As a child of the Scotch Irish diaspora, I am finding this book riveting.

The thesis presented here carefully demonstrates the powerful and ongoing impact of the Hebrew Scripture, particularly the covenanting of God's "Chosen People," on peoples who read and take seriously (even literally) the several thousand year old constructs of the ancient Hebrew tribe of Israel.

Most of my pondering about the "why" of customs and belief systems of my own almost entirely Scotch Irish family find articulation in this amazing book. Four hundred years after Calvin and over 200 since the last of my family left Ulster, the power of the covenant lingers still.

I wish Dr. Akenson could consider exploring the town of Due West, South Carolina, and Erskine College, to find the very strong threads of this culture alive and well in the United States.

D.H. Akenson has masterfully taken a complex subject, that being the Old Testament, along with South African, Irish, and Jewish histories, and has put it together in a very compelling thesis. It is well organized in sections dealing with the origins of the particular covenants, a section on the covenant and the state, and a section of the covenant in recent times. The book is very hard to read for the layman, but for the informed he has done a great service. The only weaknesses I find is that he does not do present enough analysises of the differences within the covenanted peoples, especially as certain factions differed on the application of the covenant.

I randomly picked up this book because I'm trying to learn about the history of Christianity. I haven't studied Christiany much, I'm not a church goer, and I haven't read most of the Bible. What I know of Christianity, I've absorbed from the American culture.

That said, I still enjoyed this book and could understand most of it fairly well. I expected the book to discuss Saul's philosophy and theology in more depth, but that was my mistake. This is a history book and not a philosophy or theology book. Most of the book focuses on debunking other historians views of Saul, Jesus, and the Gospels. Akenson presents Saul, as best he can, as a man who lived in Jesus's time, and most importantly, who wrote his letters before the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. Akenson outlines the probable religious atmosphere of Jesus time, speculates on Jesus's and Saul's relation to Judahism (as Akenson calls it), and discusses Saul's relation to Jesus, the early church, and the Gentiles.

I would have given this book five stars, but the organization of the book was a little too loose for my liking, and I got tired of Akenson harping on other historian's views of the Gospels (To Harkenson's credit, the harping was necessary to defend his presentation of the material... I just wish we would have done more of it in the appendix)

Akenson has done a good job of writing an informative, entertaining and accurate (inasmuch as the latter adjective can be at all meaningful here)book on Paul and Jesus for the lay reader. All in all, a very good hermeneutic reading of both concerned persons and a good illustration of their milieu. However, I have differences of opinion on several issues.
First, the author is quick (and correct) to point out the highly suspect nature of Secret Mark. But he is also quick (incorrectly- this time) to proclaim it a forgery. While I certainly agree that Crossan and Koester have prematurely and somewhat naively antedated this document, there is, at the other logical extreme, no reason to insist that it is an obvious fabrication on the part of Morton Smith (its 'discoverer') or any other. Sure, its possible. But without real evidence, we can just as properly take the leap and say that the earliest fragments of Secret Mark come from C.E. 50. Not a very good approach, of course. Methodologically, the best response to this issue is a negative one; i.e. there is NEITHER evidence that Secret Mark should predate Canonical Mark, NOR any direct evidence that the former is a forgery rather than a very late and poorly documented piece of apocryphal literature.
Second, Akenson seems to misunderstand the idea behind the Criteria of Multiple Attestation. Few biblical scholars (the Jesus Seminar included) believe that the extant Gospels are independent resources, in and of themselves. What they do believe is that there are strands of contradictory material within the Gospels that can be reasonably supposed to have come from a different source than that which they contradict. If some of these differing materials have thematically or theologically common elements, that constitutes a possible or probable independent attestation- not necessarily a definite one (though Akenson is quite right when he says that some scholars have too much faith in this device). Furthermore, Akenson does not delve sufficiently into the debate as to whether John ought to be considered dependent upon the synoptics. The concensus says no but, as Akenson points out elsewhere, others in biblical scholarship are only too willing to appeal to authority. In not dealing more fully with this issue, Akenson misses an important point that is pivotal in either making or breaking his case against the utility of the Criteria of Independent Attestation.
Third, Akenson's treatment of Q seems to me to be too conservative (very much echoing other giants like John Meier and Richard Horsley). He does not seem to want to grant that Q is best explained as having been written in stages (or formative stratum, to use Kloppenborg's terminology). If Q were was orally transmitted, verbatim and near-verbatim agreements on Jesus' aphorisms in Matthew and Luke are hard to explain. If it was not written in various stages, its various thematic tendencies also become cumbersome. While it is clear to me that the 'Cynic Sage' thesis of Burton Mack and Leif Vaage is based on too liberal an approach to scant information, Akenson's (and Meier and Horsley's) methodological conservatism is also somewhat beyond the pale.
Fourth, Akenson is correct to point out that liberal scholars are frequently sailing off the edge of the world in their conjecture. He is also correct to say that Paul is "the nearest thing we have to a witness." Unfortunately, this is not enough. In order for the Quest for the Historical Jesus to succeed to proceed substantively, we need more sources, and such sources as are not so scant in their mention of historical details. Akenson is skeptical of how we can so proceed with every other source being colored by the cultural response to the fall of Jerusalem in C.E. 70, thus most likely endearing himself to Luke Timothy Johnson and other like-minded (and admittedly articulate and respectable) theological conservatives who routinely lecture on the 'limitations of history.' My position is that because we have so very little to go on after C.E. 70, it does not follow that a careful examination of Gospel material cannot yield a reasonable amount of important, accurate and explanatory data. One previous reviewer has stated that "[e]arly First Century Jerusalem is a murky, far-away place, and we're never going to know all we want to about it, or the people who lived in it." That is a more extreme propounding of the non sequitur that lies behind the reluctance of some theological and methodological conservatives. Like the contemporaries of that revolutionary astronomer Copernicus, scholars should be ready to sail off the edge of the world before coming upon is spherical nature. The Gospels are certaunly problematic as sources, but not altogether impenetrable.
Finally, Akenson does not consider the position that Jesus never existed. Paul's relative silence on historical details about him have led some toward that hypothesis- an hypothesis that has recieved too little attention. Ironically, Akenson has firmly grasped some ammunition that could potentially blow a few holes in the mythicist argument but does not feel trigger happy on such an important, albeit little addressed, issue.

