Message and the Kingdom

In a time of social upheaval resulting from rapacious Roman taxation, Jesus's message to resist through communal cooperation was welcome to rural Galilean Jews who were expecting a return to their covenant with God. When Paul extended this message to similarly dispossessed urban Gentiles, the stage was set for a Jesus movement that would take hold in the empire and transform the world. Richard A. Horsley and Neil Asher Silberman put recent archaeological and textual research to good use in an original but reasonable interpretation of Jesus and Paul as religious and social reformers. The result is a picture of Christianity that makes sense Biblically as well as historically.