The Last Week

The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus's Final Days in Jerusalem

Top Jesus scholars Marcus J. Borg & John Dominic Crossan reveal a radical & little-known Jesus. As both authors reacted to & 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' crucifixion. Using Mark's gospel as a guide, they present a day-by-day account of Jesus' final week of life. They begin their story on Palm Sunday with two triumphal entries into Jerusalem. The 1st entry, that of Roman governor Pontius Pilate leading Roman soldiers into the city, symbolized military strength. The 2nd heralded a new kind of moral hero who was praised by the people as he rode in on a humble donkey. The Jesus introduced herein 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 & 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 confronted by similar issues. Informed, challenged & inspired, we not only meet the historical Jesus, but meet a new Jesus who engages & invites us to follow him.
"This book is about the last week of Jesus’s life. It is a week of extraordinary importance for Christians. With its climax on Good Friday and Easter, it is “Holy Week,” the most sacred time of the Christian year. And because of its centrality for the lives of Christians, how this story is told matters greatly. What was the last week of Jesus’s life about? And because this story is seen as revelatory, as speaking to us today, what is it about? Two years ago, on Ash Wednesday at the beginning of Lent, Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ made the death of Jesus “big news” in the United States and elsewhere. Cover stories in national news magazines, prime-time television shows, and major stories in newspapers across the country featured the movie. Remarkable: almost two thousand years after it happened, the death of Jesus was once again front-page news. As the novelist Flannery O’Connor put it thirty years ago, we live in a “Christ-haunted” culture. The movie was controversial and disclosed a division among contemporary Christians. Millions of Christians welcomed it enthusiastically and proclaimed it to have great potential for Christian evangelism in our time. Many were deeply moved by its graphic portrayal of how much suffering Jesus experienced “for us.” Other Christians were disturbed by it—by its portrayal of “the Jews” and by its message that all of us were or are responsible for the death of Jesus: Jesus had to experience all of this horror because of us."