Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity [Hardcover]

Paula Fredriksen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 23, 1999

In her new book, the acclaimed historian of Christianity gives us a portrait of Jesus that departs radically from the traditional. Paula Fredriksendraws on the narratives of all four evangelists, both John and the Synoptics, as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jewish authorities of Jesus' time -- Philo, Paul, and Josephus -- who wrote in Greek, and early rabbinic writings. She shows us a historical Jesus living in the tumultuous world of late-Second Temple Judaism: an observant Jew of his time, a prophetic teacher who traveled through the villages of Galilee and frequently in and around Jerusalem. At the center of her book she brings us to the questions raised by the least disputed fact about Jesus' life: his death. Jesus was executed by the Roman prefect, Pilate, on or around Passover, in the manner Rome reserved particularly for political insurrectionists -- crucifixion. Pilate could not have planned this very imperial death for a Jesus concerned purely with Jewish controversy.


Why was crucifixion chosen as the means of execution? If Jesus was executed as a political insurrectionist, why were none of his followers executed or even arrested?


The author's quest in search of the answers takes us through the religious world -- Jewish and pagan -- of Mediterranean antiquity, through the tangle of Judean and Galilean politics, and through the surprisingly intimate social interactions of Jewish and gentile communities in the ancient city. And it is through the Gospel of John -- a text out of favor in most academic reconstructions -- that she finds the answer to the interpretive dilemma posed by Jesus' execution and his disciples' survival.


She shows us a Jesus firmly situated in his native religious milieu, a Jesus whose mission and message, whose Jewish life and Roman death, account for his movement's rapid spread through territorial Israel to diaspora synagogues, its ready embrace of Gentiles, and its enduring commitment to the message of the crucified Messiah and the coming of the Kingdom of God.


Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews won the 1999 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Jewish-Christian Relations.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The epigraph to Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews by Paula Fredriksen includes the following observation by Matteo Ricci: "[A]ll things (including those that at last come to triumph mightily) are at their beginnings so small and faint in outline that one cannot easily convince oneself that from them will grow matters of great moment." This little thought helps to explain Fredriksen's big one, that no one during Jesus' lifetime (including the man himself) considered Jesus to be the Messiah. That interpretation of his life, Fredriksen argues, was occasioned by his death: "Jesus' crucifixion as King of the Jews had come as a shock to his core followers. Their experiences of his continued presence after his death, on the evidence of the Gospels, surprised them, too. Seeking to understand what they had witnessed, they turned to Scripture." Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews makes its argument through careful reconstruction of Jesus' historical context, and dogged attention to the details of his crucifixion and to the fates of his immediate followers. The book's surprising arguments and its lucid style make this a valuable addition to the canon of popular Historical Jesus scholarship. --Michael Joseph Gross

From Publishers Weekly

Among bookstore shelves crowded with recent biographies of Jesus of Nazareth, Fredriksen's contribution will certainly be a welcome addition. It is scholarly without being pedantic, insightful without being revolutionary. Yet the central question it asksA"Why did Jesus die the way he did?"Astrikes to the very core of the debate over the Historical Jesus. Fredriksen, Aurelio Professor of Scripture at Boston University, brings to this question enormous erudition drawn from the rabbinic writings, opening fresh ways of looking at the well-trodden Historical Jesus material. Her careful working through the serious historical issues surrounding the definition of "Gospel Truth," the nature of God and Israel in Roman antiquityAas well as the problem of Paul's renovation of the first Christians' view of JesusAare important contributions to our understanding of Jesus' life. Unlike some other new biographies of Jesus emerging from the trade press, the scholarly apparatus for this text was not shed in the hopes of making it more acceptable to the general reader. The author's notes, far from merely documenting sources, contain interesting and useful augmentations. There is much new here, something that seems unusual for territory so heavily mined. Fredriksen's Jesus of Nazareth is one of those enviable scholarly works that is both a credible scholarly effort and a very good read. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (November 23, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679446753
• ISBN-13: 978-0679446750
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,037,527 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

166 of 178 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Best account of Jesus' passion, December 23, 1999

By 

Loren Rosson III (New Hampshire, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity (Hardcover)

Paula Fredriksen offers the best historical account of the passion. Jesus, she says, wasn't killed for black magic, Torah-disputes, parables, nor even his outrageous demonstration in the temple. As offensive as these were to many, they wouldn't have resulted in crucifixion. Authorities knew that Jesus was essentially a harmless nuisance: Antipas left him alone, because (unlike the Baptist and other prophets) he didn't convene mass rallies in the desert; and Pilate didn't move against him on account of the triumphal entry, because he'd been long aware that Jesus really posed no threat to Roman power (John's gospel correctly indicates he'd been in Jerusalem before). The demonstration in the temple, moreover, would have hardly been noticed by anyone during a festival. But during his last trip to Jerusalem, in the days between his triumphal entry and last supper, Jesus fueled alarming amounts of messianic enthusiasm. The author suggests that Jesus stepped up the apocalypse's timetable from "soon" to "now" -- proclaiming that this passover would be the last before the kingdom arrived -- with increased amounts of crowds and pilgrims acclaiming him the messianic liberator. Pilate finally acted against Jesus to set an example for the masses and prevent riots.

