Jesus and the Hope of the Poor
by Luise Schottroff and Wolfgang Stegemann
Translated by Matthew J. O'Connell
Imprint: Wipf and Stock
According to Luise Schottroff and Wolfgang Stegemann, the search for the historical Jesus has been marked by the tendency to isolate Jesus from his disciples and from Judaism. They argue, however, that Jesus is inseparable from his first disciples and from the indigent Jews who made up the earliest Jesus movement. Understood in the context of his following, Jesus emerges from Schottroff and Stegemann as a Jew who not only proclaimed the reign of God in a unique way but who was himself a symbol of hope for the poor and oppressed of his time.
This exciting socio-historical interpretation of the Jesus movement focuses chiefly on the earliest Jesus tradition, the Sayings-source, and the Gospel of Luke. Students, teachers of New Testament studies, and anyone who wants to explore Jesus's life context will be challenged by this book.
Luise Schottroff teaches New Testament and feminist theology at the University of Kassel, Germany.
Wolfgang Stegemann is Rector and Professor of New Testament at the Augustana Hochschule, Neuendettelsau.
"Schottroff and Stegemann have distinguished themselves through as series of important publications on reading the New Testament through a lens of disciplined social criticism. This book is important because it advances that reading of the New Testament. This book is important also because it shows how the categories of social criticism require a rereading of the New Testament-particularly the story of Jesus. The book is even more important because it is written by two scholars who are thoroughly grounded in historical-critical methods of the best German scholarship, but who now mobilize that critical scholarship toward new questions. The careful attention to method that is pursued in this book helps us see that such a radical reading of the New Testament is not Marxist, but is in fact subversive in terms of the subversion of the text itself. This book is readily accessible and will be widely used as we face the crises both of the substance of the Bible and the methods we shall use to get at that substance."
-Walter Brueggemann
Columbia Theological Seminary
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