James Crossley
Introduction
In this essay I want to look at the longer-term trends in mainstream, critical New Testament studies over the twentieth century and the pivotal function played by the approximate period 1914–1918, including this period’s ongoing relevance in understanding scholarly trends. By ‘this period’ I am obviously referring to the First World War, but I want to include in this categorization something which is closely connected but less likely to be included in social histories of scholarship: the Russian Revolution.
It is probably worth stressing that in this essay I am less concerned with personal motivations – important though they are, as other contributors show – and more with the dominant discourses presented in New Testament studies, which may or may not contradict personal motivations. In particular, I want to look at specific issues in understanding the sharp ideological changes in the history of New Testament scholarship which revolve our period. I will focus on the uses of social history and social sciences in New Testament scholarship because they highlight well some of the (sometimes unconscious) ideological battles taking place in the significant changes in its use before and after the First World War (namely from a serious interest in socio-historical contextualization of Christian origins to almost ignoring such possibilities for decades). Rather than focus only on the period at hand, I want instead to look at the bigger picture of twentieth-century scholarship and wider historical and cultural trends that can help explain why such shifts might have happened. These shifts are tied in with the political situation in Germany after the First World War, the rise of Nazism and the fear of the growth of Soviet Union (and atheistic Marxism) after 1917. But first, an overview of social-historical and social-scientific scholarship of the New Testament is needed before we move on to analyses of changes in scholarly discourse.
Social-Historical and Social-Scientific Scholarship of the New Testament
It is commonly argued that between the 1920s and the 1970s (approximately) there was a near absence of social-historical approaches to the New Testament and Christian origins. Prior to the First World War, there were discussions of the social world and experiences of the first Christians or Jesus-followers, and ideas about the Christian message meeting certain societal needs, definitions of class and class interests, and the significance of the language of cults and religious or mystical experiences, which were understood in distinction from the more abstract history of dogma and theology. Indeed, given that such contributions to the social context of early Christianity came from major scholars such as Gerhard Uhlhorn, Adolf Deissmann, Ernst Troeltsch and Adolf von Harnack, we can reasonably call this trend ‘mainstream’.1 We might add to this that there were significant Marxist contributions to the study of Christian origins from figures as prominent as Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky.2 These Marxists may no longer be at the forefront of scholarly memory of the history of New Testament studies, but they were once taken seriously (even if in rejection) and continued to be considered important works in leftist circles over the century. While Europe (and Germany, in particular) were the centre of biblical scholarship, there were also major contributions emerging from North America. In the 1920s and early 1930s, the ‘Chicago School’ (and Shirley Jackson Case, in particular) challenged the relevance of a ‘history of dogma’ approach to Christian origins through promoting the importance of understanding social context, adaptation, rivalry, confrontation and growth.3 Nevertheless, the 1920s can still be seen as marking a period of declining interest in the social context of Christian origins, as the Chicago Divinity School would shift towards philosophy of religion and textual criticism of the New Testament.4 This shift is well highlighted by Frederick C. Grant’s The Economic Background of the Gospels, which was published in 1926 but, despite what might be thought to be a crucial topic, remained the standard work in 1973 when the second edition appeared.5
There are, then, good reasons why New Testament scholars think that the 1920s should mark the end of an era in the interest in understanding Christian origins in terms of its social context and social history. There were notable contributions in the decades that followed, particularly Edwin A. Judge’s The Social Pattern of the Christian Groups in the First Century in 1960,6 but it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that there was a sustained interest and broader developments in such matters, this time marked by a use of social-scientific methods, models and theories, as the work of, for instance, Gerd Theissen, Robin Scroggs, Wayne Meeks, John Gager and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza came to the fore.7 This new wave of scholarship would be taken up from the 1980s onwards by Bruce Malina and the Context Group, who would focus intensely on honour and shame and the Mediterranean Other, and how a somewhat static notion of ‘the Mediterranean (world)’ or even ‘the Arab (world)’ seemingly provide a crucial point of cultural comparison.8 Today, a wide variety of approaches are employed, and social-scientific or social-historical approaches to the New Testament and Christian origins have become normalized to the point that areas not typically classified as being ‘social scientific’ will incorporate such thinking as a matter of routine.9 The usual explanation for the shift toward social-scientific criticism in the 1970s includes the prominence of 1960s’ protest movements, the increasing influence of sociology in the universities, declining church numbers, perceptions of secularism and the impact of decolonization. I have added several other reasons, including the development of explicitly non-Marxist (and therefore more palatable) social-scientific/anthropological approaches (e.g. Keith Thomas on magic), translations of Weber into English, shifts in West German historiography away from the cult of the individual toward trends and themes, and intense Orientalist interest in ‘the Arab’, ‘the Muslim’ and ‘the Persian’, and accompanying geographical and cultural ‘areas’, which were tied up with Anglo-American foreign policy interests.10
Why did Social-Scientific Criticism Wither after the First World War?
