Wick in his new book Jesus, the God Within: Foundations of a Forgotten Faith. The Jesus most people think they know is not the Jesus of history, according to international award winning historian Daniel L. As Jewish elites fought to define their culture and as non-Jewish Christians aimed to distinguish themselves from Jewish rebels fighting the Roman Empire and come to an understanding of the man-God Jesus who had been introduced to them, the faith Jesus founded would transform the world as much as it would be transformed by it.
The book closes with two chapters showing how such influences impacted both Christian practice and doctrine, in the form of missionary activity and worship and in teachings regarding the afterlife and the very nature of existence proposed by the new Christian sect. Four discrete chapters focus on differing influences-Jewish, non-Jewish, alt-Jewish, and Gnostic-as an introduction to the societies and cultures the teachings of Jesus entered.
As different parties fought to control Jewish adaptation to a post-Jerusalem-centered mindset, the teachings of Jesus would become subsumed by ideas and practices quite different from those recorded as belonging to the first generation of his followers. Although Jesus was a Jew among Jews who focused his ministry within a Jewish milieu, the Jewish people were themselves part of a wider world that had heavily impacted their culture and society by the time of Jesus that world would in turn eventually help shape what would become the religions of both Judaism and Christianity. The World Jesus Entered traces the roots of what would become the Christian religion during its first two centuries, from the time of Jesus to the second and third generations of Christian believers. The book uses quotes from 100's of historians, scholars and educators throughout the world-most of which head how and why scripture came into our world 3,000 years ago. With the NT, the book uses a Post-Modern viewpoint which I'm sure will cause more howls from evangelicals. With Hebrew scriptures the book uses a 'minimalist' approach to Jewish history rather than scriptural. My reasons is religion is thousands of years old and there is no one argument for the myriad of personalities that wrote out these scriptures! Also, this book is done in a 'question/answer' layout and is more aimed at the layperson rather than the scholar-although it still cites/annotates as much as possible. Unlike most books on the history of religions "Revisionist." doesn't have just one argument, rather 100's. A work nearly completed, the main thrust of this book is how pagan early religions, Judaism and later Christianity collided in the 4th century to form what we know as the Bible.
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