The Religion of the Earliest Churches: Creating a Symbolic WorldIn these distinguished Oxford lectures, Theissen picks up where he left off in The Historical Jesus (1998). Employing the notion of religion as a "cultural sign language which promises a gain in life by corresponding to an ultimate reality," he plots the emergence of Christianity as a religion, with elements of myth, ritual, ethics, and an emergent symbolic system. He expands upon the historical, social, and theological analysis of his earlier works