Book Review - His Name Is Jesus - If Only It Were Readable or Credible

I consider myself to be quite open minded, and certainly more than a bit intellectually and spiritually curious. It was with that intent that I picked up a copy of this book. Between long studied traditions of gematria in Hebrew writings to recent hypotheses on "Bible Codes" of various types, I figured that a used, cheap quick read of this book might provide something to chew on.

Instead, I was greeted with assertions that and statistical probabilities and archeological "discoveries" that support the code that the author purports to have found, without the aid of computers, in the study of various areas of scripture in the Masoretic Hebrew text of the Bible. Given that Masoretic Hebrew is only about 1200 years old really began to cast some serious doubt as to the veracity of the findings - especially the computer validated statistics which "proved" the non random nature of the occurrences as noted by the author. Additionally, I am no Hebrew scholar, but I have enough exposure to know that absent vowels and with significant interpretive license on the part of the translator, the "codes" can say different messages altogether. Though the root words may be the same, the meanings may be very different.

The writing itself is a torrent of Hebrew and English "every fifth letter tarting with the second letter after the third word reads XXXXXXX wich is assumed to mean YYYYYYY and proves ZZZZZZZ" for nearly 250 pages is tough. The only reason this book even got two stars was that some of the insights - not about the code, but in the translation of the Hebrew and basic theology - were mildly interesting.

End of the day, the book is quite fantastic, in the "fantasy" fantastic way. I can't get behind the pseudoscience, and there just isn't enough here to overcome the obvious bias of the author toward messianic Christianity.