Who Are the People of God?: Early Christian Models of Community - Hardcover

Kee, Professor Howard Clark

9780300059526: Who Are the People of God?: Early Christian Models of Community

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300059523 ISBN 13: 9780300059526

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1995

Kee (biblical studies emeritus, Boston U.) examines the complex factors that shaped Judaism and early Christianity, analyzing cardinal Judaic and Christian texts and the cultural worlds in which they were written. His sociocultural approach emphasizes the diversity of viewpoint and belief present in Judaism and in early Christianity, as well as the many ways in which the two religions reacted to each other and to the changing circumstances of the first two centuries of the Common Era. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

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From Booklist:

Kee promises a synthesis of scholarly research that runs counter to "contemporary attempts to discover (invent?) a simple conceptual core out of which Christianity developed." He delivers on both counts. He combines sociologically informed reflection on ancient history and contemporary historiography with a carefully articulated description of five models of community--these five models having developed in the context of formative Judaism and early Christianity, both of which drew freely on the Hellenistic world in which they emerged for philosophical frameworks within which to answer the question posed by Kee's title. Kee is not willing to limit philosophical influences to a single school but points to Stoicism, Cynicism, Neoplatonism, and apocalypticism as influences on ideas of community that gained prominence in the early church and in rabbinic Judaism after the destruction of the temple. He returns at the end to the question of Christianity's "core" in a critical note on priority in the Gospel tradition. That note locates his work in the ongoing conversation about Christian origins and, together with the body of the text, makes this an especially lucid and important contribution to that conversation. Steve Schroeder

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