Un Grand Jour Demain...

[Roniberal]

[Ash]

Ses ouvrages sont intéressants, j'essayerai de me procurer celui-ci.

[Invité jabial]

Faites moi signe quand il sortira.

[Roniberal]

Faites moi signe quand il sortira.

Tu peux déjà le commander sur amazon.

[Taranne]

Who Was Jesus? Pope Benedict's Answer

With 'Jesus of Nazareth,' Pope Benedict XVI fights back against 'the dictatorship of relativism' by showing the world his vision of the definitive truth of Christ.

By Lisa Miller

Newsweek

May 21, 2007 issue - Who was Jesus, really? It has become acceptable, even fashionable, lately to speak of the Christian Lord in casual terms, as though he were an acquaintance with a mysterious past. Pope Benedict's trip to Brazil last week revived an old retelling of the Christian story in which Jesus is cast as a social revolutionary determined to overthrow the established order. The massive success of "The Da Vinci Code" reflected the hunger of millions to see Jesus as a regular person—a man with a wife and a child, a popular teacher whose true life story was subverted by the corporate self-interest of the early church. A look at any best-seller list reveals a thriving subcategory of readable scholarly and pseudo-scholarly books about the "real" Jesus: he was, they claim, a sage, a mystic, a rabbi, a boyfriend. He was a father, a pacifist, an ascetic, a prophet. In some parts of the Christian world, the aspects of Jesus' story that most strain credibility—the virgin birth and the physical resurrection—have become optional to faith.

One can almost hear Pope Benedict XVI roaring with frustration at this multiplicity of interpretations. Benedict, a theologian by training with an expertise in dogma, has been fierce in his condemnation of the creep of Western secularism, and the promiscuity of recent Jesus scholarship must seem to him another symptom of the same disease, all ill-founded and subjective claims. "We are building a dictatorship of relativism," he declared at the beginning of the 2005 enclave that elected him pope, "that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires." Benedict's answer to secularism is Christ, and this week the American publisher Doubleday releases "Jesus of Nazareth," Benedict's portrait of his Lord. It is an orthodox biography—one that acknowledges the role of analytical scholarship while in fact leaving little room for a critical interpretation of Scripture. This approach is not surprising, given Benedict's job description, but in a world where Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and other proponents of secularism credit belief in Jesus as one of the sources of the world's ills, Benedict offers an unvarnished opposing view: belief in Jesus, he says, is the only thing that will save the world.

And so, in a way, in the big bookstores and Amazon.com rankings, the ancient war between believers and nonbelievers begins anew. Liberal Catholics worry that, in spite of assurances to the contrary, Benedict is writing an "official" biography, and they have cause for concern. Benedict has been notoriously disapproving of unauthorized views of Jesus; he helped John Paul II crush the liberation theologists in Central America in the 1980s and more recently suspended an American priest for writing a book about Jesus that he said did not give sufficient credence to the resurrection. But for orthodox Christian believers, Benedict's book is a gift—a series of homilies on the New Testament by a masterful Scriptural exegete. In NEWSWEEK's exclusive excerpt, the pope explicates Jesus' baptism by John—a story that appears in all four Gospel accounts and that modern historians believe is at least partially grounded in fact. Benedict starts by describing the social and historical backdrop of the time, and the common use of ritual ablutions among first-century Jews. His picture of John the Baptist reflects the scholarly consensus in most respects; the Baptist was an ascetic who likely spent time with the Essenes, a group of Jews who lived in the desert awaiting the imminent arrival of the Messiah.

(Benedict is notably silent, though, on the Baptist as an apocalyptic preacher and on the probability that Jesus also believed that the world was about to end in flames. In a discussion elsewhere in "Jesus of Nazareth," Benedict goes to lengths to show that when Jesus said, "The Kingdom of God is at hand," he didn't mean the apocalypse. What he meant, the pope writes, is that "God is acting now—this is the hour when God is showing himself in history as its Lord." This interpretation may be profound and in keeping with Benedict's Christ-centered message; it is not, many scholars would say, historically accurate.)

