Download Free Jesus And The Chaos Of History Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Jesus And The Chaos Of History and write the review.

In Jesus and the Chaos of History, James Crossley looks at the way the earliest traditions about Jesus interacted with a context of social upheaval and the ways in which this historical chaos of the early first century led to a range of ideas which were taken up, modified, ignored, and reinterpreted in the movement that followed. Crossley examines how the earliest Palestinian tradition intersected with social upheaval and historical change and how accidental, purposeful, discontinuous, contradictory, and implicit meanings in the developments of ideas appeared in the movement that followed. He considers the ways seemingly egalitarian and countercultural ideas co-exist with ideas of dominance and power and how human reactions to socio-economic inequalities can end up mimicking dominant power. In this case, the book analyzes how a Galilean "protest" movement laid the foundations for its own brand of imperial rule. This evaluation is carried out in detailed studies on the kingdom of God and "Christology," "sinners" and purity, and gender and revolution.
All over the world people look forward to a perfect future, when the forces of good will be finally victorious over the forces of evil. Once this was a radically new way of imagining the destiny of the world and of mankind. How did it originate, and what kind of world-view preceded it? In this engrossing book, the author of the classic work The Pursuit of the Millennium takes us on a journey of exploration, through the world-views of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India, through the innovations of Iranian and Jewish prophets and sages, to the earliest Christian imaginings of heaven on earth. Until around 1500 B.C., it was generally believed that once the world had been set in order by the gods, it was in essence immutable. However, it was always a troubled world. By means of flood and drought, famine and plague, defeat in war, and death itself, demonic forces threatened and impaired it. Various combat myths told how a divine warrior kept the forces of chaos at bay and enabled the world to survive. Sometime between 1500 and 1200 B.C., the Iranian prophet Zoroaster broke from that static yet anxious world-view, reinterpreting the Iranian version of the combat myth. For Zoroaster, the world was moving, through incessant conflict, toward a conflictless state--"cosmos without chaos." The time would come when, in a prodigious battle, the supreme god would utterly defeat the forces of chaos and their human allies and eliminate them forever, and so bring an absolutely good world into being. Cohn reveals how this vision of the future was taken over by certain Jewish groups, notably the Jesus sect, with incalculable consequences. Deeply informed yet highly readable, this magisterial book illumines a major turning-point in the history of human consciousness. It will be mandatory reading for all who appreciated The Pursuit of the Millennium.
Foreword by Peter Machinist Hermann Gunkel's groundbreaking Schöpfung und Chaos, originally published in German in 1895, is here translated in its entirety into English for the first time. Even though available only in German, this work by Gunkel has had a profound influence on modern biblical scholarship. Discovering a number of parallels between the biblical creation accounts and a Babylonian creation account, the Enuma Elish, Gunkel argues that ancient Babylonian traditions shaped the Hebrew people's perceptions both of God's creative activity at the beginning of time and of God's re-creative activity at the end of time. Including illuminating introductory pieces by eminent scholar Peter Machinist and by translator K. William Whitney, Gunkel's Creation and Chaos will appeal to serious students and scholars in the area of biblical studies.
The ideas of Rene Girard are having a profound effect on Christian theology. This book offers a critical introduction to his thought and then uses it to interpret the Book of Revelation. The result is a reading of extraordinary relevance for the contemporary world. Readers of the Apocalypse are often disturbed by the images of destruction in the book and are unsure why these are unleashed after the exaltation of Jesus. This study examines past approaches to these texts and uses Girard's theories to revive some old ideas and propose some new ones. Seen in this light the Apocalypse becomes the story of the ultimate vindication of the victim, a source of hope, and a resource that can be used both to encourage resistance to the destructive forces within culture, and to help the church and the poor to engage constructively with the issues of our day.
This book explores the implications of an atheistic worldview through the fictional story of a student named Zach--helping readers to see that Christianity is the best explanation for life as we know it.
This in-depth discussion of New Testament scholarship and the challenges of history as a whole proposes Bayes’s Theorem, which deals with probabilities under conditions of uncertainty, as a solution to the problem of establishing reliable historical criteria. The author demonstrates that valid historical methods—not only in the study of Christian origins but in any historical study—can be described by, and reduced to, the logic of Bayes’s Theorem. Conversely, he argues that any method that cannot be reduced to this theorem is invalid and should be abandoned. Writing with thoroughness and clarity, the author explains Bayes’s Theorem in terms that are easily understandable to professional historians and laypeople alike, employing nothing more than well-known primary school math. He then explores precisely how the theorem can be applied to history and addresses numerous challenges to and criticisms of its use in testing or justifying the conclusions that historians make about the important persons and events of the past. The traditional and established methods of historians are analyzed using the theorem, as well as all the major "historicity criteria" employed in the latest quest to establish the historicity of Jesus. The author demonstrates not only the deficiencies of these approaches but also ways to rehabilitate them using Bayes’s Theorem. Anyone with an interest in historical methods, how historical knowledge can be justified, new applications of Bayes’s Theorem, or the study of the historical Jesus will find this book to be essential reading.
It's no secret that we are addicted to control. We work to control our time, our TVs, our weight, and even our faith lives. We strive for efficiency and quantifiable results. But all that control, we soon find out, is exhausting. And it is contrary to God's plan for us. In Chaos and Grace, Mark Galli offers readers freedom from the need for control and order by reintroducing them to the mysterious work of the Holy Spirit. In this insightful book, Galli exposes our individual mistakes and the church's foibles and points the way to grace--which, as it happens, usually lies through chaos and crisis. Through Scripture he shows us that this problem is not unique to modern believers and helps us learn from the stories of God's people through the ages as they gave up and gave in to the transforming work of the Holy Spirit.
"I form light and create darkness; I make well-being and create calamity; I am the LORD, who does all these things." Isaiah 45:7 When God created the world, he brought perfect order out of what was "without form and void." But with human rebellion against God leading to God's curse, disorder was introduced into creation—disorder that we still see all around us today. Tracing the chaos to cosmos theme from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22, pastor-scholar Sidney Greidanus reveals how God is restoring his creation through Jesus Christ, who has already begun to shine light into the darkness and will one day return to bring peace, order, and restoration once and for all. With discussion questions at the end of each chapter and a fourteen-session reading plan, this book is ideal for small groups as well as individual study.
In this book, Michael Patrick Barber examines the role of the Jerusalem temple in the teaching of the historical Jesus. Drawing on recent discussions about methodology and memory research in Jesus studies, he advances a fresh approach to reconstructing Jesus' teaching. Barber argues that Jesus did not reject the temple's validity but that he likely participated in and endorsed its rites. Moreover, he locates Jesus' teaching within Jewish apocalyptic eschatology, showing that Jesus' message about the coming kingdom and his disciples' place in it likely involved important temple and priestly traditions that have been ignored by the quest. Barber also highlights new developments in scholarship on the Gospel of Matthew to show that its Jewish perspective offers valuable but overlooked clues about the kinds of concerns that would have likely shaped Jesus' outlook. A bold approach to a key topic in biblical studies, Barber's book is a pioneering contribution to Jesus scholarship.
First published in 1910.