Evolution of the Word

Marcus J. Borg

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780062082121
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

By presenting the New Testament books in the order they were written, bestselling Bible scholar Marcus Borg reveals how spiritually and politically radical the early Jesus movement began and how it slowly became domesticated. Evolution of the Word is an incredible value: not only are readers getting a deeply insightful new book from the author of Speaking Christian and Jesus, but also the full-text of the New Testament—and one of the only Bibles organized in chronological order and including explanatory annotations that give readers a more informed understanding of the Scripture that is so close to their hearts and lives.

A Chronological New Testament

The Evolution of the Word

This chronological New Testament is the same as and yet different from the canonical New Testament. It contains the same twenty-seven documents, but it puts them in the order in which they were written.

The gospels do not come first. Rather, seven letters written by Paul do. Revelation is not at the end. Second Peter is, and eight other documents are later than Revelation.

Seeing the documents of the New Testament in chronological sequence illustrates and demonstrates a central theme of this book, namely, that the “Word”—shorthand for the “Word of God”—evolved. By “evolved,” I mean simply that it developed and grew over time.

For Christians, the “Word of God” refers to both a book and a person. As a book, it includes both the Old and New Testaments. Though Christians have often (and wrongly) thought of the Old Testament as having inferior status, it does not cease to be the “Word of God” because of the New Testament. Rather, the New Testament is an evolution, a development, that does not leave the old behind.

The “Word of God” as the Bible evolved over a period of a thousand years. Most biblical scholars date the earliest written parts of the Old Testament to the 900s BCE and the latest parts of the New Testament to the 100s CE.

The “Word of God” as a person refers of course to Jesus. He is the “Word” made flesh, incarnate, embodied in a human life. Of course, he himself evolved—from childhood into early adulthood and into and through his public activity. But also—and this is what a chronological New Testament illustrates—understandings of his significance and meaning evolved, developed, in the decades and century after his historical life. The Word as book and as person is not static, but the product of a process.

The process, however, is not intrinsically about improvement. Later does not always mean better. Rather, as we will see, some of the later documents in the New Testament reflect a domestication of the radicalism of Jesus and early communities of his followers.

Canonical New Testament and Chronological New Testament

The canonical New Testament (in other words, the official ordering of the books in church Bibles) begins with the gospels and concludes with Revelation. Because Jesus is the central figure of Christianity, it makes sense that the New Testament begins with narratives of his life, teachings, and passion. Thus the gospels are “chronologically” first in a biographical sense. And because Revelation is about the “last things” and the second coming of Jesus, it makes sense that it comes at the end. Revelation and the gospels function as bookends for the New Testament; everything else comes in between.

By putting these documents in a quite different sequence, namely, the order in which they were written, this book presents a literary chronology—a panoramic view of how the ideas and stories of the New Testament changed over time. It also emphasizes chronology in a second important sense, namely, that of seeing, reading, and hearing these documents in their historical context, the world of the first century and a bit beyond.

Both of these emphases are the product of modern biblical scholarship. Its roots go back to the birth of modern thought in the Enlightenment of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Though the Enlightenment began with science (Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and so forth), it soon extended to other areas of inquiry, including the study of the past. It generated a historical approach to the Bible and early Christianity that emphasizes the importance of seeing its documents in their ancient settings. When were they written? What were the historical circumstances in which they were written? What did they mean in their ancient context?

This historical approach to the Bible and the New Testament is not universally embraced by Christians. Those in churches committed to biblical inerrancy and a literal interpretation of the Bible reject much historical scholarship, because it calls into question their understanding of the Bible as having a divine guarantee to be factually and absolutely true. Some Christians are unaware of the historical approach and thus neither reject nor affirm it. But it is taught in most universities and colleges and in mainline Protestant and Catholic seminaries.

Though modern biblical scholarship has not led to unanimity about how to sequence all of the New Testament, there is a consensus about a basic chronological framework:

• The earliest documents are seven of the thirteen letters attributed to Paul. There is universal agreement that these seven were written by Paul in the 50s. They are earlier than the gospels.
• The first gospel is Mark, written around the year 70. Matthew and Luke both used Mark when they later wrote their own gospels.
• Revelation (probably from the 90s) is not the last book of the New Testament to be written.
• Second Peter is almost certainly the latest, from near the middle of the second century.

And so this chronological New Testament does not begin with the gospels, but with seven of Paul’s letters. Moreover, the gospels appear in a different order: Mark is first, not Matthew. It does not end with Revelation, but with several documents written later than Revelation.

Within this consensus framework, there is also uncertainty about the dates and sequence of some documents. Though seven letters of Paul are certainly by him and from the 50s, what about the other six attributed to him, but probably written a generation or two after his death? Are they from the 80s and 90s or from the early second century? So also how are we to date other letters—James, Hebrews, Jude, two attributed to Peter, and three attributed to John? Most are dated—estimated, guesstimated to be—from the 90s to the early 100s. How to sequence them is at best an educated guess. Should 1 Peter be before or after Hebrews or the letters of John? Hard to know.

But uncertainty about the sequence of some documents does not negate the twofold foundation of this chronological New Testament: the scholarly consensus that the chronological order and canonical order are different and that the general framework for ordering them is clear.

