In Search of First-Century Christianity

Joe E. Barnhart,Linda T. Kraeger

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351769235
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Religion

Originally pulished in 2000, In Search of First Century Christianity contends that Christianity in the first century had no founder but rather evolved as a convergence of many forces: political disillusionment, cultural mutations, religious and theological motifs, psychosocial losses and new expectations. Moving on from an examination of the foundations of historical and literary criticism in the Renaissance, and a detailed study of two writers in antiquity, Thucydides and Chariton, to examine writings in the period between Plato and the Gospel of Mark, the authors then explore the writing of Paul and the stories told in the Gospels. With the early Christians drawing from both Greek and Hebrew sources, Barnhart and Kraeger propose that, like Plato, Paul and other Christians generated an "anti-tragic theatre" gospel with the Jesus figure being the creation of a culture steeped in an anthropomorphic, metaphysical view of the world.

1  Introduction

During the last quarter of the twentieth century, historical inquiry into the emergence of first-century Christianity resurrected a fresh search for the historical Jesus. A parallel quest shadowing the primary inquiry surfaced in one question. How did Christianity with its elaborate Gospels and theological doctrines about “Jesus Christ the Son of God” come into being?

At the heart of the debate among biblical scholars stands the problem of the bridge between the earthly Jesus and the cosmic Son of God. The Jesus Seminar has worked from the perspective that the canonical Gospels and other early Gospels contain invaluable leads. If properly mined and connected with other relevant materials, they will allow researchers to reconstruct not a full biography, but a reliable account of the earthly Jesus. The scholarly task, therefore, is to cross the bridge that will return us to this Jesus before he became the captive of the theological mythmakers.

Three camps have thus emerged, one portraying Jesus as essentially the originator of a social and religious revolution more profound than any political revolution. The second camp portrays a Jesus possessed with an eschatological if not apocalyptic vision that, simply stated, did not materialize as expected. According to the third camp, one cannot realistically separate the earthly Jesus from the theological claims made about him. Except for those who hold to some theory of biblical inerrancy, the scholars of this camp continue to engage in rigorous historical and literary inquiry into the original Jesus. They think this Jesus not only existed, but also was the special presence of deity in human flesh. Those embracing this position may differ regarding the degree and nature of Jesus’ divine incarnation. They, nevertheless, are convinced that only the assumption of the divine incarnation can explain the emergence of the Church with its mission, martyrs, and theological formulations.

In writing this book, we have been constantly aware that the same data can support rival explanatory theories. We have appropriated for our theory much of the evidence used by the models of the first two camps. We believe the third camp is correct in one respect but mistaken in another. The two images of Jesus, we acknowledge, belong together and cannot be separated. At the same time, our working model does not require the conjecture that Jesus Christ was in fact a supernatural incarnation in human history. According to our thesis, Jesus Christ is more accurately viewed as a cultural emergent. Literary critic Harold Bloom is, we suggest, on the right course when he writes that Jesus Christ the Son of God portrayed in Mark’s Gospel was a literary creation. “Hamlet is beyond us, beyond everyone else in Shakespeare or in literature, unless indeed you agree with me in finding the Yahweh of the J Writer and the Jesus of the Gospel of Mark to be literary characters” (Bloom, 1998, p. 422). At the same time, we submit that neither Mark nor anyone else of the first century set out to invent a Jesus to be solely a literary personage. Rather, like the Egyptians and ancient Greeks, the early Christians believed in their divinities. From the beginning, the Jesus figure was the creation of a culture steeped in a special metaphysical view of the world that was anthropomorphic through and through. Jesus Christ as a stunning cultural mutation and elaboration emerged because Paul as well as other religious thinkers before and after him sought to solve specific problems. These problems grew out of the universal human condition of finitude and tragedy within a special Greco-Roman political setting. Furthermore, the problems were formulated in the theological and religious language inherited largely from the Hebrew tradition, including the complex narratives of the Second Temple period (van Buren, 1998, pp. 71–82). As instructors in the humanities, we have an abiding interest in better understanding how first-century Christianity fits into the rich theological and narrative tradition that took millennia to build. We come as a part of that developing human enterprise and as heirs of other, perhaps competing, traditions. This fact alone tends to generate reflection, leading us to become both insiders and outsiders to the worldview that we now call first-century Christianity (Larue, 1996, pp. 3–10, 193–230). This book thus speaks to us as much as to our readers.

