Showing posts with label John Carroll. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Carroll. Show all posts

2018/03/18

The Existential Jesus: John Carroll Amazon.com: Books



The Existential Jesus: John Carroll






Susette Ann Monk
4.0 out of 5 starsThe Existential JesusDecember 3, 2012
Format: Paperback|Verified Purchase

I found this book put into words many of my unspoken beliefs and opened a new way of seeing Jesus Christ. Well worth reading, but could be disturbing for some. Not everyone would agree with the doctrines espoused
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BRANDON KNOX

3.0 out of 5 starsChallenging interpretation of the Gospel of MarkAugust 30, 2012
Format: Paperback

To say that "The Existential Jesus" offers an unconventional interpretation of the gospels is an understatement. Carroll's thesis is that Jesus did not preach about an afterlife, or even about salvation in a broader sense, or even about ethical teaching (p. 9). Instead, he "is the archetypal stranger. He appears from nowhere, shrouded in mystery, but is soon gone...He is the existential hero - solitary, uprooted from family and home, restless, always on the move and, until the mid-point in his mission, blind to where he is going" (p. 1).

Carroll challenges the reader to look at Mark's gospel through a completely new lens. I found his interpretation of sin and the holy spirit intriguing. For the author the former is really a misnomer, positing instead that the original Greek meant something akin to "missing the mark" or a character flaw. Jesus's teaches was therefore not concerned with what we currently conceptualize "sin" to mean (i.e., doing something against the wishes or commands of God).

For me the most innovative and rewarding interpretation in the book was that of Legion - who he was, what he represented, and ultimately how he ties into later parts of Mark's narrative. Although the author uses Mark as the basis of his analysis, he also contrasts this gospel with that of John, showing how the two complement each other, with Mark showing an "existential" Jesus not concerned with the afterlife and John showing a "divine" Jesus.

While I found Carroll's underlying thesis challenging and thought-provoking, I feel he has skirted around some very fundamental questions. For example, he argues that the true meaning of sin (hamartia) and the holy spirit (pneuma hagion) were distorted over time, that Jesus used these terms very differently than we think of them today. This basic premise is itself on shaky ground. The gospels was written decades after Jesus's death, in a language (Greek) that he did not speak, addressed to a community of Gentiles (whereas Jesus preached among the Jews). To argue that Jesus's teachings were later twisted by the institutionalized church requires one to believe that the gospels themselves captured Jesus's teachings accurately, and that what he preached in Aramaic, with all of its supposed linguistic subtleties, was captured in koine Greek.

A similar critique could be made of Carroll's interpretation of the concept of the "holy spirit". He argues that "pneuma hagion" should be viewed as "the charged wind, the cosmic breath, the driving spectral force. It is also the directing power that drives the stranger [Jesus] into the wilderness" (p. 25). Such an interpretation puts the orthdox conception of the holy spirit on its head. However I struggle to believe that this is what the author of Mark had in mind when he wrote his gospel. Paul used the same term in his writings, which were penned roughly 20 years before Mark. I would be interested in knowing whether and how this Greek term had been used previously as well. Was it a term that appeared in Greek writings only with the emergence of the Jesus movement? I would need to see more than simply the author's critique to discard the orthodox meaning of the holy spirit.

Despite my disagreements with some of the fundamental arguments made by Carroll, I still found this to be a fascinating book. I found it an excellent critique of Mark's literary structure, as he explains the arch of the story, but I find his theological arguments much less convincing.
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Stuart Schulz

5.0 out of 5 starsStretch MarkApril 30, 2011
Format: Paperback|Verified Purchase

As the other reviewers attest, this is a powerful book. John Carroll is a wonderful writer, in the crazed literary critic mode, not that of the pedantic theolgian, digging deep for new connections, unafraid of over-stretching the simple truths of Mark. Which he does, often. He has discovered themes, parallels, motives, metaphors and allegories that never would have occurred to me upon five readings of Mark. And while I buy only half of them, this still represents a treasure of new insights presented in oftentimes aggressive, staccato sentences that practically poke you in the chest, and dare you to disbelieve. In fact, he at times almost sounds like the so-called primitive Mark himself. I recommend a slow read. Dont rush this book, for the wisdom of many of his ideas become apparent with several readings and consultation of the Notes in back.
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Sky Light Mine

5.0 out of 5 starsSurprisedOctober 30, 2009
Format: Paperback

This book really caught me off guard. I am not a fan of existentialism, and at first picked up the book expecting to be annoyed. I am glad I still am able to be pleasantly surprised.

