The First Christians in Their Social Worlds

Social-scientific approaches to New Testament Interpretation

Philip F. Esler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134833801
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

First published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Chapter 1
Social worlds, social sciences and the New Testament

SOCIETY AND GOSPEL

When Robinson Crusoe, shipwrecked on an uninhabited island off the coast of America, but having got abundant supplies ashore, sat down to consider his situation, he prepared a list of what he called his ‘miseries’ and ‘comforts’. Three of his six miseries involved his separation from all human company and conversation. He later described his condition as follows:

I seem’d banished from human Society…I was alone, circumscrib’d by the boundless Ocean, cut off from Mankind, and condemn’d to what I call’d silent Life… I was as one who Heaven thought not worthy to be number’d among the Living, or to appear among the rest of His Creatures…to have seen one of my own Species, would have seem’d to me a Raising from Death to Life, and the greatest Blessing that Heaven itself, next to the supreme Blessing of Salvation, could bestow.

(Defoe 1987:156)

His misfortune had brought home to Crusoe most acutely the need which all human beings have for the society of their fellows. He realised that to be cut off from the web of relationships, roles, institutions and values which exist among the men and women who comprise any social group is a form of death.

Why begin a work on New Testament interpretation with Robinson Crusoe? It is not for the reason that Defoe’s classic, with its seven hundred editions since 1719, probably stands second only to the Bible in the number of times it has been reissued. Its interest for my subject hangs upon the way it presents, at least until the arrival of Friday, a mode of living a solitary existence which sharpens, by contrast, our appreciation of life in society.

For the approach to early Christianity proposed in what follows is that the New Testament documents speak to us from particular social worlds and need to be investigated using disciplines developed specifically to comprehend the social dimensions of human experience. Without this, our understanding of the texts will be unnecessarily impaired.

My position is that the New Testament writings manifest a complex interpenetration of society and Gospel, of context and kerygma (‘the proclamation of faith’), and that we cannot hope to understand either without an appropriate methodology for dealing with the social side. The disciplines I have in mind for this task are the social sciences. Sociology is perhaps the most useful, but anthropology and social psychology also have contributions to make. I am not suggesting that these disciplines should replace the literary and historical techniques which have long been employed by New Testament critics. The social sciences are best seen as a necessary adjunct to established forms of criticism. In dealing with the past they must inevitably collaborate with history. Yet given its emphasis on the novel, the unique and the particular, history (at least to the extent it does not employ social-scientific perspectives) cannot hope to supply all the questions which must be put to the New Testament if we are to penetrate the ordinary interrelationships, values and symbols which characterised the and everyday—but nevertheless fundamentally important—early Christian communities and which are reflected in the twenty-seven canonical texts which were written for them and to them.

Accordingly, my interest, at least in this book, lies in the historical question, namely, what the texts meant for their original audience, even though the necessary research needs to be enriched with socialscientific ideas and perspectives. This is not to deny that it is also important to enquire what the texts might mean for a modern audience, or, indeed, that other techniques might be more appropriate for that enterprise. Whether this latter issue can ever be properly addressed, however, without attending to the former seems to me highly doubtful. Here I call in aid the hermeneutic path outlined by Hans-Georg Gadamer, who insists upon the necessity of understanding the horizon of the past, in our case as represented in a handful of ancient texts, in order to understand the horizon of the present. For Gadamer the continual testing of our current outlook which produces the horizon of the present depends upon an encounter with our past and its traditions. We cannot know where we are unless we appreciate where we have come from. Understanding is the ‘fusion’ of these two horizons, by which he means not their assimilation but their coexistence in a state of continuous interaction (Gadamer 1979:273ff, 337ff). To understand the horizon of the past, historical analysis is indispensable.

