Top Jesus scholars Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan join together to reveal a radical and little-known Jesus. As both authors reacted to and responded to questions about Mel Gibson's blockbuster The Passion of the Christ, they discovered that many Christians are unclear on the details of events during the week leading up to Jesus's crucifixion.
Using the gospel of Mark as their guide, Borg and Crossan present a day-by-day account of Jesus's final week of life. They begin their story on Palm Sunday with two triumphal entries into Jerusalem. The first entry, that of Roman governor Pontius Pilate leading Roman soldiers into the city, symbolized military strength. The second heralded a new kind of moral hero who was praised by the people as he rode in on a humble donkey. The Jesus introduced by Borg and Crossan is this new moral hero, a more dangerous Jesus than the one enshrined in the church's traditional teachings.
The Last Week depicts Jesus giving up his life to protest power without justice and to condemn the rich who lack concern for the poor. In this vein, at the end of the week Jesus marches up Calvary, offering himself as a model for others to do the same when they are confronted by similar issues. Informed, challenged, and inspired, we not only meet the historical Jesus, but meet a new Jesus who engages us and invites us to follow him.
Recommended and reviewed by Jay Wright, St. John's Cathedral
"For the past years since it came out, an EfM (Education for Ministry) group at St. John’s Cathedral in Jacksonville FL has read Marcus Borg’s and John Dominic Crossan’s book THE LAST WEEK. The book walks us through the week leading up to Christ’s death on the cross with insightful historical and literary analysis of the texts in scripture that outline those horrible and yet salvific events. Though it follows the gospel of Mark as its primary text it mixes in all the other relevant scriptures with the best of scholarship from a few years back before Marcus Borg died in 2016. Without turning Holy Week into a gruesome exploration of Roman crucifixion methods, it presents us with the tragedy of the situation in understandable, well written text. It serves for wonderful spiritual reading in Holy Week and will enlighten and spiritually energize its readers who have perhaps in years past participated in the liturgical re-enactments of Jesus offering Himself through the cross. The book is arranged in chapters that follow the events of each day in Holy Week. Those reading this book will find new appreciation of the most important week in Christian history. And will also find themselves more enlightened about the meaning of Jesus’s progress through the events of the Week. Particularly in time of pandemic when not everyone will be able to attend the services like Holy Thursday’s foot washing, this brief book will bring home the drama, the deep meaning and spiritual nourishment that the Body of Christ is yearning for."
