After Jesus Before Christianity

A Historical Exploration of the First Two Centuries of Jesus Movements

Erin Vearncombe, Brandon Scott, Hal Taussig, Westar Institute, The

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780063062153
• eBook ISBN:
  9780063062177
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ancient History

From the creative minds of the scholarly group behind the groundbreaking Jesus Seminar comes this provocative work of early church history—an eye-opening look at the roots of Christianity that offers a thoughtful reconsideration of the first two centuries of the Jesus movement, transforming our understanding of the religion and its early dissemination.

Christianity has endured for more than two millennia and is practiced by billions worldwide today. Yet that longevity has created difficulties for scholars tracing the religion's roots, distorting much of the historical investigation into the world of the New Testament and the first two centuries of the Jesus movement. But what if Christianity died in the fourth or fifth centuries after it began? How would that change how historians see and understand its first two hundred years?

Considering these questions, three Bible scholars from the Westar Institute summarize the work of the Christianity Seminar and its efforts to offer a new way of thinking about Christianity and its roots. Synthesizing the institute's most recent scholarship—bringing together the many archaeological and textual discoveries about life in the Roman Empire over the last twenty years—they have found: 

• There were multiple Jesus movements, not a singular one, before the fourth century
• There was nothing called Christianity until the third century
• There was much more flexibility and diversity within Jesus's movement before it became centralized in Rome, not only regarding the Bible and religious doctrine, but also understandings of gender, sexuality and morality.

Exciting and revolutionary, After Jesus Before Christianity provides fresh insights into the real history behind how the Jesus movement became Christianity. 

After Jesus Before Christianity includes more than a dozen black-and-white images throughout.

1

The Experiment

The future is not inevitable; it is often random, a matter of accidents. Ours is an experiment in historical imagination into the possibilities of the past during the first two centuries of the Common Era (CE), as the time after the birth of Jesus is called. We begin in the years after the death of Jesus and move forward with an open mind. We begin before Christianity, not assuming anything about the phenomenon that emerged well after the death of Jesus. That sounds like common sense to most historians, but in this case it is unusual and not traditionally how Christian history has been done.

This experiment relies on reading history forward. Too often, we turn to look behind us. We fall victim to the fallacy of the inevitable. Because it happened, it had to happen; we use future events to understand the past. This fallacy is a constant temptation because it scares us back into what we already know, or into what we think we know. Questions like “How did we get to where we are now?” are interested more in the present than in the past.

Reading history backwards blinds us to the open character of the future. When we approach history backwards, we are always informed by the present. Here we are, in the twenty-first century, with our diverse forms, traditions, and structures of Christianity. The question up to this point has been “How did we wind up in this place?” We look to the past, seeking our links—here are the steps that got us here; here are the causes that led to these effects, with an emphasis much more on those effects (present) than causes (past). We have been trying to construct a building from the top.

A skyscraper, however, does not begin with its observation deck.

The “master narrative” of Christianity has been the traditional way in which history was read backwards. It refers to the conventional story of early Christianity, the notion that the origins of Christianity are settled, in need of no new data. This big story is stuck in our heads, not as fact, and despite our often knowing better. Here is the basic outline of the master narrative:

• Jesus came down from heaven to establish the Christian church. He was a fantastic person whose birth marks the very beginning of civilizations. He taught the truth and did god-sized things. He handed on his complete teachings to his most loyal followers, the apostles.
• These apostles then relayed correctly to the bishops of the early churches all of the great things Jesus said and did.
• These first bishops correctly passed down Jesus’s teachings and magnificent deeds to the next two-plus centuries of bishops.
• The faithful line of bishops summarized perfectly Jesus’s teachings and acts in the fourth-century Nicene Creed, which carried full truth and authority to the twenty-first century.

As the Christianity Seminar patiently examined the available evidence, the idea that the master narrative’s assumption that “Christianity” acted as a unified, continuous early tradition in unbroken line representing a single truth made little sense. That is why members of the seminar questioned, and ultimately rejected, the master narrative of Christianity’s birth.

Much new research points to multiple and different stories of Jesus peoples (not “Christians”) in the first two centuries. The seminar’s work on these first two centuries resembles not a predestined master story but more a set of mosaic tiles in the process of being pieced together. Many pieces are still missing, and at times, some pieces pop into unexpected places. More accurately, these vibrant, many-shaped tiles work to create not one story, but many; the picture of the Jesus peoples of the first two centuries ends up more like the view inside a kaleidoscope, the tiles shifting and the picture changing with each turn of the cylinder.

The master narrative did not happen because of any cache of research. Instead, as later forms of Christianity began to be viewed as more orthodox—advocating “proper” belief and practice—this strand heavily influenced European and American societies, projecting their own power and belief systems back onto the earliest centuries. Writers of the master narrative reduced a wide variety of ideas, stories, and poetics to a simple either/or of orthodoxy or heresy. This self-serving manipulation diminished the breadth of practice and experimentation of the early Jesus peoples.

