Crucible of Faith: The Ancient Revolution That Made Our Modern Religious World

The purpose of this book is the illuminate the 300 or so tumultuous years in Palestine prior to the common era (CE). This involves a confluence of political, cultural, philosophical, and theological issues that range from essential and basic to indescribably obscure. The "crucible era", as Jenkins calls it, forged the theological building blocks of what would become rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and even Islam. Jenkins concentrates on both the final formation of the canonical Old Testament and a number of discarded texts, including Enoch, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and many others that were found either as archaeological artifacts or as the living canon of such sources as the Ethiopian Old Testament. Unfortunately, the book is rather academic in tone, which often makes it a slog as a read, however interesting many sections of it are.On the political front, the time is one of extraordinary violence. On the one hand, there are foreign powers seeking to dominate the region. In the beginning, there were the Ptolemies and Seleucids, both of them Hellenistic Greek Empires that arose after the death of Alexander the Great. Palestine served as a kind of buffer zone between them, changing hands many times. As they weakened, the Maccabees emerged as successful revolutionaries who established an independent Jewish state, eventually called the Hasmonean dynasty. The Hasmoneans had to war against many rival claimants to the true faith, e.g. the Samaritans, who had their own communities and city states. Finally, toward the end of the period, the Romans conquered the region, bringing their own style of oppression and influence.On the other hand, there was a civil war from within: rabbinic Judaism was in formation, pitting a traditional priestly aristocracy against popular, scholarly rivals who claimed to better understand God's intentions. Culturally, moreover, there is a great ferment of ideas, ranging from Greco-Roman philosophy and polytheism to alternative forms of monotheism in Persia, all of which impacted and were absorbed to different degrees.What emerged in the religious sphere was the development of a number of notions that were alluded to only vaguely in the Old Testament, if indeed at all. Many of them sought to address some of the issues that sprung from monotheism, e.g. how can evil exist and flourish when God was omnipotent and purely good? The answer was to elaborate conceptions of the afterlife, where the good and just would live in immortal paradise while the wicked would suffer eternal punishment. Moreover, evil was explained away by the existence of devils and demons, fallen angels and human-demon hybrids that God for inexplicable reasons allowed to live in a banished realm, Hell; identifiable angels and demons proliferated in this period. Furthermore, given the imminent dangers of death and destruction, the concept of the Apocalypse - the end fight between good and evil forces - emerged as a central concept. Finally, a messiah would be the instrument through which the righteous would be guided and then saved. Thus, Jesus appeared as one of many apocalyptic messianic prophets at the end of this period.As a result, a vast array of new groups were born, each touting some interpretation of these ideas and incorporating varying elements of foreign notions to address whatever dilemmas they deemed were needed, often in isolated communities that gave free range to fanatical devotions that they elaborated in apocalyptic detail. Here you find the early Christian sects, rabbinic Judaism, but also the Manichees, Zoroastrians, and innumerable others. Moreover, canonical texts were established while many of the older ones were revived and occasionally edited to better fit the times. As you can imagine, this is complexity itself. I found it fascinating and, as an atheist, wonder how anyone could believe that one interpretation would be correct over the others and hence eternally sacred.It is not always clear where the book is going, particularly as Jenkins felt compelled to cover all of the variations in lengthy, turgid descriptions of what various sources say. I found it hard to keep them straight, even as an amateur scholar of early Christianity and the late Classical era. I also would have liked much more coverage of the impact of Hellenistic ideas on all of this, though Jenkins alludes it to a degree. Though Jenkins is a conservative Episcopalian, I would note that the tone of the book is secular and not in any way advocating for a particular sect.The level of the book is quite advanced. With much knowledge assumed, many basic concepts are not completely explained, such as the mechanics of the Roman administration or the innovations of Neo-platonism. This makes much of the book hard going for the uninitiated, though also stimulating for the curious (and dogged).Though I am not a specialist, I believe this to be an important book. (Heck, anything that gets people interested in the Seleucids is OK by me!) I enjoyed looking at the footnotes for further source materials, always a sign that I was engaged deeply. I recommend this book as a fun intellectual adventure, however lugubrious many passages are.

Without a doubt, this is one of the best/ most thorough/most accessible histories on the origins of Christianity, charismatic Judaism, and Gnosticism. Jenkins touches on numerous pertinent subjects - topics that have largely been neglected - that are crucial for any student of Biblical history to comprehend; to include, Enochic literature, apocalyptic literature, and a thorough history of the Maccabean War.

