Christ's Resurrection in Early Christianity

and the Making of the New Testament

Markus Vinzent

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317166351
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Why is the Resurrection of Christ so remote, almost non-existent in many early Christian writings of the first 140 years of Christianity? This is the first Patristic book to focus on the development of the belief in the Resurrection of Christ through the first centuries A.D. By Paul, Christ's Resurrection is regarded as the basis of Christian hope. In the fourth century it becomes a central Christian tenet. But what about the discrepancy in the first three centuries? This thought provoking book explores this core topic in Christian culture and theology. Taking a broad approach - including iconography, archaeology, history, philosophy, Jewish Studies and theology - Markus Vinzent offers innovative reading of well known biblical and other texts complemented by rarely discussed evidence. Christ's Resurrection in Early Christianity takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the wilderness of unorthodox perspectives in the breadth of early Christian writings. It is an eye-opening experience with insights into the craftsmanship of early Christianity - and the earliest existential debates about life and death, death and life - all centred on the cross, on suffering, enduring and sacrifice.

Chapter 1
The Beginnings of the End

Jewish Beginnings

Any attempt to understand the beginnings of early Christianity has to overcome the entrenched assumption of the Jesus movement as being a ‘new’ religion, based on a ‘new’ gospel, a ‘New’ Testament, as being a ‘new’ Israel and so forth, a picture that, as we shall see, was created only towards the mid-second century by Marcion, a Christian teacher to whom we shall return.

Christianity was not born into Judaism, but from its infancy was simply Jewish, part of the variety that we mean by ‘Judaism’.1 This outset had its bearing on the significance of Christ’s Resurrection and the contents of Easter and Sunday.2 Moreover, in the first centuries what we call ‘Judaism’ was made up of diverse regional and conceptual traditions in Palestine–Israel and beyond, shaped by Greek cities and Roman powers, with centres in Alexandria, Antioch, Rome and elsewhere. Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes and Samaritans met in a multitude of synagogue communities of like-minded members, people from a whole host of such backgrounds of similar social, cultural and geographical milieu. Rabbinic Judaism with its Aramaic orientation did not dominate Judaism before the fourth and fifth centuries of our era, and was already the product of the mutual segregation of Judaism and Christianity in a then-Christianized and Hellenized Roman Empire. Even then Judaism had tried, with only limited success, to shake off its Greek traditions, and promoted an Aramaic-based counter-byzantine religion3 against the background of a Greco-Roman institutionalized Christianity that had lost some of its Hebrew and Aramaic Jewish traditions. If we look back to the beginnings of Christianity, we are reading Jewish history. Neither Paul nor any member of his communities knew that they were Christians or that they would later be called ‘the first’ Christians.4 The growing and often painful split was neither the first nor the last in Judaism, and it was never completed.5 Centuries before, the Hebrew tradition had already suffered divisions: Samaritans and Jews shared their past, the Torah, but they had developed different and competing centres of worship, located in geographically separated territories – Mount Garizim in Samaria close to Sebaste, and Mount Zion in Judaea in the north of the old city of Jerusalem.

The growing split between Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity did not develop into a neat geographical divide. Rather, after 70 AD the post-war situation of the lost battle against the Romans, when Jews were banned from Jerusalem and scattered over the already-existing empire-wide diaspora, meant that Jews and Jewish Christians had to live side by side as minorities in Greco-Roman environments.

While the Samaritans shared with Jews much of the Torah, the authority of further Jewish literature was part of an inner-Jewish debate and one of the grounds for the various strands in Judaism: Sadducees, to some extent like the Samaritans, solely accepted the Torah; the Pharisees added the Prophets and Scriptures, and as part of the latter produced further writings. A major step in the formation and canonization of the Pharisaic–Jewish scriptures was the translation of the Hebrew Tanak (Torah = 5 books of Moses, Nebiim = Prophets, Ketubim = Scriptures) into Greek with the production of the Septuagint at Alexandria in Egypt in the years before 132 BC.6 Still, after this translation, the Tanak ‘was not yet quite rigidly closed, its third division was still in a somewhat fluid condition, and … there were in circulation numerous sacred writings in Greek of which a considerable number became gradually and quite naturally attached to the authoritative collection’.7 It would have been ‘in no sense surprising, nor would it have been regarded as extraordinary, if from the Christian side some new edifying works had been added to this collection’.8

Judaism in the two centuries before and in the early years of our era was both Greek- and Aramaic speaking, and many if not all Christian writings of the first hundred years were part of this Jewish literature production, although the divide between the Greek and Aramaic traditions was certainly widening. The Aramaic literature that ‘supposedly record the teachings of the Rabbinic Sages who lived in Palestine from the first to the early third centuries’ AD, the so-called Tannaitic literature, includes a wide range: the Mishnah, the Tosefta, the Baraitot of the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds, the Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael (on Exodus), Sipra (on Leviticus) and Sipre (on Numbers and Deuteronomy).9 Yet these Rabbinic writings were the product of only ‘one particular religious party or movement within Judaism. But there were other forms of Judaism’, for example, that ‘of the Diaspora … before Palestinian Rabbinate was to stamp its authority comprehensively on many Diaspora communities. And there was also “popular” Judaism’.10 Many of the writings, unfortunately lost today, grew out of schools of Pharisees, Rabbis, local schoolmasters, and philosophy teachers.

Rabbinic and Christian literature that started to replace the oral tradition of earlier centuries11 only gradually substituted the ‘living voice’.12 Still in the second century, Bishop Papias of Hierapolis, who himself wrote books, regarded the living voice as more reliable than any written testimony, while well into the second century written literature only made its way to ‘limited geographical locations by special groups’.13

Christianity grew within and only slowly out of ‘Judaism’. Of course, with Paul and his missionary activity, and even potentially earlier, with the expulsion of the first followers of Jesus from Jerusalem, missionary activities among non-Jews had begun. But as we know from Matthew and Acts, this venture was not undisputed by some followers of Jesus. Moving beyond the Palestinian, Pharisaic–Jewish strongholds into Samaria was not easily accepted, so old was the conflict between Jews and Samaritans.14 Nevertheless, Paul is an example who crosses borders. He was educated in a Pharisaic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: A Rise of the Risen Christ?
• 1 The Beginnings of the End
• 2 Paul and the Resurrection Rediscovered
• 3 Celebrating Life and Death
• Bibliography
• Index