The Jesus Conspiracy: An Investigative Reporter's Look at an Extraordinary Life and Death

by Gordon Thomas

Book Overview

In this powerful bookwhich bears comparison with Frank Morisons classic Who Moved the Stone?skilled investigative journalist Gordon Thomas offers an enthusiastically detailed account of the life and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801011949
• ISBN13: 9780801011948
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: Baker Books
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

The news story of all civilized history

This book provides an account of a trial that was never fair and a life that was never ordinary. What impressed me the most was that this is not religious literature. Some of it really drives home the conditions of the times and gives a new appreciation of what life was like in the holyland. This is a book I am glad that I read. What transpired is sad from many viewpoints. There are many victims in this book that suffer to this day.

ECCE HOMO!

"Behold the man!" The words of Pontius Pilate reverberate in my mind upon reading this book, a superlative study on the life of Jesus Christ, the central figure of the human race. Gordon Thomas presents the Nazarene and His times unlike any other book I've read to date, with such painstaking realism as to allow the reader to be present during Christ's ministry. One can nearly smell the odors of Jerusalem's streets, hear the bustle of people as they gather to listen to the words of the young rabbi, and witness the events leading to His crucifixion and subsequent Resurrection . This book is noteworthy for numerous reasons, among these Thomas extensive reasearch -spanning decades- on all extant texts related to Jesus and the events surrounding him: the Bible and the numerous apocryphal and pseudepigraphal books on Christ, early Judaic and Christian histories such as Josephus and Eusebius, and even Talmudic tractates that articulate Jewish law and custom.THE JESUS CONSPIRACY (previously titled THE TRIAL; the current title is somewhat misleading and ambiguous) is centered on the murderous conspiracy by the staus quo against Jesus and the revolutionary message He spread. It explores the mentality and motives of those who participated in Christ's passion: Pontius Pilate, Roman procurator; Herod Antipas, Idumean tetrarch of Galilee; and Joseph Caiaphas, Rome-appointed high priest of the Temple. This Unholy Triumvirate were responsible for the most infamous show trial in history (covered in great detail in this book) which ultimately condemned an innocent man to one of the most barbaric deaths in human experience and centuries later provided an unjust excuse for anti-Semitism.The Passion is described with riveting detail; Thomas' vivid descriptions of Christ's flogging (which literally shred the flesh with barbed and weighted thongs) and mockery with the Crown of Thorns is disturbing. The Crucifixion is HARROWING. It is impossible not to be shaken when visualizing these events, and not be left with awe and admiration for the Nazarene, who despite all this exclaimed from the Cross: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Verily, one is overwhelmed by Christ's magnanimity and salvific love for humanity.The events following the Crucifixion are demonstrated to impossibilitate any action by the disciples on Jesus behalf. Yet the events on that fateful Sunday morning forever changed the history of humankind.Gordon Thomas, as a liberal Catholic, is far from dogmatic or confrontational: he actually attempts an unbiased, objective, even-handed examination of Christ's life and times. In his extensive introduction and epilogue, he articulates his research and addresses the numerous concerns and debates, and rightly takes issue with extremist reactionaries (the "Jesus Seminar" and others FARTHER to the left) who are more focused on smearing Christ and the Church than biblical scholarship. He does question the Bible's authority and disagrees with some

Jesus in focus

The Jesus Conspiracy A Book ReviewWhen we, in the 21st Century, seek to understand the life of Jesus it can be helpful to look at Him in the historical setting of His day. It was a time vastly different from what we face today, at least in terms of day to day things and the relationship He and others had to the Roman government and to the prevailing religious environment.In his recent book, The Jesus Conspiracy, Gordon Thomas takes his readers back to the days of some 2,000 years ago. Thomas is identified in this Baker Book House (1999) publication as a "highly successful British investigative journalist." This book of some 300 pages turns the clock back so that the reader is an eyewitness of sorts to the things Jesus said and did, as they occurred in their proper historical contexts. Along the way Thomas provides some insights about that culture which many of us would find very interesting. The book has been compared to Who Rolled Away the Stone by Frank Morrison, a work by another Englishman who had questioned the validity of the Gospels and their accounts of Jesus, especially the events surrounding the crucifixion and resurrection. Morrison began his work as an unbeliever but finished as part of the Family!Why Thomas selected this title (conspiracy) is not very clear from the text. It may that many, in that time when Jesus was walking this earth, felt that what He was attempting to do was to establish a new order of things, especially of a religious nature. What was taking place, some surely seemed to believe, was a plan to replace much of the established way of doing things in the temple. He presented a threat to the status quo. The so called trial Jesus experienced seemed to have that as the motivation. Thomas, much like Morrison in the earlier work, takes his readers step by step through this trial and shows the many illegal moves made and how those moves were tolerated. The trial was a sham! Many boundaries used to protect people were set aside.Thomas brings an additional perspective to many of the same events addressed by Morrison so that a reader can come away with a deeper appreciation, especially, of the pain and suffering Christ endured. There are some problems along the way in Thomas' attempt to bring clarity to such an important time of history. He apparently has some difficulty in accepting what the Bible says about things. He notes that "faith does not stand, or fall, on the details of history." Later he says that the "message of God's revelation, while indeed founded on fact, does not depend on each precise detail of fact." This seems to leave the door open for error to enter, especially when someone disagrees with what the Bible might say. Apparently Thomas stands outside the concept that the Bible is God's word because if God wrote the scriptures there would be no room for any mistakes, even in what Thomas may regard as less than precise detail of fact. It is agreed th