A well-written reference book which provides an in-depth look at Greek grammar. It serves as a wonderful aid in research or sermon preparation. Recommended for a specialist or someone with considerable familiarity with Koine Greek.

BDF is still the standard Greek grammar of the New Testament even after four decades. It is in the process of being revised (by a revision committee of eight members), but the revision will take several more years to complete. We felt it needed revision because BDF presupposes that the average reader has had much exposure to classical Greek prior to working in the New Testament. This is part of the reason that BDF is so hard to use: most NT students have not had exposure to classical Greek nowadays. Another reason is its cryptic nature, Teutonic abbreviations, and omission of 'normal' grammar. Nevertheless, even with these shortcomings, every responsible exegete of the New Testament must own a copy of this goldmine of information.

Daniel B. Wallace, Professor of New Testament Studies, Dallas Theological Seminary

Robert Funk wrote a gem of a book that attempts to tease out the ideas and approaches of Jesus, the man, seperate from the meditations and the symbolic language of biblical writers trying to convey the significance of the risen Christ. The results are thoughtful and, no doubt, controversial. He covers a lot of ground in a very few pages. I believe he also gives us a sense of what Jesus may have been like. For an attempt at de-mythological description, I find it amazingly spiritual. If you find value in trying to put a human face on the man who became a religious icon (as I do) I recomend this book highly.

Honest to Jesus is an interesting, energetic, and riveting book for anybody who is concerned about asking questions that would scare the pants off of Rev. Smiley in the average orthodox Christian pulpit. If you're not up to the challenge and are totally satisfied with your version of "faith," you won't want to pick up this book. Be prepared to lose some sleep. The book depressed me and energized me, all at the same time. Funk pushes the limit of scholarship to uncover the historical Jesus. However, be warned: there is more to the historical Jesus than what Funk suggests.

There is a lot that we don't and can't know, being human and having a finite lifespan. Funk proposes that historicity is the answer to nearly every problem and intellectual question. To this end, Honest to Jesus will stimulate minds, but dull hearts in the same time. Be ready to rethink your views on God's Kingdom - and Funk's, while you're at it.

In HONEST TO JESUS Robert Funk describes the methods used by biblical scholars in their quest of the historical Jesus. He shows how the Jesus Christ of the Nicean Creed of the fourth century can be traced back to the humble Jewish sage of Nazareth and then retraced on a return trip to Nicea where he is resurrected after three centuries of promotion by his gentile admirers to full divinity as the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. Funk also uses a good part of the book attempting to describe the historical Jesus using what the author considers to be the likely authentic words and deeds of the real Jesus.

Funk believes that public knowledge about the ancient gospels is woefully inadequate. Mainline churches do not address the questions people in the pews are asking about Jesus. Biblical scholars may know many of the answers to these questions but the scholars are only talking to each other. The aim of the quest of the historical Jesus is to liberate Jesus from this prison and especially from the captivity of the church creeds.

Christianity took its conclusive shape with the formation of church creeds and canons at church councils held in the fourth century C.E. Progress in this area was aided by the support and guidance of Roman Emperor Constantine.

World dominance of Christianity is at an end, according to Funk. It is not, however, the end of Christianity but actually a great opportunity to begin anew. Our understanding of the origins of the Christian religion is constantly changing. Funk believes a new perception of Jesus is possible if we place him back in his modest beginnings in Nazareth.

We have forgotten many things about Jesus that must have been obvious to his contenporaries, according to the author. For instance, Jesus was a social deviant who practiced an open table. He also criticized public displays of piety and certainly did not support the use of brokers in one's relationship to God.

Honest to Jesus is a no nonsense book that will delight the serious reader and quester for the historical Jesus. Out with mythology, out with theology, out with canonical boundaries. The There will be none of these in Funk's historical journey back to Nazareth to recover the identity of the real Yeshua.

