Messiah And Christos

This book reveals that much of Christianity and its beliefs had originated in ancient Egypt rather than the Middle East. The author presents us with how, where and why many spiritual Egyptian beliefs were adopted into Christian form and accepted as "history", as opposed to being carried over in their original mythological form. Kuhn states, "The gospels are not and never were histories. They are now proven to have been cryptic dramas of the spiritual evolution of humanity and of the history of the human soul in its earthly tabernacle of flesh." For Christianity to be expressed in the way it was first intended, as experienced during the first two centuries of its existence, one must first acknowledge its pagan roots. This is too much of a leap for most people, but they have not read this book. The author reveals how things were altered in the third century by the existing priesthood and why.

He then traces the rise and fall of "the messianic idea"' in Jewish studies and gives an alternative account of early Jewish messiah language: the convention worked because there existed both an accessible pool of linguistic resources and a community of competent language users. Whereas it is commonly objected that the normal rules for understanding "christos" do not apply in the case of Paul since he uses the word as a name rather than a title, Novenson shows that "christos" in Paul is neither a name nor a title but rather a Greek honorific, like Epiphanes or Augustus. Focusing on several set phrases that have been taken as evidence that Paul either did or did not use "christos" in its conventional sense, Novenson concludes that the question cannot be settled at the level of formal grammar. Examining nine passages in which Paul comments on how he means the word "christos", Novenson shows that they do all that we normally expect any text to do to count as a messiah text.

In Kyrios Christos, Wilhelm Bousset argues that the Hellenistic Church's declaration of "Jesus as Lord" is a transformation of the pre-Christian Judaic community's understanding of Jesus as the Son of Man. This unique distinction between the primitive Palestinian community and Hellenistic Christianity reveals how the earliest Christian beliefs were informed by existing religious influences. A well-known classic, Kyrios Christos defined the research agenda for nearly a century concerning the belief in Jesus as Lord and Christ from the New Testament through Irenaeus and his contemporaries. Bousset's landmark, with a new introduction by Larry Hurtado, is now made available for a new generation of students and scholars seeking to delve further into the ancient world of the early Christians.

Introduction by James H. Charlesworth This new edition of David Flusser's classic study of the historical Jesus, revised and updated by his student and colleague R. Steven Notley, will be welcomed everywhere by students and scholars of early Christianity and Judaism. Reflecting Flusser's mastery of ancient literary sources and modern archaeological discoveries, The Sage from Galilee offers a fresh, informed biographical portrait of Jesus in the context of Jewish faith and life in his day. Including a chronological table (330 BC – AD 70), and twenty-eight illustrations, The Sage from Galilee is the culmination of nearly six decades of study by one of the world's foremost Jewish authorities on the New Testament and early Christianity. Both Jewish and Christian readers will find challenge and new understanding in these pages.

Edited by Joel B. Green, Scot McKnight and I. Howard Marshall, this reference work encompasses everything relating to Jesus and the Gospels.

"This book is a scholarly treatment of messianism in ancient Judaism and Christianity. In particular, and in contrast to other recent treatments, it is a study of what we might call the grammar of messianism, that is, the patterns of language inherited from the Hebrew Bible that all ancient messiah texts, Jewish and Christian, use. It makes the point that all ancient messiah texts are creative efforts at negotiating a shared set of linguistic possibilities and limitations inherited from the Hebrew Bible. The distinguishing features of the book are several: First, breaking with an ideologically loaded tradition, it incorporates both Jewish and Christian texts as evidence for this discursive practice. Second, rather than drawing up a taxonomy of types of ancient messiah figures, it analyzes a range of other more specific issues raised by the texts themselves. Third, it cuts the Gordian knot of the longstanding question of the prominence of messianism in antiquity, suggesting that that question is ultimately unanswerable but also entirely unnecessary for an understanding of the pertinent texts"--

A #1 BESTSELLER IN KINDLE HISTORICAL THRILLERS Ancient scrolls hold the key to the origins of Christianity--but some will stop at nothing to hide the truth A suspicious death in Istanbul leaves one ancient scroll and clues to finding another in the hands of Drew Korchula, a thirty-two-year-old American expat, a Turkish dwarf named Kadir, and Zafer, a Special Forces washout. Drew is desperate to turn everything over to the academic community, and in the process redeem himself in the eyes of his estranged wife, but Kadir and Zafer are only interested in what they can get for the scrolls on the black market. Not everyone wants to see the scrolls go public, however, and some will stop at nothing to protect the Church and believers around the world from the revelations embodied in the priceless manuscripts. An action-packed intellectual thriller unraveling the mystery of a theological cold case more than two thousand years old, The Christos Mosaic is a monumental work of biblical research wrapped in a story of love, faith, human frailty, friendship, and forgiveness. Author Vincent Czyz takes the reader through the backstreets of Istanbul, Antakya (ancient Antioch), and Cairo, to clandestine negotiations with wealthy antiquities smugglers and ruthless soldiers of fortune, to dusty Egyptian monasteries, on a nautical skirmish off the coast of Alexandria, and finally to the ruins of Constantine's palace buried deep beneath the streets of present-day Istanbul.