The further relevance of the (re-)emergence of such approaches to the New Testament will hopefully become clearer by the time this essay is concluded. But to put the focus back on our period, the demise of social-scientific or social-historical scholarship from the 1920s onwards is striking. It was near inevitable that major historical events and developments (e.g. the German defeat, the humiliation of Versailles, the rise of fascism and Hitler, and the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the rise of the Soviet Union) would have a profound impact on scholarship. Some of this should be clear enough and is repeatedly mentioned in scholarship. For instance, in terms of intellectual history and a prominent reaction to the horrors of the war, the influence on New Testament studies (intentionally or otherwise) of Karl Barth, Dialectical Theology and the stress on the radical otherness of the Gospel was in sharp contrast to the ‘social gospel’ of liberal Protestant theology. We might view the rise of the New Testament version of form criticism pioneered by Martin Dibelius and Rudolf Bultmann as functioning in a similar way, in the sense that its popularity took off after the war with its stress on the radical otherness of the kerygma. At first sight, this may seem strange, as one of the key terms of form criticism was ‘Sitz im Leben’, that is, the setting in life. However, it was the ‘Sitz im Glauben’, the setting in faith, which dominated, as Bultmann emphasized that theological truth was to be found in the seemingly transcendent Gospel of John or the radical kerygmatic pronouncements of the church.11 What is striking in this respect is that the option for a greater stress on social context was still available despite the post-war distancing. In a 1925 essay, Oscar Cullman suggested that form criticism should interact more with a specialized form of sociology devoted to the analysis of laws allegedly governing the growth of popular traditions.12 Philip Esler has claimed that if Cullmann’s suggestion had been put into practice, different results might have followed. We might reformulate this for questions relating to the history of scholarship: Why did Cullmann’s view not get taken up?13
We need to look for further explanations to answer this question sufficiently, including to the depth of anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic sentiments in New Testament scholarship. We could, for instance, turn to an inherited tradition of European nationalism, the Jewish Question and anti-Semitism which was about to become even more prominent in central Europe as form criticism emerged. As Halvor Moxnes has shown, historical Jesus scholarship of the nineteenth century was part of developing notions of European nationalism, which could include (as in the work of Renan, for instance) constructions of a negative Jewish Other, represented by a dark (Jewish) Judea and a more enlightened Galilee.14 The history of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism that emerged in New Testament scholarship from the nineteenth century onward, and its use of Jews and Judaism as a negative foil, is now increasingly well known.15 This history might include the Germanophile Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who was developing the notion of Aryan and Germanic settlements in Galilee (and thus a potentially Aryan Jesus), through to similarly infamous later examples of Nazi sympathizers such as Walter Grundmann, K. G. Kuhn or Gerhard Kittel. The latter famously edited the influential Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament/Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT), with the early contributions (such as those by Grundmann and Kuhn) being riddled with anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism.16
Post-Versailles Germany and the rise of German fascism was obviously crucial to the intensification and prominence of anti-Semitic scholarship, but again there were alternatives available which can further help us understand why Cullmann’s option was not pursued. The British Jewish scholar Israel Abrahams (1858–1925) and his Studies in Pharisaism and the Gospels (1917/24) were, in some ways, a precursor to the work of Geza Vermes.17 In America, George Foot Moore’s work on early Judaism was, in some ways, a precursor to the work of E. P. Sanders.18 Writing in the 1930s and fleeing from Nazi Germany, the German anarchist Rudolf Rocker’s work on nationalism and culture was a damning critique of religion and the state but was scathing of Chamberlain-style scholarship, the turn to racial theories and avoidance of anything Jewish, as well as critiques of historical claims of Germanic tribes in Galilee.19 Here, decades before E. P. Sanders, Rocker was attacking the rhetoric of Judaism being about dead ritualism or slavish obedience. But none of this sort of critique would be typical of the direction New Testament studies would take. The dominance of the political and cultural context in Germanic scholarship, in particular, is crucial for understanding the history of scholarship because it is clear that the Rocker option was not a serious one – indeed, his publications were stopped by the Nazis.