Bob Funk, biblical scholar and founder of the Westar Institute which sponsors the Jesus Seminar project, has written a book that gives the layperson an inside look at what critical scholarship has unveiled thus far about the man we today know as Jesus. Funk avers that the Jesus whom Christianity has appropriated as its founder, god, messiah, savior, redeemer, miracle worker, etc. is hardly a good picture of the man who lived almost two millennia ago. The Christian Jesus/Christ is larger than life, a theologized and mythologized version. Funk asserts that the Apostle's Creed glaringly points to the importance the Church has placed on the life of Jesus--there is no mention of his life at all apart from his virgin birth, death and resurrection. The Creed turned Jesus into a god-man.

Funk's quest is to find the Jesus before all the layers of mythology and theology were piled on top of him. The quest for the historical Jesus is to determine what Jesus really said and did, what his vision of God was, what Jesus was trying to direct our attention to. Ultimately Christianity is not about Christ or Jesus but about God....

I have used Johnson's book as one of the textbooks in my "Life and Teachings of Jesus" course this past year. Students have found it stimulating and provocative. They are initially put off by Johnson's elitist, arrogant attack on the Jesus Seminar, but because of the book's lively style (and with my assurance that Johnson is actually a qualified New Testament scholar) they persist and discover his elegantly developed explanation of the relationship between history and faith. Johnson's attack on the Jesus Seminar is not entirely fair. Of course, his slamming of writers like Spong and Thiering is much deserved. On the other hand, he primarily attacks Borg for making a name for himself and advancing his career doing historical Jesus research. I thought choosing an area of specialization, becoming a productive writer, and advancing in the profession was what all academics seek to do. Johnson first criticizes Jesus Seminar members for not teaching at Harvard, Yale, Duke, Emory, etc. (as if everyone could) then criticizes many of them for doing their graduate work at those same institutions. He needs to make up his mind. Johnson's critique of Crossan is valid at many points, but he dismisses Crossan's work much too easily. It is not fair to lump him together with Spong and Thiering. I suppose Johnson needed to get all of that venom out of his system before he could write productively, and that is why I consider his book to be worth the battle of getting through the first couple of chapters. In the end it serves as a great reassurance that the best way to discover Jesus is to read the canonical gospels, which is what I still spend most of the course doing.

In his introduction Luke Timothy Johnson writes that he meant to "blow the whistle on a form of scholarship" which he considered "misguided and misleading." Instead he found himself caught up in a continuing debate over the Jesus Seminar, a debate propelled by the media which Johnson thought the wrong place for "such discussions to occur." It is contra the Jesus Seminar that Johnson writes. The JS is a small self-selected group of scholars unaffiliated with groups such as the Society of Biblical Literature. Though it does contain scholars of note, it does not contain scholars from many major institutions such as Yale, Emory, Duke, or Chicago.

Johnson next engages a number of scholars and other writers such as Thiering, Wilson (just a writer), Spong (also not an NT scholar), Borg and Crossan. To put it succinctly, Johnson finds that Jesus has been turned into a "cultural critique" that many think the world needs. For Johnson this is "platitudinous." Instead Johnson argues that the Gospels can tell us something about the historical Jesus even though they reveal a theological agenda. Further he argues that historical knowledge is normative for Christain faith.

(Fast forward toward the end of the book.) From non-canonical sources, Johnson finds covergences of evidence. From Jospehus, Tacitus, the Babylonian Talmud, Lucian of Samasota, Pliny, etc., Johnson finds that Christos was a virtual name of a man who lived in Palestine who was known as a wonder worker and a teacher and who was executed by Pontius Pilate. The followers of this man were known by religious designations and _never_ as a political movement.

Other convergences are drawn from the Pauline writings, Hebrews, and the Gospels. Johnson thus concludes that the earliest Christian literature shows a deep consistancy as "Jesus as Messiah." Though page 166 is not the end of the book, there Johnson raises the pivotal question of whether some of the claims for the pursuit of the hsitorical Jesus are not flights from the NT texts. It is there that Johnson says one can find the real Jesus.

Luke Timothy Johnson is a heavyweight in Christian scholarship and in this clear and concise book, he exposes the "misguided quest" of the Jesus Seminar. This book strengths lie in that Johnson, a first rate scholar, explains why the quest for a historical Jesus often fails.

The book introduces the Jesus Seminar and some of their most popular teachers and scholars. One reviewer clamims that Johnson is Polemic, but I am curious what he considers polemic. Johnson is not polemic, but honest in his assesments of this group. He informs the reader which Seminar folk are actual scholars and which ones are not.