One of the core contributions of this book is its rejection of the master narrative. We do not take this preexistent narrative for granted. This examination of previous assumptions allows the reader to see clearly the many important experiments and diverse Jesus movements that have been lost in the master narrative.

Reasonable, solid construction starts with foundations. Our experiment is one of foundations, and only of foundations. So if we do not assume we know the future, what can we reconstruct about the lived experiences of diverse peoples across the ancient Mediterranean? This question is in itself an exciting historical accomplishment.

This forward-looking approach to our evidence—evidence from new places, from new sources, in unexpected material forms—soon makes an essential circumstance clear. If we stand on the ground of Rome, of Athens, of urban and rural spaces across the Mediterranean in the first two centuries CE, we do not see anything resembling contemporary “Christianity,” or, for that matter, “Christianity” as it was in the later ancient world, in the Middle Ages, or across human history. In the first two centuries, what we think of as “Christianity” did not exist.

WHAT WE DISCOVERED

What happens when we approach the first two centuries forward, rather than backwards? What happens if we start at the very beginning and see what happens from there, taking one careful step forward at a time, with minds open to an unknown, unassumed future? This groundbreaking, holistic approach yielded incredible and surprising results. The discoveries we encountered showed us, among other things, a world of Roman violence, the emergence of new genders and forms of family, and an Israel both creative and traumatized.

This framing for our experiment rests on new archaeological finds and possibilities for evidence that have dramatically opened up scholarship on the realities of the first two centuries. Ever since the discovery of the Nag Hammadi collection of ancient writings in 1945 in Egypt, which posited a much more diverse range of Jesus peoples in the early centuries after Jesus’s death, researchers have advanced new perspectives and challenged conventional views of history. The substantial breadth and depth of this ongoing research helps us see very different realities occurring within the earliest Jesus peoples. Over the past eight years, the Westar Christianity Seminar that produced this book has reviewed the research from the past thirty to forty years and has consolidated and advanced the gains made.

In this chapter we introduce six surprising new discoveries of recent scholarship. The remaining chapters lay these insights out in greater detail. These six new perspectives are important because they transform how we think about the first two centuries CE and their relationship (or not) to the later phenomenon of Christianity. The first two centuries are not an interim or structured “origin” period that allowed Christianity to get its act together. No, with these new perspectives, the first two hundred years end up being an absorbing, unfinished story or, more accurately, a series of absorbing, unfinished stories.

A significant portion of the early, varied Jesus movements did not complete their journeys or continue their unfinished processes. Many of their stories have not yet been told. These six powerful and somewhat unfinished developments from the first two centuries allow for productive historical breakthroughs, though these breakthroughs are still incomplete. Our evidence is always in fragments, and we can work to make these fragments only meaningful, rather than whole. At the same time, these breakthroughs undo the necessity of fourth-, sixteenth-, or twenty-first-century Christianity as being perceived as perfect or complete. Their viability as loosely affiliated directions does not necessitate the inevitability of Christianity. Nor do these breakthroughs assume that there is, behind them, some essence of Christianity awaiting to emerge.

These discoveries undo much of the conventional picture of the first two centuries. They do not represent a uniform portrait, and indeed they often contradict one another. But they do open the door to possibilities for reimagining who these different groups were, enabling us to see these groups and peoples more clearly.

