Bridging the Jesus debates

Recovering Jesus: The Witness of the New Testament Thomas R. Yoder Neufeld. Brazos Press, 2007. 352 pages.

My four-year-old son loves a good game of hide-and-seek or a great romp through a Where’s Waldo–style book. It seems, as of late, it’s become fashionable to play the theological version of this game with a resurgence of interest in the quest for the historical Jesus.

Brian McLaren’s Secret Message of Jesus and Lee Strobel’s The Case for the Real Jesus are two of the more recent populist offerings. Meanwhile scholarly debate on the matter has raged for the better part of the last century, but seldom have the two tracks intersected with any level of rigour or understanding.

Enter Thomas R. Yoder Neufeld’s effort to bridge the two communities with Recovering Jesus. Meant as a textbook for undergraduates, it purports to live in both the scholarly and the populist worlds. As professor of religious studies at Conrad Grebel University College, Waterloo, Ont., Yoder Neufeld attempts to frame questions about Jesus in ways helpful for those completely new to the person and work of Christ, while simultaneously applying standards of biblical scholarship to the questions of Jesus’ birth, teaching, death, and resurrection.

To an extent, Yoder Neufeld succeeds where others have failed – making excellent scholarship accessible to a wider range of people. To his credit, his intentional use of clear language together with creative metaphors is a tremendous strength and would allow the book to be used in a more focused educational setting.

Serious biblical students will likely find nothing new or novel here. Nevertheless, Yoder Neufeld’s very personal and confessional approach provides a solid overview of complex topics such as the kingdom of God, the development of the cannon, understanding the cultural and religious dimensions of first century Palestine, and more. Its strength is perhaps also its greatest weakness, however, as this strategy leads to occasional overgeneralizations, raising questions without providing thorough answers, and the potential to deal superficially with complex and multi-faceted biblical and historical issues. In seeking to find a bridge between the popular and academic, Yoder Neufeld may have ended up losing both of them.

Brad Sumner is lead pastor at Jericho Ridge Community Church, Langley, B.C.