Rather, the dominant scholarly tendency can be best understood by the direction mainstream and non-Nazi New Testament scholarship of the Bultmannian variety took, in that it would repeat clichés like Judaism being a religion of cold, harsh legalism, or, indeed, one of dead ritualism or slavish obedience. This sort of scholarship would help enable the more extreme anti-Semitic scholarship to maintain credibility and, with Bultmann’s post-war popularity continuing, shows how deeply embedded anti-Jewish tropes could even continue after the Holocaust. Of course, Bultmann (an early contributor to TDNT) and other German Christians were opposed to Nazism. Nevertheless, it remains that the dominant anti-Jewish tendencies come through in Lutheran- or Bultmann-influenced pre- and post-Second World War scholarship. Despite isolated attempts, it was not until the famous critique presented by Sanders in Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977), and the emergence of North America as the centre of biblical scholarship, that this became clear in a significantly widespread manner in New Testament studies.20 To get some idea of how embedded such anti-Jewish assumptions were before Sanders, we might note that even scholars on the Left in the 1960s, such as Bultmann’s student Ernst Käsemann, could still claim (both on radio and in print) that Paul was firing at ‘the hidden Jew in all of us, at the man who validates rights and demands over against God on the basis of God’s past dealings with him and to this extent is serving not God but an illusion’.21 Certainly Markus Barth – a harbinger of changing times perhaps – reacted to Käsemann as we might have wished others would, but the general sociopolitical context from which early form criticism and interwar Lutheran-influenced scholarship emerged still had a powerful hold on biblical scholarship.22 This broad anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic cultural context helps us explain why Cullmann’s lead was not followed and why form criticism failed in providing a sustained setting in life, as well as (as Maurice Casey argued) how it effectively avoided knowledge of the Jewish man Jesus.23 If German form criticism had stressed the life setting, it would have had to look at Gospel traditions in the context of everyday social settings and Jewish life throughout the Roman Empire, which would not have easily cohered with the interests of New Testament scholarship, whether Nazis or their opponents.
The Spectre of Communism
The significance of post-First World War Germany and the transformations brought about by the Great War should be clear enough for understanding such developments, and they have been increasingly recognized in scholarship. But we need to include the impact of the Russian Revolution in our explanations because this is typically lacking, especially in histories of social-scientific scholarship. That Marxism and Marxists were seen as problematic around our period is hardly news. Prominent Marxists, including Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg, went against the Social Democratic Party and opposed the war, while Luxemburg’s revolutionary activity led to her murder in 1919. Deep suspicion and fear of Marxism and Communism was intensified by revolutionary activity carried out by 1919, but this fear had, of course, been fermenting since Marx. The period Gerd Theissen and Ralph Hochschild designate as the first period of research into the social context of earliest Christianity (1870–1920) was linked with liberal Protestant attitudes towards church and state and an interest in historical contextualization. Additionally, however, liberal Protestantism also incorporated an apologetic tendency in its disputes with the labour movement and Marxism.24 The establishment of the Evangelisch-sozialer Kongress in 1890 and luminaries such as Deissmann (himself involved in the non-Marxist Left with Nationalsozialer Verein) and Harnack are important in this respect. This tendency involved providing an alternative to Marxism, Kautsky and the Social Democratic Party on issues of industrialization in Germany, which was attracting working class support. The Evangelisch-sozialer Kongress developed their own Lutheran social gospel, even if the stress was still more on history of ideas or religious thought than hard socio-economic questions. And so we find arguments such as those of Harnack, which suggested that the poor were inspired by Christian preaching and a revolutionary message of love and compassion, even if Jesus was not a revolutionary in the strict sociopolitical (or Marxist) sense. In a similar vein, Deissmann lectured on ‘Das Urchristentum und die unteren Schichten’ (‘Primitive Christianity and the Lower Classes’) at the nineteenth meeting in Dessau, 1908. This included criticisms of Kautsky and Albert Kalthoff’s argument that, against the Great Man view of history, the earliest Jesus movement was socialist.25
For Deissmann, then, Christianity was not to be seen as a revolutionary proletarian movement with the aim to radically restructure society. Such views come through in Deissmann’s major work. In Light from the Ancient East (Licht vom Osten), he conceded that Kaltoff was a ‘gifted writer’, who ‘certainly had a heart for the lower orders of the people’, but was
