“[T]he events of Holy Week,” a United Church of Christ pastor laments in her review of this book, “are surrounded by so much baggage of atonement theology, pietism, and oversimplification.” In their 2006 book, The Last Week, authors Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan “move beyond centuries-old layers of theological interpretation, and examine Jesus’ Passion with an eye toward what Jesus was passionate about,” i.e. the kingdom of God and its justice.
Borg and Crossan understand Jesus’ Passion “not as a sacrifice or substitution (as it has been understood by much, if not most of Christendom), but as an incarnation of God’s justice, which subverts the status quo of political oppression, exploitation, and religious legitimation.” In the process, the Journey With Jesus critic adds, they “do a wonderful job of illuminating the religious background of 1st-century Judaism.”
In The Last Week, these two progressive contemporary Jesus scholars “dissect the week from Palm Sunday to Easter, day by day, using only the Gospel of Mark,” the earliest of the four gospels, vergersvoice.org mentions, and they “lay out their interpretations lucidly and logically.” The book “brilliantly depicts Jesus’ journey by telling and explaining history,” according to biblewise.com, “not offering a simple historical reconstruction.”
The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem
By Marcus Borg & Dominic Crossan
HarperOne, 2006
