Product Description

Werner examines the question of the Historical Jesus. Rather than inventing stories to recreate events or removing miracles to make the Gospels scientifically 'believable,' Werner picks apart the elements of myth that contribute to the text and looks within the Gospels for evidence of a living man.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2959573 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-15
• Binding: Paperback
• 332 pages

About the Author
Ordained a Lutheran pastor in 1956 and 'fellowshipped' a Unitarian minister in the early 60's, Ernest G Werner was active in the ministry for many years, before leaving to pursue scholarship of the Bible. A former Cornell University chaplain and a student at the Harvard Divinity School, Werner was known in Ithaca, NY, as a minister who reached the congregation, as evidenced by ever-increasing attendance at Ithaca's First Unitarian Church.

Customer Reviews

A powerfully written book and a valuable new contribution
Rod of Jesse: On the Jesus of the Gospels & Doubt of his Existence
by Ernest Werner, pub. January 2008.

What do we get when a former pastor, former assistant pastor, former minister, and former member of the Cornell University Chaplains' Staff decides to question the historicity of Jesus and the Gospels? This courageous book!

This is a powerfully written book and a valuable new contribution to seeing how fragile the belief in an historical Jesus figure really is. I'm certainly pleasantly surprised by Werner's pose and presentation.

He has decided to write his own "deep book" (a term borrowed from his mother) uncovering the legends and myths of Jesus and the Gospels. His analysis is a new and fresh perspective on the unprovable historicity of the Jesus character. Werner sees the Bible through the eyes of someone who has read it and studied it and given sermons on it for more than 50 years. He breaks the Bible down by studying each of the Gospel stories in a literary way. Analyzing the purpose of the writer's intent, the language used, and whether each specific instance can be considered historical fact, myth, legacy or just plain fantasy.

As in any thorough study of William Shakespeare, an analytical breakdown is required to understand the meaning and artistry behind the story, its detail, the characters, and the plot. What are each character's words intended to portray? What is the message of this mythical Jesus and the artistry of the creative writers behind him? Werner has provided us such a detailed analysis.

He has provided us a fascinating understanding of the way in which the gospel writers weave history, myth, folklore and legend into one of the world's greatest masterpieces. And for someone coming from the background he does; not only a former believer, but church leader, his is one of the most courageous and openly self reflective pieces I've ever come across. It takes a lot of openness, honesty and bravery to do what Werner has done, which is to say that he's questioned and changed his own mind about a lifetime of religious devotion and belief.

Within his own sphere of study, Werner has argued convincingly, dare I say proven, that the literal and historical figure of Jesus of the Bible is untenable. He has argued through exhaustive gospel analysis what he calls the "negative" arguments against the Jesus as historical personage all the way through to completion. Through this he has shown the true value of the mythic Jesus as hero archetype and champion of the poor via an honest Christian perspective and self reflective process.

Some of the areas that are weak and could benefit from further consideration include the following:

1) His analysis of John Allegro's work, which Werner sees as his most formidable challenge (pg. 217). I mention within Werner's own sphere of study because he misses out on the wordplay aspects of the myth-making, which were essential to biblical exegesis as well as storytelling, and which first led Allegro to look for hidden meanings in the Bible texts. The hidden meanings led to The Sacred Mushroom. [In 1985 Russian linguist Vladimir Nikolaevic Toporov published On the Semiotics of Mythological Conceptions about Mushrooms which may give Allegro serious academic support for his language proposals in The Sacred Mushroom.] But even without considering wordplay, Werner has unraveled much of the literary artifice behind the gospel narratives.

2) Werner overlooks vast amounts of scholarship before and after Allegro on fertility in religion and Judeo-Christianity. His unawareness of much of the work, and his sole focus on Allegro as the final and only say in this area make his conclusions in this specific regard inconclusive and in need of further study.

Nearly two centuries before Allegro, in 1786, Dr. Richard Payne Knight published A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus. His was probably the first modern book on the topic of religious genesis via fertility worship. In the 1800's Jacques Antoine Dulaure, Godfrey Higgins, Thomas Inman, Clifford Howard, H.M. Westropp and Hargrave Jennings, amongst many others, published their studies about fertility in religion. Howard covered Christianity extensively.

