The Once and Future Jesus Conference took the quest of the historical Jesus to a new level. At this unprecedented gathering, leading thinkers turned their attention from the past to the future and asked: What do new understandings of Jesus mean for the church, the faith, and the world of tomorrow? Their answers can be found in the pages of this book.

Did the historical Jesus preach that God was about to bring an end to human history and impose the divine kingdom on the earth and all its peoples? Four eminent New Testament scholars -Dale Allison, Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, and Stephen Patterson- come together under the direction of Robert J. Miller to debate this, the single most important question about the historical Jesus. Borg, Crossan, and Patterson argue that Jesus taught that God's kingdom was already here, not that it was coming in the near future. Dale Allison defends the widely-held view that Jesus was an apocalyptic...

Can the authentic words and deed of Jesus identified by the Jesus Seminar furnish a sufficient basis for a credible profile of the Jesus of history? That is the challenge faced by the contributors to this volume. Their efforts have resulted in a unique collection of studied impressions of Jesus. Here readers will see not Jesus the icon of myth and creed, but a provocative young man of first-century Palestine whose vision and determination to live the vision gave birth to a new form of faith and changed the course of history.

Professor Borg, a nationally known Jesus scholar, offers an accessible guide through the growing maze of literature and research on Jesus. A welcome resource for libraries and researchers, the book focuses on the renaissance in Jesus studies in the 1980s, examines issues in contemporary Jesus research, and reveals how current research may help rethink Jesus' identity.

Originally published in 1984, this extraordinary work has until now been available only in an expensive library edition. The present edition has been completely updated and redesigned, and includes an extended new introduction by Marcus Borg that relates the book's central arguments to subsequent Jesus scholarship. A foreword by N.T. Wright characterizes the book as one of the foundational works in the ""third quest"" for the historical Jesus. In the book, Marcus Borg argues that conflict between a politics of holiness and a politics of compassion, and their implications for Israel, resides...

Jesus and Buddha were separated by five hundred years, three thousand miles, and two drastically different cultures. Yet this trade paper edition of the highly acclaimed hardback juxtaposes passages from the New Testament and ancient Buddhist scriptures to illuminate the striking similarity between their lives, deeds, and teachings.

The image of the historical Jesus takes form in the words of the Gospel Q. The Lost Gospel Q represents the very first Gospel, older than the traditional Gospels and written by Jesus' contemporaries. It preserves Jesus' original words -- the Sermon on the Mount, Beatitudes, the Lord's Prayer, parables, and his counsel for a compassionate life. The original of the Gospel Q was lost for 2,000 years, but for the past 150 years historians and theologians have been digging through the many layers of the New Testament to uncover the original Gospel.

"Who could argue with the message the authors draw from the Bible's Christmas stories? Light in the darkest time of the year, hope in a period of creeping despair--these are powerful and universal themes that can give everyone a stake in Christmas."
--USA Today

In The First Christmas Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan--top Jesus scholars and authors of The Last Week--help us see the real Christmas story buried in the familiar Bible accounts. Basing their interpretations on the two nativity narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke,...

Most Christians are familiar with the story told in Mark's gospel, from the fishermen leaving their nets, to the miracle of the loaves and fishes, to the political rumblings and the crucifixion. But no one knows who Mark really was or why this gospel was written or why it's charged with such a sense of immediacy.

For noted Jesus scholar Marcus Borg, reading Mark is like meeting Jesus again for the first time. Individual readers and parish study groups will learn about this earliest gospel from the perspective of an important Anglican theologian.

Conversations...

Meet Paul Again . . . for the First Time

Continuing in the tradition of The Last Week and The First Christmas, world-renowned New Testament scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan use the best of biblical and historical scholarship to expose the church's conspiracy to silence Jesus's most faithful disciple, the apostle Paul.