JESUS REMEMBERED
christianity in the making Volume 1
JESUS REMEMBERED
James D. G. Dunn
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company Grand Rapids, Michigan
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546 www.eerdmans.com © 2003 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. All rights reserved Hardcover edition 2003 Paperback edition 2019 Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ISBN 978-0-8028-7799-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dunn, James D. G., 1939Jesus remembered / James D. G. Dunn. p. cm. — (Christianity in the making; v. 1) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 978-0-8028-7799-4 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Jesus Christ — Person and offices. 2. Jesus Christ — History of doctrines — Early church, ca. 30-600. I. Title. II Series. BT203.D86 2003 232 — dc21 2003049024
For Meta my love, my life
Contents
Preface
xiii
1. Christianity in the Making
1
PART ONE: FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS 2. Introduction
11
3. The (Re-)Awakening of Historical Awareness
17
3.1 The Renaissance
17
3.2 The Reformation
20
3.3 Perceptions of Jesus
23
4. The Flight from Dogma
25
4.1 The Enlightenment and Modernity
25
4.2 Exit Revelation and Miracle
29
4.3 The Liberal Jesus
34
4.4 The Sources for Critical Reconstruction of the Life of Jesus
39
4.5 The Collapse of the Liberal Quest
45
4.6 Jesus in Sociological Perspective
52
4.7 Re-Enter the Neo-Liberal Jesus
58
4.8 Conclusion
65
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5. The Flight from History
67
5.1 The Historical-Critical Method
68
5.2 The Search for an Invulnerable Area for Faith
71
5.3 Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976)
73
5.4 The Second Quest
78
5.5 A Third Quest?
85
5.6 Post-Modernism
92
6. History, Hermeneutics and Faith 6.1 An Ongoing Dialogue
99 99
6.2 The Necessity of Historical Inquiry
100
6.3 What Can History Deliver?
101
6.4 Hermeneutical Principles
111
6.5 When Did a Faith Perspective First Influence the Jesus Tradition?
125
6.6 Two Corollaries
135
PART TWO: FROM THE GOSPELS TO JESUS 7. The Sources
139
7.1 External Sources
141
7.2 The Earliest References to Jesus
142
7.3 Mark
143
7.4 Q
147
7.5 Matthew and Luke
160
7.6 The Gospel of Thomas
161
7.7 The Gospel of John
165
7.8 Other Gospels
167
7.9 Knowledge of Jesus’ Teaching and Agrapha
172
8. The Tradition
173
8.1 Jesus the Founder of Christianity
174
8.2 The Influence of Prophecy
186
8.3 Oral Tradition
192
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8.4 The Synoptic Tradition as Oral Tradition — Narratives
