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Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity
Paula Fredriksen, renowned historian and author of From Christ to Jesus, begins this inquiry into the historic Jesus with a fact that may be the only undisputed thing we know about him: his crucifixion.
Rome reserved this means of execution particularly for political insurrectionists; and the Roman charge posted at the head of the cross indicted Jesus for claiming to be King of the Jews. To reconstruct the Jesus who provoked this punishment, Fredriksen takes us into the religious worlds, Jewish and pagan, of Mediterranean antiquity, through the labyrinth of Galilean and Judean politics, and on into the ancient narratives of Paul's letters, the gospels, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Josephus' histories. The result is a profound contribution both to our understanding of the social and religious contexts within which Jesus of Nazareth moved, and to our appreciation of the mission and message that ended in the proclamation of Jesus as Messiah.
Rome reserved this means of execution particularly for political insurrectionists; and the Roman charge posted at the head of the cross indicted Jesus for claiming to be King of the Jews. To reconstruct the Jesus who provoked this punishment, Fredriksen takes us into the religious worlds, Jewish and pagan, of Mediterranean antiquity, through the labyrinth of Galilean and Judean politics, and on into the ancient narratives of Paul's letters, the gospels, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Josephus' histories. The result is a profound contribution both to our understanding of the social and religious contexts within which Jesus of Nazareth moved, and to our appreciation of the mission and message that ended in the proclamation of Jesus as Messiah.
326 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
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About the author
Paula Fredriksen
22 books97 followersPaula Fredriksen, the Aurelio Professor of Scripture emerita at Boston University, since 2009 has been Distinguished Visiting Professor of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she also holds two honorary doctorates in theology and religious studies. She has published widely on the social and intellectual history of ancient Christianity, and on pagan-Jewish-Christian relations in the Roman Empire. Author of Augustine on Romans (1982) and From Jesus to Christ (1988; 2000), her Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, won a 1999 National Jewish Book Award. More recently, she has explored the development of Christian anti-Judaism, and Augustine’s singular response to it, in Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (2010); and has investigated the shifting conceptions of God and of humanity in Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012). Her latest study, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (2017), places Paul’s Jewish messianic message to gentiles within the wider world of ancient Mediterranean culture.
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July 9, 2025
This book will be my go-to recommendation for anyone looking to get their feet wet in historical Jesus studies; not because Fredriksen’s conclusions are incontrovertible—such a standard is simply beyond the ken of a field that seeks to investigate the life and message of a man who lived two thousand years ago, and about whom the earliest written records were produced after his death by communities that remembered and interpreted him according to their own needs and expectations, which themselves require a great deal of careful contextual excavation—but because she offers a tightly-reasoned interpretation of evidence and grounds her investigation in a hermeneutic that should seem obvious but is often overlooked due to the cultural freightedness of her subject matter: Jesus as an historical figure is under no obligation to make sense to us—to fit into our theological, political, cultural, or moral categories—but he must have made sense to his contemporaries, otherwise he would not have attracted the following that later developed into what we now call the Christian religion.
Any reconstruction of Jesus that sets him squarely against the cultural matrix in which he lived takes on the fool’s errand of accessing the man’s private psychology and opens the way for anachronistic readings that make him a representative of what Christianity later became in very different circumstances. While the Jesus movement must have had distinctive features and the beliefs and lifeways of late Second Temple Judaism were far from uniform, it must nonetheless be remembered that Jesus was a public figure who preached a public message—one which he expected to resonate with the beliefs, practices, and expectations of his hearers—gathered a public following—the members of which likely had varying degrees of familiarity with Jesus himself, but who understood his role and identity in familiar terms—and died a public death—his crucified body and the titulus displayed above it, “King of the Jews,” broadcasting a grisly message to its viewers. The meaning of Jesus is thus borne of the interaction between the man himself, those who heard and responded to him, and the historical environment in which this call-and-response took place. All of this is to say that Jesus cannot be extracted from his time and place, nor can he be properly understood apart from it.
Fredriksen anchors her analysis in two facts about Jesus that both seem ironclad, but which appear to work at cross purposes—no pun intended. First, Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate, the Roman Prefect of Judaea: a form of execution reserved for political insurrectionists. A cursory review of Josephus’s Jewish War reveals how abundantly the Romans employed this penalty against those perceived to be acting in defiance of their authority, usually in the form of armed rebellion. In 6 CE, the year Herod Archelaus was deposed and the Romans assumed direct control of the province, two thousand Jewish rebels were crucified by Varus, the Roman legate of Syria, in an effort to pacify the region (BJ 2.76). Sometime around 50 CE, fearing that an ongoing bout of violence between Jews and Samaritans would escalate into rebellion, the Judaean governor Cumanus rounded up the chief instigators, who were later crucified on the orders of the Syrian legate Quadratus (BJ 2.241). When Titus besieged Jerusalem during the Jewish Revolt, hundreds of residents who attempted to escape or break the siege were tortured and crucified in various postures before the city walls to intimidate the rebels into surrender (BJ 5.450). If Jesus was indeed crucified as “King of the Jews”—when, where, and by whom such a claim was made about him is one of the critical questions for Fredriksen’s investigation—then he too was targeted as one who threatened to undermine Roman sovereignty.
Yet if this is true, it makes another authentic historical fact about Jesus and his movement all the more perplexing: the fact that while Jesus was killed, his followers were not. If Pilate believed that Jesus was the leader of a revolutionary sect, he would have gone after Jesus’s followers as well. Even the devotees of the charismatic signs prophets active in first-century Judaea were not typically spared the violence of imperial suppression. The crowds assembled by Theudas (44-46 CE), the desert prophets (50s CE), and the mysterious figure known as The Egyptian—who gathered his followers on the Mount of Olives to watch the walls of Jerusalem crumble at his command, escaped the ensuing massacre carried out by the Roman troops sent to dispatch him, and with whom, according to Acts, Paul was later confused by Claudias Lysias, commander of the city’s Roman garrison (Acts 21:38)—were met with indiscriminate slaughter.
But on the evidence of Paul (Gal 1:18-19, 2:9) and the opening chapters of Acts, the closest followers of Jesus—Paul names Peter, James (“the Lord’s brother”), and John—had, within a few years of his crucifixion, relocated to Jerusalem, which they made the headquarters of their movement. There they continued to preach about the risen Christ and the imminence of the Parousia and the establishment of God’s Kingdom, worshipped at the Temple (providing an obstacle for those who would claim that Jesus was in any fundamental way opposed to the Temple cult or Torah observance), and oversaw the movement’s outreach to the Jewish diaspora and the gentile world, all without any apparent fear of interference by Prefects, Procurators, or High Priests. The authorities did not seem to view Jesus’s followers as a threat; a fact from which one is led to surmise that they didn’t view Jesus as a threat either. But then why kill him—and in such a public, “political” fashion?
The Gospels tend to lay the blame at the feet of the Jerusalem crowds and the Jewish authorities—the Sanhedrin, priests, scribes, and pharisees—who, due to their resentment of Jesus’s teachings, healings, and claims to authority, coerced Pilate, who knew Jesus to be innocent and was disposed to acquit him, into ordering his execution. But there is considerable reason to doubt the historical veracity of these accounts.
