How Jesus Became Christian, by Barrie Wilson
Tuesday, April 8, 2008 @ 7:30pm FREE
Innis Town Hall
(2 Sussex Ave.)
author Barrie Wilson and Patrick Gray.
A Question and Answer period with the audience will follow the interview.
In How Jesus Became Christian, Barrie Wilson asks “How did a young rabbi become the god of a religion he wouldn’t recognize, one which was established through the use of calculated anti-Semitism?” Colourfully recreating the world of Jesus Christ, Wilson brings the answer to life by looking at the rivalry between the “Jesus movement,” informed by the teachings of Matthew and adhering to Torah worship, and the “Christ movement,” headed by Paul, which shunned Torah. Wilson suggests that Paul’s movement was not rooted in the teachings and sayings of the historical Jesus, but solely in Paul’s mystical vision of Christ, a man Paul actually never met. He then shows how Paul established the new religion through anti-Semitic propaganda, which ultimately crushed the Jesus Movement. Sure to be controversial, this is an exciting, well-written popular religious history that cuts to the heart of the differences between Christianity and Judaism, to the origins of one of the world’s great religions and, ultimately, to the question of who Jesus Christ really was–a Jew or a Christian.
Barrie Wilson is the Humanities and Religious Studies professor at Toronto’s York University.
Patrick Gray, B.A. (Toronto), S.T.B. (Trinity), S.T.M. (Yale), Th.D. (Trinity), discovered in the course of his S.T.B. at Trinity that what fascinated him most was the formative period of theology, the age of the Church Fathers. A Master’s at Yale helped him hone in on Christology, and on the period after the Council of Chalcedon, as the focus for his doctoral research, which he completed under Eugene Fairweather at Trinity. Providentially, he also fell in love with teaching, first as a Tutor in the Faculty of Divinity at Trinity, and then in a parish setting as the curate at the Church of St. Simon-the-Apostle, where he also became engaged in issues of social justice. Teaching jobs materialized at York University, McMaster Divinity College, and again at York. He has published one book, The Defense of Chalcedon in the East (451-553), and numerous articles, many on aspects of the christological controversies of the age of Justinian. He is just completing a career-long project on one of the Sixth Century’s most important theologians, Leontius of Jerusalem, and is negotiating with the aim of publishing the text, a translation, and a historical introduction. Outside of academia, Patrick is Honorary Assistant at St. Stephen’s Church in Maple.
and
