Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)As a college religion teacher, I recommend this book. Its scholarship is first rate. The author, whose religious affiliation is unknown to me, presents a forceful analysis of early Christianity. I rate it highly as an introduction.
Yet I feel thatI should point out that it may be destructive of a young person's Christian faith-- if that person did not understand the disclaimer that the book is written from a scholar's point of view. In practice, what this means is that a scholar who deals with empirically verifiable historical entities can never affirm that genuine miracles have occurred in history. The best a scholar can affirm is that some Biblical writer "thought" a miracle occurred. But Christianity has always affirmed that it is witness to God's real inbreaking into human history, not just a witness to someone's mental projections of a God's inbreaking. A scholar can only say that the apostles "were convinced" that Jesus had risen, not that He acually was risen.
Another consequence, in my view, is that the scholar's approach forces the author to affirm that Christians did not believe in the divinity of Jesus until after Paul. Paul's Jewish monotheistic upbringing could not find a workable terminology to fully express Jesus' divinity without compromising monotheism: but not being able to articulate some idea is not the same as not having that idea.
Excepting the above remarks, the book certainly gives Christians a well rounded view of how the Risen Jesus began to influence the formation of the New Testament.
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