The Value of a Chronological New Testament

Seeing and reading the New Testament in chronological sequence is illuminating, making many things apparent:

• Starting with seven of Paul’s letters illustrates that there were vibrant Christian communities spread throughout the Roman Empire before there were written gospels. These seven letters provide a “window” into the life of very early Christian communities.
• Placing the gospels after Paul’s letters makes it clear that, as written documents, they are not the source of early Christianity, but its product. The gospel—the good news—of and about Jesus existed before the gospels. They were produced by early Christian communities several decades after Jesus’s historical life.
• Reading the gospels in chronological order beginning with Mark demonstrates that early Christian understandings of Jesus and his significance developed over time. When Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source, they not only added to the Markan material, but often modified it.
• Seeing John separated from the other gospels and relatively late in the New Testament makes it clear how different from them John’s gospel is.
• Realizing that many of the documents are from the 90s and later allows us to glimpse developments in early Christianity in the late first and early second centuries.

“Documents” Rather Than “Books”

Though it is conventional to call the writings in the New Testament “books,” this is somewhat misleading. In ordinary English today, “book” refers to a relatively long document. We do not commonly use the word for a writing that is a few pages or ten, twenty, or even fifty pages long, though we might call the last a booklet.

In this modern sense, none of the writings in the New Testament is a “book.” The longest is the gospel of Luke, with just under twenty thousand words. Depending upon type size, modern books typically have about four to five hundred words per page. Thus Luke is fewer than fifty pages—and even less in the small print of most Bibles. Mark, the earliest gospel, has about eleven thousand words—fewer than thirty pages. The longest of Paul’s letters, Romans, has about seven thousand words—around fifteen pages. The shortest documents—Philemon, Jude, 2 John, and 3 John—are a page or less.

There is another reason that the modern meaning of “book” is misleading. In our world, books are typically written for people the author does not know and then published—they are for “the public.” But the authors of the New Testament did not “publish” their works in this sense. They wrote for people they did know or knew about. They wrote from within Christian communities and for Christian communities. They weren’t publishing books for a general reading audience. Indeed, in their largely preliterate and completely preprint world, doing so would have been a waste of time.

Chronology and Historical Contextualization

This New Testament has a second feature. It not only places the documents in chronological sequence, but also contextualizes them in their time and place. It emphasizes the importance and illuminating power of setting them in their historical context and seeking to discern their meanings in their ancient setting.

Context is not the same as “background.” I recall from graduate school forty years ago books with titles like “The Background of the New Testament” and “The New Testament in Its Background.” But context is more than background. Context is the world in which we live. Where we grew up is not only the background of our lives, but the context that shaped us. For example, I was born in the United States not long before the middle of the last century and thus grew up in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. These decades not only contain the facts of my background; they also provide the context for the era that shaped me, as have the decades since.

Unlike background, context is interactive. We live in a particular time and place, and that affects what we think and how we respond and act. To illustrate from the recent past, American racism in the 1950s and 1960s was not simply the background for Martin Luther King’s life, but the interactive context in which he lived and to which he responded. To imagine seeking to understand King’s words and life by treating his time and place as a mere set of background facts rather than as the interactive context would be to miss understanding what shaped him, what guided him, why he made the decisions he did, and even why he matters so much to us today.

By viewing the documents of the New Testament in their historical context, we recognize that they were not written to us and for us, but to and for the ancient communities that produced them. They tell us how formative figures in early Christianity saw things within their historical context, their time and place. To try to read the New Testament without taking into account its historical context produces misunderstanding. What we read is about “their then,” not directly about “our now.”

Contextualizing the documents means asking:

• What did Paul’s letters mean to him and to the communities that received them? What was going on in those communities that led Paul to address the issues he did?
• What did the gospels mean in and for the communities that produced them and to whom they were addressed?
• What did Revelation mean to the early Christian groups in western Asia Minor (modern Turkey) to whom it was addressed?

Not only do the New Testament texts come alive in their ancient settings, but we are saved from the fanciful misunderstandings that result from nonhistorical interpretations. For example, the book of Revelation tells us what some early Christians thought would happen soon in their time, not about what will happen in our time or some future time. Passages in the New Testament that affirm slavery and patriarchy and condemn same-sex relationships tell us how some of our spiritual ancestors saw things, not necessarily how we should see things. Of course, what they thought in their then matters—but it may or may not be normative for us in our now. Context matters.

The Threefold Historical Context

Taking the chronological context of the New Testament seriously involves paying attention to three contexts: Jesus and early Christianity, Judaism, and the Roman Empire. They are not successive chronological contexts, one after the other, but are more like three concentric circles, one within another. Jesus and his followers must be seen within the context of first-century Judaism, and all of that must be seen within the context of the Roman Empire.

The Context of Jesus and Early Christianity

Jesus’s historical context was the Jewish homeland in the first third of the first century. He was born around 4 BCE and crucified around the year 30. The movement he had begun continued after his death among his followers. We commonly call the movement “early Christianity,” though this is a bit anachronistic. The word “Christianity” does not appear in the New Testament, and “Christians” only appears twice. The people around Jesus understood themselves as followers of him and “the Way” that he proclaimed. For them, it was a movement within Judaism and not yet a new religion distinct from Judaism. That came later.

Soon after Jesus’s death, the movement expanded geographically beyond the Jewish homeland—into Syria, Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece, and Rome. Initially, it spread within the Jewish Diaspora (Jewish communities outside of the homeland). Within no more than twenty years, it had begun to include Gentiles, that is, non-Jews.

These early Christian communities are the historical context for the oral traditions about Jesus and what it meant to follow him (more about this in Chapter 2). They are also the context of the whole of the New Testament: its twenty-seven documents are the product of early Christians in the first hundred years or so after the end of Jesus’s historical life.

The Context of Judaism

Early Christianity and the New Testament emerged within the larger context of Judaism. To say the obvious, Jesus, Paul, and most or perhaps all of the writers of the New Testament were Jewish. Th...