Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millennium - Hardcover

Speaking out on the historical Jesus for the first time, the founder of the pioneering Jesus Seminar launches a landmark new investigation into who Jesus really was. With brilliant insight, Robert Funk reveals how Jesus was transformed from iconoclast to icon, and outlines a daring, tradition-shattering agenda for freeing Jesus from the constraints of orthodoxy and reinventing Christianity for the coming era.

"I am inclined to the view that Jesus caught a glimpse of what the world is really like when you look at it with Gods eyes. He endeavored to pass that glimpse along in short stories we call parables and in subversive proverbs we call aphorisms. But he did not spell out what he meant. I have a glimpse of the real Jesus stealing a peek at Gods domain. My glimpse is informed by, but bypasses, the Jesus of the Gospels the Christ superimposed by the evangelists on their own glimpse of the real Jesus... I am convinced that the New Testament conceals the real Jesus as frequently as it reveals him."-from the Introduction

In Honest to Jesus, Robert Funk, one of the preeminent biblical scholars of our time, embarks on a radical investigation into the transformation of Jesus, the social rebel and iconoclast, into Jesus, the religious icon. Founder of the Jesus Seminar the group of writers, philosophers, and theologians spearheading new research into the historical Jesus and the authenticity of the gospels -- Funk has never before articulated his own bold and fearless vision of who Jesus truly was and how his legacy should be approached by the modern world.

In brilliant detective work, Funk dismantles the ancient gospels in his search for the true voice of Jesus -- the coiner of sayings, the teller of tales and aphorisms, and the performer of symbolic acts. And Funk finds in the gospels a Jesus whose troubling and even subversive vision of Gods domain on earth led him to Jerusalem, to persecution, and finally to execution as a common criminal.

Funk's investigation concludes with an explosive call to arms. In twenty-one theses, Funk articulates a revolutionary new vision of Jesus and Christianity for the next millennium. Freed from religious and political propaganda, liberated from the cobwebs of orthodoxy, this is a Jesus restored to the roles of social critic, dissident and sage. Funk envisions a revitalized Christianity shaped by history rather than orthodoxy and based not on the Christ of the creeds but on the teachings of Jesus in all their original power. Forthright, penetrating, and as radical as the mysterious figure it investigates, Honest to Jesus is a new classic in the debate over the search for the real Jesus and its implications for modern Christianity.