For one, the Gospels are composite entities which combine genuine traditions about the words and deeds of Jesus, polemical jabs at other Jewish groups (in John’s Gospel the theological polemic, delivered in the form of long dialogues and soliloquies, often overrides the narrative), biographical details construed to fit biblical prophecies, biblical prophecies construed to fit biographical details, and responses to developments that had occurred since the time of Jesus—namely the destruction of Jerusalem, the defunction of the Temple cult, and the ongoing transition of Christianity from its Jewish roots to its predominantly gentile future—all of which is conveyed through literary formats which are themselves modeled on biblical texts: the narratives of Elijah and Elisha, the Exodus story, the literary prophets, the apocalypses of Ezekiel, Daniel, and Enoch, etc. The Gospels were written after the masses of Jerusalem had been killed, enslaved, or scattered to the winds, and the religious authorities—especially the Temple priesthood—had largely disappeared. Roman governance, however, remained, as did the gentile Christians who were likely not inclined to be entirely sympathetic to the rebel cause. It is therefore reasonable to suspect that the Gospel writers amplified the culpability for Jesus’s death on the part of those groups and institutions which circumstances had rendered irrelevant, and minimized that of those which remained: namely, Rome and its officials.
Secondly, the portrait of Pontius Pilate that emerges from non-biblical sources makes it seem improbable that he would be the voice of conscience in any situation. Philo of Alexandria transmits testimony from Agrippa I which describes Pilate as a cruel and irascible personality who was notorious for ordering extrajudicial executions. Josephus depicts Pilate deliberately provoking the aniconic sensibilities of his subjects by ordering imperial standards with images of Caesar to be brought into Jerusalem; interspersing soldiers in civilian clothing with concealed weapons among a crowd of Jews protesting the use of Temple funds to build an aqueduct, who then attacked and beat the protesters on his signal; and ordering a massacre of Samaritan pilgrims who followed a prophet to Mount Gerizim in the hopes of uncovering sacred vessels buried there by Moses. For this last offense, Vitellius, the Roman legate of Syria and Pilate’s superior, ordered him to return to Rome and explain himself to the emperor, at which point Pilate disappears from the historical record. This is certainly not the Pilate of the Gospels, a principled man beset by a violent mob seeking to abuse and kill the “guest” in his custody; a narrative likely modeled on the stories of Lot and the angels in Sodom (Gen 19) and the “Outrage at Gibeah” (Jdg 19).
Finally, the Gospels give no explanation for why the crowds of pilgrims who gathered in Jerusalem for Passover—the pilgrims who hailed Jesus as “son of David” as he entered the city with them; the crowds whom the chief priests, scribes, and Pharisees feared angering by arresting Jesus, hence their decision to do so by stealth in the middle of the night (Mt. 26:3-5, Mk. 14:1-2)—suddenly turn on him when he appears before Pilate.
Fredriksen’s hypothesis is that the crowds of Jerusalem did indeed contribute to Jesus’s death, and Pilate did indeed know that Jesus was not an insurrectionist plotting revolt; but their respective roles were more-or-less the opposite of what the Gospels portray. The key is the crucifixion itself, which was intended not only to inflict a painful and humiliating death on the victim, but to broadcast a message to the public. The titulus, “King of the Jews,” was part of that message, a grotesque mockery: Pilate was displaying a brutalized corpse and telling the people of Jerusalem, “this is the man you claim to be your king.” And the reason he didn’t do the same to Jesus’s followers was because he was already aware of Jesus and his preaching, and he knew that Jesus had not publicly claimed the mantle that the city, swollen with excited worshippers for the festival of national liberation, electric with apocalyptic and messianic fervor, had placed on him: that of the awaited Davidic messiah-king.
While most New Testament scholars tend to set the Gospel of John to one side in their interpretations of the historical Jesus, Fredriksen believes that John’s depiction of Jesus’s itinerary—in which he travels back and forth between his native Galilee and Judaea, staying in Jerusalem during the major festivals—is likely more accurate than Mark’s narrative (on which Matthew and Luke rely) of a single journey from the Galilee to Jerusalem. Granting John some historical credibility accomplishes two things: by revealing the “cleansing” of the Temple to be a floating tradition which Mark and John use in different ways, it removes the event as the proximate cause of Jesus’s arrest; and it also provides a basis for the notion that Pilate and Caiaphas already knew what Jesus was about, since he had visited and preached in Jerusalem several times before.
And what was the content of that preaching? Jesus’s first line in the earliest Gospel is exemplary: “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand!” (Mk 1:15) Like his prophetic mentor John the Baptist, Jesus taught that God would soon intervene directly in history, defeat the oppressors of Israel, establish his reign on earth, and inaugurate a new age of justice and righteousness in which the first would be last, the last would be first, and all the nations of the world would worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Whereas John remained near the Dead Sea and others came to him, Jesus took his mentor’s message directly to the people, coupling John’s severe warnings of impending judgment with promises of divine mercy for the penitent. Critically, the inbreaking of this Kingdom would be accomplished by God, not by the actions of Jesus and his followers. Jesus preached an ethic of voluntary poverty and generosity towards the destitute, love and prayer for one’s enemies, and nonretaliation—which is to say, an ethic designed to prepare his followers for the Age to Come, not for the violent overthrow of Roman rule. Jesus did not fit the profile of the messiah son of David: a warrior-king who would usher in God’s earthly reign through his military prowess. And the Gospels themselves—especially Mark—depict Jesus being quite elusive on the question of his messianic identity.
Nonetheless, when Jesus preached his familiar message about the imminence of the Kingdom during the week of his final Passover, the excited, rumor-mongering crowds of Jerusalem—most of whom knew little of this Galilean prophet or his message—began to proclaim that Jesus himself would be the one to bring these apocalyptic hopes to fulfillment as the Davidic messiah—as King of the Jews. What Jesus thought about these proclamations, or why they were made at this particular Passover—Fredriksen speculates that apocalyptic expectations may have been especially feverish at this time because Jesus had announced that this was the moment in which the Kingdom would finally arrive—is impossible to know for certain. But it mattered little to Pilate, who had Jesus crucified overnight, not to neutralize any perceived threat from him, but to dampen the excitement of the crowds, which threatened to boil over into seditious acts. That likely would have been the end of the matter, had not the followers of Jesus begun to report encountering him alive in the ensuing days and weeks.
Such is Fredriksen’s thesis. While I think she could have explored the question of Jesus’s self-understanding further (for instance, she believes that Jesus likely did have Twelve core disciples who were to judge the apocalyptically-reconstituted tribes of Israel, inviting the question of what he thought his own role would be), she nonetheless presents a compelling and meticulously rational interpretation of her subject.