This book takes a deep look at who Jesus is in the Gospel of Mark, a Gospel that, in many ways, is bare bones. This bare bones, however, as the author shows, betrays a masterful portrait of the mysterious humanity of Jesus. This he highlights with comparisons to John's Gospel, which he sees as being in many ways the antithesis and perfect, masterful compliment to Mark. I really enjoyed the different perspective this author takes, and one can tell he has really striven and wrestled with the text, whether he is a "believer" or not. I am a Christian, and yet find his, perhaps unconventional, insights most welcome and engaging. I think you will too, even if you do not agree with all he says.
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Dubious Disciple

5.0 out of 5 starsA Dubious Disciple Book ReviewJanuary 22, 2011
Format: Paperback

Ex-is-ten-tial -adjective: of or relating to existence, especially human existence.

This is Jesus, the way you've never read about him before. John Carroll draws primarily on the Gospel of Mark, a Gospel which rather quickly fell into disuse among early Christians as they favored the more majestic stories told by Matthew and the others.

Mark's Jesus is far more human. He sometimes questions, sometimes fails. He is ridiculed by his family. Carroll portrays Jesus as a lonely, mysterious stranger with an obscure mission. By the end of his journey, he has lost all of his followers. "His life reaches its consummation in tragedy--a godless and profane one--and a great death scream from the cross, questioning the sense of it all."

Mark's story then closes with a mystery. An empty tomb, and three women fleeing in terror, told to tell no one of what they saw--or didn't see. (Carroll is correct; the ending we have now in the book of Mark, describing the resurrection of Jesus, did not exist in the earliest manuscripts.)

Mark's Gospel is, of course, one of four. Over time, the Jesus story grew in splendor, and by the time the fourth Gospel was written, Jesus had become God Himself. When I complete my book about John's Gospel (yet a couple years away from publication), I am going to wander through every local bookstore and move my book next to Carroll's, where the two extremes can sit side-by-side.

The Existential Jesus - Book Reviews - Books - Entertainment - theage.com.au

The Existential Jesus - Book Reviews - Books - Entertainment - theage.com.au




The Existential Jesus
Gary D. Bouma, Reviewer
March 30, 2007
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A fresh encounter with Mark's Gospel impresses with its unbiased approach.

JOHN CARROLL AND A group of colleagues have met regularly for years to read the Bible. No, this is not a Bible study group carefully applying given notes to unfamiliar text. The Existential Jesus has emerged from a deep and fresh encounter with the story of Jesus as told by Mark. Mark's Gospel is the least elaborate - no birth, only an empty tomb and the most roughly hewn - no softening of this at times raging, furious character.

Author John Carroll 
Genre Spirituality/Religion
PublisherScribeRRP$35.0

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While some may be challenged by what Carroll meets in this encounter, his aim is not to deconstruct or confront. He appears to have no agenda other than retelling Mark's story as he has encountered and understood it. The book has no audience, no desire to convert, just to recount an authentic encounter with Mark's story of the Jesus who said "I am" and demanded of others, "Who am I?"

Carroll says he has never been a practising Christian but considers the Bible to be so formative of Western civilisation that, like Shakespeare, it rewards close study. He brings a well-grounded appreciation of textual interpretation using his version of the analytical technique "midrash" - a Jewish term that means "to draw out meaning" - and the expanding knowledge of the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth.
He does not bring the biases and learned habits of churchly biblical interpretation. This leaves him free to encounter freshly the power of Mark's story of Jesus. Mark's Jesus is in a sense the most pre-Christian of the gospels, least shaped by the agendas of the emerging church.
Rather than a text-by-text or chapter-by-chapter approach, Carroll discerns the gospel's themes and how its characters represent them in the unfolding drama. The disciples don't get the message. Only a few - the demoniac Mary Magdalene, the woman at the well - see Jesus for who he is. Judas sees and rejects.

