The Fabricated Christ: Confronting What We Know About Jesus and the Gospels [Hardcover]

The last 150 years of biblical scholarship have revolutionised the understanding of the four Gospels. The revolution remains, however, largely unknown to the general public. Paul Laffans The Fabricated Christ argues for the wider dissemination of this knowledge and tasks those engaged in biblical criticism with greater honesty and frankness about the results of their research.Paul Laffan teaches literature and writing at the City Literary Institute in London.

Laffan's book on the Gospels is written in the spirit of Hermann Samuel Reimarus and Wiliam Wrede. Those who accept the skeptical view that the Gospels offer little historical material will not be disappointed. Laffan uses the assured results of form and source criticism to good effect. The spirit of the book can be summed up in Laffans comment that Far from being historical, Mark was now (after a university education) as brittle as burned toast and emphatically not history. The author uses Miss Petersa Baptist teacher he had during his undergraduate yearsas a straw man representing the uncritical and benighted representative of the ignorant reader. He takes Wredes comment that Mark does not make sense, not as history to be the North Star of his entire approach to the biblical text, and he repeatedly beats the drum that the Gospels are the product of pure fabricationhence the title of the book. Those looking for a text that holds that view need look no further. Well written and researched, Laffans diatribe more than adequately fulfills the expectation of books of this genre.



Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. Choice Reviews

This book is a powerful exercise in the hermeneutics of suspicion. Laffan observes the scene in the canonical Gospels and finds there clues to what has taken place behind the scenes, in the world of the historical Jesus. The resulting reconstruction of the decisive events in Jesus' life is not unprecedentelã²