Christianity in the first century did not appear from the blue. Fortunately, for the past several decades, biblical scholarship has progressed by astounding leaps and bounds. In this book, we hope to contribute a small part to the continuing quest for a fuller account of Christianity’s origin. Progress in biblical studies often comes by crossing borders and making sustained contact with other fields of discipline. New Testament scholars have crossed borders because they had big and difficult problems to confront. They have engaged historians, literary critics, classicists, archaeologists, philosophers, social scientists, linguists, and theologians.

Contrary to what some might claim, no one stands on Mount Neutral to peer down in detachment. All committed scholars are down in the trenches, arriving from their special backgrounds, but concerned to share in the rigorous exchange of ideas. As academicians, we have buried a few of our biases and have seen others endure serious revision. Letting some biases die for us sets us free to cultivate new ones that, we hope, will prove fruitful. In Chapter 2, we offer the conjecture that the Renaissance in Europe was the great womb that gave birth to both historical and literary criticism. Chapter 3 focuses on two writers of antiquity, one a Greek historian and the other a Greek-speaking novelist. We intend to give our readers a “feel” for the way stories were sometimes told in the period between Plato and the Gospel of Mark. We believe this chapter will help set the stage for approaching the stories told in the Gospels.

Chapters 4 through 8 proceed on the assumption that the Apostle Paul’s letters provide one of the earliest records of Christian thinking. Paul was striving to solve problems that had become severe crises in the complex worldview he had inherited. As a missionary to the Gentiles, he confronted challenges that sometimes threw him into political, intellectual, moral, and emotional conflict with other apostles presumed to be agents of the gospel. No one could read Paul’s letters without sensing that his thinking was not one steady stream flowing untroubled into the sea. Rather, it was several streams rushing into one another to create such swirling eddies as to force him to deal with threatening crises. Strange as it may seem, science too is largely a process of major theories and hypotheses facing severe crises.

Chapter 9 in particular explores the fruitful hypothesis that the earliest Christians envisioned a Christ who was the opposite of Gaius Caesar Germanicus, nicknamed Caligula. According to this hypothesis, the Lord Jesus Christ, although possessing deity, assumed earthly, human form. By contrast, Caligula, though a mere mortal, became increasingly obsessed with self-deification. It is noteworthy that Caligula ruled the Roman Empire at about the time the Apostle Paul underwent transforming experiences and received what he regarded as special revelations from the resurrected Savior and Lord. Augustus’ and Caligula’s roles in the formation of early views of Christ Jesus will surface in Chapter 12.

Chapters 10, 11, and 13 explore the difficult question of whether Jesus was a historical figure whose followers somehow both preserved and systematically distorted his mission, message, and person. Or, to the contrary, did the image of a cosmic Jesus Christ first emerge within developing communities of visionaries? Did the putative “details” of Christ Jesus’ earthly life subsequently evolve and, in some cases, converge eventually to become the warp and woof of the Gospels?

In Chapters 14 through 16, we develop our thesis that, like Plato’s dialogues, Paul’s epistles and the four Gospels are strongly “anti-tragic theater.” Theodicy, the problem of suffering and evil, shadowed the ancient Greek dramatists, who left their audiences shuddering at “the fragility of goodness.” Both Paul and the Gospels, we try to show, sought a story in which goodness would ultimately triumph in the person of Christ.

2 The Renaissance and the Bible

The Two Western Canons

The giants among creative writers rewrite endlessly. Dostoevsky, the great Russian novelist, kept reworking a handful of crucial themes from novel to novel, drawing from the superlative narratives of his predecessors and recasting their characters (Fanger, 1965; MacPike, 1981; Weisgerber, 1968). Literary giants rewrite perpetually, borrowing and transforming. “Greatness recognizes greatness and is shadowed by it” (Bloom, 1994, p. 10). The towering canon of literature called the Bible represents centuries of revising and retelling. For example, the authors of Ruth and Jonah could not permit Ezra’s account to stand uncorrected. Similarly, Job refused to permit the theology of Proverbs to sail unchallenged.

