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Jesus Through the Centuries

His Place in the History of Culture
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( 662 ratings, 69 reviews)
Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
Jesus Through the Centuries by Jaroslav Pelikan examines the evolving image of Jesus and its profound impact on cultural, political, social, and economic history over two millennia. Beginning with Jesus as a first-century rabbi and moving through to the liberator image of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Pelikan provides a compelling study of how each era’s portrayal of Jesus reflects its unique temper and values.
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Format: Paperback / softback
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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

This book is ideal for readers interested in history, theology, cultural studies, and the diverse interpretations of Jesus across time. It suits both academic and general audiences seeking a thoughtful exploration of religious and cultural history.

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Jaroslav Pelikan discusses how each age created Jesus in its own image, discovering in his life and teachings the answers to fundamental questions of human existence and destiny.

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

“A rich and expansive description of Jesus’ impact on the general history of culture. . . . Believers and sceptics alike will find it a sweeping visual and conceptual panorama.”—John Koenig, front page, New York Times Book Review

Called "a book of uncommon brilliance" by Commonweal, Jesus Through the Centuries is an original and compelling study of the impact of Jesus on cultural, political, social, and economic history. Noted historian and theologian Jaroslav Pelikan reveals how the image of Jesus created by each successive epoch—from rabbi in the first century to liberator in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—is a key to understanding the temper and values of that age.

"An enlightening and often dramatic story . . . as stimulating as it is informative.”—John Gross, New York Times

“A gracious little masterpiece.”—Thomas D'Evelyn, Christian Science Monitor

Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?

Described as "a book of uncommon brilliance" by Commonweal, and praised by the New York Times for being "enlightening and often dramatic," Pelikan's work is recognised for bridging scholarly and popular discourse. John Koenig of the New York Times Book Review highlights the book’s rich and expansive description of Jesus' cultural impact, appealing to both believers and skeptics with its sweeping conceptual panorama.

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Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780300079876

Publisher: Yale University Press

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 10 November 1999

Country: United States

Imprint: Yale University Press

Illustration: 20 b-w illus.

Audience: Tertiary education, Professional and scholarly

DIMENSIONS

Width: 140.0mm

Height: 210.0mm

Weight: 272g

Pages: 304

About the Author

Jaroslav Pelikan (1923–2006), a renowned scholar of the history of Christianity, was Sterling Professor of History at Yale University. He was the author of more than thirty books, including The Christian Tradition, widely acknowledged as the foremost history of its kind.

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  • The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Volume 1
    In this five-volume opus—now available in its entirety in paperback—Pelikan traces the development of Christian doctrine from the first century to the twentieth. Pelikan's The Christian Tradition is a series for which they must have coined words like 'magisterial'.—Martin Marty, Commonweal
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  • Credo
    One of the world’s leading scholars offers unique insights into the history and significance of Christian creeds. Eminent theologian Jaroslav Pelikan has been translating, editing, and studying the Christian creeds and confessions of faith for sixty years. This book is the historical and theological distillation of that work. In Credo, Pelikan addresses essential questions about the Christian tradition: the origins...
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  • Imago Dei
    In 726, the Byzantine emperor, Leo III, issued an edict that all religious images in the empire were to be destroyed, a directive later endorsed by a synod of the Church in 753 under his son, Constantine V. If the policy of Iconoclasm had succeeded, the entire history of Christian art—and of the Christian church, at least in the East—would...
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  • Christianity and Classical Culture
    The momentous encounter between Christian thought and Greek philosophy reached a high point in fourth-century Byzantium, and the principal actors were four Greek-speaking Christian thinkers whose collective influence on the Eastern Church was comparable to that of Augustine on Western Latin Christendom. In this erudite and informative book, a distinguished scholar provides the first coherent account of the lives and...
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  • The Christian Tradition: A History of the Develo – Christian Doctrine and Modern Culture (since 1700)
    Jaroslav Pelikan begins this volume with the crisis of orthodoxy that confronted all Christian denominations by the beginning of the eighteenth century and continues through the twentieth century in its particular concerns with ecumenism. The modern period in the history of Christian doctrine, Pelikan demonstrates, may be defined as the time when doctrines that had been assumed more than debated...
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  • The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Volume 2
    The line that separated Eastern Christendom from Western on the medieval map is similar to the "iron curtain" of recent times. Linguistic barriers, political divisions, and liturgical differences combined to isolate the two cultures from each other. Except for such episodes as the schism between East and West or the Crusades, the development of non-Western Christendom has been largely ignored...
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    This penultimate volume in Pelikan's acclaimed history of Christian doctrine—winner with Volume 3 of the Medieval Academy's prestigious Haskins Medal—encompasses the Reformation and the developments that led to it. "Only in America, and in this case from a Lutheran scholar, could we expect an examination so lacking in parti pris, a survey so perceptive, so free—and, one must say, the...
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