The Master
The Master
(current book project)
The Master is the story of the man behind the myth.
While the evidence for a complete re-construction of the man is lacking – we do now have an extensive library of ancient sectarian Jewish literature that helps us contextualize Jesus’s social, ideological, and theological locations. We have early collections of Jesus’s instructional teachings preserved in the so-called “Double Tradition” of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. We can now identify Jesus’s distinctive “way” of interpreting the Torah within Second Temple Judaism. And we can now utilize sociological models and comparative categories from the academic study of religion. This gives us the opportunity of creating a new, more complex, and more coherent narrative account of the man from Nazareth.
In a number of publications, I have located the historical Jesus in the context of Early Jewish apocalypticism, a complex literary, social, political, and theological worldview that informed those who created the Enoch tradition and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The result of over twenty years of research and publication in Jesus studies, this book is the culmination of my research, an attempt to provide a coherent, compelling, and accessible story of Jesus, the man who became God.
Coming soon.