Harold Bloom wisely places Shakespeare at the center of the secular Western Canon. “Shakespeare is the secular canon, or even the secular scripture….” (Bloom, 1994, p. 24). This judgment contains a double irony. First, in myriad ways, Shakespeare learned constantly from the West’s religious canon and used it stunningly throughout his career (Shaheen, 1987 and 1989). Even Falstaff partially represents an explosive mutant of Alice, the wife of Bath, around whom Chaucer created a daring commentary on the Apostle Paul’s counsel regarding marriage and virginity (1 Cor. 7).¹

A few sentences can explain the second irony found in the way that the secular canon intersects the religious canon. As a voice of the Renaissance, Shakespeare compelled his contemporaries to ponder in a new light the historical claims of the Bible. His history plays probed until the audience could not escape wondering about the reliability of the meandering story called history. Today, some scholars insist that Shakespeare was a defender of monarchy. Perhaps so. Still, who more than he and the writers of 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings has cast a shadow of doubt over the institution of monarchy itself? Who has surpassed Shakespeare in relentlessly exposing the fraudulent claims, flaws, and foul deeds of various occupants of the throne? Furthermore, if Shakespeare could raise questions about the claims of England’s political foundations, would not questions inevitably rise regarding the head of the Church of England, who happened to be England’s monarch, beginning with Henry VIII? Thus, the question of a religion’s very foundation naturally arose in the modern history play, which was almost Shakespeare’s invention. During the Renaissance, new questions emerged regarding authoritative claims either found in the Bible or imposed upon it.

William Shakespeare, born under the reign of Henry’s daughter Elizabeth, died while James I was still posing as an enthroned God on earth. Addressing Parliament, James asserted, “Kings are justly called gods for they exercise a manner or resemblance of divine power upon earth…. [K]ings make and unmake their subjects….” (Martinich, 1992, pp. 46–47). As we will argue in Chapter 12, a presumed effluence from celestial deity to earthly rulers has been a heavy motif in human history since the ancient Egyptian monarchy. The Hebrew tradition developed ambivalence toward the claims and presumptions of mortal kings. First Samuel sets forth the position that the very idea of an earthly king over Israel came not from Yahweh, but from a people weak in faith and eager to emulate neighboring kingdoms. In Chapters 9 and 12, we suggest that early Christianity represents a creative attempt to reformulate the God-Emperor motif. While seeking to maintain the Jesus’ humanity, Christians portrayed him as free of the flaws so manifest in Roman emperors and their predecessors, the Seleucid rulers.

New Challenging Kingdoms

Before James’ arrival in England to receive the crown, Shakespeare and other Renaissance thinkers had initiated two kingdoms of their own: literary criticism and historical criticism. Although separate disciplines today, the two thriving kingdoms land on each other’s shores to exchange thorny questions and fruitful insights. Centuries prior to Shakespeare, the Hebrew tradition generated something akin to literary criticism for both those with eyes to see the subtleties of the multi-layered Hebrew Bible and those with ears to hear its many voices. Many factors, however, helped retard historical criticism for centuries until eventually the humanists of Europe grew thirsty to learn from the ancient Hebrew, Greek, and Latin texts.

The Donation of Constantine

In the fifteenth century, the discovery that the Donation of Constantine was a crude forgery blew the lid off the ecclesiastical pot. For over six-hundred years, many clergymen and scholars who knew about the document believed it the work of the fourth-century Pope Sylvester I. The document purported to give him and his successors temporal power over Italy. Actually written over three centuries after Sylvester’s death, it purports to give an authentic account of Emperor Constantine’s conversion and baptism. As Professor Phyllis Rackin has pointed out, a critical reading of the texts was the exception until the Renaissance. Lorenzo Valla (1405–1457) not only exposed the falsity of the document, but also doubted that the apostles had composed the Apostles’ Creed. Valla also helped lay the foundation for modern New Testament studies by comparing the Latin Vulgate with the Greek manuscripts.

