Religion of the Earliest Church: Creating A Symbolic World

In these distinguished Oxford lectures, Theissen picks up where he left off in The Historical Jesus (1998). Employing the notion of religion as a "cultural sign language which promises a gain in life by corresponding to an ultimate reality," he plots the emergence of Christianity as a religion, with elements of myth, ritual, ethics, and an emergent symbolic system. He expands upon the historical, social, and theological analysis of his earlier works to cover such issues as the relationship ...