1. They Resisted the Roman Empire
   A wide set of what we call Jesus clubs, movements for the Savior, communities of the Anointed, and schools of the Lord successfully resisted the Roman Empire. These peoples’ resistance against Rome often kept violence at bay and gave their people courage and an experience of safety. A key dimension of their resistance to empire was invoking God’s compassionate and strange empire, or kingdom, as later translators have it, in contrast to Rome’s cruel and dominating one. These various groups made fun of Roman military power and mocked Rome’s claim of divine power, even though they themselves had almost no power. The Empire of God challenged the Empire of Rome. Caesar Augustus as Lord conflicted with Jesus Anointed as Lord.
2. They Practiced Gender Bending
   A wide range of Jesus peoples practiced gender bending—that is, gender roles were fluid and flexible. One of their primary identities was that they were neither male nor female, but all were “one” through different lived, experienced realities of gender pluralism. Women, and a significant number of men, rejected both male dominance and female passivity. A wide swath of Jesus groups rejected marriage and traditional families, with the envoy Paul often leading the way. Although some Anointed groups and individuals supported male dominance and demanded female obedience to men, many men shifted toward acting more vulnerable and less domineering. Women cut their hair and dressed like men. These gendered activities and actions brokered new possibilities for identity among various Jesus peoples, well beyond the regular masculine/feminine dichotomies of the first two centuries.
3. They Lived in Chosen Families
   With traditional families increasingly broken and dispersed, a variety of Jesus groups started living in experimental family groups. These new family groups were voluntary; that is, they lived together increasingly outside of blood or married relationships. Whereas previously the primary relations for living arrangements were extended families of multiple generations with cousins, aunts, and uncles in the mix, Jesus people associated daily with each other according to mutual support and affection. More and more “supper clubs” became crucial and core associations of daily life. Economic sharing provided ways that members of these groups bonded. In some cases, larger housing arrangements came into play for the groups through a donor exhibiting compassion. Although most of these new kinds of families were small, occasionally a wealthy person provided larger space for bigger groups.
4. They Claimed Belonging to Israel
   The largest and most common identity of Jesus groups was their allegiance to Israel, regardless of whether the groups or members came from Israel-based bloodlines. This bond applied whether they lived in geographical Israel or around the Mediterranean basin. Small and large groups understood themselves to be following the God of Israel, read Israel-based holy writings, prayed and meditated according to the various Israel-based forms, bathed ritually according to Israel’s traditions, and—perhaps most of all—gave allegiance to their Israel-born teacher and leader, Jesus. Since Jesus belonged to Israel by blood and practice, the larger Jesus movements assumed and explicitly practiced Israel’s ways. But after the Bar Kokhba War (132–136 CE), the second major revolt against the Roman Empire of the people inhabiting the territory known as Roman Palestine, this allegiance was increasingly challenged.
5. They Had Diverse Organizational Structures
   As was the case with larger Israel itself, the many different groups, schools, clubs, and Anointed communities had a variety of practices, beliefs, and organizational patterns. These peoples had no central leadership and so had neither interest in telling nor the ability to tell the myriad groups how to practice or what to believe. The models for such organization were local and occasionally regional, and so Jesus groups generally followed the diverse club organizational rules or the varieties of synagogue practices around the Mediterranean. The idea of Christian synods and ecumenical councils lay in the distant future. As occurred both in local clubs and in synagogue patterns, it was normal for different groups to dispute with one another about practices and beliefs.
6. They Had Persisting Oral Traditions
   Writing did not dominate the life of the early communities of the Anointed to the same degree as surviving documents have dominated how we have imagined their life. There was nothing like the New Testament in the first two centuries CE. Throughout those centuries, Jesus peoples celebrating, arguing, and debating combined many forms of speaking and writing. Reading—as in all Mediterranean cultures—was done together publicly, especially when the few people who could read would read to a whole group. But often there was no reading. There was significant writing among the different groups, but this writing was part of a boisterous, complicated community dialogue, group reading, ritual practice, and—most of all—intense discussion. Much material overlapped Israel’s developing readings of Torah, the Prophets, and Wisdom literature, the writings increasingly being set apart, designated as particularly meaningful for the life and identity of these peoples. Other writings were letters between communities, partially developed stories, and songs from within communities. Important writing was also done through a few words etched in stone and referenced as rules or statutes for Jesus clubs and associations.

These short descriptions of the Seminar’s six major discoveries about the first two centuries of Jesus peoples show how dramatic the results of this experiment are. At the end of the second century, a wide range of possibilities and combinations of organization and meaning making were on the table. Our experiment is to explore the what, who, how, and why of those first two centuries, and to let these unique presences unfold in their astonishing variety. With this approach, we aim to deepen the understanding of the eclectic range of experiences, ideas, stories, and poetics that have been edited out of history, allowing ourselves to consider the breadth of practice and experimentation of the early Jesus movements. Walking forward in this way enables us to reconstruct the diverse experiments in identity, power, and belonging by those seeking to live in an Empire of God while negotiating the Empire of Rome. These major shifts in how to think about the first two centuries of the Common Era also suggest changes in how people see themselves and the world today. We welcome and encourage such reimaginations.

Papers Relevant to This Chapter by Seminar Participants

BeDuhn, Jason, Lillian Larsen, Nina Livesey, Brandon Scott, Hal Taussig, and Erin K. Vearncombe (the Christianity Seminar Steering Committee). “Summary, Westar ‘Christianity Seminar’ Trade Book on the Period 25–211 CE of ‘Early Christ People’; Content and Organization of Book: Product of Six Years of Seminar Research, Debate, Papers, Specific and Focused Seminar Session Spring 2018, and Three Years of Work by Seminar Steering Committee.” Spring 2019.

Dewey, Arthur, Joanna Dewey, Lillian Larsen, Celene Lillie, and Jeffrey Robbins. “Individual Responses to ‘Rewriting the First Two Centuries of Early Christ Mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Foreword by Sue Monk Kidd
• How This Book Came Into Being
• Contributors
• 1. The Experiment
• 2. If Not Christian, What?
• Part I: Living with the Empire
• Part II: Belonging and Community
• Part III: Real Variety, Fictional Unity
• Part IV: Falling Into Writing
• Notes
• Ancient Writings in Translation: A Guide
• About the Authors
• Copyright
• About the Publisher