Sexual Astrology - Books : The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened In the Years Immediately After the Execution Of Jesus

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by: John Dominic Crossan See Larger Image Used Price: $3.61 Collectible Price: $30.00 Third Party New Price: $7.50 Binding: Hardcover Dewey Decimal Number: 270.1 EAN: 9780060616595 ISBN: 0060616598 Label: HarperOne Manufacturer: HarperOne Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 688 Publication Date: April 01, 1998 Publisher: HarperOne Release Date: March 24, 1998 Sales Rank: 761333 Studio: HarperOne Related Items: The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now In Search of Paul: How Jesus' Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts: Revised and Updated see more Editorial Review: Product Description: The world's foremost expert and bestselling author on the historical Jesus brilliantly illuminates how the Jesus movement was 'resurrected' as Christianity by his companions who made their revolutionary vision and program into a compelling reality. In This Long-Awaited Companion to His Landmark The Historical Jesus, John Dominic Crossan details his groundbreaking account of how Christianity emerged in the period after Jesus' death. Just as Crossan initiated the current 'quest for the historical Jesus', he now moves to wholly new territory, revealing how we got from the Jesus who was executed on the cross to the Jesus of the New Testament many decades later. Crossan reveals how Jesus' companions -- men and women -- bravely expanded their movement by creating communities, new traditions, and tile earliest Gospels. In the most important book on Christian origins in years, he illuminates the mysterious period of the 30s and 40s, after Jesus and before Paul's letters, that set western history on its decisive course. Amazon.com Review: John Dominic Crossan is the leading contemporary scholar on the historical Jesus, which means that his vocation is to look behind, around, and through Christ's resurrection, toward the goal of establishing what can be known about the life of Jesus of Nazareth. His search for the historical Jesus, however, takes place in the larger context of the life of the church. Among the goals of The Birth of Christianity is to teach readers how our habits of worship have created false gods. To that end, Crossan attempts to unearth the religion's earliest forms. What did Christianity look like, Crossan asks, between the crucifixion and the conversion of Paul? And what might Christianity look like today had Saul never set off toward Damascus? Crossan's conclusions don't come from newly discovered documents; they come from freshly-minted academic methodologies. He uses anthropology, history, and archaeology to construct his arguments about the essential nature of both Jesus' religion and Paul's. The 25-cent summary of his conclusion is that Jesus did not recognize the dualism between spirit and flesh that formed the basis of Paul's apocalyptic Christianity. In other words, Jesus was more Jewish than Paul. The ramifications of this argument are huge. Crossan says much of Christian worship--and many of the world's injustices--are based on the dualistic Christ that Paul preached. Though Crossan doesn't bully readers into accepting his conclusions, he does press hard for them to situate their own beliefs in relation to his interpretations of Jesus and Paul. At every point in the evolution of his argument, he asks readers questions such as 'How do you understand a human being?' and 'What is the character of your God?' Then he proceeds to answer these questions himself. Finally, he tells readers what he thinks these answers mean. It's an incredibly civilized style of argument--both spiritually and intellectually respectful and always rhetorically engaging. Though The Birth of Christianity weighs in at almost 600 pages of text, you'll probably want to read every word. And after that, you'll probably be hungry for more. Customer Reviews Average Rating: Rating: - Difficult Read but worth the effort I may be getting old, but it took me the better part of three months to make it through this book. It was a tough slog. Unlike a lot of the books about the historical Jesus this one very explicitly lays out the methodologies and assumptions used. While this is very helpful in general, Crossan tends to get repetitive at times. In a strange way, the book is like Robert Altman's Nashville in that it seems like a whole bunch of loose threads until at the end where his vision of the world after Jesus's ... Read More Rating: - important but unreadable Too many fine biblical scholars like Crossan and Robert Eisenman just do not know how to communicate. They should take a lesson from Bart Ehrman who does. Rating: - The Birth of Christianity by Dominic Crossan Highly recommended for open mind students in religion. A must read book scholarly done with an intellectual honesty. Rating: - A magnificent edifice, but is it built on sand? Like a lawyer with a weak case, Crossan relies on razzle-dazzle and hand-waving, but I'm afraid the jury will have to render a verdict of Not Proven. As a layman, in the academic and religious senses, I'm not qualified to criticize his argument in detail, so I can only go by my sense of smell, which in this case detects reductionism, anachronism, grasping at straws, cherry picking of the work of others, and perhaps even wishful thinking. The subtitle might lead you to expect ... Read More Rating: - Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah What a big disappointment this book was. As I read it, I kept expecting eventually to hear about the birth of Christianity. But this book is not about the birth of Christianity. Rather you read 600 pages devoted to John Dominic Crossan's ego. Mr. Crossan repeatedly writes: 1. What he is going to tell us, 2. Why he is going to tell us, 3. How he is going to tell us, etc. But, he never tells the story of the birth of Christianity. There is no story or history explaining the ... 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