Carroll retells the story and then presents Mark's picture of key characters - Mary Magdalene, Peter, Judas and Pilate. Each has their own elemental response to Jesus' "I am".

Carroll, I think rightly, sees Mark's Jesus as profoundly anti-institutional. Jesus rages against the temple cult, a huge religious industry linking religion and state in a profit-seeking, order-enforcing and grace-denying institution. Jesus takes the man with a withered hand out of the synagogue to heal him, the blind man is healed in private, and the temple needs cleansing. Such an attack would make him a target. The attack is as fresh now as ever.

A withering and declining institution is no more Christlike than a flourishing one. Those who sacrifice others on the altars of human institutions are still with us, as are those who take a critically reflective view of these institutions sensing the total otherness of the one to whom Jesus pointed and referred to as Father.

The complex interactions between Jesus' emerging clarity about who he is, his relationships with disciples, family and the small but critically revealing cast of characters in this story are teased out by Carroll using his own responses, those of artists, and contemporary commentaries. I found new insights into some usually less well known characters.

The existential Jesus is a person whose very being is such that an encounter with him clarifies the existence and flaws in the being of those engaged. Jesus is not a moraliser; he's a teacher and a healer of being. There is no Gnosticism here. The encounter is with pure being, not with esoteric teaching or purifying knowledge.

Carroll's clarity of Jesus' diagnosis of the evils of human institution is not balanced by the good they do or a consideration of the impossible contradiction of the human condition - doomed to create organisations for good, which have in them the seeds of their own undoing and evil.
While in Carroll's hand Mark's Jesus is complex, evolving and immensely engaging, he seems more ready to point the finger than to wrestle with embedded contradiction. To seek such nuancing is to have two feet planted on the slippery slope to the church's establishment.
Carroll's Jesus is rabidly anti-church and uses Peter - the disciple who builds churches - as his whipping boy. For a gospel written about AD70, this is a reach; there would have been raging arguments about the nature of this new movement within Judaism - was it a Jewish sect or a new, separate movement? How should it be structured? This gospel may have been written into this conflict to call people away from forms and structures. While this is a voice that is needed in every age, each age answers with, "yes, but".

The Gospels, like the great stories of the Hebrew Scriptures, recount the experiences of humans interacting with the creative source of all that is. Few who encounter them are untouched.

I was struck by the freshness of this encounter, the willingness to pursue what was found using the tools of textual analysis to unlock the themes, the courage to let the text speak and then, having unpacked it, to just let it be. Like Mark, Carroll leaves unanswered Jesus' question, "Who am I?"

An extract from Existential Jesus will run in A2 next Saturday. 
Gary D. Bouma is professor of sociology at Monash University and author of Australian Soul: Religion and Spirituality in the 21st Century, published by Cambridge University Press at $39.95.

Bookshelf: John Carroll, "The Existential Jesus"



Bookshelf: John Carroll, "The Existential Jesus"

Bookshelf: John Carroll, “The Existential Jesus”
DECEMBER 25, 2008



Jeff Giles

Jeff Giles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Popdose and Dadnabbit, as well as an entertainment writer whose work can be seen at Rotten Tomatoes and a number of other sites. Hey, why not follow him at Twitter while you're at it?




John Carroll – The Existential Jesus (2009, Counterpoint)
purchase this book (Amazon)




You can’t claim to offer an interpretation of the Gospel of Mark that claims to offer up hitherto unseen angles — or title the result The Existential Jesus — without stirring up a few hornet’s nests, and that’s exactly what John Carroll has been doing in his native Australia since this slim 274-page volume was released in the fall. This is all well and good for Carroll, who made his bones on iconoclastic works such as Humanism: The Rebirth and Wreck of Western Culture, but will it help the casual armchair theologian come to a deeper understanding of the West’s most famous woodworking philosopher?

