Jesus, the New Testament, and Christian Origins

Perspectives, Methods, Meanings

Dieter Mitternacht, Anders Runesson, Dieter Mitternacht, Anders Runesson

• Editorial: Eerdmans
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781467461757
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

An introduction to the New Testament in its historical context, with an overview of interpretative approaches and exegetical exercises

In this up-to-date introduction to the New Testament, twenty-two leading biblical scholars guide the reader through the New Testament's historical background, key ideas, and textual content. Seminarians and anyone else interested in a deep understanding of Christian Scripture will do well to begin with this thorough volume that covers everything from the historical Jesus to the emergence of early Christianity. The contributors stress the importance of Christianity's emergence within and from Second Temple Judaism.

Unique to this book is a special focus on interpretative methods, with several illustrative examples included in the final chapter of various types of scriptural exegesis on select New Testament passages. Readers are guided through the hermeneutical considerations of a historical text-oriented reading, a historical-analogical reading, a rhetorical-epistolary reading, argumentation analysis, feminist analysis, postcolonial analysis, and narrative criticism, among others. These practical, hands-on applications enable students to move from an abstract understanding of the New Testament to a ready ability to make meaning from Scripture.

1

Invitation to Study the New Testament

Beginnings

This book is dedicated to the study of one of the most intriguing peculiarities of human history: the story of how a lowly Jewish artisan from an insignificant Galilean village of about four hundred inhabitants was executed by Roman imperial forces on suspicion of subversive behavior—only to become the most influential individual ever to have set foot on this planet. Jesus is today, two thousand years after his death, the central figure in a great number of creeds that together make up Christianity, the largest religion in the world, with most of its adherents now living in the so-called Global South. In terms of convictions, the central force behind these two thousand years of expansion is the astonishing claim that the man executed was brought back to life by the God of Israel. This belief spread rapidly around the Mediterranean, also among non-Jews, in the first few centuries of the Common Era. The originally oral traditions about Jesus’s life and teachings were eventually written down, and a number of the resulting texts came to be seen by the mainstream churches as Holy Scripture. Within three hundred years the belief in Jesus as the risen Lord (Gk. kyrios), who would return to pass judgment on humanity and establish the kingdom of God, had filtered through into the upper social strata and been designated the state religion of the Roman Empire, the very same empire that had crucified the one now worshiped. Indeed, a most remarkable journey from periphery to center.

This journey began sometime between the years 7 and 4 BCE, when Jesus was born. According to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke this event occurred in Bethlehem, in Judea. Jesus then grew up in the village of Nazareth in Galilee, in the highlands of the north, which at this time was ruled by the Jewish vassal tetrarch Herod Antipas (4 BCE–39 CE), son of Herod I, also called “the Great.” Judea, the country’s southern part where the capital Jerusalem was located, was from 6 CE ruled directly by Rome through prefects, of which Pontius Pilate, the man who condemned Jesus to death, undoubtedly is the most well known. The country that Jesus grew up in was a nation under Roman colonial control. The Roman imperial presence was felt by all, not least because of taxes and other burdens affecting the masses. The land that had been united under a Jewish king at the time of Jesus’s birth was, when Jesus began his ministry, politically divided.

The Jewish elite in the Jerusalem temple, as well as the vassal rulers in Galilee and the northeastern regions of what was once Herod I’s kingdom, had to carefully balance between Roman demands, on the one hand, and the needs and will of the people, on the other. Those who did not belong to the ruling elite reacted to this political situation in different ways. Tax collectors, for example, could further their own financial gain by charging more tax than the Romans required, thereby increasing their commission. In the New Testament we have an echo of this type of fraud in the story of the tax collector Zacchaeus, who, after he met Jesus, decided to return the money he had gained through illegal means to all his victims (Luke 19). Others chose the way of armed resistance and rebellion. This resulted in, for example, two major revolts, first between the years 66 and 70 CE and then once more between 132 and 135 CE. There were also those who did not choose violence but rather hoped that the God of Israel would intervene and in a miraculous manner reestablish Israel as a kingdom (cf. Acts 1:6–7).

The public, civic synagogue institution, where the local affairs of villages and cities were dealt with and Holy Scriptures were read and interpreted every Sabbath, constituted a sociopolitical and religious focal point where people gathered for deliberation on various matters. Religion and politics, the cultic and the common, were intertwined in ancient understandings of the world; the Sabbath’s discussion of Holy Scripture concerned the entirety of human existence and the society in which people lived. Additionally, by publicly reading and interpreting texts from Israel’s past, the people’s history was kept alive and relevant. Passages from the Scriptures that spoke of the liberation of the Jewish people from Egypt, or the people’s deliverance from the Babylonian exile, were read and interpreted in the context of contemporary situations. Luke 4 tells us, in a paradigmatic sort of way, of how Jesus makes use of the Sabbath’s Scripture reading and discussion to this effect.