Jenkins defines his “crucible era” as starting around 250 BCE - about 80 years before the Maccabean revolt in Judea against the Seleucid Greeks - and ending in 50 BCE. He has a thesis to promote; that the characteristics of today’s Judaism, Christianity and Islam were all forged during that period. This post-Biblical period was a time of changing beliefs among the Jews of Judea and the Diaspora - about the nature of God, reward and punishment, life after death, and the ability of mortals to influence their own future. The literary sources that the author draws on are the later books of the Hebrew bible, such as Proverbs and Daniel, and the many books popularly known as the Apocrypha, books which didn’t make the cut into the Jewish canon, but which were frequently preserved as part of the Christian Bible.One of the main causes of change in beliefs was the destruction of the Temple in 586 BCE and the subsequent Babylonian exile. The pre-exilic prophets, such as Isaiah and Jeremiah, attributed Israel's woes to the failure of the nation to keep to its part of the Sinai Covenant and recalled the Torah's warning that the sins of the fathers would be visited on the children. In contrast, Ezekiel, the prophet of the exile, already rejects the idea of children paying for the previous generations' sins, and emphasizes that everyone will enjoy the rewards of their own good actions. Subsequently, however, with the nation of Israel in a subject status, and other nations apparently enjoying the blessings of success despite their worship of idols and other gods, questions naturally arose. Either you had to give up trying to understand the ways of God - which is essentially the message of the Book of Job, written during this period; or, you had to look beyond the present life, to a future life where you would be justly rewarded. For the first time, the idea of a life after death - completely absent from most of the Torah and only mentioned specifically in the Book of Daniel - starts to appear. This led naturally to the concept of martyrdom (Daniel again) whereby a sacrifice for your beliefs in this life will lead to even greater rewards in that to come.Greater contact with other peoples and their belief systems - the Hellenistic culture imported by Alexander the Great and his successors, and the Zoroastrian influence from Persia - raised other questions. How universal was Israel's God? If the God of the Hebrew Bible was just the tribal divinity of the Hebrews alongside all the other nations' gods - who or what was the supreme being who presided over everything? Was God responsible for the existence of both good and evil in the world; or was the latter to be laid at someone else's door? Answers to these questions led to vivid speculation about whole cohorts of other celestial beings. Angels - who in the Bible stories appear just as messengers and agents of God - start to take on the role of powers in their own right. Each nation was seen as having its own guardian angel - Michael was the guardian of Israel; and one - the "fallen" angel, who was later promoted to the status of "anti-God" - was the one responsible for the creation and promotion of evil in the world.What we now know as the books of the Hebrew bible had not yet been compiled into a single authoritative work. In this fluid absence of an official "canon", there developed, alongside the older Biblical books, a vast new literature of visions and prophecies, much of it apocalyptic, and often written in the name of a Biblical character; the "Wisdom of Solomon", the "Book of Jubilees", the "Testament of Amram" (Moses' father), and the "Books of Enoch". Enoch was the great grandfather of Noah who, according to the book of Genesis, ascended to heaven without having died. The latter was the most influential of these so-called "pseudo-epigraphia"; so much so, that Jenkins, together with other writers, credits it with giving rise to an "Enochic" variant of Judaism. Another current of beliefs popular among all of the peoples of the region, but with a distinct Judaic variety, was the "Wisdom" literature - what we would probably call philosophy; some of this - such as the Book of Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes - did eventually make its way into the Hebrew canon. Jenkins is keen to show how what were essentially Jewish ideas - many of them subsequently discarded along with their literary sources by Rabbinic Judaism - subsequently surfaced in Christianity - both normative Orthodoxy and the various "heresies" and Gnosticisms. It is an interesting and much more thoroughly argued alternative to other explanations of the development of Christian theology, as the product of Greek philosophy and the Christian Bible.

This is an incredible book for any person seriously interested in religion. If you pose the question "what happened between the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament?", I think most persons who are literate with either of these would have trouble answering that question. Philip Jenkins answers it in this book. I found his explanation of the split between Judaism and Christianity in the second century CE particularly interesting. It is in this period between the fifth century BCE and the second century CE that a huge volume of religious literature appears, most of which is not now included in the Jewish or Christian canon. In these writings, first appear Satan as a named fallen angel, numerous references to angels, Hell as described by the Middle Ages, resurrection, a concern about an afterlife, and the appearance of the Apocalypse. The book is well written, and is intended for a lay audience.

This is a tour de force of liberal, dismissive and arrogant scholarship and I greatly regret enriching the author. The author glibly and summarily rearranges ancient texts to fit his presuppositions and treats those presuppositions as truth. Deeply disappointing and misleading in its presentation.

In this intriguing book Jenkins offers a description of how ideas long taken for granted as part of Christian and Jewish doctrine were developed during, what he terms, the "Crucible Era" - from the end of Alexander the Great's empire to the beginnings of the second century CE (350 BCE to 100 CE). This era in Palestine witnessed an extraordinary evolution in cultural and religious thought. Key ideas that emerged and were developed included - beliefs in angels; in Satan and in hell; and visions of an ultimate apocalypse and last judgment. Jenkins draws on writings now accepted as making up Old and New Testaments. But also, he introduces the lay reader to a range of unfamiliar texts, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Book of Enoch. These were written in the Crucible Era but were not ultimately included in the Christian or Jewish canons. Jenkins argues that the thinking of Jesus' first followers was firmly rooted in contemporary prophetic, apocalyptic and messianic Jewish thought as developed over the preceding turbulent Crucible centuries. A period of often very violent political and cultural conflicts.At times the book can be a dense, rather difficult to follow, read for non-academic readers such as myself. However persistence will pay off and anyone with an interest in early Christian history (and in the evolution of Judaism) will be rewarded. Jenkins' well referenced book demonstrates the importance of the Crucible Era to later beliefs. He convincingly explains how it is only with hindsight that scripture comes to be described as a consistent body of doctrine.

Well written and very readable. Provides a fascinating insight into a period of history so critical to the emergence of modern monotheistic faiths. Seems to have no particular bias or axe to grind (rare for this genre) although I'm certainly no scholar in this area.

Declaration of interest first - I know the author! It is a fascinating account of the turbulent period in the last few centuries between the Old Testament and the New. It discusses many important texts I had never heard of such as the Book of Enoch.