From Jesus to Christianity

L. Michael White

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780062241979
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

L. Michael White, one of the world's foremost scholars on the origins of Christianity, provides the complete, astonishing story of how Christianity grew from the personal vision of a humble Jewish peasant living in a remote province of the Roman Empire into the largest organized religion in the world.

Rather than reading the New Testament straight through in its traditional, or "canonical" order, From Jesus to Christianity takes a historical approach. Looking at the individual books chronologically, in the sequence in which they were actually written, readers can see what they divulge about the disagreements, shared values, and unifying mission of the earliest Christian communities. White digs through layers of archaeological excavations, sifts through buried fragments of largely unknown texts, and examines historical sources to discover what we can know of Jesus.

CHAPTER ONE

The Story of the Storytellers

Books tell stories. No, that’s not quite true. People tell stories and write them down in books. Books record those stories and make them accessible to readers. In that sense they are a medium of communication to a broader audience. Communication is easier when author and audience come from a shared cultural background and time; then it is much like hearing the story told orally. Here the burden is on the storyteller to communicate in words and ideas that the audience will find meaningful.

But books also preserve stories and thus make it possible for later generations of readers to encounter not only a story of a bygone era but also the people who once told and heard it. Here the medium of communication is more complex. Now, the reader—not the storyteller—bears the burden. In order to understand the story, the reader must negotiate changes in culture, language, and ideas that come with the passage of time. It is a process of translation from one age to another, from one culture to another, in order to hear the story as once told. At this juncture there are two stories at work. The preservation and subsequent history of the book is its own story, apart from the one on its pages, and the reader must encounter this second story—the story of the book—as well. The reading of any story from the past must respect the different layers of history and story, of then and now, that make it up.

This book is the story of the origins and development of the Christian movement as told by the people who lived it. It took place roughly two thousand years ago and covers a span of several centuries. It comes out of the history of Israel and the Jewish people but intersects with the histories of Greece and Rome. The story, at least the best-known version of it, is preserved for us in the book known by Christians as the Bible, and more specifically in the second part, called the New Testament. There are other sources too, but they are not as well known; we shall bring them into the picture as they too begin to reflect the telling and retelling of the story.

Readers of the New Testament today may have a hard time thinking of it as an ancient work. It can be read in English and other languages, and there are numerous “modern” versions that try to make it more intelligible to a contemporary audience. But all of the New Testament was originally written in Greek, the popular form of Greek often called koine (meaning “common”) that was typical of the Hellenistic age. It was assembled over time, copied and recopied, and passed down through the centuries by Christians. In the Greek Orthodox tradition it remained in Byzantine Greek; in the Roman Catholic tradition it was rendered into Latin; and there were other translations—Coptic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Armenian, Slavonic. Translating the Bible into English came much later and, like German, only became widely used as a result of the Protestant Reformation.

When we encounter the New Testament in English, moreover, we may first perceive it as a single book that traces the story of Jesus, the founder of Christianity, and the lives of his first followers. It begins appropriately enough with the birth of Jesus and continues with his life and death, as reported in the Gospels. Next comes the story of the early church as recorded in Acts, followed by a number of letters written, it would seem, by the same cast of characters—Peter, John, Paul—who show up in the Gospels and Acts as Jesus’s followers. On closer reading, however, we quickly realize that this is not just one story; there are in fact four different accounts of Jesus’s life—the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Nor is it just one book; the New Testament is a collection of books, and a collection of stories. It is more like a library, an ancient library that was intentionally assembled to preserve these stories by and for later generations of readers. Given the more complex and ancient character of its contents, how then shall we go about reading the New Testament?

First, because of its composite nature, it cannot be read like a novel, straight through from beginning to end. The various works represent different genres of literature: biographies, histories, novels, letters, sermons, apocalypses, catechisms, and church-order manuals. They were written at different times by different authors; consequently, there is no cohesive narrative. Even though they were all written in Greek, the language, tone, and style are noticeably different from one author to the next, just as in any library. Hence the various works within the collection must be read first on their own individual terms. Points of connection, comparison, and contrast come later, once we understand something of the origin of each work: where it was written, when, and why.

Second, discovering something about the original author and audience is central to this process. In some cases, knowing who wrote a work and who read it can help us understand the when and why. Conversely, discerning the occasion of a work on the basis of its internal form and language can sometimes help us discover more about the author and audience, especially when those pieces of information are not given, and usually even when they are. The nature of ancient literature requires us to deal with all of these questions in order to make sense out of what is going on in “the story.” In other words, we have to employ the tools of history in order to read the story, even when the story is about history or is part of the history.