All of this aside, however, Akenson's writing ability and his approach to the subject matter as a non-specialist is quite commendable. There are always going to be disagreements in such a volatile subject matter, so my criticisms should not be mistaken for indictments. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in an insightful survey and series of arguments regarding those two great speakers whom we now wish could have written a bit more (though Jesus may not have been literate). A more than satisfactory effort, I recommend it highly.

Akeson is a very entertaining writer, and "Saint Saul" is fun to read even if you disagree with some of the substance. His fundamental argument, which seemed completely convincing to me, is that the epistles of Paul should be the prime source for uncovering the authentic historical Jesus, because Paul, unlike the Gospel writers, wrote before the destruction of the 2d Temple around 70 CE. He explains why many of the analytical tools used by the various questors for the historical Jesus lack analytical rigor, or are based on faulty premises. One obvious example is the one just mentioned -- using the post-destruction gospels and Acts to check the historical accuracy of Saul/Paul's letters. He is very effective in exposing the party-game qualities that underlie some recent, headline grabbing New Testament scholarship. He unequivocally asserts that the Secret Gospel of Mark allegedly discovered by Morton Smith, and relied upon by such groups as the Jesus Seminar, is an outright fraud. The only critisicm I have of the book is one I see in a few of the other comments -- in the end, there is not enough about Saul/Paul, and the book sometimes reads as a CliffNote's version of Akenson's "Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds", which is referenced throughout. Nonetheless, the book substantially increased my ability to test recent hypotheses by exposing flaws in logic, so I still recommend it highly.

I had read a couple of reviews of Surpassing Wonder both of which noted that the author Donald Harman Akenson is a professor of history at Queens University in Kingston Ontario. Based on this, I approached the text as history. On that basis, the book is a disappointment. It is written in an easy going style, the style of a well written piece of fiction. However, the arguments of the author are that this is a serious historical work. All too often in reading the text and look up the end note( there are 95 pages of end-notes) the note would essentially contradict the statement in the text. The author does provide a considerable number of cultural and historical references, many of which are enlightening but the book must be read with caution. The author's tendency to dismiss other writers, and in particular biblical scholars, as less then competent raises some serious questions about the objectivity of the book; the author's reference to those scholars involved in The Jesus Seminar, as coming from "institutions that are second-line, and associated with weak and declining churches" (p. 543) is a good example of both a value-judgement and a statement not backed up with data, which tend to denigrate those involved in The Jesus Seminar in a most unscholarly manner. The author's use of the technical names for the Jewish texts, i.e. the Tanakh, the Torah, and the Talmud, are generally accurate, but a little more scholarly work, or checking with a Rabbi, would have provided Akenson with the appropriate name for an English version (i.e. not a translation) of the Pentatuch, which is the Chumash. Basically I found the book disappointing as a serious work of history, and misleading in its treatment of the Christian Bible, and of the Jewish Talmuds. It is a fun read in many respects, if a bit negative, but the fun wears thin as the inaccuracies and misleading statements build.

