Paula Fredriksen has contributed yet another eminently readable study of the early “Christian” movement, focusing on the period from the ministry of Jesus (ca. CE 27) until the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in August of CE 70. Although admitting the anachronism inherent in the book's title, Fredriksen problematizes the often unintentional yet pervasive retrojection of later Jewish-Christian divisions, early church structures, and other post-second-Temple-period features of both communities into this nascent period of the first generation of the followers of Jesus.

Organizing her study around five key points, Fredriksen reframes the Jesus story to combat the tendency to anti-Judaism and supercessionism evident in many studies of the historical Jesus and the early disciples. Chapters 1 and 2, “Up to Jerusalem” and “God's Holy Mountain,” highlight the roles of Jerusalem in general and the Temple in particular in Jesus’ message and ministry. Chapter 3, “From Miracle to Mission,” outlines the shift in message from the gospel of Jesus to the gospel about Jesus; Fredriksen suggests that Jesus predicted that God's kingdom would come during Passover of his last year, but that this (failed) prophecy later was construed by Jesus’ disciples to refer to his own Parousia at a future (second) coming. Chapter 4, “Beginning from Jerusalem,” focuses on the meaning of the term “messiah” (mashiach) during the late Second Temple period—in the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jewish apocalyptic writings from the Maccabees to the Mishnah, and New Testament authors such as the evangelists and Paul of Tarsus; in particular, here she counters the claims of a totally “law-free” gospel by any group of first-century missionaries, Paul included, and presses the likelihood of Gentile inclusion in the earliest evangelical efforts, well before Paul. The last chapter, “The Ends of the Ages,” highlights the apocalyptic context of the Jesus movement's missionary activity and the significance of the Temple's destruction for the paradigm shift in this activity—just as it forced a paradigm shift in formative “rabbinic” Judaism. Along the way, Fredriksen addresses often-overlooked yet important questions such as why Jesus alone was crucified while his followers apparently remained free; what was the likely nature of the “persecution” against the followers of Jesus that is mentioned by Paul and in Acts; and, given the social-political-religious dynamics of the first-century Roman Empire, what kinds of troubles might be created by a circumcision-free conversion of Gentile men to the Jesus community's messianic strand of Judaism.

Some readers might argue that arguments for the centrality of Jerusalem in the ministry of Jesus and the early disciples are weakened by an overreliance on the biased sources of Luke-Acts and Flavius Josephus. In Fredriksen's defense, those are the primary extant sources for this period; historians are not at liberty to choose which sources survive the vagaries of time. For an undergraduate class or for other readers new to the understanding of where Jesus fits in his first-century Jewish context (e.g., as argued by Géza Vermeś in Jesus the Jew: A Historian's Reading of the Gospels [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1973], The Religion of Jesus the Jew [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993], Jesus in His Jewish Context [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003], and elsewhere), the destabilizing challenge of Fredriksen's claim of Jerusalem's centrality for Jesus and the earliest disciples forms an integral component to the broader argument that Jesus himself and the first generation of Jesus-movement followers must be understood within the context of first-century Second Temple Judaism. If one were to use this text in a graduate class, students could be invited to evaluate various details of the argument in a more nuanced way.

In short, this clearly written and well-argued book builds on Fredriksen's prior work to strengthen the case that the Jesus movement later known as “Christianity” was a thoroughly Jewish phenomenon in the first-century CE Roman world. Fredriksen has the gift of telling history with a plot line, vividly presenting to the reader's eye each step of this remarkable origins story, which eventually gave birth to the twin sisters of “formative Judaism” and “early Christianity.”