not fitted to be the historian or even the historical philosopher of the origins of our faith, and his attempt to democratise Primitive Christianity was doomed to failure because he had not by the tedious process of detailed work made himself at home among the mass of humanity in the Imperial period.26
Deissmann had a similar view of Kautsky, who was contrasted with Troeltsch’s ‘real familiarity with the modern scientific study of antiquity’.27 The fourth edition of Light from the Ancient East also includes Appendix XI, which continued his attacks. For Deissmann, early Christianity did partly originate among the lower classes, but this was understood against Kautsky and Kaltoff; such ancient historical developments had to be the right individualist kind of origins which involved ‘investigating the real psyche of the masses and ultimately discovering within the masses the leading personalities who made the individual to be an individual indeed and raised him out of the masses’. In this same context, we even get Deissmann’s romantic construction of a kind of labouring class apostolic succession:
Even when Christianity has risen from the workshop and the cottage to the palace and the schools of learning, it did not desert the workshop and the cottage. The living roots of Christianity remained in their native soil – the lower ranks of society – and regularly in the cycle of years, when autumn had gathered the topmost leaves and the dry boughs had snapped beneath the storms of winter, the sap rose upward and woke the buds from slumber with promise of blossom . . . Jesus the carpenter and Paul the weaver of tent cloth mark the beginnings, and again at the most momentous crisis in the history of later Christianity there comes another homo novus in the person of Luther, the miner’s son and peasant’s grandson.28
In the longer run, engagement with contemporary Marxist thinkers effectively remained in these pre-First World War debates, or it otherwise typically avoided engagement with post-1917 Marxists as the Soviet Union became increasingly powerful and distinctly Other. This probably happened on both ‘sides’. While interest in biblical studies did not vanish from mainstream Marxist thinkers (e.g. Ernst Bloch), there were no prominent or influential Western Marxist works like those of Engels and Kautsky on Christian origins, even though interest from behind the Iron Curtain remained.29 Nevertheless, the spectre of Communism continued to stalk New Testament studies, and plenty of dismissals (offhand or otherwise) can he found in critical scholarship. A particularly telling and prominent example is Günther Bornkamm who, in his book on the historical Jesus from 1956, discussed the parallels between Bolshevism and Jesus on the issue of eschatology, and unsurprisingly concluded that there were profound and incompatible differences.30 Furthermore, in an appendix, Bornkamm looked at the Sermon on the Mount, where he dismissed the ideas of ‘Kautzky and others’ which involved Jesus the revolutionary of the lower classes wanting to create a new social order.31 What is notable about his appendix, as least in terms of fear of a seemingly older Marxism, is that more space was devoted to this particular tradition than any other, including that associated with Albert Schweitzer or the Lutheran tradition in general (the latter being deemed the most reasonable). This fear of Marxism or related views, while avoiding engagement with contemporary Marxist thinkers, would recur in scholarship into and beyond the 1970s.32 One important example of the ongoing fear of Marxism is from Gerd Theissen, who defended the then bourgeoning social scientific approaches to the New Testament in the 1970s against allegations of being too Marxist:
I must therefore limit myself to a few remarks which I wish were unnecessary . . . Anyone who learns from Marxism and finds it stimulating as a result to apply theories of conflicts in society to the interpretation of social and religious processes is not necessarily a Marxist. Remember Rolf Dahrendorf!33
That Theissen had to defend even the mere influence of, and engagement with, Marxism is a good example of the interests and fears of New Testament scholarship and its wariness of social contextualization of the New Testament. Where Marxist or Marxist-influenced New Testament studies were indeed happening in a more overt manner (e.g. in the work of Luise Schottroff, Fernando Belo, Martin Robbe and Milan Machoveč), this was never taken seriously in mainstream New Testament scholarship and was typically rejected even on the grounds (as Schottroff pointed out) that they were simply Marxist.34 It was not until the 1980s, and especially the 1990s and 2000s (particularly after the fall of Soviet Union), that Marxist-influenced scholarship made a minor comeback in New Testament studies, whether influencing feminist, anti-empire, or postcolonial studies, or through engagement with Marxist scholars (e.g. Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek) working on Christian origins.
