Book Notice: The Jesus Movement and Its Expansion

Book Notice: The Jesus Movement and Its Expansion July 22, 2015

Sean Freyne

The Jesus Movement and Its Expansion
Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014.
Available at Amazon.com

The late Sean Freyne is best known for his work on Jesus and the Jesus movement in Galilee. This book, published posthumously, includes great summaries of the Hellenism of Galilee and the Romanization of Judea. He treats Jesus as a prophet of Jewish restoration eschatology and more apocalyptic than Cynic. He locates Mark and Matthew as written in Coele-Syria. Freyne touches on several aspects of second century Christianity including its diversity and the development of “heresies.” In the epilogue Freyne provides a good summary of the book’s aims:

Traditionally, the search for Christian origins has often devolved into a search for a golden moment where apologetic rather than critical historical interests take over. This was certainly not my intention in undertaking this study. From the outset it was my presupposition that the rise and expansion of the early Jesus movement was never a linear and neatly organized phenomenon, but involved, rather, a number of often competing factors, social, cultural, economic, and religious, and that consequently the Jesus movement was a multifaceted reality from its very earliest days (p. 351).

 


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