Book Review: King of the Jews

King of the Jews by D. Thomas Lancaster

When I was a child, I asked my parents if there was "any more to the Bible". Somehow, although I couldn't put my finger on what I wanted, it seemed like the story was not complete. At the time my parents gave me a stock answer, along the lines of "the canon of scripture is set". I felt that something was missing- and today I would say I was looking for some historical context. What else was going on while Yeshua was calming the wind and waves of Galilee? What kinds of people crowded around Him to hear him speak and ask for healing?

In this book, Thomas Lancaster explores that context; not just the physical setting but the cultural, theological, and Rabbinic context of His life and teaching. In my dear Baptist upbringing, I had always been taught that Yeshua's teachings were utterly novel, that He came to start a new religion and those foolish Jews just didn't really understand Him very well. Here we learn quite the opposite- Yeshua sometimes alluded to parables and teachings which had originated from other rabbis, He never desired a divorce between His followers and Judaism, and His Jewish contemporaries understood Him oh so very well... and we are the ones with some bizarre notions.

The book consists of nineteen articles originally from Torah Club #4, and many of them were reprinted in messiah magazine. (They were my favorite feature and I am excited to see them all reprinted in one book.) They cover topics from Yeshua's birth to His death, His parables and miracles, John the Baptist's ministry, and such things as apocryphal gospels and Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. Lancaster helps us shed the blinders of thousands of years of a Greek mindset. He references the Talmud and other ancient Jewish writings to illustrate how Yeshua's contemporaries understood Him, and how He fit in that culture... and how we can better understand His teachings and follow Him.

Here is a quote from the Introduction:

The Church's sacred writings-the Gospels and Epistles left behind by those earliest believers-testify to the absolute Jewishness of the man and the original faith. The evidence remains within the books of the New Testament like an ancient, hidden code... The code could also be described as a paradigm of thought and interpretation. The paradigm is late second-Temple Judaism. Therefore, our best resource for interpretation is Jewish literature that was written in the same paradigm. For example, it is hard to correctly interpret the parables of Jesus in isolation, but when the reader compares the parables of Jesus with the hundreds of similar rabbinic parables preserved in ancient Jewish literature, he suddenly has a contextual matrix from which to draw understanding.

Book Review: Understanding the Difficult Words of Jesus

Understanding the Difficult Words of Jesus by David Bivin and Roy B. Blizzard

There are many expressions in the Gospels which are difficult to understand, and many which are so familiar we think we know what they mean. But do we? This book approaches the Gospels from a unique hermeneutical angle. The thesis is that Hebrew, not Aramaic or Greek, was the language of the common people in the first century C.E. They postulate that an account of Yeshua's life was originally written in Hebrew and later translated into Greek, as the need arose, and eventually this morphed into the three synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Many Hebraic sayings and idioms appear to be translated word-for-word into Greek, with confusing consequences for modern English readers. They believe the original chronology of the gospels has become jumbled, and therefore these parables and teachings have lost their original contexts.

I would recommend this book to anyone who would like a greater understanding of the cultural context of the Gospels, and to anyone who has come away from a parable of Yeshua with more questions than answers.

Here is an excerpt from Chapter 6, Page 88:

"The kingdom of God has come near you.

"In Hebrew, 'to come near' means 'to be at.' If we try to understand Luke 10:9 and 11, quoted above, by reading the Greek word engiken (translated 'has come near') we are in trouble. Engiken means 'about to appear' or 'is almost here'. However, if we translate it back into Hebrew, we get an entirely different meaning. The Hebrew equivalent of engiken is the verb karav, which means 'to come up and be with' or 'to be where something or someone else is.'

"The Greek engiken, or the English, 'near,' mean: 'It's not yet here.' The implication is that the Kingdom of God is futuristic, not yet here. The Hebrew karav means the exact opposite: 'It's here! It has arrived!' "

This book is available at Beth Shechinah.