The use of ancient texts in interpreting the present and the future—in cities and in rural areas, in the homeland and in the diaspora—contributed to creating a distinct Jewish culture and identity. A great deal of the texts that have been preserved from the first century CE bear witness to the importance that was attributed to certain writings. Of course, different groups could, and would, have different ideas not only about how these special writings should be interpreted but also about what should be considered Holy Scriptures in the first place. For example, the group known as the Sadducees accepted, like the Samaritans, only the five books of Moses (Torah), while the Pharisees, like Jesus and his followers, considered the prophetic writings and some other texts, traditionally called “the Writings,” to be authoritative texts too.

Box 1.1

Dating

When dating historical events, many are used to the terms “before Christ” (BC) and Anno Domini (AD = “the year of the Lord”). For Christians this usage is certainly appropriate, but for persons adhering to other systems of belief, or none, the terminology may seem inadequate. Many academic publications today use a terminology that does not presume Christian faith or worldview yet still adheres to the Western dating tradition. This book uses “before the Common Era” (BCE) and “Common Era” (CE). Such terms give the additional benefit of preventing the common misconception that Jesus was born in the year 1, which in all likelihood he was not (see chapter 3).

The New Testament and Its Texts

Jesus did not write any texts himself. Nor did the collection of texts we know as the New Testament exist in the early Jesus movement. Those who accepted Jesus as Messiah (Gk. Christos) read and found guidance in the same holy texts that were used by many other contemporary Jewish groups. Christians later came to call these texts the Old Testament. Jews came to call them Tanak. This latter word is an acronym that is derived from the first letters in Torah (the Law, the five books of Moses), Nevi’im (the Prophets), and Ketuvim (the Writings). In this book we will refer to this collection of texts as the Hebrew Bible and in some places, when we would like to point to the early Greek translation of these texts, as the Septuagint (LXX). The twenty-seven writings that were authored by Jesus’s followers, and that eventually were included in the New Testament, represent different genres. The oldest are letters written by Paul to the assemblies he and others had founded around the Mediterranean. In these letters he motivates and admonishes Christ followers about how they, as he sees it, should best express their trust in Christ, in both theology and practice.

Occasional oral traditions about Jesus are found in the Pauline letters. The most well-known example of such is surely the story of Jesus’s last supper with his friends: “on the night when he [Jesus] was betrayed …” (1 Cor 11:23–25). It is not until the Gospel of Mark, written more than a decade after Paul’s last letter, that we find a coherent retelling of Jesus’s life and teachings. Following this text, a kind of ancient biography, we have the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John, likely written in this order at some point between the years 80 and 100 CE, although a growing number of scholars now suggest that Luke may have been written in the early second century. Just like the Gospel of Mark, these gospels present Jesus’s life in the form of a narrative, albeit in different, sometimes supplementing, sometimes contradicting, ways. How it came to be that these gospels display such similarities and differences will be further explored in chapter 4.

The New Testament also contains the earliest account of the expansion of the Jesus movement, the book of Acts. In this text we are offered a story of how the apostles spread traditions about and sayings of Jesus, claiming him to be the resurrected Messiah, the one promised by the Jewish sacred Scriptures. As the author vividly recounts the bravery of men and women, accompanied by divine miracles, the reader learns that the mission is first directed toward fellow Jews and then expanded to include Samaritans and finally other non-Jews around the Roman Empire. At first Peter, one of Jesus’s closest disciples, is portrayed as the principal figure behind these developments, but this focus later shifts to Paul. Both Peter and Paul receive their instruction to spread the news about the resurrected Messiah to non-Jews through visions—Peter on a roof in the city of Joppa, Paul on the road to Damascus. Paul, a Jewish intellectual who had been a zealous persecutor of Jews who had joined the Jesus movement, is entirely transformed by his encounter with the risen Christ and becomes one of the most eager missionaries of the movement.

Among the remaining texts of the New Testament are those that are formulated as letters but are more similar to treatises meant for a wide and general audience. Here we find the so-called Pastoral Letters, three letters written in the name of Paul that carry forward and adapt his legacy to new situations. Furthermore, there are three letters associated with John, of which the first and longest can hardly have been meant as a letter in the strict sense of that word. These texts mirror the Johannine tradition’s emphasis on true faith in Christ. The Letter of James and the Letter to the Hebrews—neither of which belongs to the proper genre of ancient letters—appear to be written with a Jewish audience in mind, although the texts never mention which communities they are writing to. Finally, we have Revelation, the only apocalyptic text in the New Testament. It describes, with colorful and complicated metaphorical language, what is to happen in the final days, when God will judge the evil and vindicate the righteous. While this is a text about the future, it is saturated with a critique of the society in which the author lived, being especially hostile toward Rome.

Diversity, Unity, and Continuity

Most scholars hold that the texts of the New Testament were written over a period of eighty years—that is, between approximately 50 and 130 CE. The individuals who wrote them could hardly have predicted that their texts would become part of a literary collection that would be preserved for millennia and considered as holy as the Jewish Bible. Neither could the gospel authors, who shaped their portraits of Jesus with great care, know that their accounts would be included side by side in a collection of four gospels, providing the reader with diverse descriptions of who Jesus was and what he accomplished. It is this diversity that makes this literary collection so intriguing and challenging. In fact, already in antiquity attempts were made to merge the four gospels into one, thereby neutralizing the differences between them. At the same time, there were also strong forces that rejected such a harmonization of the gospels. The decision to allow the four different accounts to represent the truth about Jesus was deliberate and accepted early on by most authorities.