Any reconstruction of Jesus that sets him squarely against the cultural matrix in which he lived takes on the fool’s errand of accessing the man’s private psychology and opens the way for anachronistic readings that make him a representative of what Christianity later became in very different circumstances. While the Jesus movement must have had distinctive features and the beliefs and lifeways of late Second Temple Judaism were far from uniform, it must nonetheless be remembered that Jesus was a public figure who preached a public message—one which he expected to resonate with the beliefs, practices, and expectations of his hearers—gathered a public following—the members of which likely had varying degrees of familiarity with Jesus himself, but who understood his role and identity in familiar terms—and died a public death—his crucified body and the titulus displayed above it, “King of the Jews,” broadcasting a grisly message to its viewers. The meaning of Jesus is thus borne of the interaction between the man himself, those who heard and responded to him, and the historical environment in which this call-and-response took place. All of this is to say that Jesus cannot be extracted from his time and place, nor can he be properly understood apart from it.
Fredriksen anchors her analysis in two facts about Jesus that both seem ironclad, but which appear to work at cross purposes—no pun intended. First, Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate, the Roman Prefect of Judaea: a form of execution reserved for political insurrectionists. A cursory review of Josephus’s Jewish War reveals how abundantly the Romans employed this penalty against those perceived to be acting in defiance of their authority, usually in the form of armed rebellion. In 6 CE, the year Herod Archelaus was deposed and the Romans assumed direct control of the province, two thousand Jewish rebels were crucified by Varus, the Roman legate of Syria, in an effort to pacify the region (BJ 2.76). Sometime around 50 CE, fearing that an ongoing bout of violence between Jews and Samaritans would escalate into rebellion, the Judaean governor Cumanus rounded up the chief instigators, who were later crucified on the orders of the Syrian legate Quadratus (BJ 2.241). When Titus besieged Jerusalem during the Jewish Revolt, hundreds of residents who attempted to escape or break the siege were tortured and crucified in various postures before the city walls to intimidate the rebels into surrender (BJ 5.450). If Jesus was indeed crucified as “King of the Jews”—when, where, and by whom such a claim was made about him is one of the critical questions for Fredriksen’s investigation—then he too was targeted as one who threatened to undermine Roman sovereignty.
Yet if this is true, it makes another authentic historical fact about Jesus and his movement all the more perplexing: the fact that while Jesus was killed, his followers were not. If Pilate believed that Jesus was the leader of a revolutionary sect, he would have gone after Jesus’s followers as well. Even the devotees of the charismatic signs prophets active in first-century Judaea were not typically spared the violence of imperial suppression. The crowds assembled by Theudas (44-46 CE), the desert prophets (50s CE), and the mysterious figure known as The Egyptian—who gathered his followers on the Mount of Olives to watch the walls of Jerusalem crumble at his command, escaped the ensuing massacre carried out by the Roman troops sent to dispatch him, and with whom, according to Acts, Paul was later confused by Claudias Lysias, commander of the city’s Roman garrison (Acts 21:38)—were met with indiscriminate slaughter.
But on the evidence of Paul (Gal 1:18-19, 2:9) and the opening chapters of Acts, the closest followers of Jesus—Paul names Peter, James (“the Lord’s brother”), and John—had, within a few years of his crucifixion, relocated to Jerusalem, which they made the headquarters of their movement. There they continued to preach about the risen Christ and the imminence of the Parousia and the establishment of God’s Kingdom, worshipped at the Temple (providing an obstacle for those who would claim that Jesus was in any fundamental way opposed to the Temple cult or Torah observance), and oversaw the movement’s outreach to the Jewish diaspora and the gentile world, all without any apparent fear of interference by Prefects, Procurators, or High Priests. The authorities did not seem to view Jesus’s followers as a threat; a fact from which one is led to surmise that they didn’t view Jesus as a threat either. But then why kill him—and in such a public, “political” fashion?
The Gospels tend to lay the blame at the feet of the Jerusalem crowds and the Jewish authorities—the Sanhedrin, priests, scribes, and pharisees—who, due to their resentment of Jesus’s teachings, healings, and claims to authority, coerced Pilate, who knew Jesus to be innocent and was disposed to acquit him, into ordering his execution. But there is considerable reason to doubt the historical veracity of these accounts.
For one, the Gospels are composite entities which combine genuine traditions about the words and deeds of Jesus, polemical jabs at other Jewish groups (in John’s Gospel the theological polemic, delivered in the form of long dialogues and soliloquies, often overrides the narrative), biographical details construed to fit biblical prophecies, biblical prophecies construed to fit biographical details, and responses to developments that had occurred since the time of Jesus—namely the destruction of Jerusalem, the defunction of the Temple cult, and the ongoing transition of Christianity from its Jewish roots to its predominantly gentile future—all of which is conveyed through literary formats which are themselves modeled on biblical texts: the narratives of Elijah and Elisha, the Exodus story, the literary prophets, the apocalypses of Ezekiel, Daniel, and Enoch, etc. The Gospels were written after the masses of Jerusalem had been killed, enslaved, or scattered to the winds, and the religious authorities—especially the Temple priesthood—had largely disappeared. Roman governance, however, remained, as did the gentile Christians who were likely not inclined to be entirely sympathetic to the rebel cause. It is therefore reasonable to suspect that the Gospel writers amplified the culpability for Jesus’s death on the part of those groups and institutions which circumstances had rendered irrelevant, and minimized that of those which remained: namely, Rome and its officials.
Secondly, the portrait of Pontius Pilate that emerges from non-biblical sources makes it seem improbable that he would be the voice of conscience in any situation. Philo of Alexandria transmits testimony from Agrippa I which describes Pilate as a cruel and irascible personality who was notorious for ordering extrajudicial executions. Josephus depicts Pilate deliberately provoking the aniconic sensibilities of his subjects by ordering imperial standards with images of Caesar to be brought into Jerusalem; interspersing soldiers in civilian clothing with concealed weapons among a crowd of Jews protesting the use of Temple funds to build an aqueduct, who then attacked and beat the protesters on his signal; and ordering a massacre of Samaritan pilgrims who followed a prophet to Mount Gerizim in the hopes of uncovering sacred vessels buried there by Moses. For this last offense, Vitellius, the Roman legate of Syria and Pilate’s superior, ordered him to return to Rome and explain himself to the emperor, at which point Pilate disappears from the historical record. This is certainly not the Pilate of the Gospels, a principled man beset by a violent mob seeking to abuse and kill the “guest” in his custody; a narrative likely modeled on the stories of Lot and the angels in Sodom (Gen 19) and the “Outrage at Gibeah” (Jdg 19).
Finally, the Gospels give no explanation for why the crowds of pilgrims who gathered in Jerusalem for Passover—the pilgrims who hailed Jesus as “son of David” as he entered the city with them; the crowds whom the chief priests, scribes, and Pharisees feared angering by arresting Jesus, hence their decision to do so by stealth in the middle of the night (Mt. 26:3-5, Mk. 14:1-2)—suddenly turn on him when he appears before Pilate.
Fredriksen’s hypothesis is that the crowds of Jerusalem did indeed contribute to Jesus’s death, and Pilate did indeed know that Jesus was not an insurrectionist plotting revolt; but their respective roles were more-or-less the opposite of what the Gospels portray. The key is the crucifixion itself, which was intended not only to inflict a painful and humiliating death on the victim, but to broadcast a message to the public. The titulus, “King of the Jews,” was part of that message, a grotesque mockery: Pilate was displaying a brutalized corpse and telling the people of Jerusalem, “this is the man you claim to be your king.” And the reason he didn’t do the same to Jesus’s followers was because he was already aware of Jesus and his preaching, and he knew that Jesus had not publicly claimed the mantle that the city, swollen with excited worshippers for the festival of national liberation, electric with apocalyptic and messianic fervor, had placed on him: that of the awaited Davidic messiah-king.