Yes and no. Carroll’s work isn’t the fumbling embarrassment that his detractors claim it is — but it is a scattered, conflicted book, one that attempts to shatter theoretical framework even as it relies upon it to make crucial arguments, and one that’s just as likely to draw upon established dogma (i.e. Judas as cartoon villain) as it is to try and break new ground (the whole “existential Jesus” thing, which really isn’t all that new, but let’s not quibble). To top it all off, Carroll’s writing style is always very dry and occasionally overly analytical; chunks of The Existential Jesus can be a bit of a slog.

It’s also difficult to put down. This is probably due more to the source material — Mark is the shortest Gospel, and for a book in the Bible, moves along at a pretty good clip — than anything Carroll does with it, but it still has the effect of turning The Existential Jesus into something of a page-turner. Hardcore theologians may take issue with Carroll’s interpretation of the book’s central figure; some reviewers have suggested that his Jesus is defined more by his doubt and self-absorption than his mission. But for open-minded religious readers — and anyone interested in gaining a bit of insight into what I’ll call, for lack of a better term, the “historical” Jesus — the book has a fair amount of wheat to go with its chaff. Carroll’s Jesus isn’t the beatific, divinely removed figure you remember from Sunday school, but he is about as bummed out and conflicted as you’d expect a young man with the literal weight of the world on his shoulders to be. It’s undeniably compelling stuff.

Where Carroll really stumbles is on his many interpretive dances — he engages in a recurring, and distractingly tenuous, examination of the psyche and motives of Simon Peter that finds Carroll reaching back to the apostle’s family history to suggest some sort of generational disconnect between heart and spirit. It comes to an undeniably gripping conclusion when Peter is confronted by a servant girl in the courtyard outside Jesus’ trial, but again, that’s the source material talking; although Carroll isn’t without insight, it’s hard not to feel like he could have done a better job of reaching some of his conclusions.

Ultimately, although The Existential Jesus isn’t the paradigm-busting work of genius it hopes to be (like, say, Jack Miles’ God: A Biography), it isn’t without its merits, and anyone with an interest in revisionist theology can safely part with the $12 Amazon’s asking for Counterpoint’s paperback edition to read it for themselves. As a truly existential Jesus might argue, it’s interesting both in spite of and because of its flaws.

Telling Stories About Jesus: A Conversation with John Carroll - Keith Tester, 2010



Telling Stories About Jesus: A Conversation with John Carroll - Keith Tester, 2010




Telling Stories About Jesus: A Conversation with John Carroll


Keith TesterFirst Published November 18, 2010 Research Article

Download PDF Article information


Abstract


Since the 1980s the Australian sociologist John Carroll has been engaged in a unique project. Over the course of a number of books he has sought to investigate the fate of authority, values and vocation in the tradition of Western culture. His books are characterised by a deep knowledge of the Western tradition of high culture, especially its art and texts; they are marked by historical sweep and seriousness of purpose. For Carroll, culture is the retelling of archetypal stories which take us beyond the ego and towards the work of soul-building. In 2007 he published the book The Existential Jesuswhich seeks to tell of the meaning of Jesus for contemporar y culture. This conversation uses the publication of the Jesus book as an opportunity to ask Carroll to reflect on his work. Consequently the article is also an invitation for the wider academic community to begin to engage with Carroll’s profound and challenging inquiry into the state of Western culture.
Keywords Archetypes, being, Christianity, Humanism, Jesus, Mark’s Gospel, meaning, mythos

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The Existential Jesus





The Existential Jesus



The Existential Jesus By John Carroll Scribe, 288pp, $35


MATTHEW LAMB
TheAustralian
March 10, 2007

NICK Cave has said he first read Mark because, of all the Gospels, it was the shortest. John Carroll in The Existential Jesus makes a case for the Gospel of Mark to be not only the biggest of the Gospels but perhaps also one of the biggest books of Western civilisation. This is a bold claim, but Carroll is not shy in making bold claims.



His first claim is this: "The Christian churches have comprehensively failed in their one central task: to retell their foundation story in a way that might speak to their times." This Jesus, Carroll argues, has been reduced to an abstract figure, an illustration of various hollow doctrines and laws. The result is that he is irrelevant to the everyday lives of people.



