The Nonviolent Messiah

Download or read book The Nonviolent Messiah written by Simon J. Joseph and published by Augsburg Fortress Publishers. This book was released on 2014 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When scholars have set Jesus against various conceptions of the "messiah" and other reemptive figures in early Jewish expectation, those questions have been bound up with the problem of violence, whether the political violence of a militant messiah or the divine violence carried out by a heavenly or angelic figure. Simon J. Joseph enters the wide-ranging discussion of violence in the Bible, taking up questions of Jesus of Nazareth's relationship to the violence of revolutionary militancy and apocalyptic fantasy alike, and proposes an innovative new approach. Missing from past discussions, Joseph contends, is the unique conception of an Adamic redeemer figure in the Enochic material--a conception that informed the Q tradition and, he argues, Jesus' own self-understanding.