While most New Testament scholars tend to set the Gospel of John to one side in their interpretations of the historical Jesus, Fredriksen believes that John’s depiction of Jesus’s itinerary—in which he travels back and forth between his native Galilee and Judaea, staying in Jerusalem during the major festivals—is likely more accurate than Mark’s narrative (on which Matthew and Luke rely) of a single journey from the Galilee to Jerusalem. Granting John some historical credibility accomplishes two things: by revealing the “cleansing” of the Temple to be a floating tradition which Mark and John use in different ways, it removes the event as the proximate cause of Jesus’s arrest; and it also provides a basis for the notion that Pilate and Caiaphas already knew what Jesus was about, since he had visited and preached in Jerusalem several times before.
And what was the content of that preaching? Jesus’s first line in the earliest Gospel is exemplary: “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand!” (Mk 1:15) Like his prophetic mentor John the Baptist, Jesus taught that God would soon intervene directly in history, defeat the oppressors of Israel, establish his reign on earth, and inaugurate a new age of justice and righteousness in which the first would be last, the last would be first, and all the nations of the world would worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Whereas John remained near the Dead Sea and others came to him, Jesus took his mentor’s message directly to the people, coupling John’s severe warnings of impending judgment with promises of divine mercy for the penitent. Critically, the inbreaking of this Kingdom would be accomplished by God, not by the actions of Jesus and his followers. Jesus preached an ethic of voluntary poverty and generosity towards the destitute, love and prayer for one’s enemies, and nonretaliation—which is to say, an ethic designed to prepare his followers for the Age to Come, not for the violent overthrow of Roman rule. Jesus did not fit the profile of the messiah son of David: a warrior-king who would usher in God’s earthly reign through his military prowess. And the Gospels themselves—especially Mark—depict Jesus being quite elusive on the question of his messianic identity.
Nonetheless, when Jesus preached his familiar message about the imminence of the Kingdom during the week of his final Passover, the excited, rumor-mongering crowds of Jerusalem—most of whom knew little of this Galilean prophet or his message—began to proclaim that Jesus himself would be the one to bring these apocalyptic hopes to fulfillment as the Davidic messiah—as King of the Jews. What Jesus thought about these proclamations, or why they were made at this particular Passover—Fredriksen speculates that apocalyptic expectations may have been especially feverish at this time because Jesus had announced that this was the moment in which the Kingdom would finally arrive—is impossible to know for certain. But it mattered little to Pilate, who had Jesus crucified overnight, not to neutralize any perceived threat from him, but to dampen the excitement of the crowds, which threatened to boil over into seditious acts. That likely would have been the end of the matter, had not the followers of Jesus begun to report encountering him alive in the ensuing days and weeks.
Such is Fredriksen’s thesis. While I think she could have explored the question of Jesus’s self-understanding further (for instance, she believes that Jesus likely did have Twelve core disciples who were to judge the apocalyptically-reconstituted tribes of Israel, inviting the question of what he thought his own role would be), she nonetheless presents a compelling and meticulously rational interpretation of her subject.
May 27, 2014
With this book (copyright 1999) Paula Fredriksen, a Catholic converted to Judaism,continues and advances her 1988 work in From Jesus to Christ. Both are excellent books. She proposes as fundamental two questions: Why did Jesus die the way he did, in a Roman-style execution? and Why weren't any of his followers executed at the same time? That seems like a useful interpretive tool, and I haven't seen it used in other works about Jesus. In line with much other modern scholarship, she insists that Jesus was fundamentally Jewish. This is also a useful tool for interpretation. She works backward toward the historical Jesus from what we know about earliest Christianity, especially the genuine letters of Paul, and forward from what we know of the varieties of Judaism that preceded Jesus. Jesus must have made sense to his contemporaries and must make sense out of what immediately follows. That means it's harder for us, 2000 years later, to make Jesus relevant to modern issues, but Jesus' world was not our world.
Fredriksen makes a good case for seeing in the Gospel of John more history than earlier 20th century scholars: John's highly developed, post-Easter theology, which he puts in the mouth of Jesus, depends less on history than the theologies of the other 3 gospels; therefore, when John does give us some history (as in the number of trips Jesus made to Jerusalem and the length of Jesus' ministry), it is less likely to to be shaped to fit a theology, more likely to be just something that a community remembers.
Fredriksen assigns responsibility for Jesus' death almost entirely to Pilate, contrary to the impression that all four gospels give. Here too she is in good scholarly company. Her hypothesis about what led to Pilate's decision makes good sense. She thinks crowds of Passover pilgrims, who did not know Jesus well and proclaimed him as a more political Messiah than Jesus actually was, provoked Pilate, who actually knew Jesus to be a rather harmless sort, to act. And what better way to calm this rambunctious crowd than to kill its hero? I would not say that she's proven her case. It remains a hypothesis, but one that should be taken seriously.
This book is both scholarly and well-written. I highly recommend it.
Fredriksen makes a good case for seeing in the Gospel of John more history than earlier 20th century scholars: John's highly developed, post-Easter theology, which he puts in the mouth of Jesus, depends less on history than the theologies of the other 3 gospels; therefore, when John does give us some history (as in the number of trips Jesus made to Jerusalem and the length of Jesus' ministry), it is less likely to to be shaped to fit a theology, more likely to be just something that a community remembers.
Fredriksen assigns responsibility for Jesus' death almost entirely to Pilate, contrary to the impression that all four gospels give. Here too she is in good scholarly company. Her hypothesis about what led to Pilate's decision makes good sense. She thinks crowds of Passover pilgrims, who did not know Jesus well and proclaimed him as a more political Messiah than Jesus actually was, provoked Pilate, who actually knew Jesus to be a rather harmless sort, to act. And what better way to calm this rambunctious crowd than to kill its hero? I would not say that she's proven her case. It remains a hypothesis, but one that should be taken seriously.
This book is both scholarly and well-written. I highly recommend it.
June 15, 2023
Although by no means a walk in the park to absorb and understand, this book effectively addresses a question that has always fascinated me: how a separate, hugely significant religion emerged from beginnings that were entirely Jewish.
September 9, 2011
This is a fascinating and objectively written book on a subject that is seldom written about in a fashion that is either fascinating or objective. Regardless of your beliefs, this is a book that should not offend the thoughtful reader.
April 12, 2018
A good and pragmatic history or potential history done by someone who at least is aware of the problems of history itself. Some really good points but at times can be a bit repetitive due to its nature.. If you are interested in Jesus as a Jew of his time then well worth a look.
April 30, 2025
An excellent book with some good stimulating insights, such as how the Twelve continued preaching in the Temple (and Paul sacrificed there) after the gospels report of Jesus “cleansing” it. Also good to point out how there was no Roman military intervention against him during the “cleansing of the Temple “ and the Triumphal Entry, suggesting that they were not large enough to draw attention.