Wow! What a read! "Surpassing Wonder" is surpassingly satisfying. Here in this book are the answers to the riddles of the ages. Who wrote the Bible, and the when, where, what, and why of it. Where did the Jews come from, and the Christians? All is explained, clearly and conclusively. Akenson creates order out of chaos, like a veritable god.

The author is quite upfront in warning off readers who will not profit from this book: i.e. those devoted to the concept of Bible inerrancy or otherwise unwilling or unable to broaden their perspectives. Those readers are missing out on a wonderful ride. In a manner reminiscent of Stephen Jay Gould (another author I wouldn't recommend to the blinkered reader), Akenson combines humor, imagination and scholarship to explore the incredible richness of Biblical texts. I was very impressed with his main thesis, which is audacious yet plausible and cogently argued. The book is more than a satisfying intellectual read. It is an invitiation to share in the author's unquenchable joy as he attempt to answer questions central to our understanding of ourselves.

This Corrects misspelling (rode)...

I would recommend a Christian spend their money on any of the above books and not waste it on this book. This book is about a Jewish Rabbi who already has ignored over 300 prophecies in the Old Testament which He says he is a scholar of. This Rabbi says nothing about Daniel's prophecy that the Messiah had to come before the destruction of the 2nd Temple in 70 A.D. He doesn't bother to explain that Daniel gave the exact day that Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a colt; when He let Himself be proclaimed Messiah & King. Having missed these, Rabbi Neusner then naturally proceeds arguing with Jesus as if Jesus was not the Son of God. Memorable arguments this Rabbi mounts are the same ones that Jews of Jesus's day argued--such as why does Jesus do miracles on the Sabbath, and why do the apostles pick corn on the Sabbath. He cannot see why Jesus does not teach Torah as Moses did (i.e. God said), but teaches it as in His own name. The Rabbi says nothing about Moses himself writing that a prophet greater than he would come (Jesus). I found this book so dull and uninspired reading that I got through only about 1/2 of it before being bored to death and giving it up. The "veil" remains. I found this book so dull and uninspired reading that I got through only about 1/2 of it before being bored to death and giving it up.

I would recommend a Christian spend their money on any of the above books and not waste it on this book. This book is about a Jewish Rabbi who already has ignored over 300 prophecies in the Old Testament which He says he is a scholar of. This Rabbi says nothing about Daniel's prophecy that the Messiah had to come before the destruction of the 2nd Temple in 70 A.D. He doesn't bother to explain that Daniel gave the exact day that Jesus tode into Jerusalem on a colt; when He let Himself be proclaimed Messiah & King. Having missed these, Rabbi Neusner then naturally proceeds arguing with Jesus as if Jesus was not the Son of God. Memorable arguments this Rabbi mounts are the same ones that Jews of Jesus's day argued--such as why does Jesus do miracles on the Sabbath, and why do the apostles pick corn on the Sabbath. He cannot see why Jesus does not teach Torah as Moses did (i.e. God said), but teaches it as in His own name. The Rabbi says nothing about Moses himself writing that a prophet greater than he would come (Jesus). I found this book so dull and uninspired reading that I got through only about 1/2 of it before being bored to death and giving it up. The "veil" remains.

Most Christians do not understand the conflict between the Jesus and the Pharisees. Was Jesus enlightened to God's intent and the Pharisees in the dark? Read this book and the foundation of that dispute opens in front of you. Neusner did not change my religious convictions, but he opened my heart and mind to the reasons the Pharisees did not accept Jesus and felt threatened by his message. It was not about mere political power. Their refusal was based upon deeply held convictions. Please, read this book.