Sunday, October 03, 2004

1st century Judaism and Jesus

One of my blog readers requested my suggestions for learning about first century Jewish life. I wrote my college thesis about women in the first century, so I know a little (very little - scholars seem to have a lot of conflicting opinions) bit about this. Here's some quick suggestions:

For the beginner - The Jesus I never knew by Philip Yancey. Yancey recounts his personal experience with learning about Jesus in the context of his society.

For a scholarly, but still accessible, treatment - try some of the books by N.T. Wright, a well-respected British scholar.

If you want to be challenged, try The historical figure of Jesus by E.P. Sanders. Sanders is interesting - a Jewish scholar of the New Testament.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I am familiar with some of the writings of N.T.Wright the conservative scholar from England. I particularly enjoyed the book jointly written by him and the more liberal scholar Marcus Borg, "The Meaning of Jesus". I also found a delightful short book of essays by Samuel Sandmel published b y Oxford Press in 1969. The book is entitled "The First Christian Century in Judaism and Christianity" the consensus seams to be that very little is understood about 1st century Judaism in which Jesus grew up in. This from the Ancient Mariner