That said, I found some major holes in the thesis that Jesus was crucified because (1) he announced that “this Passover” would be when God broke into the world eschatologically, (2) crowds of his followers in Jerusalem named him messiah as a result, and (3) Pilate and Caiphas crucified him to suppress the excited crowds.
The holes I saw are as follows. First, the emergence of the belief that Jesus died as expiation for sin appears to have taken hold long before the oldest of New Testament letters: Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians. Secondly, the structure of the church seems to have been established from the earliest days. Third, the repeated practice of the Eucharist is not just found in the gospels, but in 1 Corinthians, Acts, and Jude at the very least, in addition to extra biblical documents such as the Didache and, possible later, the letters of Ignatius of Antioch in the beginning of the second century.
These are three major and critical elements of the earliest records of Christianity that seem to be almost entirely missing from Fredriksen’s analysis. Maybe my perspective comes from being a dedicated Catholic and I’m anachronistic in my inserting my current faith into the first century. However, I think any objective reader of the New Testament and other early Christian texts like the Didache would highlight these issues.
Maybe where Fredriksen goes astray is in isolating apocalyptic expectations as the only important thing shared by Jesus and the writers of the New Testament. While that element is clearly present, the other factors I describe are irrefutably there as well. I think those absences mean that her “theory of Jesus” is unalterably flawed.
That said, I found some major holes in the thesis that Jesus was crucified because (1) he announced that “this Passover” would be when God broke into the world eschatologically, (2) crowds of his followers in Jerusalem named him messiah as a result, and (3) Pilate and Caiphas crucified him to suppress the excited crowds.
The holes I saw are as follows. First, the emergence of the belief that Jesus died as expiation for sin appears to have taken hold long before the oldest of New Testament letters: Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians. Secondly, the structure of the church seems to have been established from the earliest days. Third, the repeated practice of the Eucharist is not just found in the gospels, but in 1 Corinthians, Acts, and Jude at the very least, in addition to extra biblical documents such as the Didache and, possible later, the letters of Ignatius of Antioch in the beginning of the second century.
These are three major and critical elements of the earliest records of Christianity that seem to be almost entirely missing from Fredriksen’s analysis. Maybe my perspective comes from being a dedicated Catholic and I’m anachronistic in my inserting my current faith into the first century. However, I think any objective reader of the New Testament and other early Christian texts like the Didache would highlight these issues.
Maybe where Fredriksen goes astray is in isolating apocalyptic expectations as the only important thing shared by Jesus and the writers of the New Testament. While that element is clearly present, the other factors I describe are irrefutably there as well. I think those absences mean that her “theory of Jesus” is unalterably flawed.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 14, 2024
This may be the best book on the historical Jesus I have read thus far, and I may need to give Paula Fredriksen more attention. I had only read one of her books previously (ten years ago): Sin: The Early History of an Idea which I rated two stars. In this current book, Fredriksen maintains that we can reconstruct Jesus if we stick to the few incontrovertible facts we know about him. At the beginning of the book she says the strangest fact is the fact that Jesus was crucified but his followers were not. Why were they not? She doesn’t answer this question until the last chapter. On the way there she critiques many alternate constructions of Jesus including my heretofore favorite: Jesus as a Cynic sage. She also fleshes out her view of the historical Jesus as a thoroughly Jewish teacher, as opposed to the later picture as someone controverting basic Jewish ideas such as purity and the centrality of the Jewish temple to worship. If the historical Jesus had in fact gone against such basic Jewish idea, Fredriksen plausibly argues, he never would have gained the following he did.
November 26, 2024
It was good. A lot of words to say not a whole lot, but what she did say was interesting. I think I liked “zealot” more. The author of zealot was a Muslim, who converted to Christianity, and then back to islam. This author was catholic and converted to Judaism.
Her interpretation about Jesus being a practicing Jew meaning he intended all the people after his death misses the point of what the Christian’s think of his death. So she points the fact that Jesus did all the ceremonial washing etc, but all of that was “pre-death”
It seems that what paula is saying is that because the gospel says Jesus dies because he overturns the tables (as in the act of overturning the tables got him in trouble), instead of being killed because he said the temple is irrelevant (so threatening the money machine capability that the temple was) makes the death on the cross less significant.
I was getting annoyed at Paula the whole book because she kept on trying to fully rationalize and find perfect proof of an event that is identified as a religious occurrence. But then she did later on say plainly she is approaching Jesus’s death from a historical standpoint instead of theological. There’s only so much you can do with historical accounts, and you have to decide if you feel moved to making that jump to believing.
Her interpretation about Jesus being a practicing Jew meaning he intended all the people after his death misses the point of what the Christian’s think of his death. So she points the fact that Jesus did all the ceremonial washing etc, but all of that was “pre-death”
It seems that what paula is saying is that because the gospel says Jesus dies because he overturns the tables (as in the act of overturning the tables got him in trouble), instead of being killed because he said the temple is irrelevant (so threatening the money machine capability that the temple was) makes the death on the cross less significant.
I was getting annoyed at Paula the whole book because she kept on trying to fully rationalize and find perfect proof of an event that is identified as a religious occurrence. But then she did later on say plainly she is approaching Jesus’s death from a historical standpoint instead of theological. There’s only so much you can do with historical accounts, and you have to decide if you feel moved to making that jump to believing.
December 12, 2018
Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews by Paula Fredriksen is an excellent well-researched book attempting to account for the mission and death of Jesus. It is very well argued but is written compactly, entrusting the reader to pay close attention at times to threads of argument and counter-argument, a dialectic necessary for disentangling such historical confusion on the subject. No words are wasted.
The blurb (above) is rather misleading by suggesting the the author begins with the crucifixion, because it is towards that decisive incident primarily that the text leads. The event is not reliably explained without an understanding of Jesus' society, its religious beliefs, practices and history, and the existing power structures in the region. The author examines the Biblical text itself, non-biblical accounts such as those of Josephus, and addresses the major theories of historians and clerics, some of whom have failed to take fully into account the situation on the ground during Jesus' time but rather assumed an unsound modern perspective. Here, briefly, is the author's persuasive claim:
By careful comparisons of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) among themselves, with the book of John, the existing letters of Paul (written before the Gospels), and other contemporary written accounts, and by knowing their historical and social context, it is possible to discern why the accounts differ considerably; that is, to identify the motives of the writers and also to recognize their possible sources and dependencies on one another. The motives themselves are informative, and properly assessing motivic portions of text as unhistorical enables a finer focus on what is historically reliable. This is the usual method of analysis (exegesis).
Based on Old Testament prophesies, many in the Jewish community in which Jesus lived were expecting (and their forebears had been expecting for centuries) a day of judgement (the apocalypse), and a messiah. They had suffered savage depopulation of the north by the Assyrians in the 8th century BC, depopulation and captivity by the Babylonians in the 6th century, other rebellions and outrages through the years, and were now chafing under the rule of Rome and her puppet rulers. There were other men before (and after) Jesus who were acclaimed here or there as a messiah, but no judgement day had yet transpired.
