The Existential Jesus

There is a worthwhile interview here with John Carroll about his forthcoming book on Mark’s Gospel, The Existential Jesus. Carroll is professor of sociology at La Trobe University, and the author of Ego and Soul: The Modern West in Search of Meaning, Terror: A Meditation on the Meaning of September 11, and the fascinating book, The Wreck of Western Culture: Humanism Revisited.

A description of The Existential Jesus reads:

Upending Christianity’s popular notion of Jesus the comforter, the good shepherd, the Lord and Savior, this forceful document reexamines the Christ image of the New Testament gospels—the mysterious stranger, the singular, abandoned, and solitary figure—and rethinks the current role of Western culture through this altered view of Christianity. The existential Jesus has no interest in sin, and his focus is not on an afterlife. He gestures enigmatically from within his own torturous experience, inviting the reader to walk in his shoes and ask the question, Who am I?—establishing Jesus as the West’s great teacher on the nature of being. Incorporating a new and original translation of the Gospel of Mark from its original Greek, this radical reinterpretation identifies the philosophical and cultural significance of the gospels in the modern world, based on the life and actions—rather than the word—of Jesus Christ.

And in a review, Peter Jensen, Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, writes that Carroll’s book ‘testifies to the need for our culture to grapple once again with the Jesus of the New Testament. John Carroll is right. This task is inescapable if we wish to undersutand our history and the significance of or civilisation’.