“Yahweh our angels is Unity” — Notes on Margaret Barker’s King of the Jews
I first bought Margaret Barker’s King of the Jews: Temple Theology in John’s Gospel when I was a missionary for the LDS Church, when it came out in 2014, but I have come to revisit it recently and am enjoying it even more now than I did back then. I think, in many respects, I was not ready in 2014 to appreciate this book, but now — after having traveled through Eastern thought, contemplated my own spirituality a great deal further, and come to better understand adjacent fields, such as psychology — I believe I am now in a better position to benefit from what may very well be Barker’s magnum opus thus far. Barker has changed the way I see Jesus of Nazareth, making it feasible for me to understand Jesus while also being faithful to what I’ve learned from Eastern thought, my own native Mormonism, as well as numerous decidedly secular fields. I believe that Barker’s work holds promise if for no other reason than that, in recovering a potential ur-Christianity, so to speak, she also provides her readers with a vision which may feasibly be ported into purely secular or non-religious contexts — King of the Jews may be a great example of her work’s wide applicability.
As I mentioned in my previous post on the subject, Barker has received mixed reception as a historian, but that is not at all to say she is a bad historian, and…
