A useful manual for Christians seeking to find the roots of their faith in Jewish Scripture.
In his nonfiction debut, Mapp tracks down and explicates threads of Christian prophecy in the Scriptures, operating under the familiar religious assumption that, as he puts it, “The entire Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is about Him.”
Mapp extensively explores the Old Testament, finding incidents and symbols that he contends foreshadow later happenings in the life and ministry of Jesus. He “decodes” these incidents—events ranging from the creation of Adam and Eve to the Flood and Noah’s Ark to the Israelites’ years of wandering in the desert—by overlaying them with Christian symbology. The author envisions most of the greatest Jewish prophets and leaders, from Isaac to Joshua to Moses, as precursors and archetypes of the Christ story, even when these connections are heavily conflicted. For example, Mapp (following many experts) attempts to find Christian parallels in the worldly, entirely human life of King David. “Of course, the type breaks down in a number of key aspects,” he concedes in this instance. Bible “decoding” accounts like Mapp’s typically make allowances of this kind. Although the author contends that “many notable Old Testament passages…forecast details of His life with amazing accuracy,” “amazing accuracy” would be for Jeremiah or Ezekiel to say, “In 1,025 years, a man named Jesus will be born in Bethlehem who will be the Son of God.” “Amazing accuracy,” in other words, requires no decoding. Instead of such clarity, explicators of Christian prophecy seem forced into the same kind of word games that Mapp plays in his book, sifting through Old Testament texts for phrases that can be applied to New Testament contexts. It’s a venerable practice (indeed, the authors of the four Gospels were the first to indulge), but Mapp’s efforts will probably fail to persuade his unconvinced readers that the Old Testament writers had Jesus in mind. Yet for devout Christians who place importance on the New Testament being the fulfillment of the Old (who have, in Mapp’s tidy phrasing, the “gladly held conviction that Jesus Christ is Lord”), this book provides a handy gathering of the most popular of these interpretations. As a bonus, Mapp’s readings of the New Testament—particularly the Gospel of St. John—are enjoyably nuanced.
A useful manual for Christians seeking to find the roots of their faith in Jewish Scripture.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5127-1040-3
Page Count: 138
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Children's author Grimes (From a Child's Heart, 1993, etc.) does an adult turn with this mild historical fiction about the mother of Jesus. Largely narrated in the first person, the novel tells the familiar story of Mary in a simple, pious way that is sure to please fundamentalist believers. Coming of age in the backwater of Galilee, ruled by the evil and tyrannical puppet-king Herod, Mary is attracted to the carpenter, Joseph, by his muscular good looks and his love of God. She is betrothed to him when she is visited by the Archangel Gabriel, who announces that she has conceived a child by the spirit of God. She envisions opprobrium and rejection as a result of this ``illegitimate'' pregnancy, but Joseph stands by her and vows to keep the matter private between them. Forced to flee to Egypt to avoid the mass infanticide ordered by Herod, they return only after the monarch's death. Jesus, the son she bears, impresses all those around him, and Mary remembers the promise of Gabriel and the old prophecies, but she still doesn't fully understand. Finally, Jesus embarks on a ministry of which she is no real part. She sees him only occasionally and is confused when he spurns her. She watches helplessly as he is arrested and executed. When he is raised from the dead, in fulfillment of the prophecies, Mary, like Doubting Thomas, refuses to believe it until she has seen it with her own eyes—after which she emerges believing and exultant. Passages from the Gospels punctuate the text and serve to give it a homogenized story line culled from disparate parts of the biblical tradition. Attempts to add resonance to the bare-bones account by portraying Mary's inner thoughts are only sometimes successful. Boy meets girl. Girl gives birth to Messiah. Messiah dies. Messiah lives. Enough said.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-15-173199-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
Michael Lerner has found God, and he wants other alienated progressive Jews to find God, too. Unfortunately, this overlong tome is more likely to put readers to sleep than to awaken them to Jewish spirituality. Who is Lerner's God? ``S/he'' is ``the possibility of possibility,'' that is, the possibility of transformation. Lerner wants to return Judaism to its original revolutionary creed of freedom, equality, and social justice and to its belief that the world must be ``repaired.'' Editor of the progressive journal Tikkun, he convincingly responds to critics who say that Jewish renewal, with its revisions of liturgy and ritual, is inauthentic, by showing how through its history Judaism has undergone a continual process of change. But he is on squishier ground when he draws on psychoanalytic theory. In an almost comical act of biblical interpretation, Lerner explains that Abraham's binding of Isaac for sacrifice was a repetition compulsion, a reenactment of his own father's supposed cruelty to him. Similarly, all oppression and injustice—from slavery to the Holocaust—is reduced to a form of collective neurosis. Lerner's arguments are often philosophically weak; claiming Jews have internalized such ``distortions'' as anti-Semitism, Lerner states that ``it is ludicrous to describe the abandonment of Judaism...as a product of rational choice.'' We are all victims of the past—so much for radical freedom. Contemporary Jews, according to Lerner, have lost touch with the revolutionary message of their religion, instead accommodating to secular, capitalist society. He paints a portrait of the American Jewish community as venal and corrupt. He offers no evidence, but he does have a villain: his favorite bogeyperson, Norman Podhoretz, and other neo-cons. Readers may want to go directly to Part III, a useful discussion of the ways in which Jewish renewal ideas are being expressed in ritual, from nonpatriarchal liturgy to a reappropriation of the Sabbath as an expression of human equality and dignity. Lots of mind-numbing analysis and little inspiration for Jews seeking a religious expression for their political convictions.
Pub Date: Sept. 21, 1994
ISBN: 0-399-13980-X
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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