The New Yorker on Jesus

From the May 24th issue of New Yorker: "What Did Jesus Do? Reading and Unreading the Gospels", by Adam Gopnik. It takes Crossan's ideas of egalitarianism a bit too seriously, but does have good things to say, and is well written. I like this part lending to the "Big Bang" theory of high Christology in the early Christian movement:

"Paul's divine Christ came first, and Jesus the wise rabbi came later. This fixed, steady twoness at the heart of the Christian story can't be wished away by liberal hope any more than it could be resolved by theological hair-splitting. Its intractability is part of the intoxication of belief. It can be amputated, mystically married, revealed as a fraud, or worshiped as the greatest of mysteries. The two go on, and their twoness is what distinguishes the faith and gives it its discursive dynamism."