Halvor Moxnes’ Jesus and Rise of Nationalism is without a doubt a groundbreaking book which examines nineteen-century historical Jesus studies in their cultural and political contexts of developing nations rather than viewing them as literary-historical discipline. Moxnes explores ‘how nineteenth-century constructions of the historical Jesus contributed to national projects at different stages of development and in different geographical locations’. To that end, Moxnes chose four European scholars from different eras of nineteenth-century Europe. He shows clearly how Friedrich Schleiermacher's Jesus’ biography reflected the role that German teachers played in Germany's movement towards a democratic nation with the rights of free speech and participation in government of the state. David Friedrich Strauss portrayed Jesus first as spiritual, apolitical and religious-moral in a world full of power, war and oppression and later as the other, the enthusiast with a sense of national superiority. Ernst Renan's Jesus became a prototype of the ‘positive Orient’ which mirrors Renan's image of French society. And finally Scottish Adam Smith portrayed Jesus as the great and ideal young man who overcomes the temptations of sex and success, thus creating the example of a person necessary to build the nation and thus the British Empire.

In all of these examples Moxnes’ interest is in studying the correlation between two modernising processes of nineteenth-century Europe: the rise of nationalism in Europe and the emergence of historical Jesus studies, both being critical forces against the monarchy and its religious Christian legitimisation. ‘By placing the historical person of Jesus Christ in focus, such studies took away the authority from the dogmatic teaching about Christ in the church and challenged the Christological legitimatization of the political authority of monarchs and rulers’ (p. 2). On the other hand, both processes led to conflicts, two world wars, colonialism and even ethnic cleansing. The nineteenth-century study of the historical Jesus is thus an important theological exercise raising awareness of the national package that underlines modern Jesus studies and the political implications of the construction of Jesus and Jesus’ Palestine. These implications are nowhere more evident than in areas related to the Jewishness of Jesus, the Holy Land and the Middle East.

Moxnes’ approach to nation is influenced by studies by John Breuilly and Benedict Anderson on the ‘cultural meaning’ of nationalism, which emphasise its character as constructed or ‘imagined’. Moxnes' interest in the ‘cultural meaning’ which is created through these texts is also a follow-up on a research project Moxnes directed few years earlier at the University of Oslo on ‘Jesus in Cultural Complexity’. (Halvor Moxnes et al., Jesus beyond Nationalism: Constructing the Historical Jesus in a Period of Cultural Complexity (London: Equinox, 2009)).

Moxnes is convinced that the nation state can't deal with the global challenges of today. And he doesn't hide his explicit desire ‘to move beyond the imagination of the nation, to a post-national world order’ (p.3). The political interpretation of the historical Jesus in a post-national world, he argues, has to abandon viewing the historical Jesus through the dominant lenses of ethno-nationalism, replacing ‘a nation people’ with ‘a world people’, thus adopting categories which are more inclusive, global and which are concerned for the future of all humanity. To that end, Moxnes uses Habermas’ ‘global householding’, where solidarity extends beyond household and nation to a global world. According to Moxnes, modern works on the historical Jesus have thus to go ‘beyond notions of nation, people, and empire’ to writing about him ‘in contexts of a global community’ (p. 198).