The Court-Martial of Jesus: A Christian Defends the Jews Against the Charge of Deicide

by Weddig Fricke

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802110940
• ISBN13: 9780802110947
• Release Date: January 1990
• Publisher: Grove/Atlantic
• Length: 296 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A Real Eye Opener

Fricke's The Court Martial of Jesus is one of those rare books that comes along maybe a couple of times a decade; a book about Jesus written for a lay audience that manages to be both well written and well reasoned-a difficult combination to achieve in any genre, much less theology.Fricke's premise is that the Gospel's portrayal of the Jews as those most responsible for Jesus' crucifixion is a later bit of fiction designed to exonerate the Roman government (at the time the most powerful political body on the planet) by portraying the Jews as instigating the Galilean preacher's death. Appealing to what historians do know of how the Roman government operated at the time as well as the personality of Pontius Pilate, it is an argument he dissects with the cold precision of a brain surgeon as he skillfully demonstrates just how far-fetched the Gospel accounts of Jesus' arrest and trial really are, as well as how the Gospels have been subsequently responsible for almost 2,000 years of anti-Semitism because of their vicious portrayal of the Jews in general. Well documented with copious end-notes (I found it necessary to read the main text and end-notes side-by-side to get the maximum effect of his arguments) he presents a compelling and, some would say, even damning indictment against those unknown gospel writers who probably never imagined the damage their words would ultimately have on the Jewish people. Liberal theologians will not find anything particularly new in his theory-one that the modern church has, to its credit, begun to accept and come with grips with-but for those who imagine the gospels to be historically accurate documents, his data may be quite an eye opener. Ironically, Fricke is not a Jew himself or a secularist, but portrays himself as a professing Christian who, also being a German, understands the horror of anti-Semitism first-hand. It is an effective combination that should give us tiny percent of the population who care about such things something to seriously ponder.My only question about the book is how Fricke can maintain his faith at all-especially considering the hatchet job he does on the passion. If the gospels are in places spurious, why does he accept their accounts of the resurrection-for instance-as being literally true? It seems if the passion is a hodgepodge of anti-Semitism and revisionism parading as historical fact, the entire work is put into question. In this the fundamentalists are correct: if you can discount any of the Bible, then all of it is potentially wrong (at least those elements that cannot be independently confirmed by secular historians.) That being said, however, this is a book I would highly recommend for those who have an analytical mind and for whom the truth is more important than their faith, and is a sobering piece of work that will prevent the reader from seeing another passion play in quite the same innocent way ever again.