During the Renaissance, more people began to realize that human history was not like pieces appearing simultaneously in a medieval tapestry. Rather, history’s unfolding story required real time so that what appeared at one period might have been impossible at another. Renaissance scholars began to see more clearly the need to reconstruct reliable representations, which would require enormous discipline. They gained a glimpse of some crucial differences between people separated by several centuries.

Eventually, some persistent students of the Bible came to perceive the text as not really one voice or one message, but a process containing many voices speaking at very different times (Rackin, 1990, pp. 9–12). Furthermore, Renaissance scholars reasoned that various biblical texts must have been composed under strikingly different circumstances and for perhaps different purposes. In short, scholars could not take Holy Writ as a “given” immaculately conceived.

The Christian Humanists and the Text

Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, and other Christian humanists sought to make a distinction between the scriptures and the interpretations that had developed around them over the centuries. Erasmus in particular could no longer view historical truths, records, facts, and witnesses as pieces in a perfect mosaic. Luther had serious doubts about the Epistle of James. Calvin elected not to publish a commentary on the troublesome New Testament Apocalypse. Erasmus had found it necessary to sift through various manuscripts and documents to arrive at what he judged to be the more likely approximation of the original texts. The existence of variant versions eventually created new questions about every version of the Bible.

Catholic apologists often charged that by translating the Bible into readable German, Luther sowed the seeds of skepticism and unbelief throughout all Germany. Thomas More believed Luther had not only turned the moral world upside down, but also threatened to remove all meaning from the universe (Marius, 1985, p. 271). According to historian Richard Marius, Luther proved to be “perhaps the most brilliant wordsmith European civilization produced between Dante and Shakespeare…. [W]hen Luther spoke, people all over Europe repeated what he said” (Marius, 1985, p. 269). Few writers have equaled Dr. Luther in grasping the enormous power of words to create both doubt and belief.

Around September 1514, Martin van Dorp, a University of Louvain lecturer, sent a disturbing letter to Erasmus. In it, he hinted that the faculty might openly condemn Erasmus if he published notes on a thousand New Testament passages or amended the Latin Bible, the Vulgate that the Church had used for centuries. Erasmus’ threat profoundly disturbed Dorp. What would the faithful think if they learned that the Church’s great doctors and councils had based many doctrines on a flawed Vulgate? If the integrity of the biblical text came under question, would not questions emerge about the Church’s teachings and her trustworthiness (Marius, 1985, pp. 145–146)? What then could one say of a God who permitted errors to creep into his sacred Word and his Holy Church?

The Renaissance with its movable type not only made Holy Writ available to vast numbers of believers in England and on the Continent, but also raised gnawing questions for devout humanist scholars themselves. Most people in the pews never learned of questions about textual criticism, just as today most church members remain unaware of the astounding transformation in biblical studies that flourished during the second half of the twentieth century. The Renaissance scholars can perhaps be forgiven for shielding the people from the disturbing questions. They themselves had no ready answers. How indeed could they readily explain the corrupted texts of Scripture and the error-riddled texts of Church fathers (Marius, 1985, pp. 67–69, 146)?

With the translation of Scripture into various languages came the text’s increasingly wider distribution. Placing it into the hands of the people was itself revolutionary, even without giving them information about textual corruption. Once the political climate shifted even slightly, new questions and doub...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Renaissance and the Bible
• 3 Thucydides’ History and Chariton’s Novel
• 4 Paul the Apostle: Problems in the Paradigm
• 5 Paul, the Hellenistic Jew
• 6 Paul and Two Jews of Alexandria
• 7 Paul and 2 Esdras
• 8 Paul on Sinful Desires and Divine Providence
• 9 An Apocalyptic Vision of Ultimate Power
• 10 Versions of the Jesus Story
• 11 Borg’s Jesus, Anderson’s Christ
• 12 Jesus as King
• 13 Is Jesus a Legend?
• 14 Tragedy and Gospel
• 15 Culturology
• 16 Christ and Human Vulnerability
• Bibliography
• Index