The wind blows where it wishes; we hear the sound, but cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. The history of first-century religious developments has something of this feel to it. We are listening to the sound, sometimes to the echo, of great and turbulent movements of at least the human spirit, and perhaps the divine; but to trace their origins is extremely difficult. We know something of their eventual destination, since we can observe the same movements in subsequent centuries; but we cannot be sure that Judaism and Christianity developed as their early adherents expected or intended.
We have been engaged in the study of the literature, history and theology of Judaism and Christianity at one of their most traumatic moments: the birth of the latter, and the death and rebirth of the former. In our retelling of the stories of these first-century movements, we have hoped to move in the direction of a realist, albeit a thoroughly critical, understanding of their history. In particular, we have examined the stories that these movements themselves told, in order to arrive at an understanding of their own self-awareness. At the end of the day, we are confronted with a striking fact: towards the end of the first century there were two recognizably distinct communities, each making more or less the same claim. Within fifty years of the death of Jesus, by the time that Ignatius and Akiba were young men, those who saw themselves as Jesus’ followers were claiming that they were the true heirs of the promises made by the creator god to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and that the Jewish scriptures were to be read in terms of a new fulfilment. At the same time, as Judaism reconstructed itself in the aftermath of AD 70, the ground upon which it stood was the same: the creator god would somehow, despite all appearances, remain faithful to the covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and he would make his will known in the scriptures, read now as Torah.
We have seen that, as was inevitable unless such communities were totally isolated from each other, the two clashed in various ways. Christianity’s claim to be the true tenants of the vineyard was, naturally, resented, just as the Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes had long resented each other’s competing claims. So, far from being mutually isolated, Christianity and Judaism were, for the first generation at least, intertwined in ways that must at the time have seemed quite inextricable. The community of Jews knew that the Way of Jesus had been born and nurtured in their midst; the early Christians knew it too. Nor was it even clear to many first-generation followers of Jesus that there were in fact two communities. In the very early days, when, according to Acts, Jews were sometimes converted in large numbers, some people undoubtedly thought that the ethnic people of the creator god, and the new community created in and around Jesus, would end up coterminous.
Two communities; two different readings of scripture; two ways of self-understanding; one common root. The questions that face any student of this phenomenon must then be: why did it happen in this way? What does it ‘mean’? Can we test the claims, and if so what do we find? The three focal points that emerge as we engage with these issues are the questions of Jesus, of the New Testament, and, finally, the question of god.
The historian of the first century, faced with the evidence we have studied in this book, cannot shrink from the question of Jesus. We may feel that the evidence may be insufficient to say very much; that the results of such a quest may be theologically dubious; or that there will not be very much that is new to say. But the existence of the double community, these two ‘peoples of god’, Jewish and Christian, forces the historian to look at origins, whether or not this is congenial or difficult, tortuous or risky. We must ask: why did this Jewish sect, out of all the other groups and movements within the first century, develop in this way, so strikingly different from all others? And, whenever we approach the early Christian writings with this question, we have a strong sense that it was not simply a matter of the sect’s early corporate decisions, enthusiasm, shrewd planning or anything else. It was something to do with Jesus.1
This points us inexorably towards the task which awaits us in the next volume, for which the present one is in many ways preparatory. Who was Jesus? What were his aims? Why, historically speaking, did he die? And why, granted all this, did early Christianity turn out as it did? What exactly happened at Easter, to cause this new movement to come to birth in this form, making these claims? Jesus stands between the two communities, living and working within that first-century Judaism which we mapped out in Part III, and being claimed as the starting-point of the community we mapped out in Part IV. The community of his followers remained recognizably Jewish, and yet redrew its belief and life in significantly new ways. The only means by which we can finish off this historical jigsaw lies in attempting to answer these basic questions about Jesus himself. We have seen in earlier chapters that the stories, large and small, in the New Testament, and in a good many of the other early Christian writings, do indeed purport to speak of Jesus, despite suggestions to the contrary within twentieth-century scholarship. On this basis, we can and must move cautiously forward, to engage seriously with the enormously difficult task of reconstructing the history that lies between the work of John the Baptist and the emergence of the Christian church.
The historian faces the question of Jesus; the theologian, the question of god. The literary critic—and at this point historians and theologians are compelled to be literary critics as well—faces the question of the New Testament. What is to be done with it?
