Nazorean
How a Jewish Wisdom Sect Gave Birth to the Church
- Biblical Studies & Commentaries
- Publisher: Wipf and Stock
- Published: 2024
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Publisher's Description
A swirl of Jewish sectarian movements muddied the religious waters during the late Second Temple period. In recent decades, scholars of the Bible have struggled to understand the role these sects played in the rise and spread of the Jesus movement. Nazorean joins this wave of sectarian scholarship. In this book, Kem Luther sketches the history of a wisdom-oriented sect that gave birth to the Christian church. Weaving a series of what the philosopher and historian R. G. Collingwood called "webs of imaginative construction," he provides a provocative and plausible story about a wisdom sect--the Nazoreans--that shaped the career and teachings of John the Baptist and Jesus. To support his scenario, Luther offers sectarian readings of passages from the Gospels of Matthew and John, the Epistle of James, Acts, the Wisdom of Solomon, and the Psalms of Solomon. He links his developing awareness of the sectarian context of these documents to his own trek through a landscape of post-1960 American religion. The candid account of Luther's own journey through a naive modernism, his immersion in evangelical subculture at a Bible school, and his postgraduate studies in mysticism and philosophy makes a fascinating complement to his textual studies.
Endorsements (2)
“Kem Luther’s Nazorean is both personal and scholarly. He makes clear his own presuppositions and how he has arrived at them, writing with honesty and gentle humor. Luther invites his readers to consider how we write history and the possibilities of ‘imaginative construction’ in uncovering influences on John the Baptist, Jesus, and his followers within the matrix of Second Temple Judaism. The result could be insights that have been hiding in plain sight.”
“Martin Hengel commented, in his monumental Judaism and Hellenism, that ‘It is very probable that, in addition to the Essenes and Pharisees, there were other pietistic and conventicle-like groups not established as parties’ and that these were ‘very significant for later Palestinian Judaism.’ Those who delve with Kem Luther’s scholarly and thought-provoking historical imagination may discover the importance of one such group, the Nazoreans, for understanding both Jesus and the origins of earliest Christianity.”
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