Jesus Rabbi and Lord: The Hebrew Story of Jesus Behind our Gospels

In 1945, Robert Lisle Lindsey from Norman, Oklahoma, found himself the pastor of a small Baptist congregation in Jerusalem, Israel. With his Hebrew-speaking congregants in mind, he began a translation of the Greek texts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke and soon concluded there must lie behind these Gospels--even if distantly--an early Hebrew story of Jesus. To his surprise, he also found that Luke almost always showed Greek texts which could easily be translated literally to Hebrew. The same was true of Matthew, wherever he was not copying Mark's Gospel.In 1962, Lindsey met Professor David Flusser of Hebrew University and the two pursued the question of whether we can get back to the earliest semitic story and words of Jesus. "It is clear," say Lindsey and Flusser, "that our synoptic texts originated mainly in one Greek translation of a Hebrew biography of Jesus, probably written by the Matthew of tradition. The materials are too Hebraic to have originated in Greek, as many scholars mistakenly think today. Happily, if we use the right tools we can still hear Jesus speak as his fellow Jews of the first-century heard Him.''Lindsey tells here the warm, personal account of how he and Flusser struggled over many years to discover the earliest form of Jesus' words and narratives of His life. They believe that the records, when properly analyzed and studied, show us an authentic picture of Jesus interacting with the people of Jerusalem and Galilee. Jesus clearly heads a movement, the ''Kingdom of Heaven,'' and is a Divine Figure whose actions and words are fully Messianic.