Atheism and Christianity
We might, then, point out that the Russian Revolution followed by the rise of the Soviet Union and the Cold War are obvious contexts for explaining this ongoing fear of Marxism and, by implication, understandings of social sciences and social history in New Testament studies. Indeed, we can go one step further and argue that 1917 marked the beginning of the end of social-scientific or social-historical approaches to the New Testament until its revival in the 1970s, when, among other things, non-Marxist sociology became more readily available and left-wing thought was revived for a younger generation (see above). But we should also think about the specifics of the field and make comparisons with others. If we compare, for instance, the field of historical studies generally, Fernand Braudel and the Annales tradition were engaging seriously, even in disagreement, with Marxism after 1917 and during the Cold War. British Marxist historians such as Eric Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson and Christopher Hill would remain Marxists even after 1956 and the controversial speech of Khrushchev and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. The reason for this, I have argued, is that the specifically Christian character of New Testament studies, and its location as part of Theology, contributed significantly to a fear of Marxism.35 With this in mind, we might note, for instance, the largely ignored 1976 English translation of Milan Machoveč, Jesus für Atheisten (1972): A Marxist Looks at Jesus. Does not such a translation process partly reveal two reasons why this book was both novel and overlooked in mainstream New Testament scholarship?36
The seeming synonyms – atheism and Marxism – are significant because the distinctly Christian character of twentieth-century New Testament scholarship is key to understanding why the fallout from the First World War and 1917 was especially important in the decline of social contextualization; from this perspective, atheism was closely associated with the rise of Soviet Russia. And this fear of atheism, or alternatively that a form of Christian exegesis must be assumed correct, was already clear enough in Deissmann, Harnack, Troeltsch and others, and was regularly assumed through Bultmann onward. In his review of the history of social-scientific approaches, Stephen Barton stands in a longer tradition when he warned of a ‘more fundamental’ problem than reductionism and imposition of models in social-scientific criticism of the New Testament, namely ‘the danger of using methods and models and remaining unaware that their philosophical roots lie in Enlightenment epistemological atheism’.37 Whatever the problems of Enlightenment epistemology, atheism was not typically perceived to be a danger to historical studies, social sciences or humanities outside Theology and Religious Studies, as Barton effectively implies. And yet, if there were a lack of awareness of the apparently atheistic origins of social-scientific methods in New Testament studies, then one exception was always going to be Marxism. Certainly, there were Christians who identified as socialists or were members of Communist parties, but it remains that there were also consistent anti-Communist and anti-atheist tendencies reflected in many official lines of churches or attitudes of prominent individuals, and variants are found in pre-First World War scholarship. They are not difficult to find in the more official post-1917 and Cold War church pronouncements, whether Catholic or Protestant (e.g. Popes Pius XII and John Paul II, Second Vatican Council, hostility to Liberation Theology, Martin Niemöller, Otto Dibelius, Church of England clergy, etc.). This was hardly unexpected: it was assumed that Christians faced restriction of religious practice under the Soviet Union, which was constructed widely enough as atheistic.
Another, related problem for a Christianized field of study was that social-scientific approaches to the New Testament were perceived to be ‘reductionist’, ‘explaining away’ Christian origins in terms of socio-economic context, and moving away from ideas, theology, the divine and the influence of ‘Great Men’ like Jesus and Paul.38 Indeed, the language and perceived explanatory force of the Great Man remained strong at the turn of the millennium in, for instance, historical Jesus scholarship and across the ideological spectrum, whether Sanders, Wright, Crossan, Chilton, Meier or the Jesus Seminar.39 The critique of downplaying the individual and accompanying allegations of reductionism has been a standard perception of Marxist and social-scientific approaches for decades. It is striking that what was becoming arguably the most widespread and positive sociological view of Christian origins was also the most individualistic with potential agency: the Weberian charismatic leader.40 A telling example of the significance of Weber for New Testament scholarship, to counter perceived threats of reductionism and Marxism, is highlighted by one of the few mainstream treatments of Marxism in pre-1990s’ scholarship on social-scientific approaches, by Robin Scroggs. Scroggs was prepared to give praise to methodological developments but did not want to entertain Robbe’s idea that Christianity’s emergence was simply a social process or merely a protest against the class exploitation where the importance of Jesus the individual completely disappears, and, crucially for Scroggs’s understanding of Robbe, no Weberian perspective is permitted.41
These sorts of tendencies were effectively present in pre-First World War scholarship (e.g. Harnack, Troeltsch and Deissmann). Indeed, it is the move to social history that was used to promote the uniqueness or superiority of Christian origins among the early pioneers of social-historical approaches. So, for instance, we see such tendencies at work in Gerhard Uhlhorn’s Die christliche Liebestätigkeit in der alten Kirche (ET: Christian Charity in the Ancient Church), where the ancient world was constructed as lacking in the in kind of love that Christianity brought and was unable to develop a concept of charity without Christianity.42 Or, again, Harnack in The Mission and Expansion of Christianity provided an explanation of the success of earliest Christianity in terms of its superior message, a view echoed in more recent works like that of Rodney Stark.43 Here, we might note that in the pre-First World War period, the rise of the importance of social context can be distinguished not only from the more overtly theoretical social-scientific approaches that would gain momentum from the 1970s onwards but also again from the two famous Marxists not typically categorized as New Testament scholars: Engels and Kautsky.44 The stress on social contexts allowed for difference and Christian agency in a way that a perception of modelling human society in a holistic manner through historical materialism seemingly did not.