Jesus was the foremost teacher, healer and leader among several, and they and most other able Jews journeyed annually to Jerusalem for Passover. It was always the largest Jewish gathering of the year, and Roman soldiers always were brought in so as to keep a rebellion from breaking out, as indeed one did break out in 69 AD whereafter the Romans famously demolished the temple. But the soldiers always were vastly outnumbered and so acted proactively when possible. In Jesus' last year, the expectation emerged throughout the Passover throng that Jesus was the messiah and that the end was near. It is likely that, although Jesus' teaching foretold a future messianic apocalypse, he did not make any such claim for himself or declare that the end was imminent. But the situation developed beyond his control.
The Romans and the high priests long knew of Jesus and had found no reason for apprehension, but this turn was new and alarming for both parties, because Roman policy was to hold the high priests accountable for any Jewish attempt at insurrection, and insurrection now appeared possible. There was just one workable solution. Most safe and effective would have been for soldiers quietly to remove Jesus in the evening and crucify him out of sight of the temple complex, to be sought and found dead on the cross the next morning, a clear warning in classic Roman style. It is significant that none of Jesus' disciples were executed: when the Romans recognized a seditious plot, they routinely crucified every suspected conspirator.
Worshipers were astonished to awaken to Jesus on a cross, and soon began the various attempts to make sense of, and to find or create, meaning in his death. Some still believed that Jesus was the messiah, but this ending was unacceptable; it was later said to be better accomplished after Jesus returned three days later in either Galilee (Matthew and Mark), on the road to Emmaus (Luke) or in Jerusalem (John) and then rose to heaven. By the way, the earliest writer who addressed Jesus' return was Paul, who knew several of the 12 original apostles. He explicitly stated that Jesus had returned to earth in spirit but not in flesh and blood.
Endeavors by Paul and (the anonymous writers of circulating manuscripts called) Mark around 50-65 AD, Matthew and Luke around 85-90 AD, and John around 90-110 AD, and by subsequent commentators, to find meaning in Jesus' life and death, leaned heavily on old testament prophesies, attaching them to Jesus. Likewise, some compositions recorded after the destruction of the temple ascribe a prophesy of its destruction to him. "Prophesying" an event that had already happened was not uncommon in Old Testament writings intentionally imputed as composed before its occurrence.
Throughout the ensuing ages, some Christians continued to preach and to expect the impending arrival of the last judgement, including not a few at the end of 1999. Another such prediction was for October 22, 1844, thereafter called the "Great Disappointment" and figuring large in the founding of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
The book is well-written and annotated but would have read more easily with a few more subdivisions, each with a setup sentence to guide the reader between argument and counter-argument. This is a quibble. Anyone seriously interested in the historical Jesus will want to read this.
The blurb (above) is rather misleading by suggesting the the author begins with the crucifixion, because it is towards that decisive incident primarily that the text leads. The event is not reliably explained without an understanding of Jesus' society, its religious beliefs, practices and history, and the existing power structures in the region. The author examines the Biblical text itself, non-biblical accounts such as those of Josephus, and addresses the major theories of historians and clerics, some of whom have failed to take fully into account the situation on the ground during Jesus' time but rather assumed an unsound modern perspective. Here, briefly, is the author's persuasive claim:
By careful comparisons of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) among themselves, with the book of John, the existing letters of Paul (written before the Gospels), and other contemporary written accounts, and by knowing their historical and social context, it is possible to discern why the accounts differ considerably; that is, to identify the motives of the writers and also to recognize their possible sources and dependencies on one another. The motives themselves are informative, and properly assessing motivic portions of text as unhistorical enables a finer focus on what is historically reliable. This is the usual method of analysis (exegesis).
Based on Old Testament prophesies, many in the Jewish community in which Jesus lived were expecting (and their forebears had been expecting for centuries) a day of judgement (the apocalypse), and a messiah. They had suffered savage depopulation of the north by the Assyrians in the 8th century BC, depopulation and captivity by the Babylonians in the 6th century, other rebellions and outrages through the years, and were now chafing under the rule of Rome and her puppet rulers. There were other men before (and after) Jesus who were acclaimed here or there as a messiah, but no judgement day had yet transpired.
Jesus was the foremost teacher, healer and leader among several, and they and most other able Jews journeyed annually to Jerusalem for Passover. It was always the largest Jewish gathering of the year, and Roman soldiers always were brought in so as to keep a rebellion from breaking out, as indeed one did break out in 69 AD whereafter the Romans famously demolished the temple. But the soldiers always were vastly outnumbered and so acted proactively when possible. In Jesus' last year, the expectation emerged throughout the Passover throng that Jesus was the messiah and that the end was near. It is likely that, although Jesus' teaching foretold a future messianic apocalypse, he did not make any such claim for himself or declare that the end was imminent. But the situation developed beyond his control.
The Romans and the high priests long knew of Jesus and had found no reason for apprehension, but this turn was new and alarming for both parties, because Roman policy was to hold the high priests accountable for any Jewish attempt at insurrection, and insurrection now appeared possible. There was just one workable solution. Most safe and effective would have been for soldiers quietly to remove Jesus in the evening and crucify him out of sight of the temple complex, to be sought and found dead on the cross the next morning, a clear warning in classic Roman style. It is significant that none of Jesus' disciples were executed: when the Romans recognized a seditious plot, they routinely crucified every suspected conspirator.
Worshipers were astonished to awaken to Jesus on a cross, and soon began the various attempts to make sense of, and to find or create, meaning in his death. Some still believed that Jesus was the messiah, but this ending was unacceptable; it was later said to be better accomplished after Jesus returned three days later in either Galilee (Matthew and Mark), on the road to Emmaus (Luke) or in Jerusalem (John) and then rose to heaven. By the way, the earliest writer who addressed Jesus' return was Paul, who knew several of the 12 original apostles. He explicitly stated that Jesus had returned to earth in spirit but not in flesh and blood.
Endeavors by Paul and (the anonymous writers of circulating manuscripts called) Mark around 50-65 AD, Matthew and Luke around 85-90 AD, and John around 90-110 AD, and by subsequent commentators, to find meaning in Jesus' life and death, leaned heavily on old testament prophesies, attaching them to Jesus. Likewise, some compositions recorded after the destruction of the temple ascribe a prophesy of its destruction to him. "Prophesying" an event that had already happened was not uncommon in Old Testament writings intentionally imputed as composed before its occurrence.
Throughout the ensuing ages, some Christians continued to preach and to expect the impending arrival of the last judgement, including not a few at the end of 1999. Another such prediction was for October 22, 1844, thereafter called the "Great Disappointment" and figuring large in the founding of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
The book is well-written and annotated but would have read more easily with a few more subdivisions, each with a setup sentence to guide the reader between argument and counter-argument. This is a quibble. Anyone seriously interested in the historical Jesus will want to read this.
April 25, 2022
Well written, well researched and easy to follow along. I would point out that this is from an Historian's point of view rather than a Theologian's point of view so if you're easily offended and don't like your beliefs to be challenged, well, read something else. However, if you're not afraid of hearing something that might not align with your world views, read away, learn and think. All very healthy things for us to do.
