Biblical scholar

In this book, Margaret Barker explores and explains apparent inconsistencies in the New Testament to present a new way of understanding Christian origins. She confronts and overturns much of the scepticism of recent scholarship.

She shows how the original understanding of resurrection may in fact be Jesus’ mystical experience at his baptism, when he was raised up and transformed into the divine Son, how the resurrection proof texts in the New Testament may be the ‘ascent texts’ of the royal high priesthood, and how Jesus may have seen himself as the anointed high priest, the Messiah, come to offer himself as the atonement sacrifice of the last days.

Margaret Barker therefore offers a new understanding of atonement drawn from Temple traditions, and shows for the first time how Christology and soteriology were necessarily related in the sacrifice of the Son of God. She contends that Jesus knew who he was and what he was doing - that the so-called Christ of faith was not the creation of the early churches but rather the figure Jesus believed himself to be. The Gnostic post-resurrection discourses are a memory of his private teaching to his disciples and their parousia hope derived from his teaching about the final Day of Atonement. With his death, Jesus would enter the heavenly sanctuary and then emerge again as did the high priest, to bring the Day of the Lord.

This work redraws the map of the New Testament and offers a new understanding of resurrection, Christology, atonement and parousia. The conclusion is that Jesus was indeed ‘the author and finisher of our faith.

READ THE INTRODUCTION

Professor John Sawyer, Theology.

Published by T&T Clark, Edinburgh, 1996. ISBN 0567085375