Christian Beginnings

Author: Geza Vermes
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300195311
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 367

Book Description
DIV The creation of the Christian Church is one of the most important stories in the development of the world's history, but also one of the most enigmatic and little understood, shrouded in mystery and misunderstanding. Through a forensic, brilliant reexamination of all the key surviving texts of early Christianity, Geza Vermes illuminates the origins of a faith and traces the evolution of the figure of Jesus from the man he was—a prophet recognizable as the successor to other Jewish holy men of the Old Testament—to what he came to represent: a mysterious, otherworldly being at the heart of a major new religion. As Jesus's teachings spread across the eastern Mediterranean, hammered into place by Paul, John, and their successors, they were transformed in the space of three centuries into a centralized, state-backed creed worlds away from its humble origins. Christian Beginnings tells the captivating story of how a man came to be hailed as the Son consubstantial with God, and of how a revolutionary, anticonformist Jewish subsect became the official state religion of the Roman Empire. /div

Beginnings

Author: Peter C. Bouteneff
Publisher: Baker Academic
ISBN: 1441201831
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
What are we missing when we look at the creation narratives of Genesis only or primarily through the lens of modern discourse about science and religion? Theologian Peter Bouteneff explores how first-millennium Christian understandings of creation can inform current thought in the church and in the public square. He reaches back into the earliest centuries of our era to recover the meanings that early Jewish and Christian writers found in the stories of the six days of creation and of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Readers will find that their forbears in the faith saw in the Genesis narrative not simply an account of origins but also a rich teaching about the righteousness of God, the saving mission of Christ, and the destiny of the human creature.

Clement of Alexandria and the Beginnings of Christian Apophaticism

Author: Henny Fiska Hägg
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199288089
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Book Description
Can humans know God? Eastern Orthodox theology affirms that we cannot know God in his essence, but may know him through his energies. Henny Fiska Hägg investigates the beginnings of Christian negative (apophatic) theology, focusing on Clement of Alexandria in the late second century.

Christian Beginnings and the Dead Sea Scrolls

Author: John J. Collins
Publisher: Baker Academic
ISBN: 080102837X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 144

Book Description
Examines some of the major issues that the Dead Sea Scrolls have raised for the study of early Christianity.

Displacing Christian Origins

Author: Ward Blanton
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226056899
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Book Description
Blanton Ward traces the current critical engagement of Agamben, Derrida and Zizek, among others, back to the 19th and early 20th century philosophers of early Christianity.

The Myth of Christian Beginnings

Author: Robert L. Wilken
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1725225883
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
In this challenging and vividly written book Dr. Wilken shows that there never was a golden age in the Christian past. Christian hope did not come to fulfillment in the age of apostles, nor in the time of Constantine, nor in the Middle Ages, nor during the Reformation, nor in the revivals of the 19th century, nor in the movements of renewal in our own time. The history of Christianity is a story of imperfection and fragmentation, but also a history of hoping and striving for an end that cannot be seen yet bears on the present. With lively examples from the Christian past Wilken shows that change has been an abiding feature of Christian tradition. Often those who proposed new ways of thinking and acted in unexpected ways turned out to be more faithful than those who repeated the old formulas. As much as the past may give specificity and concreteness to renewal in the present Christian hope is set on things that are yet to be.

A Larger Hope?, Volume 1

Author: Ilaria L. E. Ramelli
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1610978846
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 315

Book Description
In the minds of some, universal salvation is a heretical idea that was imported into Christianity from pagan philosophies by Origen (c.185–253/4). Ilaria Ramelli argues that this picture is completely mistaken. She maintains that Christian theologians were the first people to proclaim that all will be saved and that their reasons for doing so were rooted in their faith in Christ. She demonstrates that, in fact, the idea of the final restoration of all creation (apokatastasis) was grounded upon the teachings of the Bible and the church’s beliefs about Jesus’ total triumph over sin, death, and evil through his incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. Ramelli traces the Christian roots of Origen’s teaching on apokatastasis. She argues that he was drawing on texts from Scripture and from various Christians who preceded him, theologians such as Bardaisan, Irenaeus, and Clement. She outlines Origen’s often-misunderstood theology in some detail and then follows the legacy of his Christian universalism through the centuries that followed. We are treated to explorations of Origenian universal salvation in a host of Christian disciples, including Athanasius, Didymus the Blind, the Cappadocian fathers, Evagrius, Maximus the Confessor, John Scotus Eriugena, and Julian of Norwich.

Judaism and Christian Beginnings

Author: Samuel Sandmel
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195022810
Category : Bible
Languages : en
Pages : 510

Book Description
In this book, Samuel Sandmel traces the history, institutions and ideas of Judaism from 200 B.C. to 175 A.D. Drawing on sources ranging from the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, the Rabbinic literature, the histories of Josephus, and the Qumran scrolls to the Epistles of Paul, the Gospels and, the Acts of the Apostles, he documents the growth of Synagogue Judaism and its influence on the early Christian Church.

The Resurrection of the Son of God

Author: Nicholas Thomas Wright
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 9780800626792
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 854

Book Description
Explores ancient beliefs about life after death, highlighting the fact that the early Christians' belief about the afterlife belonged firmly on the Jewish spectrum, while introducing several new mutations and sharper definitions, forcing readers to view the Easter narratives not simply as rationalizations, but as accounts of two actual events: the empty tomb of Jesus and his "appearances." Simultaneous. Hardcover no longer available.

The Origins of Christian Morality

Author: Wayne A. Meeks
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300065138
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Book Description
By the time Christianity became a political and cultural force in the Roman Empire, it had come to embody a new moral vision. This wise and eloquent book describes the formative years--from the crucifixion of Jesus to the end of the second century of the common era--when Christian beliefs and practices shaped their unique moral order. Wayne A. Meeks examines the surviving documents from Christianity's beginnings (some of which became the New Testament) and shows that they are largely concerned with the way converts to the movement should behave. Meeks finds that for these Christians, the formation of morals means the formation of community; the documents are addressed not to individuals but to groups, and they have among their primary aims the maintenance and growth of these groups. Meeks paints a picture of the process of socialization that produced the early forms of Christian morality, discussing many factors that made the Christians feel that they were a single and "chosen" people. He describes, for example, the impact of conversion; the rapid spread of Christian household cult-associations in the cities of the Roman Empire; the language of Christian moral discourse as revealed in letters, testaments, and "moral stories"; the rituals, meetings, and institutionalization of charity; the Christians' feelings about celibacy, sex, and gender roles; and their sense of the end-time and final judgment. In each of these areas Meeks seeks to determine what is distinctive about the Christian viewpoint and what is similar to the moral components of Greco-Roman or Jewish thought.