I argued in Parts I and II of this book for a holistic reading of the New Testament that would retell its stories faithfully, that would allow its overtones as well as its fundamentals to be attended to. The outworking of that task is, from one point of view, a matter for the commentator and the preacher as much as for the historian and theologian. But these latter must insist that one can only understand the New Testament by seeing its component parts as straddling the two worlds from which Christianity was born. It is a Jewish book, telling Jewish-style stories, yet telling them for the world. It is a book of the world, retelling the story of the world as the story of Israel, and the story of Israel as the story of Jesus, in order to subvert the world’s stories, and to lay before the world the claim of Jesus to be its sovereign. It is a Christian book, pouring new wine into the old bottles of Judaism, and new Jewish wine into the old bottles of the world, intending that this double exercise should have its inevitable and explosive double effect.
Thus it is that (what we now call) the New Testament can only properly be understood if we recognize that it is a collection of writings from precisely thus community, the subversive community of a new would-be ‘people of god’. These writings, moreover, were not written in order to provide merely an account of first-century Christianity, as though by a detached observer. Nor were they merely a commentary on it, as though first-century Christianity were a thing in itself, and the writings in question were a discussion or theological analysis of it conducted from behind an invisible glass screen. They were part of that complex entity, first-century Christianity, itself. Though we must of course use the New Testament as our main evidence for our own description and analysis of first-century Christianity, since there is no better evidence available, we must do so in the knowledge and recognition that it was not designed primarily for this use. The writing of the books that now form the New Testament arose naturally from within the daily life of the early church. The task of writing was interwoven with preaching and praying, with mission, sacrament and reflection. If the New Testament is to find an appropriate reading, it will be one which takes all this fully into account.2
The question as to what one should do with the New Testament, however, is hereby restated, not solved. It is hard to see what kind of an obligation one might be under to treat any book exactly as its author wished. There may, nevertheless, be some kind of sliding scale of potential treatments. If we may revert to an illustration from chapter 1: to use Shakespeare’s plays as the basis for a study of Elizabethan society or language does not reflect the intention of the author, but it may be quite a worthy task, and one of which the author would not in principle have disapproved, unless it got to the point at which readers seemed to be forgetting that these were plays, meant to be staged. To use the same book to prop up a broken table-leg, however, might well be thought outside the bounds of appropriateness. In the same way, there may be a sliding scale of appropriateness for the use of the New Testament. It may quite properly be used to reconstruct the life, language, religion and beliefs of the early Christians, provided we remember that it was not written for that purpose, but rather as something more like a play to be staged, that is, as a charter for a community, a set of books designed (in their very different ways) to fuel worship and witness. To use these books, as they have often been used, to prop up the broken leg of this or that theological, political or pietist scheme looks like falling off the end of the scale of appropriateness. The New Testament must, ultimately, be treated in a way that allows it to remain itself. Just as the Talmud is not appropriately used if it is quarried to provide spurious validation for distorted would-be ‘Christian’ readings of Judaism, so the New Testament cannot be used in ways which violate its basic identity and integrity. Or, if it is so used, any impression that such use carries some kind of authority must be firmly rejected.
We thus return, by a circuitous route, to the question which occupied us in chapters 1 and 5. What sort of authority does the New Testament possess? If the answer is, as it has often been, that the New Testament is the closest historical witness to the origin and rise of Christianity, some will object. Q, if we possessed it, would be earlier; if someone dug it up in the sands of Egypt, would we bind it up in Bibles along with Matthew, Mark and Luke? The Gospel of Thomas, some say, is earlier; if this were really so, ought it to be regarded as more authoritative than the canon as it now stands? The impression often given by the supporters of an early date for Thomas is that we should. Yet this idea is based on the belief that early Christianity is automatically normative; and this belief is self-contradictory, since nobody in early Christianity itself seems to have believed that earliness implied normativity.