In one of the excerpt's most affecting scenes, Benedict describes the hordes of sinners he imagines standing on the banks of the Jordan River waiting for baptism. Jesus waits among them. Morphing from historian to pastor, Benedict asks the question that so many Sunday-school teachers have asked before him: as the Son of God, why would Jesus need to be purified? "The real novelty is the fact that he—Jesus—wants to be baptized, that he blends into the gray mass of sinners waiting on the banks of the Jordan," writes Benedict. "Baptism itself was a confession of sins and the attempt to put off an old, failed life and to receive a new one. Is that something Jesus could do?"

With that, the senior theologian steps in, the man whose job for two decades was to defend Catholic doctrine to the world. Jesus' descent into the water is a symbolic foreshadowing, Benedict explains, of his death and resurrection—and the resurrection he promises to all his followers. In the ancient Middle East, water represents death; it also represents life. With his baptism, "Jesus loaded the burden of all mankind's guilt upon his shoulders; he bore it down into the depths of the Jordan," Benedict writes. "He inaugurated his public activity by stepping into the place of sinners. His inaugural gesture is an anticipation of the Cross. He is, as it were, the true Jonah who said to the crew of the ship, 'Take me and throw me into the sea'."

What of the next part of the story? The part where Jesus rises from the water, the heavens part, the Spirit descends on his shoulders (in the shape of a dove) and God's voice says, "This is my Son, the Beloved, in whom I am well pleased." Does Benedict believe, as the fundamentalists do, that this literally happened? George Weigel, the theologian and papal biographer, imagines that something very important happened that day—what, exactly, he does not know. Benedict is asking readers to see Scripture as inspired but not dictated by God, Weigel explains, and to see the New Testament narrators as real people grappling with "the extreme limitations of the describable." For Benedict, the starting point is faith.

"Jesus of Nazareth," then, will not bring unbelievers into the fold, but courting skeptics has never been Benedict's priority. Nor will his portrait join the lengthy list of Jesus biographies so eagerly consumed by the non-orthodox—the progressive Protestants and "cafeteria Catholics" who seek the truth about Jesus in noncanonical places like the Gnostic Gospels. Moderates may take "Jesus of Nazareth" as something of a corrective to fundamentalism because it sees the Bible as "true" without insisting on its being factual. Mostly, though, "Jesus of Nazareth" will please a small group of Christians who are able simultaneously to hold post-Enlightenment ideas about the value of rationality and scientific inquiry together with the conviction that the events described in the Gospels are real. "This is about things that happened," explains N. T. Wright, the Anglican Bishop of Durham who is perhaps the world's leading New Testament scholar. "It's not just about ideas, or people's imaginations. These are things that actually happened. If they didn't happen, you might still have interesting ideas, but it wouldn't be Christianity at the end of the day."

Faith may actually be the most productive approach to finding truth in Scripture; the historical method has so far gleaned very little in the way of facts. Jesus left no diaries, and he had no contemporary Boswell. The best accounts of his life, the Gospel stories, were written at least 30 years after his death by men who believed he was God; other corroborating evidence of his life is scanty at best. For more than 1,500 years, no one even thought to seek the "truth" about Jesus. For Christians, Jesus was the truth.

The Enlightenment saw the revolutionary beginnings of the 300-year quest for the historical Jesus. For the first time, scholars began to look at the Bible critically, as a series of stories written by time-bound people with biases and agendas of their own. Thomas Jefferson announced that the "true" sayings of Jesus were as easily distinguishable "as diamonds in a dunghill," and set to work in the evenings sorting them out. Nineteenth- and 20th-century scholars tried to unearth the facts of Jesus' life by studying the first-century Roman-Jewish world. New Testament stories were true, they decided, if they "fit" into the first-century context. Stories were also true, the scholars said, if they didn't fit at all—if they so strained credibility that no sane and pious narrator would include them unless he had to.

Using these and other more conventional methods of verification, scholars came up with a few spindly facts about the man so many people call Christ. Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew, ministered in Judea sometime between 28 and 33. He was baptized; a member of his own band betrayed him. He was charged with a political crime: the Romans put KING OF THE JEWS on his cross. He was buried and followers said he appeared to them after his death. No one saw him rise again, though there are reports his tomb was empty. "We learned from the search for the historical Jesus that the search for the historical Jesus is not going to take us very far," says Alan Segal, professor of religion at Barnard College.

