Ancient Judaism and Christian Origins
Diversity, Continuity, and Transformation
- Biblical Studies & Commentaries
- World Religions
- Publisher: Fortress Press (Augsburg Fortress)
- Published: 2003
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Publisher's Description
In the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, Christian scholars portrayed Judaism as the dark religious backdrop to the liberating events of Jesus' life and the rise of the early church. Since the 1950s, however, a dramatic shift has occurred in the study of Judaism, driven by new manuscript and archaeological discoveries and new methods and tools for analyzing sources. George Nickelsburg here provides a broad and synthesizing picture of the results of the past fifty years of scholarship on early Judaism and Christianity. He organizes his discussion around a number of traditional topics: scripture and tradition, Torah and the righteous life, God's activity on humanity's behalf, agents of God's activity, eschatology, historical circumstances, and social settings. Each of the chapters discusses the findings of contemporary research on early Judaism, and then sketches the implications of this research for a possible reinter-pretation of Christianity. Still, in the author's view, there remains a major Jewish-Christian agenda yet to be developed and implemented.
Endorsements (3)
“It is a great thing when a meticulous scholar, who has come to master all the intricacies of his field, designs to tell a wider public what difference it all makes – in this case to the very understanding of Christianity. This book is a most welcome case in point.”
“Theologically sensitive and historically precise, Nickelsburg's lucid study situates Jesus and his earliest followers within the vibrancy of Formative Judaism. His insightful presentations of Judaism's compelling consciousness of grace, inspirational stories of martyrs, exuberant delight in following the Torah, and profound teachings on justice and mercy not only explicitly correct earlier scholarship's tendentious descriptions of Jewish practice and belief, but also provide the groundwork for Jewish-Christian dialogue today.”
“One of the innovative leaders in this revolutionary rethinking of esoteric apocalypses, testaments, and legends, Nickelsburg presents in concise form a broad synthetic picture of the results of the last generation of burgeoning scholarship on the way we read and understand the wide variety of ancient Jewish literature. As one of the few scholars who commands a thorough knowledge of these important Jewish texts, he pulls together a rich range of references relevant to the main traditional topics of investigation and explores their implications for serious reinterpretation of the variety of movements that developed into early Christianity.”
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