The question looks as if it might begin, once more, to lurch to and fro along the epistemological scale. At one end we have Wrede’s positivism: the Christian canon is irrelevant, the task is mere description of facts, and nothing in the past can be regarded as normative for the present. At the other, we have the ghetto of subjectivism: Christians regard the New Testament as ‘their’ book, a private text, which means something to them, and which cannot be expected to mean the same thing, or indeed necessarily anything much, to anyone else. As a third option, the critical realism we suggested earlier might support a model of authority linked to narrative. The New Testament offers itself, both explicitly and implicitly, as a set of stories, and a single Story, which, like all stories, lays claim to attention. It does this even when treated simply as myth: someone innocent of history, but at home in the world of fairy stories, or indeed of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, could well find the New Testament powerful and evocative. This mythological power is in no way lost, but in fact enhanced, when historical study suggests that something very like this story actually happened. That, of course, is the point at which the relativist’s account of the whole process is called into question, which is precisely why, in a relativistic age, the move from ‘simply myth’ to history-as-myth, or myth-as-history, is so often attacked. But that is the move that our whole study suggests and commends. If we read the New Testament as it stands, it claims on every page to be speaking of things which are true in the public domain. It is not simply, like so many books, a guide for private spiritual advancement. To read it like that is like reading Shakespeare simply to pass an examination. The New Testament claims to be the subversive story of the creator and the world, and demands to be read as such. Any authority it exercises in the process will be a dynamic, not a static, authority; the New Testament will not impose itself from a great height, and to attempt to use it in that fashion is at once to falsify it. Its claim is less brittle, and, if true, more powerful. It offers itself as the true story, the true myth, the true history of the whole world.
Cognate with the question of the New Testament, finally, is the question which will haunt this project all through. If the historian cannot escape the question of Jesus, nor the literary critic the question of the New Testament, the theologian cannot escape the question of god. Here, too, the historian and the literary critic, if they are true to their own subject-matter, will find that that subject-matter calls into question any specialization which excludes the question of god from consideration. Ultimately, as we saw in Part II, history, literature and theology belong together.
The question of god, though conspicuous by its absence from the great majority of books about the New Testament, is in fact the question which lies at the root of most if not all of the issues which are more frequently discussed. The question of Paul and the law is at bottom a question about god. The issues raised by the gospel of Matthew, or the book of Revelation, are at their heart questions about god. So we could go on. These questions look initially as though they presuppose agreement about the referent of the word ‘god’ itself, and simply enquire about what precisely this (known) god wants, has done, intends to do. But increasingly they begin to look as though they are probing to a deeper stage, so that literally nothing is assumed: they are enquiring after the meaning of the word ‘god’ itself. Who precisely is this god of whom the Jewish scriptures had spoken, the god who made himself known to Abraham, Moses, David and the prophets? Which community (of the two in question, at least) is speaking truly, or at least more truly, about this god? Increasingly, as early Christianity develops, there is a strong sense that new claims are being made at this fundamental level, not only in language but also in symbol and praxis, not least in the symbolic praxis of reading the Jewish scriptures in a new way:
It is the contention of [the New Testament writers] that with the coming of Jesus the whole situation of mankind has so altered as to change the semantic content of the word ‘God’.3
This fact about the New Testament, I suggest, provides one of the best clues to explain why, even when the question of god has not been explicitly raised, these writings have been felt to contain a power and appeal, an intrinsic authority. They are written, in their different ways, to articulate and invite their hearers to share a new worldview which carries at its heart a new view of ‘god’, and even a proposal for a way of saying ‘God’.
Judaism and Christianity each claimed to be the ‘people of god’, and meant by that word ‘god’ the transcendent being who had created the world, who guided and directed its life and course, who had entered into covenant with Israel, and who, both communities believed, would one day act, precisely as the creator and covenant god, to put the entire world to rights and to rescue his true people from oppression. But if there were two such distinct communities, each making this claim, the historian’s question, how this came to be so, will be matched by the theologian’s questions: are these two claims equally coherent? Is there any way of telling whether one or other might have made more sense from the perspective of the first century? Which of them makes more sense to us? What might it mean for a community in a subsequent generation, whether in the second or the twentieth century, to claim continuity with one or other of these communities?