Nevertheless, in the last 30 years the speed and intensity of that search has escalated—starting with the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars who, like Jefferson, tried to weed the authentic sayings of Jesus from the inauthentic and ending most recently with the largely discredited "discovery" of Jesus' family tomb in a Jerusalem suburb. Archeology is the new frontier—untold dollars are being spent digging in Israel, looking for evidence of Jesus and his times. Not all these efforts can be said to be futile: while the search for the historical Jesus has given us very little about Jesus, it has given us a rich picture of the world in which he lived, a multicultural world of elites and peasants, of tyranny and impulses for freedom, a world where people struggled to balance their instincts for assimilation against their own religious roots—a world, in other words, very much like our own. Benedict's portrait may contribute little to our historical understanding of Jesus, but what he does give is a window into his own, passionate and uncompromising faith, a faith that faces constant challenge in the world of ideas. Let the battles begin.

With Julie Scelfo

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18629187/site/…=slate?from=rss

[José]

Faites moi signe quand il sortira.

Il est sorti en France ce mercredi.

[Ronnie Hayek]

Je l'ai d'ailleurs vu hier dans ma librairie préférée, mais j'ai préféré acheter ceci:

(Sur les conseils de Melo). La couverture de la traduction française est atroce et ne rend pas justice à la richesse d'informations que contient ce bouquin (que je n'ai pas encore lu, je le précise).

[José]

Je l'ai d'ailleurs vu hier dans ma librairie préférée, mais j'ai préféré acheter ceci:

Au fait, les livres que je t'avais mentionnés :

Prescott a également écrit sur les Incas et la conquête de leur empire, mais l'ouvrage est indisponible en français pour le moment.

[Ronnie Hayek]

Au fait, les livres que je t'avais mentionnés :

Prescott a également écrit sur les Incas et la conquête de leur empire, mais l'ouvrage est indisponible en français pour le moment.

OK, merci beaucoup!

Je vois quelques commandes à passer je sais où.

[Kimon]

Il est sorti en France ce mercredi.

Je l'ai reçu dans ma boîte à lettres aujourd'hui, ça va obscuranter sec ce week end !

[Invité jabial]

Acheté depuis un moment, il trône sur mon bureau. Je ferai ma critique quand j'aurai le temps de l'avoir lu.

[melodius]

Putain si tous les Juifs du forum se mettent à le lire ce bouquin va falloir que je m'y mette aussi ! Et moi qui comptais commencer un livre sur le cyclisme…

[José]

Et moi qui comptais commencer un livre sur le cyclisme…

Je ne peux que vivement te conseiller le Dorosz :

[Yozz]

Putain si tous les Juifs du forum se mettent à le lire ce bouquin va falloir que je m'y mette aussi ! Et moi qui comptais commencer un livre sur le cyclisme…

Attends, je vais te résumer le bouquin sur le cyclisme, comme ça tu pourras lire celui-là sans regrets:

- pédales

- roues

- plein de machins pour que les suscités aillent bien ensemble, et là où on veut qu'ils aillent

- beaucoup de sueur

- un petit mix de dopants.

[melodius]

Je ne peux que vivement te conseiller le Dorosz :

J'en connais un qui va devoir regarder derrière lui lorsqu'il poussera RH à l'eau…

[Patrick Smets]

Et pour que tu ne perdes vraiment pas ton temps

-raison

-foi

-plein de machins pour que les suscités aillent bien ensemble, et là où on veut qu'ils aillent

[melodius]

Et pour que tu ne perdes vraiment pas ton temps

-raison

-foi

-plein de machins pour que les suscités aillent bien ensemble, et là où on veut qu'ils aillent

Pfff.

Même pas drôle.

Tu ferais mieux de me trouver les bouquins que j'ai commandés.

Je l'ai d'ailleurs vu hier dans ma librairie préférée, mais j'ai préféré acheter ceci:

(Sur les conseils de Melo). La couverture de la traduction française est atroce et ne rend pas justice à la richesse d'informations que contient ce bouquin (que je n'ai pas encore lu, je le précise).

L'as-tu lui depuis ?

[Ronnie Hayek]

L'as-tu lui depuis ?

Non, je vais le commencer.

