What follows is a quote from Hellerman's conclusion in his Jesus and the People of God. I highly recommend this work which interacts with Second Temple materials and Jesus' reconstruction of Jewish boundaries (something typically discussed in Paul but ably demonstrated by Hellerman to be a central concern of Jesus as well). Jesus' expansive social agenda appears to leave little room for the subjective, individualistic emphasis upon Jesus as 'personal savior', which continues to characterize much popular evangelical theology in the West today. It is hardly accidental that such an outlook all too easily facilitates the competitive (and therefore selective) propensities of persons in capitalistic societies, who tend to accumulate status and wealth for themselves as individuals while ignoring the needs of other persons - not to mention other Christians - in less fortunate circumstances. Jesus' vision for a renewed people of God was just that - a vision for a people who would experience life together as family under the reign of Yahweh. Jesus' surrogate family model thus poses no small challenge to Western Christians, many of whom have been socialized to embrace a solitary, individualistic version of the Christian faith that bears little resemblance to the community-oriented approach of Jesus and his early followers. (Hellerman, Jesus and the People of God, 326)
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