Westminster College Books

As a student at Texas Lutheran (where Dr. Beck serves as chair of the Theology department), I am very familiar with Dr. Beck both as a scholar and as a person. Of his assorted works on New Testament theology, this one (IMO) is his finest, most insightful book. I read it for his New Testament Studies course, and now as I am doing my New Testament Theology independent study with him, I find myself referencing it in my assignments because of its unique insight into certain passages of Scripture. This work is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in biblical studies. You might not always see eye-to-eye with Dr. Beck (I sure don't), but his knowledge base and sheer depth of sincere conviction merit great respect.

A serious bible scholar does responsible criticism and interpretation of the cryptic biblical material, rather than just looking for the end of the world, Dr. Beck is looking at the text to see what it offers for us. As a student of Dr. Beck, I again say that he is (as he has long been) at least a decade ahead of those around him in so many ways - his understanding of Jewish-Christian relationships, biblical material, and church practices.

I first read this book in 1990 after it was assigned for a course on ministry with children I took in a graduate school for Christian Education. After 12 years I am still actively using it. The strength of the book is that it makes a convincing argument concerning the necessary of using children's literature in the Christian nurture of children. If you want children to learn to read and love the Bible, you need to use more than the Bible. This book convinced me of that. It demonstrates in practical ways how to use children's literature in connection with the Bible to give children a fuller understanding of the world God has made. Children's literature becomes a bridge linking the world of the Bible and the world of adults with the world of children. In addition to arguing its point and making excellent suggestions on how to use children's literature in the Christian education of children, the book also includes an annotated booklist of the best children's literature, the age groups for which it is written and a summary of the stories and themes you will find in each of the books. I highly recommend this book for parents, teachers, pastors and directors of Christian Education.

I was very satisfied with the quality of this work. Probably not a coincidence that Oxford University calls it a "Classic".

The author systematically demolishes every aspect of the Jesus Christ story, convincingly arguing that Jesus Christ was a mythical figure who never actually existed, and the Jesus cult is an updating and re-telling of myths that existed in all of what we now call middle-eastern societies 3,000 years ago.

He relates that all of the cultures in the area had this mythology: son of God born to a virgin, suffering, dying and being resurrected. The Babylonians, Attics, Greeks, Egyptians, Essenes, Persians, Indians, and even Jews with their story of Joshua. In every one, the name of the mother of the son was a variation of "Mary". In the Vedic Indian cult, the son's name was Jesudu.

We learn that all of these myths were related to the cycle of the changing length of the days and intensity of the sun during the year; and that Paul rehashed existing sun-worship myths into story of a person he never met named Jesus who was the Messiah who had been born to a young woman named Mary, lived, died, came back to life then levitated up into the sky someplace... and as this had conveniently happened in the past, there was no need to wait for the Messiah any more, we could start worshipping right away.

Drews also shows how the stories in the canonical New Testament are a collection of traditional folk tales from Jesus cults that were mostly oral then written down mostly in the second century after Paul.

He also explains how the story of the cross is wrong - people were hung from poles at the time, not nailed to crosses.... the cross is a stylized representation of the two sticks used to create fire in the sun worship rituals. Normally, a lamb was shown at the center of the cross as this was the symbol of the simultaneous death of the winter and birth of the summer. It wasn't until 600 years after Paul that the Church required a figure of a man representing Jesus at the center of the cross instead of a lamb.

Though a bit turgid, being translated from German, and a bit of heavy slogging in places, the book finishes on a strong note.

If you believe the Jesus story, you will not be pleased with this book.

If you doubt the Jesus story and are looking for some well-researched analysis of the historicity and veracity of the story, this book will be of great interest.

Drews wrote this book in German and it was translated to English with sometimes difficult sentence construction, but the ideas are good and essentially clear. The ideas are not at all outdated. I've read the recent Christ-myth books, such as The Jesus Puzzle, The Christ Conspiracy, The Jesus Mysteries, The Jesus Myth, and Deconstructing Jesus. This book and The Jesus Mysteries are my favorites because instead of only refuting the historical Jesus and discarding the whole of the Jesus story, they ask what is the meaning and value of the myth, in terms of religious experiencing and insight into the relation of self and world.

