A swirl of Jewish sectarian movements muddied the religious waters during the late Second Temple period. In recent decades, scholars of the Bible have struggled to understand the role these sects played in the rise and spread of the Jesus movement. Nazorean joins this wave of sectarian scholarship. In this book, Kem Luther sketches the history of a wisdom-oriented sect that gave birth to the Christian church. Weaving a series of what the philosopher and historian R. G. Collingwood called "webs of imaginative construction," he provides a provocative and plausible story about a wisdom sect--the Nazoreans--that shaped the career and teachings of John the Baptist and Jesus. To support his scenario, Luther offers sectarian readings of passages from the Gospels of Matthew and John, the Epistle of James, Acts, the Wisdom of Solomon, and the Psalms of Solomon. He links his developing awareness of the sectarian context of these documents to his own trek through a landscape of post-1960 American religion. The candid account of Luther's own journey through a naive modernism, his immersion in evangelical subculture at a Bible school, and his postgraduate studies in mysticism and philosophy makes a fascinating complement to his textual studies.

Etienne Nodet and Justin Taylor investigate the character of the early Christian community by looking at the origins of baptism and the Eucharist and the links between them. A fundamental work on the initiation sacraments, "The Origins of Christianity" focuses on the Essenes at the time that this tradition-bound culture came in contact with the Gentiles. The result was a profound change that transformed a sect into a church.

From its earliest known interpretations, Ecclesiastes has been read in very diverse, even diametrically opposed, ways. Paying close attention to recent work on Ecclesiastes, this text shows the continued diversity of interpretation at various levels.

The truth behind the Gospel accounts of the Nativity, updated to include the latest research--a classic by a renowned scholar, hailed as "masterly" and "definitive" in the original edition.

Presents 30 papers from the Society's 135th annual meeting held November 1999 in Boston. Sample topics include: non-linear time in apocalyptic texts (Dailey); new resources -- including an online bibliography -- for the study of Josephus (Sievers); and the Book of Elchasai: A Jewish apocalyptic writing, not a Christian church order (Luttikhuizen).

Cities evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls and archaeological resources to reveal that the early Jesus movement was comprised of loyal Jewish nationalists.