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(More customer reviews)This book is not guilty of the major crime perpetrated by most 'historical Jesus' works, yet Mark Gibb's book is ground breaking solid scholarship. There is a major problem, in my opinion, with 'historical Jesus' labors -- that area of scholarship which seeks to know the real non-supernatural person who left tangible effects in and especially on history through his actual words and deeds that resulted in the religion and dominant cultural sphere of Christianity. This problem, and wayward deed, is historical Jesus scholarship, mostly inadvertently, reduces Jesus to a clinical end analysis, ignoring the spirit and heart of the man, ignoring his personal yearnings, desires and life-purpose. It lays out the dead body on the autopsy table for inspection, and severs the cadaver into constituent parts: He said this. He didn't say that. He did this. He couldn't have done that. Here is the language he spoke, with its idioms and nuances. Here were his Jewish beliefs. Here is the Hebrew impact. Here are the Greek, and Roman affects. He was a peasant in a discontented illiterate pastoral society, and the like. Lay out each of the body parts on the table for inspection under hot dehydrating lights. All of them are true, yet each of them is dead. Where is the heart? Under what purpose and intention did these parts come together in a real male human with his own personal mission that only he and his "father" knew. How did he suffer trying to share his visions with others? How much was his social situation typical of new religious movements in general, when the founder is typically ostracized, persecuted, prosecuted by the establishment for upsetting the social order. What kind of personal jealousies swirl around a would-be spiritual teacher in his own family setting, among own small circle of friends, and in own neighborhood? How is Jesus like you and me, rather than either set above us, or set about us in pieces? Religions and cultural paradigm shifts do not arise from dead parts. Where is the humanity of Jesus? Are his spirit, intentions, and undisclosed desires something which we, at times, have shared and can identity with? Read Mark Gibbs' "The "Virgin and the Priest" for the marvelous and astonishing historical Jesus.
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For the first time ever in print, The Virgin and The Priest unravels the Infancy Narratives of the New Testament to reveal how they were compiled to protect the truth of Jesus' parentage from those deemed incapable of receiving it. An ancient formula, explaining why "holy births" in the messianic lineage resulted from questionable sexual relationships, was insinuated into the gospel narratives. These trysts of the Old Testament heroes were necessary in order to "purify" Jesus' ancestry and allow his genetic inheritance to be "sinless." Far from advocating a miraculous birth, the New Testament informs us that Zacharias, the priestly father of John the Baptist, was Jesus' biological father.
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