I started my search by trying to find books about the fall of the second temple. I wanted to learn more about how that event triggered such a strong split of beliefs between Jews and Christians. I was unable any books that centered around the second temple unless it was about rabbinic Judaism only. I wanted to find a comparison between the thinking of the two religions. I ended up finding a book on the library catalog called The Jewish Jesus : how Judaism and Christianity shaped each other by Peter Schäfer. However, when I went to the library and looked through the book I didn’t think it was what I wanted. The book talked more about the philosophical symbols like Angels and creation and the messiah and I wanted to focus on the early differences of the development for Christianity and Judaism.

I didn’t have a backup plan in case I didn’t like that book so I spent 15 minutes looking at all the books around me and ended up in the next isle over and found the exact book I was looking for. It was called Ancient Judaism and Christian origins: diversity, continuity, and transformation by George W.E. Nickelsburg. This book may not center on the fall of the second temple but has chapters on traditional topics like scripture and tradition, Torah and the righteous life, God’s activity on humanity’s behalf, and agents of God’s activity. The author says that there is a revolution taking place in regards to the study of Judaism and a lot of it is due to the Quamran Scrolls. Within each chapter though, the author examines first the modern research on early Judaism but then examines the Christian equivalent on the topic or the different interpretation as well as the Jewish interpretation on traditionally Christian ideas.

What I really liked about this book was the way it analyzes more than just the surface contradictions like the choosing of the New Testament. It looks at the new construction of the historical, theological and methodical implications on Christian origins. This book would be a huge help in my paper because of its multi-sided views and its use of many textual sources both in the writing itself and many helpful sources at the end of the book.

I actually started researching just “world religions” to get a basic idea of what types of book s were in in the library. I found a lot of really interesting books on violence and war in religion but they were all online editions and not in the library. After that, I searched for “afterlife” because I was really interested in reincarnation and wanted to learn more about different interpretations of it. When I found this book it was by accident. I was looking for The Book of Miracles: The meaning of miracle stories in Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. 

I ended up finding section after section on religion and I just searched the stacks for a while. I ended up finding the section on afterlife and looked there for a while. I found this book called Tales of Lights and Shadows about the dualities of afterlife interpretations such as bright vs dismal and reincarnation vs heaven. I was drawn to the chapter about  “Circling Paths and Endless Journeys” taking about reincarnation through different religions. There was a comparative subsection about Nirvana and other religions that was really similar to things we have gone over in class already.