In many ways this book owes to E.P. Sanders' reconstruction of Jesus the eschatological prophet obedient to Torah, but while for Sanders Jesus was killed for acting against the temple, Fredriksen believes he was executed because Caiaphas was nervous about Pilate's itchy trigger-finger when dealing with popular prophets. This is a sound contribution to historical-Jesus studies and should be read by anyone remotely interested in the field.

58 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Historical Jesus Born of Common Sense, December 2, 2000

By 

peculiar "andrew_eccentric" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity (Hardcover)

The words that come to mind having absorbed the arguments of Paula Fredriksen in "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews" are "common sense". In her book she has not fallen prey (like so many in historical Jesus studies) to the predatory gaze of "method" neither has she been overly waylaid along the way by a need to pander to various "audiences" either contemporary or ancient. She has done history - Jewish history - and, in my opinion, done it well. Her Jesus is "a prophet who preached the coming apocalyptic Kingdom of God." She follows this tack not least because it enables Jesus to cohere with his immediate mentor, John the Baptist, and the movement that "sprang up in his name" - the first Christians. Fredriksen believes that in many ways what Jesus preached was revolutionary only in the sense that he talked about God's kingdom NOW rather than SOON - it was a matter of TIMETABLE and not CONTENT. Thus, Fredriksen contributes another Jesus to the current round of thoroughly Jewish Jesuses.

A key and noteworthy aspect of Fredriksen's work is the insight that the itinerary of John, as against the Synoptic Gospels, may be closer to the truth. That is, Jesus was known in Judea and Galilee rather than just Galilee. This allows her to say that Jesus, being known in and around Jerusalem, could be seen as a one man threat in a sense, rather than the leader of a revolutionary movement or army. Thus, when the time came to do away with Jesus his followers were left alone since they were never perceived as the threat Jesus was. This threat was due to Jesus ability to galvanise the crowds with his imminent eschatological message, a message which at his final Passover may well have been tinged with a crowd more and more convinced of his possible messianic credentials. Thus Jesus was executed by Pilate as a political insurrectionist.

So what other examples of scholarly common sense might we find in this book? Well, the insight that searching for the historical Jesus now requires knowledge of the historical Galilee and historical Judaism. Further, the suggestion that Jesus is not the all-seeing, all-knowing individual some scholars (and many readers) assume him to be. Why can't Pilate's action against Jesus have caught him by surprise, for example? Further, but by no means finally, that Jesus' messianic identity might well be in some way concretised in the consciousness of those following Jesus before the crucifixion and, indeed, act as a fatal impetus towards it.

So here we have a book of eminent common sense which attempts what was seemingly becoming thought impossible - a reasoned and reasonable view of the historical Jesus which attempts to make sense of our historical evidence without fuss, bluster or fanfares of publicity. I judge that Fredriksen has done as good a job as we can expect against the current background of research - and in a way that is both readable and enjoyable. As a current postgraduate student specialising in the historical Jesus,I recommend this book to every reader interested in the subject.

32 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A seminal work of scholarship., February 18, 2000

By 

Danny Tweedy - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity (Hardcover)

As far as I'm concerned Paula Fredricksen provides a fresh and convincing thesis in this work en route to capturing the historical Jesus.

To say that I was impressed with her even-handed academic approach would be a gross understatement. With the care and meticulousness of an anthropologist at dig site, Fredricksen excavates for the historical Jesus working from a premise that denies the all too obliged notions of the "apocalyptic messiah" or Gallelian sage.

It is with this approach that she acquires the foundation for a clear and bias-free perspective( or at least as bias-free as it it possible to get). She treats the historic record with the exacting precision and care of a surgeon, and arrives at the historical Jesus not through the prizm of the narratives (the Gospels) or through that of his proverbs, but through the seemingly inexplicable occasion of his death.

Frederiksen is perhaps most to be complimented on her evaluation of the variations of Jesus depicted between the Gospels; not using these inconguencies to dismiss them, but offering them as items to be used to juxtapose against other documents that reflect the 1st century Jesus (the dead sea scroll for example). This is an impressive technique, which has the result of more accurately capturing the historical Jesus.

Above all of this, the book is very cogent and not a difficult read. This is perhaps its best quality.