The Last Week

Lent has just begun.  As such, I felt that it would be appropriate to review a book that “fits” this Christian season.  That book is The Last Week by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. 

While the book is now ten years old, The Last Week remains a clearly written, easily accessible work.  Written by two great scholars and writers, The Last Week is not an overwhelmingly scholarly book – at least not in the sense that a book such as Walter Brueggemann’s Theology of the Old Testament might be considered scholarly.  Instead the scholarship is evident in the material, but it is written in such a way that every reader can find plenty of material to absorb.

This book is an interpretive work on the last week of the life of Jesus as found in the Gospel of Mark, chapters 11-16.  It is an insightful commentary on these chapters that brings some understated academic understandings to light.  However, it is best understood as a work that takes seriously the socio-political climate of Roman occupied Jerusalem and places that fact as the background for reading the story of Jesus.

As such, Borg and Crossan describe a Jesus that has a political and theological agenda that was strictly anti-imperial (anti-Roman in particular).  This is the underlying paradigm for the work. The presentation of Jesus as a political revolutionary should come as no surprise for those familiar with Borg and Crossan’s other works, namely Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (Borg) and Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (Crossan).

While a political portrait of Jesus is nothing new (think Richard Horsley, S.G.F. Brandon, or James J. Tabor), what Borg and Crossan attempt to do is present a genuine re-reading of Holy Week and imbue it with often overlooked meanings and possibilities.  The end result is a powerful image of Jesus as the voice of a theology that speaks against the power of Rome and offers an alternative vision for life in the Kingdom of God.

It may not be a paradigm some readers will be comfortable with, but if nothing else, the book provides some great insight into the times and teachings of Jesus.  I would certainly suggest reading it during Holy Week, if not as a Lenten study.  It certainly offers a challenge to consider Jesus in the light of the political and theological tensions that existed in his time and may well continue to crowd our thinking. 

Information:

The Last Week: A Day-by-Day Account of Jesus’ Final Week in Jerusalem

Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan

New York, NY: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006