Seeing the actual development of the Christian message, over time, is exciting and produces insights one would never get without knowing the time line. Starting with the most depressing comclusion: the last few items, letters written after 90-100 AD but attributed to earlier writers, have lost the pro-woman, pro-slave (anti-slavery) attitudes of the older works, and sadly accommodated (Borg's word) to Roman society of the time. They get steadily worse after about 100. This fits (all too well) with the progressive corruption of the Christian message by Gnostic and Manichaean ideas of hating the world, hating women, hating sex, and hating the flesh. We are long overdue to purge this from the record.Also interesting is the recognition that the actual pages devoted to Jesus' message--love, tolerance, freedom, mutual care, mutual responsibility--are really very few. The Sermon on the Mount is the main text that is believably ascribed to Jesus (it is in Matthew and Luke and presumably from the mysterious "Q" text). A great deal of further writing on love, charity, and mutual care is found, even in those last "accommodating" letters, but the total pages are surprisingly few. Moreover, the message develops over time. Luke (or whoever wrote "Luke" and "Acts"--no name given--well, maybe he really was named Luke) is the main source for the flaming radicalism that animated the Catholic Worker movement and many other social movements dear to me personally. Luke seems to have done most of the development of this theme--whatever Jesus contributed to it is rather obscure. As a Christian, I trust that Luke was reporting Jesus' actual teachings, but I think he elaborated a bit.So, now, we have a very good idea of who said what when (not as trivial a matter as some reviewers make it). Where did these ideas come from? Again, as a Christian, I believe they were inspired by God, but where did the specific rhetoric, development, and imagery come from? There is really nothing, and I mean nothing, in Greek or Jewish philosophy that seriously anticipates the message of universal love, tolerance, forgiveness, healing, help, responsibility, self-sacrifice, and friendship. Jesus quoted the Hebrew Bible to good purpose, but--like many another--he cherry-picked lines, out of context. He found every line teaching us to "love thy neighbor as thyself," etc., and managed to miss all the surrounding context--from banning mixed-fabric clothing to killing the children and even the livestock of anyone you conquer.So, what I would REALLY love to see, Dr. Borg, or anyone else qualified (which I am not), where did all this come from? How much did Judaism, Greek religion, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and anything else around contribute to the mix? What sources did the wording have?One more thing: Dr. Borg repeats the bit of lore that Palestine was "95% illiterate" in Jesus' time. My colleague Reza Aslan, whom I much respect, also cites this, and maintains that Jesus was an illiterate, uneducated peasant. Nope. Besides the fact that Jesus was called "Rabbi" far too often for this to stand, and this in the believably old parts of the Gospels, there are some letters recently published in ARCHAEOLOGY from Egyptian soldiers at the front in Romania about the same time. They wrote letters home in perfectly good Latin with fine handwriting. Even if they had to draw on scribes, this indicates a high level of literacy in areas far more remote and hard-scrabble than Palestine. For what it's worth, Han China can match this, with a flock of letters from the same time period and the same context--foot-soldiers at the front. They could write perfectly well. We have to shake this Victorian notion that nobody could read before Good Queen Victoria took over. I suspect the levels of literacy in Palestine in Jesus' time were 2 or 3 times what Borg allows. And Jesus was a highly educated individual who knew Greek philosophy and, indirectly, a lot about Buddhism and other religions. Or at least somebody did--how else could anyone come up with the Sermon on the Mount? I hope someone will concentrate on the teachings themselves rather than dates and individuals.