Reviews for Myles Munroe Devotional and Journal: 365 Days to Realize Your Potential

The average rating for Myles Munroe Devotional and Journal: 365 Days to Realize Your Potential based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-02-01 00:00:00 David Espinal With this book (copyright 1999) Paula Fredriksen, a Catholic converted to Judaism,continues and advances her 1988 work in From Jesus to Christ. Both are excellent books. She proposes as fundamental two questions: Why did Jesus die the way he did, in a Roman-style execution? and Why weren't any of his followers executed at the same time? That seems like a useful interpretive tool, and I haven't seen it used in other works about Jesus. In line with much other modern scholarship, she insists that Jesus was fundamentally Jewish. This is also a useful tool for interpretation. She works backward toward the historical Jesus from what we know about earliest Christianity, especially the genuine letters of Paul, and forward from what we know of the varieties of Judaism that preceded Jesus. Jesus must have made sense to his contemporaries and must make sense out of what immediately follows. That means it's harder for us, 2000 years later, to make Jesus relevant to modern issues, but Jesus' world was not our world. Fredriksen makes a good case for seeing in the Gospel of John more history than earlier 20th century scholars: John's highly developed, post-Easter theology, which he puts in the mouth of Jesus, depends less on history than the theologies of the other 3 gospels; therefore, when John does give us some history (as in the number of trips Jesus made to Jerusalem and the length of Jesus' ministry), it is less likely to to be shaped to fit a theology, more likely to be just something that a community remembers. Fredriksen assigns responsibility for Jesus' death almost entirely to Pilate, contrary to the impression that all four gospels give. Here too she is in good scholarly company. Her hypothesis about what led to Pilate's decision makes good sense. She thinks crowds of Passover pilgrims, who did not know Jesus well and proclaimed him as a more political Messiah than Jesus actually was, provoked Pilate, who actually knew Jesus to be a rather harmless sort, to act. And what better way to calm this rambunctious crowd than to kill its hero? I would not say that she's proven her case. It remains a hypothesis, but one that should be taken seriously. This book is both scholarly and well-written. I highly recommend it.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-11-29 00:00:00 Kameron Duncan A good and pragmatic history or potential history done by someone who at least is aware of the problems of history itself. Some really good points but at times can be a bit repetitive due to its nature.. If you are interested in Jesus as a Jew of his time then well worth a look.