There were also other gospels that were not included in the New Testament, all of them written later than the four. One of these has become rather well known: the Gospel of Thomas. This text is not a narrative like the other gospels but contains a compilation of Jesus’s words. For whatever reasons, the early authorities in the movement considered this list of Jesus’s words to depart too much from what they understood the other four gospels conveyed. It was never included in the canon, therefore, but shared the fate of a multitude of other writings about Jesus that were discarded.

The early centers of belief in Jesus as the Christ—Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, Ephesus, and Rome—sought unity in all this diversity. Finally, in the fourth century, they agreed that twenty-seven books should be considered especially authoritative and thus be recognized by all Christians as part of a collection of holy writings. This meant that a visible sign of unity within the (majority) church was achieved, while still preserving a form of measured diversity. Different accounts of Jesus’s life and teachings, and different rules for how a Christ follower should live, were allowed to stand side by side in the same literary collection. The basic (theological) position seems to have been that revealed truth allowed for, even required, diversity, although within certain limits, which, of course, were determined by those considered authorities.

The word “gospel” (Gk. euangelion) means “good news.” This word was used early on to describe Jesus’s teachings. With time, however, the term came to denote the texts that present accounts of Jesus (gospels). In a comparable manner, the descriptor “New Testament” began to be used for a single collection of texts in the second century. The word “testament” comes from Latin and translates the Greek diathēkē (covenant), which in turn is a translation of the Hebrew word berit. These designations indicate that the texts included in this collection, the New Testament, were thought to describe in a meaningful way God’s covenant with his people and humankind, a covenant that has its center in Jesus, called the Christ.

The term “new covenant” is, however, older than this. It occurs as early as in Jer 31:31–34, where a promise is made that there will come a time when God will make a new covenant with his people Israel. Describing the covenant, the passage continues: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” The Hebrew Bible tells of many covenants, which were made at different points in time during Israel’s history (e.g., between God and Noah, Abraham, the people of Israel at Mount Sinai, and David). In all these cases, the new was not considered to be a replacement or annulment of the old, but rather seen as an addition to what already existed, as a sign of God’s faithfulness. The covenants were complementary in nature, in other words. The term “new” could even carry a negative connotation, as “old” traditions were generally considered better and more trustworthy. An example of this way of thinking may be found in Gal 3:17; a new covenant cannot abolish or supersede an older one (compare 1 Cor 3:10–13).

The literary collection that came to be known as the New Testament was added to and combined with the more ancient Jewish Scriptures, which Jesus’s followers had venerated since the very beginning: the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. This in turn eventually led to the Christians coining the term “Old Testament” as a descriptor for these more ancient texts. The definitive contents of both collections (Old and New Testaments), however, was decided long after these descriptive terms had come into use. In fact, not even today do we find absolute agreement between different church traditions as to exactly which texts should be included in the canon.

From the time when the texts included in the New Testament were written until the time when the collection as such was agreed on, Christianity grew and expanded its presence around and beyond the Mediterranean world. The formation of the canon may be interpreted as an attempt at unifying Christians in order to prevent schisms and to counteract the development of isolated Christian groups that had little in common with others. As a recognized literary collection, the New Testament later also became a tool for mediating and reaching agreements between various Christian groups.

Many groups of Christ followers were marginalized in this historical process. Some of them are named in, for example, the writings of the church fathers, while others will remain unknown to us. In striving to limit diversity, the majority church identified, for better or for worse, what it saw as heretical groups. During the 1900s several sensational finds of papyri in Egypt were made, which have contributed to the fact that we today have access to some of the texts owned and copied by these groups themselves. The latest in this line of discoveries is the Gospel of Judas. The text is mentioned by the church fathers and was published in 2006 after extensive restoration work. Such finds are extremely important, since they make possible a better understanding than ever before of the early Christian movement in all its diversity.

The historical Jesus interpreted in word and deed what were for him the holy texts of the Hebrew Bible. Later, the texts that were written about Jesus himself were at once a result of and an influence on the Jesus movement and emerging Christianity. Thus, text and history become intertwined in a fascinating development that results in the birth of a world religion—a religion that still holds sacred the texts that bear witness to the early centuries’ view on what defines legitimate diversity within Christianity. Throughout history and today, these texts have been and are read and interpre...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by David E. Aune
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 Invitation to Study the New Testament
• 2 Historical Background and Setting
• 3 The Historical Jesus
• 4 The Texts
• 5 The Emergence of Early Christianity
• 6 Readings
• Appendix 1: Nonbiblical Sources
• Appendix 2: Jewish History: A Chronological Overview
• Appendix 3: Maps
• Glossary
• Contributors
• Who Wrote What?
• Bibliography