When the team of scientists at Dennison Industries makes an unexpected discovery, they realise that their fledgling technology has far greater possibilities than they could have imagined. The Push isn't just new, it changes everything. Expanding our horizons. Setting the human race free. Unshackling us from the confines of Earth. But when probes start to go missing while exploring the far reaches of our solar system, the team begin to realise that something else is watching. Something ancient and patient. And as they race to come to terms with this revelation, they discover that freedom was never something we were meant to have. We were shackled for a reason.

In this book Richard Horsley and Tom Thatcher trace the Gospel of John's portrayal of Jesus as a prophet of renewal by reading the text against a double backdrop -- the social history of Roman Palestine and the media world of John.This innovative study is the first to consider the Gospel of John as story in the ancient media context of oral communication and oral performance. Horsley and Thatcher creatively combine concerns from the fields of Jesus studies and ancient media studies in their analysis. Taking the main conflict evident in John's story of Jesus as the key to its plot, they discern how this Gospel -- usually read as "spiritual" -- portrays Jesus engaged in a concrete program of renewal and resistance.

Debate over whether or not Jesus can be best interpreted within an -apocalyptic scenario- has continued to dominate historical Jesus studies since Schweitzer and Bultmann. In The Prophet Jesus and the Renewal of Israel Richard Horsley shows that the apocalyptic scenario -- with its supposed expectation of -the end of the world, - the fiery -last judgment, - and -the parousia of the Son of Man- -- is a modern scholarly construct that obscures the particulars of texts, society, and history. Drawing on his wide-ranging earlier scholarship, Horsley refocuses and reformulates investigation of the historical Jesus in a thoroughly relational-contextual approach. He recognizes that the sources for the historical Jesus are not separate sayings, but rather the sustained Gospel narratives of Jesus' mission. Horsley's new approach finds Jesus the popular prophet engaged in a movement of renewal, resistance, and judgment against Roman imperialism, Jerusalem rulers, and the Pharisees.