Concluding Remarks and Thinking Forward
We have seen the reasons why a strong mainstream emphasis on the social world of Christian origins and the New Testament went into sharp decline after the First World War. One reaction to the horrors of the Great War was the rise to prominence and influence of Dialectical Theology, with its stress on the radical otherness of the Gospel. Form criticism (in its New Testament form at least) was compatible with such tendencies, particularly with its kerygmatic interests rather than the promised Sitz im Leben. Also broadly compatible was the rise of fascism, Nazism and anti-Semitism after the humiliation of Versailles, as form criticism was able to avoid locating traditions which would inevitably have involved Jewish social settings. But it was also seen that incorporating 1917 and the Russian Revolution into the scholarly narrative is vital to understanding tendencies in the history of scholarship. The emergence of the Soviet Union, in particular, meant that Marxism and its overt sociological interests was even less likely to be entertained in mainstream New Testament scholarship, some of which was already openly suspicious before 1917. Marxism and the Soviet Union were further an unattractive proposition from the perspective of New Testament scholarship (and, thus, interest in social contextualization) because of their close associations with atheism. Indeed, it took the social upheavals of the 1960s and a new generation of leftist thought to propel social-scientific criticism to the mainstream, despite its suspicious materialist baggage.
If we want to overdo the argument, 1914–1918 ought to be seen as one of the two (maybe three) great turning points in the history of twentieth-century New Testament scholarship and its distinctive emphases. Perhaps the other major one should be the late 1960s and the emergence of North America as the centre of biblical studies, with accompanying major sociocultural upheavals: the Six-Day War and its impact on foreign policy and cultural interests, a new or renewed interest in Israel and Jewishness and the emergence of postmodernity and neoliberalism. This period (rather than, say, the years immediately after 1945) facilitated the rise of the now widespread (though often duplicitous) rhetoric of philo-Semitism (with less fear of Jewish social contexts) and the fragmentation and subcategorizations of the field.45 The years 1914–1918 effectively marked the end of sustained investigations into the social life of the first Christians and helped inaugurate the rise of New Testament form criticism, the leading proponents of which presented the forms sharply detached from social life, and Jewish social life in particular. It marked the end of Marxism and Marxist-tainted social history, more or less until the 1980s onward, with occasional exceptions typically ignored or dismissed. It was claimed of the one-time bishop of Berlin-Brandenburg, Otto Dibelius, that he thought ‘sociology was a form of atheism and that all modern evil started with the French Revolution’.46 A bit strong, perhaps, but this logic might crudely summarize mainstream New Testament studies for several decades following the First World War and the Russian Revolution.
1.Gerhard Uhlhorn, Die christliche Liebestätigkeit in der alten Kirche (Stuttgart: D. Gundert, 1882), ET: Christian Charity in the Ancient Church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1883); Adolf von Harnack, Die Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1902), ET: The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries (New York: Putnam, 1904–5); Adolf Deissmann, Licht vom Osten: das Neue Testament und die neuentdeckten Texte der hellenistisch-römischen Welt (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1908) [4th ed. 1923], ET: Light from the Ancient East: The New Testament Illustrated by Recently Discovered Texts of the Graeco-Roman World (London: Hodder & Stroughton, 1927); Adolf Deissmann, Paulus: Einer kultur- und religionsgeschichtliche Skizze (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1911), ET: Paul: A Study in Social and Religious History (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1957); Ernst Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der christichen Kirchen und Gruppen, Gesammelte Schriften I (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1912), ET: The Social History of the Christian Churches, Vol. I (London and New York: G. Allen & Unwin/Macmillan Co, 1931). For analysis and overview, see Ralph Hochschild, Sozialgeschichtliche Exegese: Entwicklung, Geschichte und Methodik einer neutestamentlichen Forschungsrichtung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), 45–206.
2.Friedrich Engels, ‘On the History of Earliest Christianity (1894)’, in Collected Works Volume 27, Engels: 1890–95, ed. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 447–69; Karl Kautsky, Der Ursprung des Christentums: Eine historische Untersuchung (Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz, 1908), ET: Foundations of Christianity: A Study in Christian Origins (London: Orbach & Chambers, 1925).
3.Shirley Jackson Case, The Social Origins of Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1923); Shirley Jackson Case, The Social Triumph of the Ancient Church (New York and London: Harper, 1933).
4.Robert W. Funk, ‘The Watershed of the American Biblical Tradition: The Chicago School, First Phase, 1892–1920’, JBL 95 (1976): 4–22; Howard Clark Kee, Christian Origins in Sociological Perspective (London: SCM Press, 1980), 17.
5.Frederick C. Grant, The Economic Background of the Gospels (London: Oxford University Press, 1926) [2nd ed. 1973].
6.Edwin A. Judge, The Social Pattern of the Christian Groups in the First Century (London: Tyndale Press, 1960).