Carroll's second claim, in response to the first, is this: "Jesus is the core of Western Dreaming. His presence is vital to our civilisation and its individuals. He is known by his story." Against the abstract figure of Jesus, Carroll argues that it is through paying attention to the narrative structure of the Gospel of Mark, and to its underlying mythic substratum, that the importance of Jesus as an individual is to be found. His importance to us as individuals quickly follows.



Carroll's Jesus is therefore a figure for a post-church, secular society. This Jesus is "individual-centred and anti-tribal", outside of family and community, a figure in which "group traits and attachments have been stripped away". He is, as Carroll argues, an existential Jesus.



This retelling of the Jesus story is certainly compelling. Carroll offers us his own translation of the Gospel of Mark, accompanied by his always interesting commentary. But it also contains ambiguous claims that detract from its core concerns.



To reclaim Mark's Gospel from the churches, Carroll removes the story from its Judeo-Christian tradition and inserts it into the Greek tradition. From the opening verses of the Gospel, "Jewish history is made obsolete". And by its concluding verses, it presents an "anti-Christian ending", an anathema to traditional Christian churches. Yet Carroll constantly relies on the Jewish concept of midrash to justify his retelling of the Jesus story. But this concept refers only to reinterpreting such stories from within the limits of the same church teaching and scholarship Carroll rejects. Moreover, he relies heavily on the Christian notion of evil, which sets up a dualistic narrative structure, repeated in other parts of his story (insiders and outsiders, for example). But such dualism is very much a Judeo-Christian framework, absent in the Greek tradition (they preferred hubris).



Despite this, Carroll's commentary of Mark proceeds by linking most of the Jesus story to various Greek sources and ideas. He does this to elevate the importance of mythos in the narrative. His interpretations are convincing here, but this raises other problems: the more Mark is shown to be derivative of Greek sources, the less original this figure of Jesus appears to be. This is compounded by Carroll's retrospective reading of Renaissance and romantic conceptions of individuality back on to the Gospel, and his use of Freudian and Jungian concepts to justify pushing interpretations of the Gospel to suit his own ends.



A more ambiguous claim is Carroll's conception of an existential Jesus because the mythical figure presented is not existential at all but is, by Carroll's own repeated admissions, essential. It is by holding up this "Jesus essence" that Carroll bases his claim for the originality of Mark's Gospel.



The whole book is framed around a question of the "enigma of being". Carroll cites Martin Heidegger as leading the turn of philosophy back to being in the 20th century, but it is likelier Jean-Paul Sartre is Carroll's influence here. Yet the appellation of existential can apply to an individual only if their existence can be said to precede their essence. Carroll argues, however, that not only is the essence of Jesus his main focus, this focus is also based on the argument that Jesus is, indeed, the essence that precedes all our individual existences. Moreover, Heidegger famously criticised Sartre for dabbling in questions of existence and essence (regardless of which comes first), because such metaphysics (and, by extension, Carroll's theoretical framework) is still residing within the "oblivion of the truth of being".



Indeed, each of these ambiguous claims is associated with the theoretical framework Carroll calls on to justify his translation and interpretation of Mark.



But they detract from his core concern, which is to elevate the story itself, as a "self-contained numinous object", above such theoretical ballast. After all, it was the traditional churches' reliance on such hollow doctrines and laws that, Carroll claims, reduced Jesus to an abstract figure in the first place.



I happen to agree with Carroll's core concern and it is in this spirit that I offer these criticisms, not to dismiss his book but the better to focus on what is most interesting in it. And this is the concern with revitalising individuality in the contemporary world and doing so through the virtues of storytelling, as opposed to empty doctrine. It is interesting because it broadens the debate about Jesus beyond the restrictive framework of traditional church teachings and reminds us non-Christians that these stories are at the heart of our culture, too.



Most of all, Carroll's book is a rarity in Australian publishing in that despite its ambiguities, or perhaps because of them, it requires its readers to think. The Existential Jesus may not be the greatest story told but it is certainly one worth hearing.



Matthew Lamb is based in Dubai, where he is working on a PhD on Albert Camus.