Jesus The Statesman

About the Book

In contrast to all of the fanciful fabrications that have appeared in print recently, it is refreshing to see Buchanan’s compelling portrait of Jesus as a master diplomat, organizer, chief executive, and statesman. Others have been led astray by some of the following invalid nineteenth century assumptions, presuming:

     1) that the later church composed the gospel reports unreliably,
     2) that all of the political terms in the gospels must be understood non-politically,
     3) that any expression of “the end” always means the end of the world, regardless of its context,
     4) that Jesus and his followers were illiterate, so the gospels were not written down until much later than the time when Jesus lived,
     5) that Jesus did not speak to his own age but to ours.
     6) That it does not matter what Jesus said and meant in his own day. What is important is how reading the gospels makes readers think and feel today.

With all of these potential eliminations of selected historical facts about Jesus, twentieth and twenty-first century authors have moved freely to invent a Jesus to fit their own time and location, treating the gospels as if they were inkblot tests to be used to reflect the readers’ own feelings and opinions. Authors have disagreed about the details, because they had different needs. For some Jesus was a peasant, a Cynic (John Dominic Crossan), or a magician (Morton Smith). For others he was probably illiterate (James Dunn). Some thought the gospel reports were inaccurately preserved from only an oral tradition (James Dunn). There has been a strong tendency to use some or all of these hypotheses as if they were computer default settings, or NO TRESPASSING territorial signs, without the observance of which authors were not authorized to write. Such techniques and procedures as these at least partially account for the many strange pictures painted by westerners during the past century.

The historian Buchanan, however, has examined and rejected the respective default settings. He realized that the nineteenth century scholars who put up the NO TRESPASSING signs and established the default settings do not own the land or control the computers, so, without the inhibitions of the consensus, Buchanan has evaluated the texts for himself and found them reliable. This allowed Buchanan to write about the real Jesus, as he existed in his own country and in his own time. Having tested a large portion of Jesus’ teachings and shown that they were valid, the author then introduced the readers to the coded messages and Jewish thought forms necessary to understand the meaning of this large body of material.

The gospels are not fairy tales or comic strips, and Jesus was not a fairy godmother who could wave a wand and change pumpkins into chariots and then back into pumpkins again. He was not the superman of comic strips who could fly like a bird and then return to be like an ordinary businessman, as he chose. Jesus was a real human being who sacrificed for his people, wrestled with difficult decisions and then made them wisely. He was never an illiterate peasant who told interesting stories only to the poor. He did not emulate Mahatma Ghandi, Abraham Lincoln, or St. Francis of Assisi. He was never married. He was not a labor leader or an advocate of women’s rights. He lived in the Near East 2,000 years ago during a very tense period in Jewish history. He was very wealthy, but gave up all of his wealth and took monastic vows of poverty, celibacy, and obedience. He recruited a cabinet of some of the best leaders in Palestine, who also gave up all of their wealth to follow his lead. Buchanan’s careful history skills have checked all of the sources and have revealed that Jesus was a very religious, talented, well-educated upper class leader. He authorized his cabinet mem

About the Author

THE AUTHOR Prof. Buchanan is third in a family of ten children. He spent 14 happy years as a pastor before teaching 31 years in a Theological Seminary. He has worked extensively in the Near East, published many sermons, church school materials, poems, 17 books, and more than 60 articles in academic journals. Some of his research has taken place in libraries in Germany, Israel, and many universities in USA. He has been recognized in academic circles for being the first for the following: 1. use of insights from the Dead Sea Scrolls to solve biblical problems. 2. discover midrash (commentary on Scripture) in the First Testament. 3. publish intertextual commentaries both in the First Testament and in the New Testament. 4. discover the northern boundaries of the Promised Land. 5. is one of two scholars who independently discovered the true location of the temple at Zion. 6. discover the method for distinguishing the teachings of Jesus from the additions of the later church. Other scholars have followed Schweitzer in declaring that this could not be done. He has not turned his attention to the historical Jesus, demonstrating the validity of the gospels and showing much historical data that has been overlooked by other scholars. As a pastor he has answered here the many questions parishioners have asked him about Jesus. As a historian he has searched diligently for new sources to learn about Jesus. This book is written for the general public and can be understood by people who read newspapers.