Skip to content
Responsive image
Vendor
C.H.BECK
Susanne Simor
Original language
German
Categories

Jesus or Paul

Johannes Fried

The Origin of Christianity in Conflict

"Jesus lives!" After Jesus' crucifixion this good news could be understood in many different ways. His closest associates knew that he had survived the cross and preserved the words of the fled master. The apostle Paul, however, proclaimed the resurrection of the Son of God from the dead and had little interest in the life of the Jewish teacher. Johannes Fried reconstructs the conflict and shows how Paul's teaching prevailed in the end.

Death on the cross, resurrection, mission of the apostles to Jews and Gentiles, our concepts about early Christianity are still strongly influenced by traditions of faith. The historian Johannes Fried re-interrogates the biblical and extra-biblical sources and puts them together to form a new, coherent picture: there was a basic conflict in the emerging Christianity between followers of Jesus in Jerusalem, who knew about his survival and who held his teachings in the earliest core of the Gospel of Thomas, and the Apostle Paul, who spread the message of the substitutionary atoning death of the Son of God in the pagan world. The message of Paul prevailed in the Roman Empire. The tradition of Jesus' followers, on the other hand, was branded heretic and only a few traces remain. Johannes Fried follows them with the tools of the historian and shows that everything could have been very different from what we believe.

Available products
Book

Published by C.H.Beck

Main content page count: 198 Pages