Michael Bird: Jesus Is the Christ
What Bird offers is invaluable in that the reader is compelled to ask, “Who do I say Jesus is?” Every reader of the Gospels must ask this, they cannot merely accept a second-hand declaration without any personal thought or commitment. In a lot of instances there is a confusion of terms: “Messiah” or “Christ” are not nouns nor are they last names. They are adjectives or compound designations and are synonymous. Jesus is the Christ is correct; so is Christ Jesus. He is the “anointed one of God.” In his conclusion Bird raises the issue of what it means to believe in Jesus as “Messiah” or “Christ.” Though the messiahship of Jesus functions differently in each of the four evangelists, there is a pervasive and shared conviction among all four that Jesus is the anointed one of God come into the world for all men.
Bird’s Jesus Is the Christ needs to be thoroughly read and studied as it forces one to deal with Jesus’ question to his immediate disciples: “Who do you say I am?” It needs to be answered with thought and conviction behind it. This reviewer also recommends that Jesus Is the Christ be read in conjunction with his earlier writing Are You the One Who Is to Come? And his more recent one The Gospel of the Lord: How the Early Church Wrote the Story of Jesus (Eerdmans, 2014).
Reviewed by Woodrow E. Walton
Publisher’s page: www.ivpress.com/cgi-ivpress/book.pl/code=2823
Category: Biblical Studies, Winter 2015
Followers
Fans
