Marcus Borg

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Marcus Borg is a contemporary Jesus Scholar and religious author. He holds a D.Phil. from Oxford University and is Hundere Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture, an endowed chair at Oregon State University. He lectures widely and occasionally appears in the national news media. He is currently president of the Anglican Association of Biblical Scholars and a columnist for Beliefnet.

Borg was raised in the Scandinavian Lutheran church in 1940s North Dakota, and attended Concordia College, Moorhead, a small liberal arts school in Moorhead, MN. While at Moorhead he was a columnist in the school paper and held forth as a Conservative. After a close reading of the Book of Amos and its overt message of social equality he immediately began writing with an increasingly liberal stance and was eventually invited to discontinue writing his articles due to his new-found liberalism. He did graduate work at Union Theological Seminary, and obtained masters and D.Phil degrees at Oxford under George Caird. Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright had studied under the same professor, and many years later Borg and Wright were to share in coauthoring The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, an amicable study in contrast. Following a period of religious questioning in his mid thirties, and numinous experiences similar to those described by Rudolf Otto, Borg became active in the Episcopal church, in which his wife serves as a priest.

Borg advocates entering into relationship with God as more important than belief about God. He has a panentheist understanding of God, which sees God as both indwelling in everything and transcendent. He teaches that a historical metaphorical approach to the Bible is more meaningful for today's world than is Biblical literalism.

[edit] Bibliography

Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary, 2006, ISBN: 0060594454
The Last Week: A Day-by-Day Account of Jesus's Final Week in Jerusalem, co-authored with John Dominic Crossan, 2006, ISBN 0-06-084539-2
The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith (2003)
Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously but Not Literally (2001)
God at 2000 (editor, eith Ross Mackenzie, 2001)
The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions. Co-authored with N. Thomas Wright, 1999, ISBN 0-06-060875-7
Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?: A Debate Between William Lane Craig and John Dominic Crossan, 1998 (Marcus Borg, Respondent)
Conflict, Holiness and Politics in the Teachings of Jesus, rev. ed., 1998 (originally published in 1984)
Jesus and Buddha: The Parallel Sayings, ed., 1997
The God We Never Knew, 1997
The Lost Gospel Q, ed., 1996
Jesus at 2000, ed., 1996
The Search for Jesus: Modern Scholarship Looks at the Gospels, co-authored with John Dominic Crossan and Stephen Patterson, ed. by Hershel Shanks, 1994
Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship, 1994
Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, 1994, ISBN 0-06-060917-6
Jesus: A New Vision, 1987
The Year of Luke, 1976
Conflict and Social Change, 1971