Books like From Jesus to Christ by Paula Fredriksen

This book traces how the idea that Jesus of Nazareth was God emerged and evolved in the early church, revealing the historical, textual, and theological steps that shaped the doctrine of Jesus’s divinity.

A provocative study that treats the Gospels as Jewish midrashic texts, questioning the literal historicity of key Jesus narratives.

A scholarly exploration of how Jesus, a young Jewish rabbi, came to be the central figure of Christianity, contrasting the Matthew and Paul perspectives and examining the roots of Christian doctrine and its relation to Judaism.

In Beyond Belief, Elaine Pagels examines the roots of Christianity, from the Gospel of Thomas to early canon formation, while reflecting on the personal and spiritual impact of faith in the modern world.

Explores the Gospels' Jesus, offering a fresh perspective on how he has shaped faith, morality, and society for nearly two thousand years.

"Five years after his book about God as portrayed in the Old Testament - God: A Biography - Jack Miles gives us his consideration of Christ. He presents Christ as a hero of literature based only in part on the historical Jesus, asking us to take the idea of Christ as God Incarnate not as a dogma of religion but as the premise of a work of art, the New Testament.". "As this story begins, God has not kept his promise to end the five-hundred-year-long oppression of the Children of Israel and return them to greatness. Under Rome, their latest oppressor, the Jews face a holocaust. This is God's supreme crisis. Astonishingly, God resolves the dilemma by becoming a Jew himself, Christ, inflicting upon himself in advance the very agony his people will suffer, revising in the process the meaning of victory and defeat. By dying and rising as Christ, God not only swallows up the historical defeat of the Jews but also offers the promise of a cosmic victory that will "wipe away every tear" for all mankind."--BOOK JACKET.

"Paula Fredriksen draws on the narratives of all four evangelists as well as both John and the Synoptics, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jewish authorities of Jesus' time - Philo, Paul, and Josephus - who wrote in Greek, and early rabbinic writings. She shows us a historical Jesus living in the tumultuous world of late-Second Temple Judaism: an observant Jew of his time, a prophetic teacher who traveled through the villages of Galilee and frequently in and around Jerusalem."--BOOK JACKET. "At the center of her book she brings us to the questions raised by the least disputed fact about Jesus' life: his death."--BOOK JACKET. "Why was crucifixion chosen as the means of execution? If Jesus was executed as a political insurrectionist, why were none of his followers executed or even arrested?"--BOOK JACKET. "The author's quest in search of the answers takes us through the religious world - Jewish and pagan - of Mediterranean antiquity, through the tangle of Judean and Galilean politics, and through the surprisingly intimate social interactions of Jewish and gentile communities in the ancient city. And it is through the Gospel of John - a text out of favor in most academic reconstructions - that she finds the answer to the interpretive dilemma posed by Jesus' execution and his disciples' survival."--BOOK JACKET.

Jesus Through the Centuries is an original and compelling study of the impact of Jesus on cultural, political, social, and economic history. The author reveals how the image of Jesus created by each successive epoch - from rabbi in the first century to liberator in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - is a key to understanding the temper and values of that age. In Mary Through the Centuries, first published in 1996, the author examines all of Christian history and culture to create the most complete portrait of the Virgin Mary ever written. Pelikan assesses the ways Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims, artists, musicians, and writers, and men and women everywhere have depicted, venerated, and been inspired by Mary, a symbol of hope and solace for all generations. --from inside jacket.