Third, because it is a library and not a single book, we must give some thought to how we ought to “catalog” its contents. On the one hand, we might wish to group the writings by genre—biography on one shelf, letters on another, apocalypses in the back row. Then they can be subgrouped by author. To be sure, this kind of organization would facilitate certain kinds of literary analysis and comparison. In effect, that is the way the New Testament is already laid out. Yet this organization can lead to some problems if we are not also aware of the differences of date and place between the documents. A chronological list yields a different perspective on the writings and how the various parts of the story relate to one another.

In this book, then, we shall attempt to examine the various writings of the New Testament and other pieces of the earliest Christian literature in a more or less chronological progression, from earlier to later. Thus, one of the issues to be discussed at every step is why we should place a particular book of the New Testament at a particular point in time and what other events or writings were happening at that time. For example, although the Gospels come first in the order of New Testament books, they were not the first ones written. Their position comes from the fact that they deal with the life of Jesus, but as we shall see, they were written considerably later. The earliest was at least forty years later, while the last, almost a century. Hence, the way each Gospel tells its story of Jesus may reflect influences and concerns that come from the time of the author and audience rather than from the days of Jesus himself.

That is one of the main problems with this story. We have no writings from the days of Jesus himself. Jesus never wrote anything, nor do we have any contemporary accounts of his life or death. There are no court records, official diaries, or newspaper accounts that might provide firsthand information. Nor are there any eyewitnesses whose reports were preserved unvarnished. Even though they may contain earlier sources or oral traditions, all the Gospels come from later times. Discerning which material is early and which is late becomes an important task. In fact, the earliest writings that survive are the genuine letters of Paul. They were written some twenty to thirty years after the death of Jesus. Yet Paul was not a follower of Jesus during his lifetime; nor does he ever claim to have seen Jesus during his ministry. Moreover, Paul’s letters were written not to people who lived in the Jewish homeland or who would have heard reports about Jesus from his own time. Instead, his letters were written to new converts who lived in far-off regions of the Roman Empire, western Turkey, Greece, and even Rome itself. Although they are the earliest version of the story, they nonetheless stand at some distance temporally and culturally from the world of Jesus. Even so, they clearly reflect some information about the life of Jesus based on the stories that circulated orally about him. They are only a portion of the larger story, and yet they each tell their own story.

A Generational Approach

The New Testament preserves a number of these individual stories. It represents layers of material from more than a century of the early Christian movement. It is all the more valuable, therefore, as a historical record, since it preserves the changing story as told over several generations. For this reason, we shall adopt a generational approach to the writings and to the historical development of the early Christian movement. Now the “library” begins to resemble an archaeological excavation, as we dig down through the layers and sift for nuggets of information or buried fragments. We must consider the earlier and later deposits of evidence and how they may relate to one another.

We may think of a generation as roughly forty years, a traditional way of reckoning ancient genealogies. The world into which Jesus was born is, in this sense, the “prior generation” out of which the Jesus movement would emerge. Then come the career and death of Jesus. We shall consider the history, culture, and religion of this period in Part One: The World of the New Testament.

Part Two deals with the first generation. It runs from the death of Jesus, in about 30 CE, to the end of the first Jewish revolt against Rome in 70 CE (for more on dates and chronology, see the last section of this chapter). In this part we shall consider the historical evidence for Jesus’s ministry and death, the founding of the Jesus movement and the first oral traditions, and Paul’s career. Key elements in this period are the sectarian origins of the movement within Judaism and its first expressions within both Jewish and Greek cultural horizons.

The second generation runs from 70 to about 110 CE and deals with the changes that occurred both within the Jesus movement and outside of it as a result of the failure of the first Jewish revolt and the destruction of the Temple. These “birth pangs and new horizons” are dealt with in Part Three. The earlier Gospels along with some of the other letters belong to this period, as does the book of Revelation. In this period the tensions between the Jesus sect and other Jews were growing stronger, and new questions of self-definition began to emerge, especially in light of increasing contact with Greco-Roman society. The different versions of the story reflect these changing social horizons.

Several writings in the New Testament belong to the third generation, which runs from about 110 to 150. In it we start to see the movement breaking away from its Jewish roots and becoming a separate institutional church, or what we may more properly begin to call “Christianity.” We also begin to see other important writings from the generation after the apostles, such as the so-called apostolic fathers, in which issues of church leadership and the relation to the Roman state become important considerations. The other factor that becomes more apparent in this period is regional diversity within the Christian movement.

By the fourth generation, which runs from about 150 to 190, the Christian movement was coming of age socially and intellectually within the Roman world. All the main writings that would eventually make up the New Testament were present; however, there was as yet no New Testament. There were, in fact, many other writings that had come along during the second and especially the third generation, many of them claiming to be from Jesus or the apostles. In light of the spread and regional diversity of Christianity by this time, the question came to be which ones were authentic or authoritative, which ones were to be read or not read. It was this fourth generation that saw the first efforts to shape the New Testament canon and thus produce “the book.” Hence, the New Testament is the source for much of our understanding of the development of early Christianity, but it is also a product of that development. That too is part of the story.

