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RELIGION 1300/ HDS 1772 – Judaism and the Making of Christianity

Fall views of Autumn foliage and ivy framing a window and a lion statue in the courtyard of The Center for European Studies

NEW COURSE

RELIGION 1300/ HDS 1772 – Judaism and the Making of Christianity

Semester: Fall
Offered: 2022
Instructor: Annette Reed
Meeting Time: T 12:00pm-3:00pm

If Jesus and his first followers were all Jewish, when and how did Christianity emerge as a separate religion? This course explores this question first by considering the Second Temple Jewish context from within which the Jesus Movement took form and then by mapping different approaches to communal identity among Jews and Christians in the first centuries of the Common Era. Sources to be read and analyzed include selections from the Dead Sea Scrolls, OT Pseudepigrapha, New Testament, NT Apocrypha, and Patristic and Rabbinic literature. We will also engage with contemporary theories about “religion” as well as the historiography of antisemitism. Interested students will have the option of writing a research paper.

Offered jointly with: Harvard Divinity School as HDS 1772

For more details please visit the Harvard Course Catalog.