When Christians Were Jews

The First Generation

By: Paula Fredriksen

Narrated by: Matthew Lloyd Davies

A compelling account of Christianity’s Jewish beginnings, from one of the world’s leading scholars of ancient religion

How did a group of charismatic, apocalyptic Jewish missionaries, working to prepare their world for the impending realization of God's promises to Israel, end up inaugurating a movement that would grow into the gentile church? Committed to Jesus’s prophecy - “The Kingdom of God is at hand!” - they were, in their own eyes, history's last generation. But in history's eyes, they became the first Christians.

In this electrifying social and intellectual history, Paula Fredriksen answers this question by reconstructing the life of the earliest Jerusalem community. As her account arcs from this group’s hopeful celebration of Passover with Jesus, through their bitter controversies that fragmented the movement’s midcentury missions, to the city’s fiery end in the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, she brings this vibrant apostolic community to life. Fredriksen offers a vivid portrait both of this temple-centered messianic movement and of the bedrock convictions that animated and sustained it.

©2018 Paula Fredriksen. (P)2018 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

E”en So, Lord

To know more is to grow sore is to chore door is to floor store.

Poor narration.

The narrator starts every sentence with a loud voice then trails off to a whisper for the final words of a sentence. It seemed over-dramatic to me. I found his narration distracting. That said, I loved the book content.

Please provide narrators with a pronunciation guide

Worlds worst pronunciation for terms that even a layman should know. A serious drawback of an otherwise wonderful book.

Seemed untrustworthy

I really liked the narrator because he didn’t use a boring monotone, but made what he read interesting to listen to. I decided not to finish the book, however, because the author seemed to be cherrypicking info to fit her theories, and then proceeding as if the theory was a given. For instance, she settled on John—the gospel written the farthest from Jesus’s time—as providing the one true timeline for Jesus’s ministry, quickly dismissing the other three. I thought her reasoning was faulty, and from there my distrust of her theorizing snowballed. Eventually I came to question everything she was saying. Bummer.

How Christianity Began

The author presents an excellent and engaging history of the beginning of Christianity and the belief of the early companions of Jesus of the imminent return of Jesus to end the world, raise the dead and render Judgment. Great rendition of a captivating story.