One book to rule them all – John Anderson’s non meme

Earlier this week John Anderson asked the very difficult question:

What ONE book has most shaped your perspective on the Bible and why?

Indeed, it was so difficult I was avoiding answering it, because every time I thought of one book, I was all Vicky Pollard about it (For all you non Little Britain watchers – “Yeah but no but yeah but no but…”).

Then I thought how much more fun it would be to list the books that had clearly had the most influence on others (e.g. Mark Goodacre – Q, Jim West – Wikipedia and so on). But such procrastination is unworthy, and I finally settled on the one I shall dare to name as Ed Sanders’ Jesus and Judaism.

Why? Because I’d recently got very fed-up with backwards and forwards arguments about christological titles, or wrestling with the dubious logic of form criticism and its attempt to isolate apophthegms as though you could pronounce on their historicity only once they were extracted from any historical context given them in the tradition.

In contrast, Sanders wrote well, argued in ways that looked remarkably like real history, and showed some real and infectious enthusiasm for his subject, to say nothing of incredibly wide-ranging knowledge of the field. It was in the best sense of the word “academic” rigorously argued, engaging in scholarship, and demonstrating mastery of the field. At the same time it avoided all those faults most commonly indicated by the description academic – it was exciting and not tediously dry, it was clear and comprehensible instead of obfuscatingly incomprehensible and it never got lost in the obscurity of its own footnotes but clearly saw how the trees fitted into the wood.

So there you have it. You may now have your own Vicky Pollard moment (“Whatever”).

Tagged as: books, E. P. Sanders, historical Jesus, memes