Although social-scentific interpretation of the New Testament has been under way for nearly two decades, there are still some critics who believe that the social sciences have little, if anything, to contribute to the task of interpretation. Yet when one considers that the strictly historical methodology which they endorse is found in its essential lineaments in the writings of David Friedrich Strauss and Ferdinand Christian Baur published in the 1830s (Kümmel 1978:120- 161), this antipathy is rather puzzling. Can we really cling to a methodology in the form it took over 150 years ago, even though in the meantime we have seen the flowering of the social sciences and their robust growth and differentiation into significant new fields of research? Does the historical criticism of the New Testament documents, which were written for small first-century groups, have nothing to learn from the penetrating social analysis conducted by Alexis de Tocqueville, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, E.E.Evans-Pritchard, Mary Douglas, Clifford Geertz, Julian Pitt-Rivers and Peter Berger, to name only a few? To refuse such assistance seems to involve little more than a reflexive defence of our unfortunate and quite contingent delimitation of academic disciplines, which is itself a subject worthy of sociological investigation!

My aim in this chapter is to set out in fairly broad terms one of the ways in which the social sciences have been used in New Testament interpretation, by employing the sociology of knowledge, and to consider certain fundamental issues which arise in this enterprise. In subsequent chapters I will introduce other socialscientific perspectives which have proven helpful, especially the cultural anthropology of the Mediterranean world and the sociology of sectarianism, and focus more closely on particular New Testament topics. In the last three chapters I will take up the use of the apocalyptic genre in situations of political domination and explain how social-scientific approaches assist in the interpretation of three works, sharing certain common themes, written in such a context. This will involve a discussion in Chapters 6 and 7 of two texts from outside the New Testament, Daniel 7 and 4 Ezra, the latter being a Jewish apocalyptic work written around 100 CE (Common Era), and one New Testament text, the Apocalypse (Chapter 8), which, like 4 Ezra, reveals the reactions of a first-century religious community to Roman rule.

THE SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE

The various New Testament critics who have engaged in socialscientific exegesis adopt, not unnaturally, a variety of startingpoints and preferred theoretical positions. The area which I have found most productive of fresh questions and perspectives is the sociology of knowledge. My own introduction to the field came during my graduate studies when I began reading Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (first published in 1966), subtitled A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, at a time when I was grappling with the political material in Luke—Acts (a widely used abbreviation for Luke’s Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles). It soon became apparent that the model developed by the authors in this work, concerning the manner in which a social entity is created and maintained, often in the teeth of opposition from its rivals, threw up a host of questions for which responsive data could easily be found in Luke—Acts. My discovery soon after of Bryan Wilson’s sectarian typology (Wilson 1975:9-30) and David Barrett’s illuminating study of a large sample of contemporary religious movements in Africa (1968) provided a body of materials to expand the key insights of Berger and Luckmann and to generate a model covering the development of religious reform movements and sects. A little further below I shall briefly summarise this model, which I utilised in Community and Gospel in Luke—Acts (1987), and show how it may be used in relation to a range of New Testament documents. First, however, I should set out something of the history and nature of the sociology of knowledge and the contribution of Berger and Luckmann.

When the comparative study of religion was establishing itself as a serious enterprise in the second half of the nineteenth century, a strongly individualistic outlook was common among both British and American scholarship (Sharpe 1975:53-71 and 97-114). Among writers such as E.B.Tylor and William James there was a pronounced tendency to regard religion as best understood from the viewpoint of the experience and psychology of individuals. In Britain a significant movement away from this emphasis came with the publication of Robertson Smith’s Lectures on the Religion of the Semites: The Fundamental Institutions in 1889. By concentrating upon the role and importance of ritual within early society, Robertson Smith paved the way for more refined attempts to relate religion to the society in which it was located (Sharpe 1975:80-1). Put another way, he was a pioneer in the sociology of religion. But it was in France, in the writings of Emile Durkheim, that a fully fledged theory relating religion to its social setting first appeared. His classic exposition of the social origins of religion—The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (which was based on a study of the religion of Australian Aborigines)—appeared in 1912. Durkheim was influenced by Robertson Smith to an extent, but was also indebted to Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, whose book La Cité ancienne (1864) had investigated the ancient city-state in the light of its religious beliefs and traditions.

Durkheim’s broad view was that a religion was entirely a product of society. For him the religious life was the concentrated expression of the collective life of a particular group. Religion was really a society’s idealised image of itself. He wrote:

Thus the collective ideal which religion expresses is far from being due to a vague innate power of the individual, but it is rather at the school of collective life that the individual has learned to idealize…For society has constructed this new world in constructing itself, since it is society itself which this expresses.

