The World Jesus Entered

The World Jesus Entered traces the roots of what would become the Christian religion during its first two centuries, from the time of Jesus to the second and third generations of Christian believers. Although Jesus was a Jew among Jews who focused his ministry within a Jewish milieu, the Jewish people were themselves part of a wider world that had heavily impacted their culture and society by the time of Jesus; that world would in turn eventually help shape what would become the religions of both Judaism and Christianity. As different parties fought to control Jewish adaptation to a post-Jerusalem-centered mindset, the teachings of Jesus would become subsumed by ideas and practices quite different from those recorded as belonging to the first generation of his followers.

Four discrete chapters focus on differing influences—Jewish, non-Jewish, alt-Jewish, and Gnostic—as an introduction to the societies and cultures the teachings of Jesus entered. The book closes with two chapters showing how such influences impacted both Christian practice and doctrine, in the form of missionary activity and worship and in teachings regarding the afterlife and the very nature of existence proposed by the new Christian sect. As Jewish elites fought to define their culture and as non-Jewish Christians aimed to distinguish themselves from Jewish rebels fighting the Roman Empire and come to an understanding of the man-God Jesus who had been introduced to them, the faith Jesus founded would transform the world as much as it would be transformed by it.