A book about the disciples of Jesus would typically start with Jesus himself: first there was Jesus, then he had disciples. This book suggests a fundamentally different story: first there was a movement, then Jesus emerged as its leader. This movement was markedly different from both rabbinic Judaism and gentile Christianity. It became known to history as Jewish Christianity-Jews who followed both Jesus (as they understood him) and the Jewish law (as they understood it). These first disciples affirmed simple living, nonviolence, and vegetarianism, and rejected wealth, war, and animal sacrifices. Some two decades after Jesus was crucified, they split with their most famous missionary, Paul, over the issues of vegetarianism and eating meat from animal sacrifices. The history of Jewish Christianity takes our understanding of Christian origins into a completely new realm.

A book about the disciples of Jesus would typically start with Jesus himself: first there was Jesus, then he had disciples. This book suggests a fundamentally different story: first there was a movement, then Jesus emerged as its leader. This movement was markedly different from both rabbinic Judaism and gentile Christianity. It became known to history as Jewish Christianity-Jews who followed both Jesus (as they understood him) and the Jewish law (as they understood it). These first disciples affirmed simple living, nonviolence, and vegetarianism, and rejected wealth, war, and animal sacrifices. Some two decades after Jesus was crucified, they split with their most famous missionary, Paul, over the issues of vegetarianism and eating meat from animal sacrifices. The history of Jewish Christianity takes our understanding of Christian origins into a completely new realm.

RADICAL MEASURES ARE NECESSARY

If you've ever wondered where we're headed, and what a truly sustainable future might look like-this is the book for you.

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Today's civilization is like a kid with a credit card, thinking the party will never end. Politically speaking, there are no adults in the room. Perhaps there never were.

Climate change is only the best known of the many environmental crises that are undoing human civilization. The area of land turned into desert or otherwise rendered unfarmable by humans is now larger than the area being farmed-which is itself being destroyed by the very methods used to farm it. These methods depend heavily on fossil fuels every step of the way.

Meanwhile, the ever-more difficult extraction of the ever-rarer resources needed to manufacture the ever-expanding number of products our civilization requires (or desires) to keep itself going cannot be sustained. We live on a finite planet with finite resources-a fact that the world's economies, based as they are on the concept of infinite expansion, refuse to acknowledge.

Recycling bottles, putting up windmills, and driving electric cars isn't going to cut it. We're told it will, because it's comforting to think that small changes will save us. We, all of us, need to make massive changes, now. Nothing less will do.

This book details the challenges we face, and the solutions that may save us.

Jesus' preaching was first and foremost about simple living, pacifism, and vegetarianism; he never intended to create a new religion separate from Judaism. Moreover, Jesus' radical Jewish ethics, rather than a new theology, distinguished him and his followers from other Jews. It was the earliest followers of Jesus, the Jewish Christians, who understood Jesus better than any of the gentile Christian groups, which are the spiritual ancestors of modern Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox churches. In this detailed and accessible study, Keith Akers uncovers the history of Jewish Christianity from its origins in the Essenes and John the Baptist, through Jesus, until its disappearance into Islamic mysticism sometime in the seventh or eighth century. Akers argues that only by really understanding this mysterious and much misunderstood strand of early Christianity can we get to the heart of the radical message of Jesus of Nazareth.