- Paula Fredriksen is Distinguished Visiting Professor of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and has long been a highly regarded scripture scholar and author.
- When Christians Were Jews is her latest book. It's a fascinating exploration of the early Christian community and how they dealt with Jesus's sudden and unanticipated crucifixion.
- She also analyses the gospel stories of Mathew, Mark, Luke and John and the writings of Paul, and contrasts their quite different accounts of the significant events and what they meant. There were certainly many differences between them.
- The blurb summarises the book's major focus well: How did a group of charismatic Jewish missionaries end up becoming the foundation of the gentile church? In this electrifying social and intellectual history, Paula Fredriksen answers this question by reconstructing the forty years of this community's lifetime. Moving from its hopeful beginnings with Jesus at Passover through to its fiery end in the war against Rome, Fredriksen presents a vivid portrait both of this temple-centred messianic movement and of the bedrock convictions that animated and sustained it.
- They believed Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah and that his 'second coming' and the long awaited apocalypse were immanent. They would be 'freed'. As the years went on of course this expectation died.
- Fredriksen clearly outlines the various arguments and disagreements in the early community about Jesus's anticipated 'return'. But what she doesn't do, quite disappointingly in my view, is question the historical reality of Jesus's so-called 'resurrection'. She takes for granted that he actually rose on the third day and soon after 'ascended to heaven', confining her exploration to the eschatology of the 'second coming'.
- The book has extensive notes, maps and timelines. It's a scholarly work and not for the faint hearted.
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