A Social History of Christian Origins
(Routledge, 2022)
A Social History of Christian Origins explores how the Jewish rejection of Jesus – a mythic narrative embedded in Paul’s letters and the New Testament Gospels – represents the ethnic, social, cultural, and theological conflicts that facilitated the construction of Christian identity.
This is a study on social conflict in the early Jesus movement. Although this monograph is not specifically about the historical Jesus, it revisits both the question of method in Jesus Research as well as the conceptual categories – including asceticism, “common Judaism,” and apocalypticism – that we use to think about the historical figure of Jesus.