210
8.5 The Synoptic Tradition as Oral Tradition — Teachings
224
8.6 Oral Transmission
238
8.7 In Summary
253
9. The Historical Context
255
9.1 Misleading Presuppositions about ‘Judaism’
255
9.2 Defining ‘Judaism’
260
9.3 The Diversity of Judaism — Judaism from Without
265
9.4 Jewish Factionalism — Judaism from Within
281
9.5 The Unity of First-Century Judaism
286
9.6 Galilean Judaism
293
9.7 Synagogues and Pharisees in Galilee?
302
9.8 The Political Context
308
9.9 An Outline of the Life and Mission of Jesus
312
10. Through the Gospels to Jesus
327
10.1 Can a Further Quest Hope to Succeed?
327
10.2 How to Proceed?
330
10.3 Thesis and Method
335
PART THREE: THE MISSION OF JESUS 11. Beginning from the Baptism of John
339
11.1 Why Not ‘Beginning from Bethlehem’?
340
11.2 John the Baptizer
348
11.3 John’s Baptism
355
11.4 John’s Message
362
11.5 Jesus’ Anointing at Jordan
371
11.6 The Death of John
377
11.7 Jesus Tempted
379
12. The Kingdom of God
383
12.1 The Centrality of the Kingdom of God
383
12.2 How Should ‘the Kingdom of God’ Be Understood?
387
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12.3 Three Key Questions
396
12.4 The Kingdom to Come
406
12.5 The Kingdom Has Come
437
12.6 Solving the Riddle
465
13. For Whom Did Jesus Intend His Message?
489
13.1 Hearing Jesus
490
13.2 The Call
498
13.3 To Israel
506
13.4 To the Poor
516
13.5 To Sinners
526
13.6 Women
534
13.7 Gentiles
537
13.8 Circles of Discipleship
539
14. The Character of Discipleship
543
14.1 Subjects of the King
544
14.2 Children of the Father
548
14.3 Disciples of Jesus
555
14.4 Hungering for What Is Right
563
14.5 Love as Motivation
583
14.6 Forgiving as Forgiven
589
14.7 A New Family?
592
14.8 Open Fellowship
599
14.9 Living in the Light of the Coming Kingdom
607
PART FOUR: THE QUESTION OF JESUS’ SELF-UNDERSTANDING 15. Who Did They Think Jesus Was?
615
15.1 Who Was Jesus?
615
15.2 Royal Messiah
617
15.3 An Issue during Jesus’ Mission
627
15.4 A Role Declined
647
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15.5 Priestly Messiah
654
15.6 The Prophet
655
15.7 ‘A Doer of Extraordinary Deeds’
667
15.8 Teacher
696
16. How Did Jesus See His Own Role?
705
16.1 Eschatological Agent
705
16.2 God’s Son
708
16.3 Son of Man: The Issues
724
16.4 Son of Man: The Evidence
737
16.5 Son of Man: A Hypothesis
759
16.6 Conclusion
761
PART FIVE: THE CLIMAX OF JESUS’ MISSION 17. Crucifixus sub Pontio Pilato
765
17.1 The Tradition of Jesus’ Last Week
765
17.2 Why Was Jesus Executed?
784
17.3 Why Did Jesus Go Up to Jerusalem?
790
17.4 Did Jesus Anticipate His Death?
796
17.5 Did Jesus Give Meaning to His Anticipated Death?
805
17.6 Did Jesus Hope for Vindication after Death?
818
18. Et Resurrexit
825
18.1 Why Not Stop Here?
825
18.2 The Empty Tomb Tradition
828
18.3 Appearance Traditions
841
18.4 The Tradition within the Traditions
857
18.5 Why ‘Resurrection’?
866
18.6 The Final Metaphor
876
19. Jesus Remembered
881
19.1 A New Perspective on the Jesus Tradition
881
19.2 What Can We Say about Jesus’ Aim(s)?
884
19.3 The Lasting Impact of Jesus’ Mission
890
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Abbreviations
895
Bibliography
901
Index of Authors
949
Index of Subjects
970
Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings
977
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Preface
It has long been a hope and intention of mine to provide a comprehensive overview of the beginnings of Christianity. As a student of the New Testament (NT), in both professional and personal capacity, I suppose the ambition has a twofold origin: partly a desire to understand the NT writings in historical context, and not only as theological resource or as literature; and partly an instinctive hermeneutical awareness that the part can be understood only in the light of the whole, just as the whole can be comprehended only through a close understanding of the parts. The desire first took flesh in 1971, when A. R. C. (Bob) Leaney, a wonderfully generous and gentle Head of Department for a recently appointed lecturer, encouraged me to rethink the main NT course in the Theology Department of Nottingham University. With limited teaching resources, and Bob Leaney content to teach what he described as ‘a miniKümmel’ (Introduction to the writings of the NT), the obvious answer seemed to me to be a course entitled ‘The Beginnings of Christianity’. The aim was to give students a fairly detailed insight into the life and teaching of Jesus and the initial developments which constituted early Christianity, in both historical and theological perspective. I already conceived the task in three phases. A whole term (ten teaching weeks) had to be given to Jesus; how could it be otherwise, given the central importance of Jesus for and in Christianity? That left only one other term for the sequel(s). And in practice the discussion of primitive Christianity and of Paul’s contribution in particular left very little time for anything beyond the first generation. The lecture course always came to an end when analysis of the second generation of Christianity had barely been entered upon. The situation was unsatisfactory, and only a partial remedy was provided by incorporating much of the missing material into an MA course on ‘Unity and Diversity in the New Testament’, which was duly written up for publication (1977). Otherwise the regular xiii