To this complex of questions some have sought to reply: the two systems are simply different. Each, no doubt, makes sense in its own world of discourse, but comparing them, within a first-, never mind a twentieth-century, perspective, makes no sense:
Judaism and Christianity are completely different religions, not different versions of one religion … The two faiths stand for different people talking about different things to different people.4
There is something to be said for this as an approach to mutual understanding and common dialogue in the twentieth century. Whatever tasks or obligations Judaism and Christianity conceive themselves as having towards each other in our own generation, those tasks cannot be advanced, nor those obligations discharged, by imagining ourselves simply as odd variants of each other, Christians as Jews manqués or vice versa. Yet, when we move in the world of the first century, the claim of utter differentiation seems to me quite obviously false—just as false, in fact, as the claim, which is also sometimes advanced, that the two religions are really just the same, so that one may elide the two movements into each other, downplaying differences, smoothing off rough corners and edges, and producing an inoffensive but historically incredible picture of both.5
Neusner is too good a historian to accept this latter proposal. Yet his thesis of complete difference is, in its way, equally relativistic. In seeking to do justice to, and even to honour, such (to him) remote religious features as Roman Catholic veneration of Mary, Neusner is in danger of making both Judaism and Christianity simply different distorting windows on the one divine reality. Ultimately, the two proposals (1. our religions are really the same; 2. our religions are completely different responses to the same god) lead to the same destination: if none of us is so very clear about the meaning of the word ‘god’, we can simply recognize our differences while admitting that they are not ultimately very important. And that suggestion, while attractive within both modernism and postmodernism, has little if anything in common with the world (or worlds) of Judaism and Christianity in the first century. The question of the meaning of the word ‘god’ therefore lies at the heart of the account we give of the first-century communities that we have been studying.
What claims, then, are advanced for the meaning of the word ‘god’? As I said in the Preface, justifying my use of the lower case for the initial ‘g’, it can be highly misleading to think of ‘God’ as though the word were univocal. A prime example of this occurs in Neusner’s attempt to hold Judaism and Christianity at arm’s length from each other:
What other understanding can we seek [in common with each other]? My answer derives from the commonplace fact that, after all, we really do worship one God, who is the same God, and who is the only God, we [i.e. Jews and Christians] and the Muslims with us. Within that common ground of being, a human task before us emerges. It is to seek in the religious experience of the other, the stranger and outsider, that with which we within our own world can identify.6
An ‘Enlightenment’ agenda and proposal, indeed. It is a ‘commonplace’ that those who use the word ‘God’ mean the same thing by it; all that this leaves us to do is to explore ‘religious experience’. The trouble with this is that it projects an eighteenth-century way of doing theology back on to the first century, and, in so doing, distorts. In the first century, claims about any god could become controversial, even polemical. The claims made by pagans for their gods, over against Israel’s god, were regularly polemical in the sense of accompanying actual military, social and economic oppression.7 Israel’s counter-claim was always polemical vis-à-vis the whole pagan world: her literature abounded with tales of pagans coming to acknowledge her god as the true one,8 or of her god doing battle with the pagan gods and defeating them.9 The whole point of the glad shout on Israel’s watchtowers after the defeat of Babylon is that that event will demonstrate Israel’s god to be the true king, and Babylon’s to be a mere idol:
How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger
who announces peace, who brings good news,
Who announces salvation, who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns.’
YHWH has bared his holy arm before the eyes of all the nations;
and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God.10
Within later Judaism, the same polemic is applied over and over again to Christianity. Christians say that they worship a god who is both three and one, which Jews see as compromising monotheism; Christians say that Jesus is the full and complete revelation of this one god, which Jews regard as a paganization of the god in whom they believe, almost a contradiction in terms.11 In a work which many date as early as the first century, but which certainly reflects attitudes at a period not much later, one rabbi declares that the Minim (‘heretics’, probably including Christians) ‘know Him [i.e. Israel’s god] and yet deny Him’,12 the reason being that they have introduced into the pure Jewish idea of god the belief that Jesus is, in an ontological and not merely a messianic sense, the ‘son of god’. Christianity thus becomes in Jewish eyes a form of paganism, and is castigated to this day by some writers on exactly this ground.13 (Several Christian writers, believing that Judaism was a degenerate form of religion, have been happy to go along with the historical judgment behind this assessment.)
This critique, however, does no justice to early Christianity, just as generations of ‘Christian’ critiques have done no justice to first-century Judaism. In the first century, as we saw in the previous chapter, the claim was regularly advanced that the god of Israel had now made himself known in and through, and even as, Jesus and the divine spirit. For the historian of first-century theologies, there can be no getting away from the choice which the two communities posed. Judaism claimed that Christianity, by putting Jesus in the middle of its doctrine of god, had irreparably damaged that doctrine. Christianity claimed that mainline Judaism, in clinging to the idea of national privilege and not recognizing the righteous saving act of her own god in the death and resurrection of Jesus, had stepped aside from the covenant. Both religions claimed that they were giving the true meaning to the word ‘god’, in line with prior scriptural revelation, and that the other was not.