7.David G. Horrell, ‘Social-Scientific Interpretation of the New Testament: Retrospect and Prospect’, in Social-Scientific Approaches to New Testament Interpretation, ed. David G. Horrell (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), 3–27.
8.Horrell, ‘Social-Scientific Interpretation’, 6; James G. Crossley, Jesus in an Age of Terror: Scholarly Projects for a New American Century (London: Equinox, 2008), 59–142. The output of Malina and the Context Group has been voluminous but perhaps the most influential work is Bruce J. Malina, The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1981).
9.We only need think of one of the most popular mainstream issues in contemporary Gospel studies, ‘memory’, which is heavily grounded in social-scientific theory and studies. See, e.g. Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006); Dale C. Allison, Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History (London: SPCK, 2010), 1–30; Rafael Rodriguez, Structuring Early Christian Memory: Jesus in Tradition, Performance and Text (London: T&T Clark, 2010); Anthony Le Donne, The Historiographical Jesus: Memory, Typology and the Son of David (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2009); J. Schröter, Jesus von Nazaret: Jude aus Galiläa-Retter der Welt, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2009); Chris Keith, ‘Memory and Authenticity: Jesus Tradition and What Really Happened’, ZNW 102 (2011): 155–77; Chris Keith, Jesus against the Scribal Elite: The Origins of the Conflict (Ada, MI: Baker, 2014); Alan Kirk, ‘Memory Theory and Jesus Research’, in Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus: Volume 1, ed. Tom Holmén and Stanley E. Porter (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 809–42.
10.James G. Crossley, Why Christianity Happened: A Sociohistorical Account of Christian Origins 26–50 CE (Louisville: WJK, 2016), 3–22.
11.Gerd Theissen, Social Reality and the Early Christians: Theology, Ethics and the World of the New Testament (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993), 9–13.
12.Oscar Cullmann, ‘Les récentes etudes sur la formation de la tradition évangélique’, Revue d’Histoire et de Philosophie religieuses 5 (1925): 564–79 (573).
13.Philip F. Esler, Community and Gospel in Luke-Acts: The Social and Political Motivations of Lucan Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 3.
14.Halvor Moxnes, Jesus and the Rise of Nationalism: A New Quest for the Nineteenth Century Historical Jesus (London and New York: I. B. Taurus, 2011).
15.E.g. Geza Vermes, Jesus and the World of Judaism (London: SCM Press, 1983), 64–66; Susannah Heschel, ‘Nazifying Christian Theology: Walter Grundmann and the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life’, Church History 63 (1994): 587–605; Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Maurice Casey, ‘Some Anti-Semitic Assumptions in The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament’, NovT 41 (1999): 280–91; Peter Head, ‘The Nazi Quest for an Aryan Jesus’, JSHJ 2 (2004): 55–89.
16.Casey, ‘Some Anti-Semitic Assumptions’.
17.Israel Abrahams, Studies in Pharisaism and the Gospels, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917/24).
18.E.g. George Foot Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era: The Age of the Tannaim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927).
19.Rudolf Rocker, Nationalism and Culture (Los Angeles: Rocker Publications Committee, 1937).
20.E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (London: SCM Press, 1977).
21.Ernst Käsemann, New Testament Questions of Today (London: SCM Press, 1969), 186.
22.Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 213.
23.Maurice Casey, ‘Who’s Afraid of Jesus Christ? Some Comments on Attempts to Write a Life of Jesus’, in Writing History, Constructing Religion, ed. James G. Crossley and Christian Karner (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 129–46.
24.Theissen, Social Reality, 3–8.
25.For further discussion of the Evangelisch-sozialer Kongress, including its relevance for social-scientific interpretation of the New Testament, see e.g. Steven J. Friesen, ‘Poverty in Pauline Studies: Beyond the So-called New Consensus’, JSNT 26 (2004): 323–61 (323–37). For a summary of the political context of Deissmann, see e.g. Albrecht Gerber, Deissmann the Philologist (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 209–44.
26.Deissmann, Light, 403.
27.Deissmann, Light, 403.
28.Deissmann, Light, 404.
29.P. Kowaliński, ‘The Genesis of Christianity in the Views of Contemporary Marxist Specialists of Religion’, Antonianum 47 (1972): 541–75.
30.Günther Bornkamm, Jesus of Nazareth (London: Hodder & Stroughton, 1960), 102.
31.Bornkamm, Jesus, 223.
32.Crossley, Why Christianity Happened, 3–22. Cf. Friesen, ‘Poverty in Pauline Studies’, 323–37.
33.Gerd Theissen, Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978), 125 n. 40.