(Durkheim 1976:423)

Durkheim would allow of no transcendent or supernatural cause for religion; his theory was completely reductionist.

It was not till 1924 that the German philosopher Max Scheler coined the phrase ‘the sociology of knowledge’ (‘Soziologie des Wissens’) to encapsulate the insight that all knowledge has a social genesis. Durkheim, however, had been a practitioner of at least the rudiments of this variety of sociology before it had acquired a name. Yet, at the same time, the sociology of knowledge was to an extent indebted to Marx and Engels for the view, forcefully expressed in The German Ideology, that human consciousness is determined by social setting. The work of Peter Berger, and of Thomas Luckmann in collaboration with him, in the area of the sociology of knowledge owes much to these pioneers. At the same time it belongs in the phenomenological tradition as evidenced in the writings of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Schutz and others (Wuthnow et al. 1987:8-11, 22-76). From authors such as these Berger took his preoccupation with the role of subjective meanings in social life and with the intersubjectivity or shared understandings on which social interaction is based (Wuthnow et al. 1987:9).

SOCIAL WORLDS AND NEW TESTAMENT
COMMUNITIES

In The Sacred Canopy (1969) Berger has taken the model of the creation and maintenance of social worlds which he developed with Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality and conveniently applied it to the area of religion. The importance of this model for New Testament criticism depends on the view that the New Testament documents were, by and large, written for particular early Christian communities and that these communities may be regarded as social worlds of the kind Berger describes. That some parts of the New Testament—for example, several of Paul’s letters, 1 Peter and the Apocalypse—were written for particular Christian communities (even though the word ‘Christian’ was not employed by their members as a term of selfdesignation) is beyond doubt. My own research on Luke—Acts, which comprises nearly one quarter of the New Testament, suggests that its author was writing for a particular Christian community or an ensemble of communities with pronounced structural similarities (Esler 1987). A strong case can also be made for many other works, including the Gospels of Matthew and John, having had an initial audience of this kind, and this is the view taken in what follows. Although dissenting voices are beginning to be heard on this point (Tolbert 1989; Darr 1992), some of them at least seem to depend on views as to the original audiences of the texts which are more problematic than the postulation of Christian communities (see the review of Darr 1992 in Esler 1994b). Stephen Barton has recently published a helpful article on the communal dimension of early Christianity (Barton 1992). The notion of ‘social world’ has been taken up in several works by New Testament critics (Meeks 1972 and 1983; Gager 1975; Overman 1990; Neyrey 1991).

It is desirable to offer at least a broad outline of Berger’s model (Berger 1969:3-51). He begins with the proposition that every human society is an enterprise in world-building. To explain this, one must understand society in dialectical terms: humanity produces society, yet every society continuously acts back upon its producers. Every individual biography is an episode within the history of society. What is more, it is within society, and as a result of social processes, that the individual becomes a person and attains an identity. Accounts of children raised by animals, including fictional ones such as David Malouf’s visionary masterpiece An Imaginary Life (1980), which fuses the tradition of the wolf-boy with Ovid’s exile to Tomi, reveal the vital character of social nurture for human identity. Berger isolates three moments or steps in this dialectic: externalisation, objectivation and internalisation. Externalisation is the ongoing outpouring of human being into the world, which results in all the products of our culture, material and non-material. Society is part of the non-material culture, and an essential part, since it structures our relations with our fellow men and women. Only in society can we create our world. The creation of the early Christian communities, with their distinct modes of organisation, behaviour and symbolism, provides an example of externalisation. Objectivation, secondly, refers to the phenomenon that culture comes to confront humanity as a reality outside of its human producers. Thus, the agents from the banks who come to eject Dustbowl farmers from their lands in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath disclaim any responsibility on their part, for the reason that it is not them nor any human beings but the banks which are responsible (Steinbeck 1975:36-9). Here we see how an institution can acquire an objective reality seemingly beyond the control of its human creators.

