Paul Verhoeven's "Jesus of Nazareth"

Paul Verhoven is a bit dated as a celebrity, to the extent that the Jesus Seminar he was a member of is also. He ought to have been dated sooner, as he is a movie director and not a scholar; but to that extent as well, the Jesus Seminar is perhaps the best place for him, since that body is so filled with poor scholarship on its own.

Jesus of Nazareth [JoN] would seem to the layman like an erudite work, but it took only 55 pages for me to see it was not. Rather. Verhovan is a seed-picker, and in JoN he merely scatters the seeds of whatever his favorite views are. He reports that as a child, he took Jesus' promises about prayer with fundamentalist literailty [5]: "Your mind could actually control matter through prayer. Jesus himself said so." And as my "you may be a fundy atheist" list puts it, his ideas about God haven't improved in the interim.

Suffice to say, in line with the above, there's nothing of value in JoN which we haven't covered on Tekton before -- just a buffet of some of the most outlandish ideas to come from Jesus Seminar Way.