I wanted to draw everyone’s attention to a new book on Jesus by Kenneth Bailey. Bailey spent his career working in the Middle East for many years. His earlier books, Poet and Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes (combined as one book later) were provocative and insightful about orality and memory in Middle Eastern cultures. This new book is an easy-to-read entrée into the world of Jesus, a world quite foreign to modern westerners. Endorsed by some heavy-weight scholars, including Craig Evans, Robert Yarbrough, Gary Burge, and Craig Keener, it reduces some serious scholarship to a level that can be understood by anyone interested in Jesus.
The description on IVP’s website says:
Beginning with Jesus' birth, Ken Bailey leads you on a kaleidoscopic study of Jesus throughout the four Gospels. Bailey examines the life and ministry of Jesus with attention to the Lord's Prayer, the Beatitudes, Jesus' relationship to women and especially Jesus' parables.
Through it all, Bailey employs his trademark expertise as a master of Middle Eastern culture to lead you into a deeper understanding of the person and significance of Jesus within his own cultural context. With a sure but gentle hand, Bailey lifts away the obscuring layers of modern Western interpretation to reveal Jesus in the light of his actual historical andcultural setting.
This entirely new material from the pen of Ken Bailey is a must-have for any student of the New Testament. If you have benefited from Bailey's work over the years, this book will be a welcome and indispensable addition to your library. If you are unfamiliar with Bailey'swork, this book will introduce you to a very old, yet entirely new way of understanding Jesus.
One of the battles currently going on in NT studies is whether a Greco-Roman background or a Jewish background is the better lens through which to read the Gospels and what each says about Jesus. Bailey, once again, makes a strong case that the Jewish background is the filter through which we can most accurately see Jesus. Of course, the Jewish background of first-century Palestine must take into account the heavy pockets of Gentile population, the Roman-controlled state (and before that, the Greek), and the kinds of interactions that the Jews, especially in Galilee, had with their Gentile neighbors. It also must take into account that the Gospels were largely written to Gentile audiences. Yet, even with such caveats, it is vital for us to see the Gospels through Jewish peasant eyes, as Bailey has argued. One of the remarkable blind spots in today’s biblical scholarship is how much of a modern western bias has tacitly influenced so much recent literature. Yet this happens while many of the scholars who have such blind spots loudly proclaim that Christian orthodoxy today is a by-product of western (especially American) imperialism. It strikes me that to force the Gospels through a western mold, whether it be ancient or modern, almost assumes a superiority of one’s own culture as the measuring stick of truth.
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