Book Review

José Antonio Pagola

Jesus: an Historical Approximation

The book of Jose¹ Pagola is a very attractive reading and full of important information on the historical
figure of Jesus. Pagola writes with the explicit intention of bringing to his contemporary readers a
more vivid character than the one routinized in dogmatic statements or in the liturgical pictures, which
have probably become too familiar to our ears. In this perspective, the book is a success and it can
communicate very effectively the profound admiration or even love that the author has towards Jesus
described as a landmark figure in the history of humankind. This is all the more remarkable if one
considers the oppositions and even personal attacks that the author had to go through as a
consequence of the publication of his book.

Pagola¹s main (or almost exclusive) sources for this biography of Jesus are the four canonical
gospels. In this, as in some other critical choices, he aligns himself with the mainline Catholic
exegesis (as represented, for instance, by J.P. Meier) that sidelines apocryphal texts as less
trustworthy or too late to be taken into consideration in this quest. However, Pagola¹s critical acumen
is not be underestimated as he is fully conscious that the gospels¹ accounts must be examined with
due consideration for their redactional development (in particular, as far as christology is concerned).
In addition to a specifically literary analysis, however, the author brings into play in his reconstruction
a significant number of new interpretive tools that have been recently employed mostly by North
American scholars. Indeed, it is one of Pagola¹s main goals to enliven his picture of the historical
Jesus by looking more attentively at the socio-cultural context of 1st century Galilee as this has been
fleshed out by archeological discoveries and anthropological studies. These choices enable Pagola to
draw a very attractive portrait of Jesus as a messenger of liberation for the poor and oppressed of his
time, deeply concerned for the suffering of the sick and marginalized as well as passionately in love
with his utopian vision of the ³kingdom of God².

From a specific historiographical point of view, however, this mixture of a purportedly neutral
historical-critical approach and of a lively pastoral and spiritual intention does not work well all the
time. This a reproach that could be moved to most of the contemporary ³quest² for the ³historical
Jesus² and certainly not to Pagola alone, but it affects this book as those written by other scholars
(e.g. J.P. Meier¹s ³marginal² Jesus that is not marginal at all and most certainly not for contemporary
readers). Pagola¹s love for Jesus brings him almost necessarily to describe his main character as
someone who stands out on the background of his historical and cultural context, a revolutionary
figure that, for Pagola¹s own admission has to speak to the readers at the beginning of the 21st
century. To get to this, however, the author has to somehow put in a darker light the context in which
Jesus operated and this move is not devoid of dangers: a very telling example could be Pagola¹s
attitude towards some traits of the Jewish society and religiosity at the time of Jesus. For instance, the
author repeats the old (and now almost completely refuted) idea that Jesus¹ address to God as
³Abba² would imply a particularly intimate and familial relationship between him and the divine Father.
However, one must observe that, by stressing this interpretation, Pagola risks to end up describing
the entire Jewish attitude towards God as formalistic and hierarchical (a distinctively anti-Jewish
interpretive tradition from which, by the way, the very reading of ³Abba² that I described originated).

I think that Pagola¹s book is a substantial contribution that would definitely deserve to be reviewed in
a major journal. As for its use in a class, the issue is a bit more complicated because the book is
written for a wide audience and the lack of a substantial engagement with the secondary literature on
the subject could render it inadequate for an advanced class. On the other hand, I can see that the
book could be a very important reading for a more general course on the reception of the figure of the
historical Jesus in the contemporary debate in the academia and outside, in the pastoral and spiritual
education (in this perspective, it is also very important, and goes to the merits of the publishing house,
that a voice from outside the boundaries of the English speaking academic world has been given the
opportunity to be heard).

Giovanni B. Bazzana
Assistant professor of New Testament
Harvard Divinity School

Andover Hall 121

45 Francis Avenue
02138 Cambridge MA
Tel. 617-384-5965
E-mail. gbazzana@hds.harvard.edu