The conclusion of this book is that given the choice between Jesus as myth and the historical Jesus, the right path for religion as religion is to choose Jesus as myth. If all we have is the historical Jesus of liberal Protestantism, then we no longer have religion, just mundane morality divested of both myth and the supernatural. But if we retain Jesus as myth, then we retain the religious redemption that is possible. He asserts that the Catholic Church could become legitimate by abandoning the historical Jesus and emphasizing the mythic Jesus as redeemer. Despite his elevation of redemption as the true essence of religion, Drews does not define redemption. (I'd define redemption as reconciliation between the self as moral agent and that from which it emanates.) Drews does not explicitly define this reconciliation and explain specifically how the Jesus myth assists this reconciliation.

He explains a main motive for creating the assertion of the historical Jesus. The early Jewish Christian leaders used a strategy of trying to limit authority to themselves and shut out competitors such as Paul and his Gentile/mythic Christianity by creating historical requirements that would serve to exclude others and restrict authority to themselves. Drews shows that this is the same strategy the Church fathers used: assert that the only spiritual authority is that of the person who spent time with the historical Jesus. If Jesus is allowed to be purely mythic, religious authority is potentially spread evenly among all people, but if Jesus is historical as well as mythic, the profitable and advantageous possibility of excluding other authorities arises.

Drews emphasizes the sacred meal as central to early Christian worship and compares it to the central role of soma (= "body") in Vedic religion, thus this book is useful for the entheogenic theory of religion.

To my surprise, The Christ Myth is not at all a rant of Christianity and Christian theology, but rather simply a comparsion between Christian beliefs, similar pagan belies, and the essential meaning behind the motiff of the suffering god image that has persisted religious faith in a number of different ways from Mithras, Odin, and on to the sacraficial vegetation god worshipped by modern pagans. That is at least the first part of the book, the second part takes a look at the Jesus figure himself, apart from his pagan influences, and relates how the character of Jesus came about, meaning what went into him, what sources were used, and the eventual product character that is today the centerpiece of Christianity. But all throughout this, the book is still not work of religious forgery of deception, but rather a book about literature and poetry, and how these two elements forged the image of Jesus Christ.

Well researched but poorly executed. A prime example of turgid,abstruse,poorly organized scholastic writing that all too often characterized late 19th & early 20th centuries. As was pointed out in a previous review,some of this prolix style is a result of translation from the original German. Another difficulty is that of organizing large amounts of ethno religious myth data. This problem was addressed quite satisfactorily by J.M. Robertson in PAGAN CHRISTS (1909)who was another pioneering scholar of the MYTHACIST school of thought regarding christian origins. More recently, Aschyra S.(THE GREATEST STORY EVER SOLD) & Timothy Frecke (THE JESUS MYSTERIES) do a similarly effective examination of the non historicity of the jesus figure. That said,Drews made a powerful contribution that can't be discounted by any serious scholar seeking the truth & not simply a reinforcement of his religious delusions.

You must take a carefull look on this book originally writted at the turn of the century (1910). How actual are the views of this eminent German philosopher.

I am so sorry to be doing this, but I wouldn't want anyone who has read the review by Midwest Book Review to think, as its final sentence asserts, that this "combines his two benchmark books under one cover." I happen to have a paperback edition of THE LIFE OF JESUS CRITICALLY EXAMINED, translated into English by the famous novelist George Eliot, itself 812 pages, in which Strauss exhibited what Nietzsche called the real Straussian genius, as a scholar who was adept at compiling a variety of scholarly views on the subject with a bit of dogmatic import. As Strauss put it on page 780 of his truly great work, "as subject of the predicate which the church assigns to Christ, we place, instead of an individual, an idea." Not surprisingly, the church wanted to maintain its own selection of views on Christ, but it was still possible for Strauss to switch from theology to more popular matters of public opinion, in which pompous thinkers like Wagner and Schopenhauer were lightly skimmed over in favor of the famous old masters of German thought. Wagner and Nietzsche found Strauss particularly vulnerable to attack, and my familiarity with this book is entirely the result of Nietzsche's attempt to destroy it, which provided him a freedom of speech that he could never have savored if he had remained in Germany, a dark and dreary place thoroughly soaked in beer, if Nietzsche can be given any credibility on matters relating to the country of his birth. Strauss deserves to be recognized as the best recorder of ideas with which the most intellectual pretenders to culture intoxicated themselves with their beer, but the jump from Christianity to this, the contrast called forth by the title of this book, is hardly any indication of any great leap forward. At one time, this might have been like a little red book of Chairman Mao Quotations for those who valued their own opinions above all else, but it had been bested by 1873. After Strauss was buried, Nietzsche wrote to one of his friends that he could hope "that I did not sadden his last months, and that he died without knowing anything about me. It's rather on my mind." (11 February 1874) It might also be on the mind of anyone who reads this book today.