation?
The options are to: a) rearrange the stories; b) replace some of the content with ideas from apocryphal gospels, other ancient writings, and speculations by centuries of scholars; c) just plain make stuff up.
Verhoeven does all of these things. It makes for an interesting read: he has obviously studied the materials closely, and the book is well-annotated (indeed, 40% of the pages are footnotes).Verhoeven did his homework.
Verhoeven digs into the relationship between Jesus and John the Baptist, the sin of riches, exorcisms, and much more to paint Jesus in human terms. Jesus is not an ideal for Verhoeven, but a living, breathing person, with fears and failures alongside his accomplishments. Jesus is a hunted criminal who masterfully escapes the long arm of the law...until an apostate disciple masquerading as a Zealot (not likely one of the twelve, nor even named Judas, according to Verhoeven) leads the authorities to him.
After Jesus' crucifixion, his disciples believed he returned from the dead. But if the whole of the Jesus story were wrapped up in this miracle of overcoming death, Christianity could not have survived for 2,000 years. Jesus created powerful parables and devised a new code of ethics; regardless of his false understanding that the kingdom of God was imminent, he indeed transformed the world. Verhoeven closes his book with this paradox: Jesus' mistaken view of reality led to the most significant ethical revival in the past two thousand years.
Paul Verhoeven started the book by telling his readers that this is a book he absolutely wanted to publish because it was important to him, and he wasn't sure he would be able to release his views as a film during his lifetime. As it turns out, in 2012 he announced that a film project is being developed. There is already a lot of controversy about the project, and that's a pitty. And actually, I cannot imagine the film being as good as the book, because it's bound to miss a lot of the context and the many annotations that the book has. Although I don't underestimate Verhoeven's talent any more.