Hearing the Storytellers

Over and above how or when these writings came about, we must also consider what was happening to the people who wrote and read them. They are the real-life part of this story; they are the storytellers. So it will become important to discern what they were thinking and saying about Jesus, about their own experience, and in some cases about one another. It is a very human story, after all.

Just as with the documents themselves, we should expect some changes to occur and to be reflected in the writings. For example, the earliest followers of Jesus were all Jewish, just as was Jesus himself. The Jesus movement was initially a sect within Judaism, one of many at that time. Consequently, in order to understand the life and death of Jesus, what really happened and why, we must start with the social and political conditions of Jesus’s homeland. Gradually, the Jesus movement began to break away from its Jewish roots, and it eventually became a separate religion of the Roman world. Roughly by the end of the second generation, it had become a movement predominantly of non-Jewish converts. Consequently, there were new social and cultural horizons that came to be part of their understanding of the story. Why did this happen? How did it affect the people who were caught in the middle of this momentous change? Or did they even realize how much they had changed? One of the most dramatic parts of the story is the changing relations between the Jesus movement and its parent religion, Judaism.

As we have already said, the New Testament is not one continuous story, like a novel or a biography; there is no single narrative. Nor is there a single narrator, a single history to be told. Rather, we begin to realize that the dynamism of the Jesus movement and even its complex textures and changes are reflected in its stories. There are many stories and many voices to be heard.

Some basic human traits can be seen in the experience of those earliest followers of the Jesus movement who first told and retold the story. As a first-century Jew experiencing the awesome power of Roman rule, Jesus himself can be seen as narrating a story, or vision if you will, of how God’s plan for Israel was to be carried out. But was he an apocalyptic firebrand or a social critic? There were differences of opinion even then. When he was executed by the Romans, however, the story changed. The story was not only the one he told, but the one told about him and what he stood for. Then some began to ask: How? Why? Me too? For us? Even then, the reactions reverberated through centuries of Jewish experience, and the natural recourse was to the Jewish scriptures, especially the Psalms. The vocabulary that grounded their stories came from a stock of songs, symbols, and expressions ingrained through cultural memory: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept . . . ,” “The Lord is my shepherd . . . ,” “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Pss. 137:1; 23:1; 22:1). Tradition and experience were mediated by storytelling.

The medium of storytelling was predominantly oral, especially in the earliest days of the Jesus movement. That may be the reason we have no writings from Jesus himself or from any of his followers for at least twenty years. The stories were first passed on by word of mouth. Even when stories were first written down, the mode of expression was essentially oral in character. Ancient letters and books were meant to be read aloud, as if hearing the living voice of the writer. The types of writing reflected these different forms or contexts of expression. Detecting these differences can be very important to our understanding of both what is being said and why. Hence, the social location and cultural horizons of the storyteller and the audience are important clues to meaning, intent, and understanding.

When the social location changes, so do the forms of expression and the cultural resonances. Jesus and his first followers spoke Aramaic, the common Semitic language of the Middle East in that day. Proper Hebrew, the language of most of their scriptures, was largely unknown and certainly unspoken, except by a very few. But apart from meager glimpses of Aramaic, the language of most early Christians, like that of many other Jews, was predominantly Greek. Greek was the primary language of Roman administration and civic life in the eastern part of the empire, especially in the larger cities like Alexandria, Antioch, and Ephesus. All the documents of the New Testament and most of the other early literature were in Greek. Of course, people could still look to the Jewish scriptures, since these too had been translated into Greek, but even so there was a noticeable change in cultural outlook that showed through. What difference did it make when Paul summoned up Stoic maxims alongside Jewish traditions or when Acts recounted Paul’s preaching among the Greek philosophers in the Athenian agora? What difference did it make when the stories of Peter and Paul came finally to Rome?

So another factor that affected the way the stories were told is the spread of the Jesus movement into various parts of the Roman world. It produced literary trajectories as older forms of the story were retold in new situations. Sometimes we can even track the pathways of the spread by tracing these literary trajectories. At the same time, retelling the story for new audiences inevitably brought other changes as elements of local culture or native dialects filtered into the telling. Although Roman rule facilitated travel to far-flung regions, Christian communities in some localities developed in marked isolation from other Christian communities. The result was growing diversity from region to region within Christianity. Now there were new voices to be heard: Clement, Ignatius, Thomas, Hermas, Marcion, and more. As time went on, diversity became more and more of an issue as some Christians, at least, realized they were not all telling the same story. Now new questions began to be asked: about the nature of the scriptures, the sources of authority, and the shape of canon. Even then, they were trying...