This work offers a social-scientific analysis of Yehud and uses that analysis to construct a model through which to analyze later monotheistic religious developments.

This work offers a social-scientific analysis of Yehud and uses that analysis to construct a model through which to analyze later monotheistic religious developments.

Monotheism and Tolerance suggests a way to deal with the intractable problem of religiously motivated and justified violence.

In A Social-Political History of Monotheism, Cataldo shows how political concerns were fundamental to the development of Judeo-Christian monotheism. Beginning with the disruptive and devastating historical events that shook early Israelite culture and ending with the seemingly victorious emergence of Christianity under the Byzantine Empire, this work highlights critical junctures marking the path from political frustration to imperial ideology. Monotheism, Cataldo argues, was not an enlightened form of religion; rather, it was a cultic response to effluent anxieties pouring out from under the crushing weight of successive empires. This provocative work is a valuable tool for anyone with an interest in the development of early Christianity alongside empires and cultures.

As A Million and One Gods shows, polytheism is considered a scandalous presence in societies oriented to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim beliefs. Yet it persists, even in the West, perhaps because polytheism corresponds to unconscious needs and deeply held values of tolerance, diversity, and equality that are central to civilized societies.

God Crucified presents a new proposal for understanding New Testament Christology in its Jewish context. Using the latest scholarly discussion about the nature of Jewish monotheism as his starting point, Richard Bauckham builds a convincing argument that the early Christian view of Jesus' divinity is fully consistent with the Jewish understanding of God. Bauckham first shows that early Judaism had clear ways of distinguishing God absolutely from all other reality. When New Testament Christology is read with this Jewish context in mind, it becomes clear that early Christians did not break with Jewish monotheism; rather, they simply included Jesus within the unique identity of Israel's God. In the final part of the book Bauckham shows that God's own identity, in turn, is also revealed in the life, death, and exaltation of Jesus. Originating as the prestigious 1996 Didsbury Lectures, this volume makes a contribution to biblical studies that will be of interest to Jews and Christians alike.

In Hindutva as Political Monotheism, Anustup Basu offers a genealogical study of Hindutva—Hindu right-wing nationalism—to illustrate the significance of Western anthropology and political theory to the idea of India as a Hindu nation. Connecting Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt's notion of political theology to traditional theorems of Hindu sovereignty and nationhood, Basu demonstrates how Western and Indian theorists subsumed a vast array of polytheistic, pantheistic, and henotheistic cults featuring millions of gods into a singular edifice of faith. Basu exposes the purported “Hindu Nation” as itself an orientalist vision by analyzing three crucial moments: European anthropologists’ and Indian intellectuals’ invention of a unified Hinduism during the long nineteenth century; Indian ideologues’ adoption of ethnoreligious nationalism in pursuit of a single Hindu way of life in the twentieth century; and the transformations of this project in the era of finance capital, Bollywood, and new media. Arguing that Hindutva aligns with Enlightenment notions of nationalism, Basu foregrounds its significance not just to Narendra Modi's right-wing, anti-Muslim government but also to mainstream Indian nationalism and its credo of secularism and tolerance.