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James Constantine Hanges, Christ, the Image of the Church: The
Construction of a
New Cosmology and the Rise of Christianity
Contexts and Consequences: New Studies in Religion and History
When and how does devotion to
Jesus become distinctive enough to be called Christianity?
Scholars have long recognized that Jesus' earliest followers
continued to see themselves as Jews. Believing that Jesus
lived on as the risen Christ did not demand that they part
ways from the Jewish community. Even when non-Jews began to
respond to the preaching about Jesus, their belief in Jesus
as the risen Christ did not alone distinguish them from the
Jewish members of the Jesus movement. The element that
distinguished the first Christians must be sought elsewhere.
Following Durkheim's description of the symbolic nature of
group formation, this book argues that the earliest
distinctively Christian communities are the Pauline
churches, which arise as the result of the apostle's
introduction of ecstatic Christpossession to Greeks, who
received the divine spirit free from mediation through the
Torah. Paul's ethnically Greek communities symbolized
themselves in the image of Christ as both a possessing and
possessed spirit, and projected this Christ as the image of
the community, cosmologically in such an innovative way
relative to Torah that it requires description as a
distinctive new religion.
Contents
Introduction
Abbreviations
Chapter 1 The Folly of the Cross
Chapter 2 The Scandal of the Cross
Chapter 3 Christ, the Image of the Church
Chapter 4 The Age of the Spirit
Chapter 5 Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Reviews
“Christ,
the Image of the Church is a fresh, original study that is
sure to make a significant impact on the field of New
Testament studies, as well as on religious studies in
general. One of its major theses; that religious experience,
socially construed, is crucial to the understanding and
interpretation of the emergence of new religions, is well
argued and persuasively demonstrated. It rightly challenges
and corrects interpretations of these phenomena that attempt
to explain it solely in terms of the history of ideas and
theological propositions. It is a mature work of scholarship
and will surely make its mark on the field.”
Adela Yarbro Collins,
Buckingham Professor of New
Testament Criticism
and Interpretation, Yale
Divinity School.
“Hanges
is not the first to look to Pauline circles for the earliest
instances of something different enough from Judaism that it
could be called 'Christianity' ... but what Hanges brings to
the table is a fresh theoretical argument for this
assertion. Moreover, he mounts this argument within a larger
context of contemporary Pauline scholarship that over the
last several decades has seemed to be swinging in the
opposite direction. I find Hanges' contribution attractive
and most helpful. He has offered as succinct a solution as I
have seen to handling some important issues that have
preoccupied Pauline studies for a long while, and I would
anticipate that his book is going to be very well-received….
I wish I had had Hanges' book as one of the studies for
analysis by my students.”
Michael A. Williams,
Professor and Chair
Department of Near Eastern
Languages
&
Civilization
University of Washington.
Author
James Hanges (PhD, University of Chicago) teaches in
the Department of Comparative Religion at Miami University
of Ohio.
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