Toto

Is anyone familiar with this book or author?

I caught part of an interview with Gregory Riley this morning on KPCC. He's from Claremont, where Dennis MacDonald teaches. (The interview is on this page for June 24. I didn't hear enough of it to know if it's any good.)

The River of God: A New History of Christian Origins

The reviews on Amazon criticize him for not being new enough. He appears to be a more moderate version of Freke and Gandy.

Peter Kirby

I have a review of his One Jesus, Many Christs here:

http://www.earlychristianwritings.co...ies.html#riley

I have The River of God in my possession but haven't read it yet.

best,
Peter Kirby

godfry n. glad

Yeah, I've read One Jesus, Many Christs. It was interesting, but not particularly ground-breaking or earth-shattering.

If as the reviews indicate, he claims that modern scholarship places the antecedents to modern Christianity _entirely_ within Judaism, then I'd say he was wrong. Indeed, there are scholars who insist that the _primary_ source of Christian teachings was Judaic (Meyer, Brown & Sanders), as versus the Cynic philosophical source (Crossan and the bulk of the Jesus Seminar), which places primary sources with the Hellenistic antecedents. Both of these approaches assume a priori that Jesus existed and was the source of the initial teachings.

It would be interesting to see which traditions he thinks feed into early Christianity. He is a decent writer, even if he does assume historicity a priori.

Kelly