[José]

An author and his subject

Jun 28th 2007

From The Economist print edition

Islam and Christianity may come together in music but the pope, in his book on Jesus, draws one clear dividing line

THIS is an unusual moment in religious history. In late June, even as Muslims in Pakistan were expressing outrage over the knighthood that Queen Elizabeth is to confer on the “blasphemous” author Salman Rushdie, respected representatives of the Christian Western world were acknowledging the power and beauty of Islamic spirituality.

Westminster Cathedral, Britain's chief place of Roman Catholic worship, offered the shimmering mosaics of its quasi-Byzantine interior as the setting for “The Beautiful Names”, a new composition by Sir John Tavener. The 99 names of God, taken from the Koran, were sung in Arabic and the inspiring, guttural sounds of the language had been diligently mastered by English singers more used to Bach or Handel. The work had been commissioned by Prince Charles, who will one day succeed his mother as head of the Anglican church but cherishes a deep interest in Islam.

On the pavement outside the cathedral, a few Catholics staged a peaceful protest, arguing that because Islam rejected basic Christian doctrines—such as the Trinity and the divinity of Christ—it had no place in a church. But most of the British establishment seemed to be inside, enjoying the singing. The cathedral authorities insisted that what had taken place was an artistic performance, not an act of worship.

The Catholics' ultimate boss, Pope Benedict, is less flexible. He may feel that because we live in an age when acts of religious accommodation are possible—and, for the sake of world peace, necessary—it is more important than ever to draw doctrinal lines in the sand. In his recently published book “Jesus of Nazareth”, he seems to be saying that “much as we respect one another and accept one another's right to exist, there are important things on which we cannot agree.”

The pope's elegantly, almost tenderly written essay on the founder of his faith is less obviously polemical in tone than his lecture in Germany last September. This outraged Muslim opinion by quoting a Byzantine emperor who had called Islam irrational and violent (the pope later apologised for the offence his remarks had caused but stopped short of withdrawing them). Yet his book remains uncompromising in its insistence on the divinity of Jesus Christ, and hence in its rejection of arguments to the contrary put forward by liberal Christians, or indeed by Muslims and Jews.

Pope Benedict takes issue with a powerful body of conventional wisdom among revisionist scholars of the New Testament. This school starts by making an undeniable point: the contrast in tone between the “synoptic” gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke—which emphasise the story of Jesus's life as a teacher and healer—and the mystical language of John's gospel (as well as many of the Pauline epistles) which meditate on the divinity of Christ rather than the particular things he did or said. Some modern readings of the New Testament go on to argue that “the historical Jesus” of the first three gospels is not really portrayed as divine at all; and that the divinity of Christ, which is so emphasised by John and Paul, represents a later doctrine that was artificially bolted on to the basic story of Jesus's life.

The pope will have none of this. He insists that the divinity of Christ is very much present in the first three gospels, and that the gospel of John, for all its mysticism, does contain a reliable first-hand historical account of the life of Jesus. In making the first half of this case, he finds himself going head to head—with perfect courtesy, it should be said—with some Jewish critiques of the New Testament.

Whatever Jesus was, the pope argues, he was not simply a free-thinking rabbi who told people to lighten up and ignore the finer points of the Mosaic law. On the contrary, he saw the law of Moses as God-given and supremely important—and it was only because of his own divinity that he had the right to reinterpret that law. In other words, the teachings of Jesus and his divinity are inseparable. That means there is no avoiding a hard argument with those who deny his divinity: either he was the Son of God, and entitled to remake God's law, or he was an impostor.

What emerges from the pope's style of argument is a profound distrust of liberalism and watering-down of any kind. He has no time for the suggestion that Jesus was merely a good human being who offered an interesting new interpretation of Jewish teaching that had become excessively rigid or chauvinist. He respects tough-minded Jews, who do not believe that Jesus was the Messiah, more than woolly conciliators from any side.

Oddly enough Sir John Tavener, the builder of religious bridges through music, says something similar. He has been influenced by a school of thought which maintains that all rigorously followed religious traditions somehow converge at the “summit” of human experience, whatever disagreements may exist lower down. So Sir John admires the traditionalism and rigour of Pope Benedict—just as he admires the traditionalism and rigour of the equivalent schools of Islam and Judaism.

Fine—but how far is it really possible for people who disagree about a matter to which they ascribe supreme importance to admire one another's integrity and rigour? That question may be easier to answer in music than it is in prose.

http://www.economist.com/books/displaystor…tory_id=9401639