Barrie Wilson, "How Jesus Became Christian" (2008)

Barrie Wilson, How Jesus Became Christian: The Early Christians and the Transformation of a Jewish Teacher Into the Son of God (St. Martin's Press, 2008).

Wilson covers much the same territory as Bart Ehrman is better known for: critical analysis of how the texts selected for the Bible were written, how the messages of these texts co-relate, and how the various texts were selected for inclusion into the Biblical canon. These respected authors also consider some of the texts that were not included in the canon, exploring the history and themes within the texts, the arguments that raged around whether they should be included in the Bible.

Both authors cover information familiar to scholars of the Bible but that rarely fails to astound those whose critical inquiry has been limited to discussions held in church, or for whom the Bible is foreign territory. Essentially, the message is that the Bible is a product of distinctly human efforts developed over the course of more than a hundred years, that the authors of most of the books of the Bible are not known (despite the various books being named after disciples), and that there are a multitude of contradictions and inconsistencies even between the books accepted into the Biblical canon.

Both authors also describe at length the battles over the right to claim the legacy of Jesus, comparing the faith that developed around Jesus’ brother James in Jerusalem, which adhered closely to Jesus’ attempts to revitalize and strengthen a strict Jewish tradition, and the faith developed by Paul and his adherents that sought to discount many of the distinctly Jewish traits of Jesus’ teachings.

Wilson offers a particularly intriguing suggestion, proposing that there is little to no historical support for many of the events described in Acts. From this observation, and after observation of theological and factual inconsistencies between Acts and the biblical texts that were likely written about the same time, Wilson concludes that the events described in Acts likely never occurred, and that they were possible written to provide a ‘missing link’ to support the philosophical, theological, and political aims of the Pauline branch of the early Church against the Jamesian/Jerusalem branch that adhered more closely to Jewish tradition and Jesus’ teachings.

I particularly found Wilson's book well-written and eminently readable. This may be partly due to the fact that Wilson was attempting to advance a quite new, contentious position.

See my comments on Ehrman's Jesus Interrupted... elsewhere on this blog.