The Development of Christology

Many people today, alas, know little history, and even less Christian, specifically doctrinal, history. They are as a result often upset to hear of the vigorous debates--not to say fights--that embroiled many Christians between the third and eighth centuries especially. Along comes a new book surveying the development of Christological doctrine and challenging some of the assumptions about that development: 

Charles Talbert, The Development of Christology During the First Hundred Years: And Other Essays on Early Christian Christology (Brill, 2011, 200pp.).

About this book the publisher says:

Entering the debate about the development of Christology among Jesus' earliest followers, this volume critiques both the traditional evolutionary view that posited an elementary early Jewish Christology that developed in complexity as it was increasingly Hellenized and the more recent attempt to see a full-orbed Christology both as early and as Jewish, not Hellenistic, in its categories. It contends that during the first 100 years Jesus' followers employed four models from their milieu, Jewish and Greco-Roman, both to understand and to communicate their Christologies. These models were … read moreappropriated because they were appropriate vehicles for expressing the impact of Jesus on them, past, present, and future