The Meaning of Jesus

Was Jesus born of a virgin? Did he know he was the Messiah? Was he bodily resurrected from the dead? Did he intentionally die to redeem humankind? Was Jesus God?
In The Meaning of Jesus two leading Jesus scholars with widely divergent views go right to the heart of these questions and others, presenting the opposing visions of Jesus that shape our faith today.
In alternating chapters, Marcus Borg, the most popular revisionist voice on Jesus and a member of the Jesus Seminar, and N. T. Wright, the most prominent standard-bearer for the traditional stance and an outspoken critic of the Jesus Seminar, present their views of who Jesus was, what he taught, and what he did.
Candid, spirited, and thoughtfully debated, this compelling discourse will stimulate fresh ideas and intense dialogue among anyone concerned with what it means to be a Christian today.
"THIS BOOK HAS grown out of a friendship. We first met in 1984, after Tom Wright had read Marcus Borg’s book Conflict, Holiness, and Politics in the Teachings of Jesus. As Tom has described elsewhere, he found this book exciting and illuminating, and he sought out Marcus to congratulate him as well as to explore some “matters arising” and to ask why the book had ended as it did rather than in certain other possible ways.
Since our friendship thus grew out of the fascinated study of Jesus within his historical context, it is appropriate that it should give birth, some fourteen years later, to a book in which we put down some markers indicating where the conversation has led. During this period, we both have published several books and articles, many of them about Jesus. It is impossible in a work of the present size to rehearse all the arguments and to set out all the documentation, which are the normal requirements of scholarship. The main lines of most of what we here summarize have been set out and argued for in these other works, though at various points we both go beyond what we have said elsewhere, not least as a result of our own continuing dialogue."