For the first-century Jew, Torah was non-negotiable as divine revelation; the Christians seemed to be sitting loose to it; therefore, the Christians were wrong. The defence of Israel’s Temple and Land against pagan pollution was, for many Jews, a non-negotiable part of the task laid upon Israel by her god; Christians ignored these tasks; therefore, the Christians were wrong, not just about a detail, but about Israel’s god. Conversely, for the early Christians, the death and resurrection of Jesus were the full revelation in action of the one god, the great divine act for which Israel had been waiting; further, this meant that Israel’s god, the world’s creator, had made himself known uniquely in Jesus. Pagans and Jews alike refused to acknowledge this Jesus, and hence to recognize this god in what he had done. Even when common ground is sought, as in Romans 1, or the Areopagus speech, or Romans 9–11, the argument is precisely that though pagans and Jews are confronted by the true god, they have refused to submit to the reality of who he is.14 Paul, John and the others steer a delicate course in order to avoid dualism (non-Christians know nothing whatever of the true god), paganism (we worship our god, you worship yours, and we go our separate ways), deism (the deity is distant, and we cannot know much about it), and relativism (we all follow different paths up the same misty mountain). The New Testament writers claim that, though there is only one god, all human beings of themselves cherish wrong ideas about this one god. In worshipping the god thus wrongly conceived, they worship an idol. Pagans worship gods of wood and stone, distorting the creator by worshipping the creature. Jews, Paul argues in parallel with this, have made an idol of their own national identity and security, and so have failed to see what the covenant faithfulness of their god, the god of Abraham, had always entailed.15 Christians, as the addressees of the New Testament writings, are clearly not exempt from the possibility of idolatry, of using the words ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’ while in fact worshipping a different god.16 Our study of the history of Judaism and Christianity in the first century leads us inexorably to the conclusion that both cannot be right in their claims about the true god.
Both might, of course, be wrong. The Stoics might be right: there is one god, since the whole world is divine, and we humans are part of it. The Epicureans, and their modern successors the Deists, might be right: there is a god, or possibly more than one, whom none of us knows very well and all of us distantly acknowledge, with ignorance and distortion. The pagans might be right: there are different ‘divine’ forces in the world, which need to be propitiated when angry, and harnessed to one’s own advantage when not. The Gnostics might be right: there is a good, hidden god who will reveal himself to some of us, thereby rescuing us from this wicked world of matter and flesh, which are the creation of an evil god. Or the modern atheists or materialists might be right. There is no neutral ground here. We are at the level of worldview, and here ultimate choices are involved. The claim of first-century Judaism, and of subsequent Judaism, is that the creator of the world has revealed himself in Torah in ways which simply do not allow for the claims of Stoicism, Epicureanism, paganism, Gnosticism and the rest—or for those of Christianity. The claim of Christianity from its earliest days, and subsequently, is that the creator of the world, the god of Abraham, has revealed himself through Jesus, and through his own spirit, in ways which disallow the various pagan claims—and also those of a Judaism that rejects Jesus. This conclusion is of course unpalatable in a world (our own) that has been dominated by neo-Epicureanism with its distant, unknowable divinities. It is all the more unpalatable in view of the ugly resurgence of violence between soi-disant ‘religious’ communities, however much it may be shown that the generating force of the violence has nothing to do with the religion in whose name it is perpetrated. But it represents the way things were seen in the first century, within the two communities that claimed to be the people of the one true god.
How might one decide between these competing claims? First-century Jews looked forward to a public event, a great act of liberation for Israel, in and through which their god would reveal to all the world that he was not just a local, tribal deity, but the creator and sovereign of all. YHWH would reveal his salvation for Israel in the eyes of all the nations; the ends of the earth would see that he had vindicated his people. The early Christians, not least in the writings that came to be called the New Testament, looked back to an event in and through which, they claimed, Israel’s god had done exactly that. On this basis, the New Testament, emerging from within this strange would-be ‘people of god’, told the story of that people as a story rooted in Israel’s past, and designed to continue into the world’s future. It repeated the Jewish claim: this story concerns not just a god but God. It revised the Jewish evidence: the claim is made good, not in national liberation, but in the events concerning Jesus.