Recommended Reading
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Biblical Scholarship, Jesus, and Early Christianity

Biblical Scholarship, Jesus & Early ChristianityThis is the most readable introduction to the thinking of one of members of the Jesus Seminar. For many Christians disenchanted with traditional claims about Jesus, this book has been the entryway back to a thinking but spiritual faith.
Crossan tells us what we can know about the social, political, and religious world of Jesus, and then paints a picture of Jesus as a Jewish peasant and political and spiritual revolutionary.
Crossan takes seriously what history and the social sciences tell us about the poltical, economic, and religious time of Jesus. A more scholarly version of Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography."Why did Jesus happen when and where he happened?" is the question that drives Excavating Jesus, a collaboration between the leading historical Jesus scholar John Dominic Crossan and noted Galilean archeologist Jonathan Reed. Excavating Jesus is a groundbreaking work of popular biblical scholarship, an extraordinarily mature and accessible integration of textual study with archeological research.Jesus saw the extraordinary in the ordinary. His extraordinary vision comes to us in bits and pieces, in random stunning insights, embedded in the everyday language of his parables, aphorisms, and dialogues. In A Credible Jesus, Robert Funk sorts and assembles these fragments and examines ways in which the vision they preserve can serve twenty-first century people searching for meaning in a very different world than the one Jesus inhabited. The results are both unsettling and reassuring. Robert Funk is founder of the Jesus Seminar and director of the Westar Institute.  In this compelling study of the birth and infancy of Jesus, Robert Miller separates fact from fiction in the gospel narratives and relates them to stories about the miraculous births of Israelite heroes and of Greek and Roman sons of God. Born Divine analyzes the Christian claim that the birth and childhood of Jesus fulfilled Old Testament prophecies. The historical and theological dimensions of the virgin birth tradition are discussed with honesty and insight. This wide-ranging book also presents additional infancy gospels from the second century through the Middle Ages. Ehrman looks at the variety of early Christian groups that did not survive the movement towards "orthodoxy." Each of these movements believed that they were being true to Jesus. Ehrman suggests that there was much more variety in early Christianity than our Christian scriptures and standard Christian history would lead us to believe.From Publishers Weekly: In this majestic new book, Pagels (The Gnostic Gospels) ranges panoramically over the history of early Christianity, demonstrating the religion's initial tremendous diversity and its narrowing to include only certain texts supporting certain beliefs. At the center of her book is the conflict between the gospels of John and Thomas. Reading these gospels closely, she shows that Thomas offered readers a message of spiritual enlightenment. Rather than promoting Jesus as the only light of the world, Thomas taught individuals that "there is a light within each person, and it lights up the whole universe. If it does not shine, there is darkness." As she eloquently and provocatively argues, the author of John wrote his gospel as a refutation of Thomas, portraying the disciple Thomas as a fool when he doubts Jesus, and Jesus as the only true light of the world. In this book, Nelson-Pallmeyer draws heavily on clues left by other Jesus scholars (Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, etc.) to find what was central to the life and thought of Jesus. He methodically argues that the Bible is full of contradictory and distorted images of God, and rife with stories attributing to God violence, abuse and murder. These images and tales must be jettisoned, for they conflict with the nonviolent God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth, who preached and worked against the domination culture of his era.Crossan and Reed examine the history and archeology of Paul's world and paint a picture of an apostle who challenged the empire of Rome with the radically different kingdom of Jesus.Stark uses contemporary social scientific methods that describe how religious groups recruit and retain members to paint a plausible picture of how and why Christianity grew in the early centuries.This book explains the quest for the historical Jesus and how this quest has always been linked to the search for God. It presents a "Jesus theology" based on the life and teachings of Jesus. Stephen J. Patterson is a member of the Jesus Seminar.