By the early to mid 1900's, scholars such as Sanger Brown, B.Z. Goldberg, Ernest Busenbark, Bronislaw Malinowski and Wilhelm Reich had all published extensively on fertility worship. From 1912 through 1918 Theodore Schroeder published several essays on the erotogenesis of religion, laying the frame work for future studies to look at all religions as fertility based. In 1945 T. Clifton Longworth published A Devil a Monk Would Be: A Survey of Sex & Celibacy in Religion which is one of the most revealing books on sex (and its suppression) in Christianity today, and revealed a startling pornographic history of Christian churches and ancient Church practices in the UK and ancient world. All of these scholars published their findings long before Allegro ever began. This field of study continues strong to the present day.

3) Werner must recognize that his own Victorian/20th century way of thinking is prudish, in order to open up to the vast amounts of research in the area of fertility cults. He attacks Allegro's proposals as "obscene" and "schizophrenic," not allowing himself to realize that this is a value judgment that the ancient world would not have shared on sexual matters. Prudery should not concern the scholar of the ancient world either. The people who performed these rites then, as now, do not see it as obscene or schizophrenic - to suggest it is so is to obscure the issue.

Central to Werner's thesis is his profound insight into the Lazarus episode. And into the links with Egyptian sun worship - which show him to be on the brink of realizing the heritage of ancient fertility religion behind Christianity. But he is only on the brink, and to go beyond the brink he will need to take a more objective look at the fertility roots of ancient religions and those that have evolved from them.

4) Just as Werner only looks toward Allegro for citations on phallic worship in Christianity, he does the same for entheogens, or psychoactive drugs, in Christianity. He solely focuses on Allegro's mushroom interpretations, as if Allegro were the only one in the entire field. Werner must be unaware of the last four decades of excellent publications on the topic of entheogens in Judeo-Christianity by the likes of Professor Carl Ruck from Boston University, Dr. Dan Merkur from the Syracuse Theological Seminary, Dr. Giorgio Samorini, Dr. Christian Rätsch, Clark Heinrich, Donald Teeter, James Arthur, Steve Kubby, Mark Hoffman, Michael Hoffman, Chris Bennett and Neil McQueen, Andrew Rutajit and myself, who've all written extensively on mushrooms and other entheogens in Christianity.

5) Similarly, Werner does not pursue his studies of sun worship's correlations to Jesus and Christianity (astrotheology) far enough. While he brings it up many times, his analysis is insufficient and not deep enough to dismiss these possibilities in favor of a mythical-only theory. Here he focuses on Dupuis as the be-all end-all to the field, overlooking many other scholars, past and present.

6) Werner chooses not to utilize the iconographic/symbolic evidence in favour of the purely scriptural (which I'm not necessarily against because his contribution in this way is very valuable.). But he's therefore sometimes overly ready to dismiss other correlations based on his scripture only premise. For instance, images from the Canterbury Psalter, or Abbey of Montecassino (and many others), which lend heavy support to not only the mushroom theory, but also other entheogens, are not discussed. This can also be said for other areas of his study - such as fertility worship (see Samorini 1998; Ruck, et al. 2001/2005; Rush 2007/2008)

7) His writing style sometimes doesn't make for easy reading - I found it difficult at any speed other than audible. But it's worth the hard work to arrive at the message.

8) I dislike his approach of calling people who call Jesus' historical existence into question "negative". Why call people who want positive proof, negative?

This book is not the final word. He's analyzed the myth within the mythos, and the writing there of - which in and of itself is complete. But he dismisses what remains, human spirituality and imagination, to Jung and human psychology only, declaring the direct experience unreachable, unattainable, though failing to look at the entheogenic experience through unbiased eyes - or even eyes that have studied the experience. (Johns Hopkins University study on Psilocybin and Religious experiences, May 5, 2006.)

He has all of the components in his book to finish his study - fertility, drugs, and solar worship. His present study of these areas was limited and not nearly as comprehensive and vast as his study on the Gospels specifically.

So, therefore, I don't take Rod of Jesse seriously as a critique of Allegro's work specifically. But I want to be clear that these weaknesses in Werner's book do NOT affect the overall premise of his work. Overall, except with Allegro, what he's written is solid.

It is my hope that my critique will be seen as positive encouragement to Mr. Werner for a job well done! I merely want to suggest areas for future study that I feel will be more rewarding than some of his present conclusions.

Overall this book is a masterful piece of art. Mr. Werner has set himself in history as an analytical and critical thinker. His contribution to biblical scholarship is valuable and will not go unrecognized.

5 Stars!