January 7, 2022
This is the best and most comprehensive book on the historical Jesus I have ever read. Frederikson does an amazingly thorough job of situating Jesus in his historical and cultural context, thereby weeding out a lot of the noise created by modern interpreters. Highly recommended for those interested in the academic study of religion.
December 28, 2022
Great great book. What I liked most was that the author does a great job offering the varying perspectives of multiple scholars before offering her own hypotheses. Unfortunately, this is relatively rare.
June 25, 2018
Scholarly work on Jesus in context of time and religion. I enjoyed it, and found it difficult.
August 18, 2014
I'm only half-recommending this book, but think it might be of interest to my friends who are particularly fascinated by history, and I'm thinking of my atheist friends who have been reading more polemical books by atheists trying to make the case that Jesus never existed at all. This book was recommended to me by an atheist historian, and it's representative of modern scholarship, taking a more straightforward, critical approach to the questions surrounding the historical Jesus.
Paula Fredriksen holds degrees from Oxford and Princeton, was awarded the Yale University Press Governor's Award for Best Book for an earlier study of Jesus, and she won the National Jewish Book Award for the book I'm recommending (well, at least half-recommending) here. She has spent time as a visiting professor in Jerusalem at Hebrew University.
In making her case for seeing Jesus principally as an apocalyptic prophet, Paula Fredriksen compares her reasons with those who reconstruct Jesus in many other ways: a radical social reformer; a pious, individually oriented Hasid; a political critic; or a Cynic-like sage.
Fredriksen depends principally upon what's known of the historical community Jesus came from and from the earliest writings about him: those of the Q community in the Galilee, the writings of Paul, and those sections of the Gospels that pass her credibility tests.
She sees Jesus of Nazareth as standing apart from other particular prophets of God's coming kingdom - John the Baptizer, Theudas, the Egyptian, the signs prophets reported by Josephus. Among them only Jesus of Nazareth was proclaimed Messiah after his death, and only Jesus was believed to have been resurrected from the dead.
The core historical anomaly of the Passion stories," she says, is that "Jesus was crucified, but his followers were not." Usually, when insurrection was suspected of a leader whipping up crowds, his followers were also crucified as a lesson to others. Noting that Jesus was killed as an insurrectionist, she puts together facts to conclude that Herod Antipas had had plenty of opportunities to put Jesus to death earlier in Galilee, if Jesus had been doing anything worthy of being accused of insurrection (such as claiming too obviously be the Messiah). Pilate, who came to Jerusalem and upped the presence of Roman soldiers for the feasts, would have also had reason to put him to death earlier, had he looked at Jesus as anything other than harmless. She finds evidence that Jesus repeatedly visited Jerusalem and taught there during the Jewish feasts. Given what we know of Jesus' more unusual teachings, both Herod and Pilate probably saw him as a pacifist.
So why did this particular Passover feast get him, and him alone, crucified? Fredriksen thinks she finds hints in the accounts of Jesus' triumphal entry, the overturning of the moneychangers' tables, and the Last Supper. Jesus, the apocalyptic prophet, she says, must have excited the crowds with a more specific message that the Kingdom was coming - NOW. The crowds got out of hand, proclaiming Jesus as Messiah, even though, Fredriksen says, Jesus himself probably made no such claim, or at least not obviously. The larger crowds had a different, old-fashioned impression of a Roman-conquering Messiah than Jesus' own followers had of him, and Pilate, probably in consultation with the high priest (who held his position at Rome's whim and was accountable for any rioting), decided to disabuse the crowds of any hope that a Jewish king was about to take over. Jesus' own, closer followers posed no threat, given Jesus' well-known pacifistic teachings. She takes the accounts of the Last Supper to mean that Jesus knew things were hot and prepared his disciples for the worst-case scenario.
Whatever my Christian and atheist friends think of her reconstruction of Jesus, I think this is a fascinating book to glean what "indisputable facts" (according to Fredriksen) scholars are counting on as historical when they draw their conclusions: "Jesus' encounter with John the Baptizer, his popular following, his proclamation of the Kingdom of God, his crucifixion by Pilate in Jerusalem, the survival of his core followers, who took up his proclamation of the Kingdom while identifying Jesus as Christ, risen from the dead, and extending the mission out from its Jewish matrix to also include Gentiles."
"No reconstruction of the historical Jesus can persuade," says Fredriksen, "if it cannot meaningfully accommodate ... this handful of sure facts."
Paula Fredriksen holds degrees from Oxford and Princeton, was awarded the Yale University Press Governor's Award for Best Book for an earlier study of Jesus, and she won the National Jewish Book Award for the book I'm recommending (well, at least half-recommending) here. She has spent time as a visiting professor in Jerusalem at Hebrew University.
In making her case for seeing Jesus principally as an apocalyptic prophet, Paula Fredriksen compares her reasons with those who reconstruct Jesus in many other ways: a radical social reformer; a pious, individually oriented Hasid; a political critic; or a Cynic-like sage.
Fredriksen depends principally upon what's known of the historical community Jesus came from and from the earliest writings about him: those of the Q community in the Galilee, the writings of Paul, and those sections of the Gospels that pass her credibility tests.
She sees Jesus of Nazareth as standing apart from other particular prophets of God's coming kingdom - John the Baptizer, Theudas, the Egyptian, the signs prophets reported by Josephus. Among them only Jesus of Nazareth was proclaimed Messiah after his death, and only Jesus was believed to have been resurrected from the dead.
The core historical anomaly of the Passion stories," she says, is that "Jesus was crucified, but his followers were not." Usually, when insurrection was suspected of a leader whipping up crowds, his followers were also crucified as a lesson to others. Noting that Jesus was killed as an insurrectionist, she puts together facts to conclude that Herod Antipas had had plenty of opportunities to put Jesus to death earlier in Galilee, if Jesus had been doing anything worthy of being accused of insurrection (such as claiming too obviously be the Messiah). Pilate, who came to Jerusalem and upped the presence of Roman soldiers for the feasts, would have also had reason to put him to death earlier, had he looked at Jesus as anything other than harmless. She finds evidence that Jesus repeatedly visited Jerusalem and taught there during the Jewish feasts. Given what we know of Jesus' more unusual teachings, both Herod and Pilate probably saw him as a pacifist.
So why did this particular Passover feast get him, and him alone, crucified? Fredriksen thinks she finds hints in the accounts of Jesus' triumphal entry, the overturning of the moneychangers' tables, and the Last Supper. Jesus, the apocalyptic prophet, she says, must have excited the crowds with a more specific message that the Kingdom was coming - NOW. The crowds got out of hand, proclaiming Jesus as Messiah, even though, Fredriksen says, Jesus himself probably made no such claim, or at least not obviously. The larger crowds had a different, old-fashioned impression of a Roman-conquering Messiah than Jesus' own followers had of him, and Pilate, probably in consultation with the high priest (who held his position at Rome's whim and was accountable for any rioting), decided to disabuse the crowds of any hope that a Jewish king was about to take over. Jesus' own, closer followers posed no threat, given Jesus' well-known pacifistic teachings. She takes the accounts of the Last Supper to mean that Jesus knew things were hot and prepared his disciples for the worst-case scenario.
