The Jesus Sayings
By Rex Weyler
House of Anansi Press, $29.95, 352 pages
Weyler is a dynamic figure; writer, journalist, and a founder of Greenpeace International. His previous books were on music technology (The Story of Harmony), Greenpeace (Greenpeace: The Inside Story), and a history of the American Indian movement (Blood of the Land). Here, in The Jesus Sayings, Weyler explores many of new research on early Christian writings, and new techniques in language and manuscript analysis that allow better tracing of the ancestry of those manuscripts. In addition, recent archeology has brought new documents to light from those early days of the Christian Church’s development.
The Jesus Sayings is both the story of modern Biblical archeology, research and scholarship, and that of the subject, the words and teachings of Jesus, using the most original documents possible, stepping outside the traditional Gospels, and looking at the documents used to create them, and those gospels rejected by the African Synod of Hippo in 393 and further upheld by the Councils of Carthage in 397 and 419 and St. Augustine. While potentially controversial to Biblical literalists, The Jesus Sayings provides an interesting view of that period of time in the early Church when people were trying to make sense of Jesus’ message. Weyler also draws similarities between Jesus’ teachings and those of the Cynics, a Greek school of philosophy that encouraged living a life of virtue and lack of possessions and rejecting wealth and power. A very interesting book, handled with concern and care for the subject, and providing a great overview of modern Biblical research.
