Overview

This volume challenges Gerd Theissen's dominant thesis of ""wandering radicals"" as the earliest spreaders of the Jesus tradition. Several conclusions emerge: (1) the textual evidence for the ""wandering radicals"" hypothesis is not tenable and it must be replaced with one that more closely comports with the evidence: (2) the immediate context of the Jesus movement, and of Q in particular, is the socio-economic crisis in Galilee under the Romans; and (3) the formation of Q is the product of Galilean village scribes in the Jesus movement reacting to the negative developments in Galilee that affected their social standing. Arnal moves decisively beyond earlier Q studies, which focused almost exclusively on literary history without dealing with the social realitites of the first century.

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9780800632601

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William E. Arnal is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Manitoba (Winnipeg, Canada). He is co-editor of and contributor to Whose HIstorical Jesus? (1997).

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