Whatever my Christian and atheist friends think of her reconstruction of Jesus, I think this is a fascinating book to glean what "indisputable facts" (according to Fredriksen) scholars are counting on as historical when they draw their conclusions: "Jesus' encounter with John the Baptizer, his popular following, his proclamation of the Kingdom of God, his crucifixion by Pilate in Jerusalem, the survival of his core followers, who took up his proclamation of the Kingdom while identifying Jesus as Christ, risen from the dead, and extending the mission out from its Jewish matrix to also include Gentiles."
"No reconstruction of the historical Jesus can persuade," says Fredriksen, "if it cannot meaningfully accommodate ... this handful of sure facts."
February 10, 2017
I haven't read much Historical Jesus work, but I have read enough to place Fredriksen's work in its relative environment. In short, I found her historical reconstruction very convincing--particularly because her method is more appropriate (IMHO) than some others I've seen. Rather than being a slave to redaction criticism and "earliest is best" thinking, Fredriksen paid attention to biblical texts (remaining rightly suspicious of their theological claims in reporting events), and she referred to other texts from the period to present a plausible picture of Jesus and his mission that would have made sense in first-Century Palestine (Galilee and Judea). What she offers is compelling: Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet, announcing the imminence of the Kingdom of God; his mission would have made him known to Jewish and Roman authorities in Jerusalem; his teaching would have garnered popular opinions on Jesus as God's Messiah (whether he fought these opinions or not is not the issue--the crowds held them); and these amped up crowds could have caused riots and sedition, which Pilate needed to quell (hence the crucifixion). The result is a tragic story of a misinterpreted prophet to Israel. Later, followers of Jesus vindicated this injustice with their Christologies. Even as a Christian, this is a reconstruction I can get on board with. Thoroughly convincing; I wish I had known about Freddiksen sooner.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 21, 2024
This is an excellent book prioritizing an historical perspective on Jesus, by a Jewish scholar of New Testament. I am likely to use or at least strongly recommend it for my study groups. I almost did not give it the full five stars, however, because of her seemingly determined exclusion of “social” reform as intentional in his life. She makes Galilee sound like the ideal place to live, forgetting that within Galilean memory Sephora’s had been razed to the ground by the Romans in 4 BCE and as someone who still remembers where she was when Kennedy was shot and when the Twin Towers fell, I cannot imagine the citizens of Nazareth forgetting such a thing in a hurry either, and there are no reports of Jesus ever setting foot in Sepphoris. And it’s my personal opinion that the healings that Jesus was known for were in line with what I might call a “social agenda” derived from the early Hebrew prophets. I do not know for sure that there has ever been a time in the history of humankind that social issues of one kind or another have not been of concern. My rant now being out of the way, I still gave this book top marks because I believe it makes such an important contribution to the ongoing conversation about the life and times of Jesus and is one of her best books.
November 28, 2018
From the Afterword:
"The Jesus encountered in the present reconstruction is a prophet who preached the coming apocalyptic Kingdom of God. His message coheres both with that of his predecessor and mentor, John the Baptizer, and with that of the movement that sprang up in his name. This Jesus thus is not primarily a social reformer with a revolutionary message; nor is he a religious innovator radically redefining the traditional ideas and practices of his native religion."
Which is a pretty fair description of the themes explored. I found the author's lack of belief annoying: for example, she chose to assume that all early references to the messiah could not have applied to Jesus specifically because they were prophecy, and therefore either fiction or deception. But everyone has an agenda, and Fredricksen is clear about hers. Her description of life under Roman rule in the first century was fascinating, and more than made up for other issues of faith (or lack of faith).
"The Jesus encountered in the present reconstruction is a prophet who preached the coming apocalyptic Kingdom of God. His message coheres both with that of his predecessor and mentor, John the Baptizer, and with that of the movement that sprang up in his name. This Jesus thus is not primarily a social reformer with a revolutionary message; nor is he a religious innovator radically redefining the traditional ideas and practices of his native religion."
Which is a pretty fair description of the themes explored. I found the author's lack of belief annoying: for example, she chose to assume that all early references to the messiah could not have applied to Jesus specifically because they were prophecy, and therefore either fiction or deception. But everyone has an agenda, and Fredricksen is clear about hers. Her description of life under Roman rule in the first century was fascinating, and more than made up for other issues of faith (or lack of faith).
October 9, 2023
Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews maps the historical world of Jesus walked.
This was the first book that was about a historical Jesus that I have read, although the idea was already familiar from other sources.
Paula Fredriksen provides an excellent view of how Jesus, as a man of his time, must have lived in accordance with the Law while also living a daily life in step with the ideas of the Hellenized world around him. The author has done her research. She looks into the culture, the cityscapes, the languages Jesus would have spoken, and the ideas that would have then been current. What she draws from all that with the reader is more than a dusty image of a remote time.
The holy land here is in a struggle between the West (Rome) and the East. Jesus asks for a new Kingdom of God, and on the eve of Passover with thousands in the streets, Rome in the person of Pilate reacts.
This was the first book that was about a historical Jesus that I have read, although the idea was already familiar from other sources.
Paula Fredriksen provides an excellent view of how Jesus, as a man of his time, must have lived in accordance with the Law while also living a daily life in step with the ideas of the Hellenized world around him. The author has done her research. She looks into the culture, the cityscapes, the languages Jesus would have spoken, and the ideas that would have then been current. What she draws from all that with the reader is more than a dusty image of a remote time.
The holy land here is in a struggle between the West (Rome) and the East. Jesus asks for a new Kingdom of God, and on the eve of Passover with thousands in the streets, Rome in the person of Pilate reacts.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 11, 2016
In many ways, an update to the author's more famous "From Jesus to Christ," this book is actually a more important read. Fredriksen sets the figure of Jesus within his cultural context and calls into question many familiar notions -- some from the New Testament texts themselves. For example, she notes that Jesus could never have ousted the moneychangers from the Jerusalem temple, since the place was about the size of a U.S. football field. A must-read for those who want a fresh view of who Jesus of Nazareth may have been.
July 29, 2015
Didn't finish. Started this because Anne Rice cited it as an important influence on her novels about Jesus. Found it to be a dry recital of passages of ancient texts that contradict each other and reveal nothing. Suppose a Bible scholar might be interested but for someone with a moderate interest in history, it's a fine example of what I hate about religion... the sort of discussion about how many angels dance on the pinhead according to the Book of Random Scroll.
May 21, 2013
Amazing look at Jesus's life within the context of Second Temple Judaism. The vast majority of New Testament scholarship is either virtually inscrutable and laden with technicalities or it panders to religious communities that might object to its comments. Fredriksen's book is extremely readable and fascinating.
June 30, 2008
This religious scholar gives a good mental picture of what life was like at Temple during the life and times of Jesus. The writer presents a solid argument as to the reason for Jesus' death. A scholarly read, but i liked it.
Want to read
August 7, 2013
Read
June 5, 2018Read for RELA 1082 Jesus in History, Fall 2007.
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