34.Luise Schottroff, ‘“Nicht viele Mächtige”: Annäherungen an eine Soziologie des Urchristentums’, Bibel und Kirche 1 (1985): 2–8, ET: ‘“Not Many Powerful”: Approaches to a Sociology of Early Christianity’, in Horrell, Social-Scientific Approaches to New Testament Interpretation, 277–86.
35.Crossley, Why Christianity Happened, 3–22.
36.Milan Machoveč, Jesus für Atheisten (Stuttgart: Kreuz-Verlag, 1972), ET: A Marxist Looks at Jesus (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1976). Other Marxist/Marxist-influenced approaches include Heinz Kreissig, ‘Zur sozialen Zusammensetzung der frühchristlichen Gemeinden im ersten Jahrhundert u.Z.’, Eirene 6 (1967): 91–100; Martin Robbe, Der Ursprung des Christentums (Leipzig: Urania-Verlag, 1967); Fernando Belo, Lecture matérialiste de l’évangile de Marc (Paris: Cerf, 1974), ET: Materialistic Reading of the Gospel of Mark (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1981); Anton Meyer, Der zensierte Jesus: Sociologie des Neuen Testaments (Olten: Walter Verlag, 1983). There are other Marxist approaches which have had virtually no impact on mainstream New Testament studies collected in Kowaliński, ‘Genesis of Christianity’.
37.E.g. Stephen C. Barton, ‘Historical Criticism and Social-Scientific Perspectives in New Testament Study’, in Hearing the New Testament: Strategies for Interpretation, ed. Joel B. Green (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 61–89 (76). Cf. e.g. Daniel J. Harrington, ‘Sociological Concepts and the Early Church: A Decade of Research’, Theological Studies 41 (1980): 181–90 (189); John G. Gager, ‘Shall We Marry Our Enemies? Sociology and the New Testament’, Int 36 (1982): 256–65 (257); Bengt Holmberg, Sociology and the New Testament: An Appraisal (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990), 145–50.
38.See e.g. Edwin A. Judge, ‘The Social Identity of the First Christians: A Question of Method in Religious History’, JRH 11 (1980): 201–17; Cyril S. Rodd, ‘On Applying a Sociological Theory to Biblical Studies’, JSOT 19 (1981): 95–106.
39.James G. Crossley, Jesus and the Chaos of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 13–21.
40.See e.g. John Howard Schütz, ‘Charisma and Social Reality in Primitive Christianity’, Journal of Religion 54 (1974): 51–70; John Howard Schütz, Paul and the Anatomy of Apostolic Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); John G. Gager, Kingdom and Community: The Social World of Early Christianity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1975); Robin Scroggs, ‘Earliest Christian Communities as Sectarian Movement’, in Christianity, Judaism and Other Greco-Roman Cults: Studies for Morton Smith at Sixty. Part Two: Early Christianity, ed. Jacob Neusner (Leiden: Brill, 1975), 1–23; Bengt Holmberg, Paul and Power: The Structure and Authority in the Primitive Church as Reflected in the Pauline Epistles (Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1978); Kee, Christian Origins, 54–73. Cf. Geza Vermes, The Religion of Jesus the Jew (London: SCM Press, 1993), 70–75.
41.Robin Scroggs, ‘The Sociological Interpretation of the New Testament: The Present State of Research’, NTS 26 (1980): 164–79 (177).
42.Uhlhorn, Die christliche Liebestätigkeit.
43.Harnack, Die Mission und Ausbreitung. Similar critiques have been made of early examples of social-scientific approaches associated with Uhlhorn, Harnack and Troeltsch. See e.g. Schottroff, ‘Not Many Powerful’, 277–78; Shaye J. D. Cohen, ‘Adolph Harnack’s “The Mission and Expansion of Judaism”: Christianity Succeeds where Judaism Fails’, in The Future of Early Christianity: Essays in Honour of Helmut Koester, ed. Birger A. Pearson et al. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 162–69; Theissen, Social Reality, 5–6; Jack T. Sanders, Charisma, Converts, Competitors: Societal and Sociological Factors in the Success of Early Christianity (London: SCM Press, 2000), 1–2.
44.Cf. Hochschild, Sozialgeschichtliche Exegese, 79–96; John Howard Schütz, ‘Introduction’ in Gerd Theissen, The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982), 1–23 (10).
45.For discussion, see William Arnal, The Symbolic Jesus: Historical Scholarship, Judaism and the Construction of Contemporary Identity (London and Oakville: Equinox, 2005); James G. Crossley, Jesus in an Age of Neoliberalism: Quests, Scholarship and Ideology (London: Routledge, 2012).
46.Owen Chadwick, The Christian Church in the Cold War (London: Penguin, 1993), 7.