Johnson then reminds the reader the "limitations of history" in trying to develop a historical Jesus. This area examines the limtations of this social science. He then develops what is "historical about Jesus" and the "Real Jesus." This book is an easy read, yet has enough depth that it adequately deals with such an important topic. While I cannot completely agree with Johnson on every detail, he has produced a great work which is neeeded as a counter-balance to the media circus that surrounds the Jesus Seminar and the often lack of serious scholastic response by "litarlist Bible Christians."

I can't believe all the wasted ink attacking these people. None of the historians reviewing the gospels is saying "If we don't think it happened, don't believe it." Every one that I've read (maybe 20 books) is only saying that, as historians, it's not their job to examine and analyze miracles (changing water to wine and coming back from the dead). That's the job of theologians. An historian's job is to compare the gospels and historical records and see what seems likely or unlikely. You want to believe in miracles? Fine. You believe Jesus was the son of God? Fine. Why waste your time attacking scholars on a subject they're, admittedly, not even trying to deal with. That being said, here's my problem with this book. Since three of the gospels tell (with slight variation) the same story, why have the text of Mathew, Mark and Luke included separately? The reader covers the same ground and analysis three times. It would have been much easier for the reader to combine the story of the synoptic gospels and read the analysis once. My other problem is the translation. If Jesus was charismatic, as these scholars claim, then HOW he said things was just as important as WHAT he said. There is not an ownce of beauty or inspiration in this translation. It is broken down to the simplist, most comman language. No one not already a Christian would be converted by this boring, pedestrian version.

As Jew married to a Christian, and who's children, given free will choose Christanity, I have always been put off by the New Testament either the King James or Revised Standard Edition.

So it was a marvelous suprise to find this book, As soon as I read the introduction I knew this is a book I yearned for for 53 years. Here is the real Jesus, minus the overlay of a Christian sect using him to there own agenda. I have lived my life using many of the teachings of Jesus especially the sermon on the Mount.

However, to convert to Christanity one needs to really understand the man. To me Jesus is not the Christ,created by Paul, Mary and Peter, but another great leader like Moses, Mohatma Ghandi, Mohammad, or Buddha. In that textual assumtion one can believe in Jesus and his teaching and not get caught up in theology. Too many Christians, like too many Jews, or Mohamadans profess their allegence to their faith but rarely follow it's teachings. Just imagine a world where we would all do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Hate,war, bigotry, man's inhumanity to their fellow man would vanish. Then one could truly beleive in a Messiah that changed the world. Now we can only understand the Acts of Jesus and try to practise what he preached.

I have read several of the Jesus Seminar series now and have many more on the shelf to read as well as books from some of the individual scholars. But what intrigues me about this volume is the cross reference work and foot notes that help me to better understand the context of the what Jesus did and what was done to him.

After reading much of this volume, I can say that I was not disappointed in the thorough and logical way in which the case for the historical acts by and toward Jesus were developed. This book will find a prominent place on my reference shelf for those times when I need a detailed analysis to answer the question, "What would Jesus do?"

A must have for any serious New Testament work.

[...] Funk indeed attempts to force a particular viewpoint: the Christ of faith is a fiction. Whether you believe that or not, the problem with the Jesus Seminar is that their scholarship is flawed. They apply certain criteria to "determine" what Jesus "historically" said, yet they ignore their own criteria when it comes to miracles. For more details regarding the problems with the Jesus Seminar, read Jesus Under Fire.

This book, like all of the books by those involved with the Westar Institute, gives the reader a chance to make intelligent decisions about one's faith on one's own. Unlike many so-called theological books on the market, this book does not attempt to proselytize and force a particular viewpoint onto the reader.

Read, enjoy, and expand your theological and faith horizons.

A lot of people have attacked the Jesus Seminar and its credibility. For those who have doubts read "The Jesus Seminar and its Critics." Though I don't agree with everything they believe (i.e. their view on miracles) they have done some respectable things that can only help in our search for the truth, such as this book. This book should not replace the canonized gospels but shouldn't be discarded either.