The Birth of Christianity : Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus
Pages
688
Publisher
HarperOne
Published
1999
ISBN-13
9780060616601
In this national bestseller, John Dominic Crossan, the world's leading expert on the historical Jesus, reveals how Christianity emerged in the period following Jesus' death. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Crossan shines new light on the theological and cultural contexts from which the Christian church arose. He argues powerfully that Christianity would have happened with or without Paul and contends that Jesus' "resurrection" meant something vastly different for his early followers than it does for many traditional Christians today--what mattered was Christina origins finally illuminates the mysterious period that set Western religious history in its decisive course.
Reviews
Review of Biblical Literature (RBL) (Jonathan L. Reed)
March 10, 2000
March 10, 2000
The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998. Pp. xxxiv + 635, Hardcover, $30.00, ISBN 0060616601. Jonathan L. Reed University of LaVerne La Verne, CA 91750 With The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately after the Execution of Jesus, John Dominic Crossan has produced the sequel to his widely publicized and controversial The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. The present work follows up his historical Jesus research by focusing on the earliest followers of Jesus during the "lost years," the decades after Jesus' death and prior to the ascendancy of Pauline Christianity. Still, while this book's theme shifts from the teachings and life of Jesus onto the beliefs and practices of his earliest followers in Palestine during the 30s and 40s, Crossan's sources and methods remain the same. In fact, Crossan uses much of the present book to clarify and defend his earlier statements on sources and methodology by directly responding to his critics. The Birth of Christianity sequentially answers four questions. Why one should undertake a reconstruction of the continuity between Jesus' followers before and after his crucifixion is addressed in part 1 (pp. 1-46). Where the evidence for such a reconstruction is found is addressed in parts 2 and 3 (pp. 47-135), which delineate the nature and extent of the early Christian texts that shed light on the 30s and 40s. How such a reconstruction can be done is found in parts 4 and 5 (pp. 137-235), which describe Crossan's methodological triad of cross-cultural anthropology, history, and archaeology to reconstruct the political, socio-economic, and religious context of Christian origins in Galilee. The second half of the book, parts 6 through 10 (pp. 238- 573), then addresses what these sources and methods reveal about Jesus' followers in the 30s and 40s when placed in their Palestinian context.
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