The State of New Testament Studies

A Survey of Recent Research

McKnight, Scot, Gupta, Nijay K., Scot McKnight, Nijay K. Gupta

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780801098796
• eBook ISBN: 9781493419807
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

This book surveys the current landscape of New Testament studies, offering readers a concise guide to contemporary discussions. Bringing together a diverse group of experts, it covers research on the most important issues in New Testament studies, including new discipline areas, making it an ideal supplemental textbook for a variety of courses on the New Testament. Michael Bird, David Capes, Greg Carey, Lynn Cohick, Dennis Edwards, Michael Gorman, and Abson Joseph are among the contributors.

Part 1: Ancient Context

1
Early Christianity and the Roman Empire

GREG CAREY

Introduction

Jesus was “crucified for us under Pontius Pilate,” according to the Nicene Creed, itself a product of Roman imperial politics. Facing intractable divisions among his Eastern churches, Emperor Constantine convened the first great ecumenical council in an attempt to restore unity to the church. The council produced this confession—a confession that identifies Rome with Jesus’s public execution—with the emperor personally present during the deliberations.

The phrase “crucified for us under Pontius Pilate” embodies the ambiguity that marks early Christianity’s relationship with Rome. Early Christians venerated a Jewish messiah who suffered execution at the hands of Roman authorities, a brutal fact that complicated all their attempts to establish public identity. The NT’s three references to Christianoi (Acts 11:26; 26:28; 1 Pet. 4:16) do not indicate a new world religion populated by “Christians,” as many of us might imagine. We might better translate Christianoi as “seditionists,” or more precisely “messianists,” for each occurrence indicates the suspicion with which others regarded the movement.1

Jesus and his first generations of followers lived within the Roman Empire and faced the pressing question of allegiance. The three Synoptic Gospels all record a scene in which Jesus confronts the question of paying taxes to Caesar, and the Gospel passion narratives all raise the problem of Jesus’s identity as king—or seditionist. Writing to Rome itself, Paul enjoins believers to submit to the ruling authorities in a passage that agitates Christian ethicists to this day (Rom. 13:1–7), but he also derides “the rulers of this age,” who, had they grasped divine wisdom, “would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor. 2:8). Addressing its readers as diasporic exiles (1:1) and foreigners (2:11), 1 Peter refers to Rome as “Babylon” (5:13). This usage emerges in Jewish literature only after Rome’s sack of Jerusalem in 70 CE, and it appears in Revelation as well, most notably in chapters 17–18. Without question, Rome and its empire were on the minds of early Christian writers, not least in the NT. Yet it appears the first generations who worshiped Jesus developed complex and diverse—we might say, ambivalent—ways of relating to Rome and its institutions. Moreover, many interpreters have a great deal at stake in the question of how early Christians related to their imperial context.

The Stakes

We biblical scholars, who frequently cloak our passions in the language of academic objectivity, often reveal our commitments in assessing how early Christians negotiated their relationship to Rome. Those who are critical of American military, cultural, and economic adventurism—I would include myself among them—rely on Scripture as an essential resource for articulating our critiques.2 In a classic essay on Paul and slavery, Richard A. Horsley gives voice to this point of view.

[Paul] was evidently attempting to establish communities of what was, in effect, an international counter-imperial (alternative) society. It was international (and multicultural) insofar as assemblies were established in a number of cities and peoples, and as the assemblies in particular cities involved people of various and/or hybrid ethnic and cultural background. It was counter-imperial insofar as it owed its loyalty to Christ, who was enthroned in heaven as the true emperor or kyrios [Lord] of the assemblies, indeed of the world. . . . And it was an alternative society insofar as the assemblies were to conduct their own affairs, without interacting with the civil and other aspects of the dominant society while recruiting and expanding their movement . . . during the time remaining before the parousia of their Lord.3

Horsley foregrounds Paul’s ministry in terms not of theology but of cultural formation. In contrast to Rome’s lord, Caesar, Pauline assemblies proclaim the crucified messiah Jesus as the one true Lord. The movement expresses itself through diverse assemblies that scatter around the empire and practice “alternative” lifestyles as they await the culmination of Jesus’s rule.

Interpreters of the historical Jesus have also maximized the ways in which Jesus’s ministry amounted to countercultural resistance. Although many scholars produced important work in the 1990s, public attention focused on debates between John Dominic Crossan and N. T. Wright. Suspicious of the portrayal of Jesus in the canonical Gospels, Crossan argued that Jesus rejected apocalyptic theology, the expectation of God’s violent intervention to remove Israel’s enemies and establish justice in the world. Wright trusted the Gospel accounts and placed apocalyptic expectation at the center of Jesus’s ministry. Crossan begins his account of Jesus with a study of Roman imperial culture, while Wright places Jesus in the context of anti-Roman sentiment in first-century Judaism. Theological liberals gravitated to Crossan’s work, while conservatives rallied around Wright. Yet both authors agreed, and still agree, on the notion of Jesus’s ministry as a form of critique and resistance against Rome. Both Crossan and Wright identify Jesus as a counterimperial revolutionary.4

Crossan, who is Irish-American, and Wright, who is English, were writing at a particular point in American adventurism. With the Cold War drawing to a close, a congressional investigation had just unraveled Reagan administration interventions in Central American civil wars, and US forces had successfully invaded both Panama and Grenada. Francis Fukuyama authored his classic essay “The End of History?,” arguing that the Soviet Union’s dissolution would open the path for universal democracy and the end of large-scale conflict.5 The same year that Crossan and Wright published their first major monographs on the historical Jesus, President George H. W. Bush declared “a new world order” in his State of the Union address. Theorists rushed to redefine the concept of empire from a nation-state model to more abstruse networks of commercial and diplomatic hegemony.6 If ever the United States looked like an empire, this was the moment.

Before launching into an investigation of Christian identity in the context of empire, we do well to consider some unanticipated implications.7 For example, a predisposition to identify with early Christianity as a counterimperial movement can foster a peculiar exceptionalism. As assemblies who sometimes considered themselves at odds with the larger society—“aliens and exiles,” as 1 Peter would have it (2:11), and a “third race,” in the words of Aristides (Apol. 2.1), Clement of Alexandria (Strom. 6.5.41), and others—Christians defined themselves as neither Jews nor Greeks nor anything else.8 We Christians already have a long habit of labeling our origins as exceptional or unique.9 Assessing appropriations of early Christian identity in the context of queer theory, Maia Kotrosits observes, “The queer ‘early Christian’ is positioned—almost by definition—as out of alignment with and even in opposition to the Roman Empire in some way.”10 Appeals to Christian uniqueness have a way of turning ugly...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1: Ancient Context
• Part 2: Interpretation
• Part 3: Jesus, Paul, and New Testament Theology
• Part 4: New Testament Texts
• Contributors
• Scripture and Ancient Writings Index
• Author Index
• Select Subject Index
• Back Cover