I apologize for my lack of blogging. My first year as an adjunct faculty and p/t work has proven time-consuming. I hope life will return to a manageable hurricane so I can return to some more regular blogging soon.

For now, I’d like to offer a blurb for a book that has been mentioned on a view biblioblogs before. It is worth the overlap, believe me. I intend to offer another post beyond this one to discuss the book, but I didn’t want to hold off on the blurb.

Earlier this year I made an authoritative declaration that every NT scholar ought to read Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. This is now my second binding authoritative declaration: Every NT scholar needs to have this book on his or her shelf.

Jewish Believers in Jesus: the early centuries
Oskar Skarsaune and Reidar Hvalvik, editors
Hendrickson, 2007
a whopping 903 pages
Purchase from Amazon.ca or Amazon.com

Here’s the TOC:

Part One: Introduction
1. Jewish Believers in Jesus in Antiquity—Problems of Definition, Method, and Sources. By Oskar Skarsaune
2. The Definition of the Terms Jewish Christian and Jewish Christianity in the History of Research. By James Carleton Paget,
   Part Two: Jewish Believers in Jesus in the New Testament and Related Material

3. James and the Jerusalem Community. By Richard Bauckham
4. Paul as a Jewish Believer—According to His Letters. By Donald A. Hagner
5. Paul as a Jewish Believer—According to the Book of Acts. By Reidar Hvalvik
6. Named Jewish Believers Connected with the Pauline Mission. By Reidar Hvalvik
7. Jewish Believers and Jewish Influence in the Roman Church until the Early Second Centur y. By Reidar Hvalvik
8. Jewish Believers in Asia Minor according to the Book of Revelation and the Gospel of John. By Peter Hirschberg
9. The Jewish Christian Gospel Tradition. By Craig A. Evans,
10. Jewish Christian Editing of the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. By Torleif Elgvin
11. Jewish Christian Elements in the Pseudo-Clementine Writings. By Graham Stanton
12. Fragments of Jewish Christian Literature Quoted in Some Greek and Latin Fathers. By Oskar Skarsaune
13. Jewish Christian Sources Used by Justin Martyr and Some Other Greek and Latin Fathers. By Oskar Skarsaune
    Part 4: Jewish Christian Groups according to the Greek and Latin Fathers

14. The Ebionites. By Oskar Skarsaune.
15. The Nazoraeans. By Wolfram Kinzig,
16. Cerinthus, Elxai, and Other Alleged Jewish Christian Teachers or Groups. By Gunnar af Hällström and Oskar Skarsaune.
    Part 5: Other Literary and Archaeological Evidence for Jewish Believers

17. Evidence for Jewish Believers in Greek and Latin Patristic Literature. By Oskar Skarsaune
18. Evidence for Jewish Believers in the Syriac Fathers. By Sten Hidal
19. Evidence for Jewish Believers in Christian-Jewish Dialogues through the Sixth Century (excluding Justin). By Lawrence Lahey
20. Evidence for Jewish Believers in “Church Orders” and Liturgical Texts. By Anders Ekenberg
21. Jewish Believers in Early Rabbinic Literature (2d to 5th Centuries). By Philip S. Alexander
22. Archaeological Evidence of Jewish Believers? By James F. Strange
    Part 6: Conclusion and Outlook

23. The Histor y of Jewish Believers in the Early Centuries— Perspectives and Framework. By Oskar Skarsaune

The book also has an excellent bibliography (over 100 pages), as well as modern authors, Subject, and Ancient Source indexes.

Here are two of the jacket blurbs:
This is a first-rate contribution by top scholars to our understanding of Jews who believed in Jesus during the first few centuries of Christianity. Not only does the volume address in depth the many complexities of the historical, social, literary, and religious aspects of Jewish believers in Jesus, it also admirably engages the very construction of scholarship on the topic. This is a comprehensive work of meticulous and careful scholarship that should be the standard reference on the subject for years to come. — Jeffrey S. Siker, Loyola Marymount University

Tor a long time, the accepted view on the early Jewish Christian community has been that after the Jewish war against the Romans that ended in A.D. 70 with the destruction of Jewusalem, the Jewish Christian community became a marginal phenomenon and soon disappeared in the Gentile Christian church. The contributions to the present book on Jewish believers in Jesus result in a fundamental revision of this picture. It shows that more or less close relations between Jewish believers in Jesus Christ and Judaism continued at least into the Constantinian period (4th century) in spite of the endeavors of leaders on both sides to get their view of a fundamental opposition between Judaism and Christianity generally accepted. I consider the accumulated evidence for the revision of this picture very persuasive. It amounts to a strong suggestion that for a long period the disagreements concerning the person of Jesus did not prevent a continuing awareness of the fact that Jewish believers in Jesus and even Christians from the Gentiles could feel they believe in the same God as the Jews did. This view of the relationship should also have an impact on contemporary Jewish Christian dialogue.” — Dr. Wolfhart Pannenberg, University of Munich (Emeritus)

Oskar Skarsaune wrote 238 pages out of 778 written pages. That’s just below a 3rd of the essays. It is to Skarsaune’s credit that other voices were brought into dialogue with his substantial amount of work on the subject— between the two editors a 350 page book could have been published. This book seeks to take a fresh look at the make-up of early Christianity. I am looking forward to digging into this book further, and recommend it to Deinde readers.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 7:10 pm by Danny Zacharias and is filed under Hendrickson, Book Blurbs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.