Review of Israel Knohl's The Messiah Before Jesus

Israel Knohl's The Messiah Before Jesus: The Suffering Servant of the Dead Sea Scrolls is an important book in Bible scholarship. It is short, and a rather easy read, but extremely interesting. In the book he advances the following thesis: Jesus was a messiah who was following the pattern of an earlier messiah.

It was earlier believed that although there were many messiahs of Jesus' period, but many things about Jesus like the suffering servant" and the "son of man" attitude were later inventions of the church, and not authentically from Jesus. Knohl believes that they were actually Jesus' attitude. He claims that there was an earlier messiah, just before Jesus lived who followed the same pattern. This was a messiah who is reflected in the Dead Sea scrolls. He then conjectures that this messiah was in fact a certain Menachem who was mentioned in the Talmud as the other leader with Hillel in the time of the "pairs" of leaders in Tannaitic times. His evidence for this is impressive and well thought out.

It was an intersting read.

Review of Annamarie Schimmel's book Islam: An Introduction

I finished reading Annamarie Schimmel's book Islam: An Introduction. It was OK. It read a little dull and the author was understandably sympathatic with certain tendencies within Islam, but it was a worthwhile read anyway. The book is short, that is an advantage. It makes you able to read it. Unfortunately it leaves no room for a quality narrative that allows you to put all the information in to some context. There is information on a whole host of topics, but little synthesis with other world events or how the events (polotical, social, economic, mysitcal, etc) relate to each other. It seems like each chapter would serve as a useful springboard for the investigation of any particular topic about Islam tha might interest you. It also seems like a good course text that would allow a teacher to use each chapter as a basis for a lecture in to that partictular aspect on Islam. Overall I would recommend the book, though I would not go in expecting a "good read", but rather a bunch of facts that make for a good starting point.