Every society faces the problem of ensuring that its values, its objectivated meanings, are transmitted from one generation to the next. This transmission occurs through ‘socialization’, which means the ways in which each new generation is taught to live in accordance with the institutional programmes of society. From the viewpoint of the individual members of a social group, this process is ‘internalization’, which is the third step in Berger’s scheme. Through internalization individuals identify with and are shaped by social meanings, so that these meanings become lodged within their consciousness. Thus, the institutional programmes set up by a society become objectively real as attitudes, motives and values. We are led by this aspect of the model to enquire, for example, whether the large amount of teaching contained in Matthew’s Gospel (in contrast, say, with the situation in Mark) functions to preserve the author’s congregation, to maintain its distinctive identity and outlook, and not just to promote ethical conduct among its members. This possibility is strengthened when the Matthean Jesus says: For I tell you, unless your righteousness (dikaiosuneē) exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’ (Matt. 5.20).

Here we see the notion of righteousness, which at one level encapsulates the ethical demands of this Gospel, serving a vital social function of differentiating the members of the community from its rival in the Judaism which was developing alongside it and for whose leaders dikaiosuneē was also a key expression. The Matthean beatitudes may be subjected to the same type of analysis.

From this account of the dialectic manner in which society is established and maintained it may be said that the socially constructed world is, above all, an ordering of experience. A meaningful order, or nomos, is imposed upon the discrete experiences and meanings of individuals. It is for this reason that radical separation from the social world constitutes such a powerful threat to the individual, who loses not only emotionally satisfying ties to other people, but also his or her orientation in experience, sense of reality and identity. Something of this process can be seen in the experience of Robinson Crusoe. Nearer to home, for current purposes, the solemnity attached to the process of expulsion from the community which we find, for example, in Matt. 18.15-17 illustrates the enormity of such separation. The seriousness of such a step can also be seen in 1 Cor. 5.13.

Very often the socially established nomos merges its meanings with what are considered to be the fundamental meanings in the universe. In such a case nomos and cosmos appear to be coextensive. The New Testament communities which I have begun to introduce above are heading towards such an intersection. This idea can be seen with some clarity at the end of the First Gospel, when Jesus offers the fact that all power in heaven and on earth has been entrusted to him as the basis for commissioning his listeners to make disciples of all nations (Matt. 28.16-20). Success in this task would produce an ekkle-sia on earth governed by the power of God’s rule; the Kingdom of Heaven would have indeed come. For Berger, religion is the human enterprise by which a sacred cosmos is established. Influenced by Rudolf Otto, Emile Durkheim and Mircea Eliade, he describes the sacred as ‘a quality of mysterious and awesome power, other than man and yet related to him, which is believed to reside in certain objects of experience’ (Berger 1969:25). The sacred cosmos is confronted as an immensely powerful reality beyond humanity itself and yet locating humanity in an ultimately meaningful order. At one level the opposite of the sacred is the profane, on another level the opposite is chaos or anomy.

Having explained the genesis of society and religion, Berger proceeds to describe how they are maintained. Here the centrally important process is ‘legitimation’, a word he employs to denote the socially objectivated ‘knowledge’ serving to explain and justify the social order. ‘Legitimations are answers to any questions about the “why” of institutional arrangements’ (Berger 1969:29). Legitimation is especially important in any social order where the prevailing arrangements are under threat from dissenters from within, or through opposition from without, which may be capable of causing the members to falter in their commitment. There are many signs in the New Testament that the early Christian communities were troubled by problems whose origins were internal or external or both. In his speech to the Ephesian elders in Acts Paul predicted precisely these kinds of disturbance: ‘I know that after my departure fierce wolves will c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• The First Christians In Their Social Worlds
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Social Worlds, Social Sciences and the New Testament
• Chapter 2: Reading the Mediterranean Social Script
• Chapter 3: Glossolalia and the Admission of Gentiles Into the Early Christian Community
• Chapter 4: Sectarianism and the Conflict At Antioch
• Chapter 5: Introverted Sectarianism At Qumran and In the Johannine Community
• Chapter 6: Millennialism and Daniel 7
• Chapter 7: The Social Function of 4 Ezra
• Chapter 8: Sorcery Accusations and the Apocalypse
• References