preface revisions of the lecture material meant that the third section of ‘Beginnings’ continued to find itself restricted to two or three brief sketches. The situation changed significantly with my move to the University of Durham in 1982, where I inherited a core NT course on ‘New Testament Theology’. Faced by a similar challenge of too much material to cover in a single course, I had no doubt that the course should focus on the two NT figures of greatest theological significance — Jesus and Paul. It seemed obvious to me then, and still seems obvious to me, that in a Department focusing on the Jewish and Christian traditions of theologizing, detailed historical treatment of the principal focus of all Christian theology (Jesus) was indispensable. Similarly in regard to Paul, arguably the first and most influential of all Christian theologians (by virtue of the canonization of his letters): how could a course in New Testament Theology not give equivalently detailed treatment of Paul’s theology? And so my earlier material was reworked to sharpen the theological focus (already a central concern of the earlier course anyway) and to concentrate solely on Jesus and Paul. In a larger Department it was always possible to offer various options which advanced my continuing interest in the second generation of Christianity and the transition to the so-called ‘sub-apostolic’ age. This latter interest came to initial fruition in the Durham-Tübingen research seminar on ‘The Partings of the Ways, ad 70 to 135’, in September 1989, appropriately on the centenary of the death of my great hero, J. B. Lightfoot. The papers were subsequently published (1992) under the title Jews and Christians, with the original title of the Symposium as the book’s subtitle. There was also the lecture series which I gave in the Gregorian Pontifical University (Rome) in 1990 as Joseph McCarthy Visiting Professor, which was published in fuller version as The Partings of the Ways between Christianity and Judaism in 1991. But in the meantime the theology of Paul had become such a major concern that further work towards the fulfilment of my original vision had to be put on hold until I had got Paul out of my system. That time duly arrived, with the publication of my The Theology of Paul the Apostle in 1998. At which point, as I delighted to tease my friends, ‘I gave up Paul for Jesus’. Having focused my attention so heavily on Paul for nearly twenty years I had no delusions as to the magnitude of the mountain before me. Even though I had kept fairly well abreast of Jesus and Gospels scholarship during that period I knew well enough that the shift of research interest from Paul to Jesus demanded a massive re-tooling job on my part. Fortunately I was granted by the University in effect two years research leave, first as a Derman Christopherson Fellow (1999-2000), and then as my regular research leave enhanced in recognition of my (second) spell of three years service as Head of the Department. I continued my postgraduate supervisions (almost always a delight and stimulus) but otherwise was freed from academic duties as a member of the Department. I xiv
Preface am immensely grateful to the University and to my departmental colleagues for thus encouraging and supporting me and gladly acknowledge that without that leave the challenge of the present volume would have been impossible to take on, let along to meet even to the extent that the following chapters attest. During the course of the two years, a blessed anticipation (arrabZn) of early retirement in due course (take heart, Meta, there is light at the end of the tunnel), I was able to try out several ideas and sections of the book as its structure developed. The attempts to explain and the opportunities to defend its various hypotheses and findings helped (as always) to clarify and sharpen my own thinking and formulation. I am grateful more than I can say for all the pleasure and stimulus these occasions afforded, for me certainly, and I hope for the others involved. For more than two years I have been able to offer a one, two, or three lecture series under various titles round the theme ‘Looking for Jesus’ — in San Antonio, Texas; as the Hugh Price Hughes Lecture in Hinde Street Methodist Church, London; as the Lund and the Zarley Lectures in North Park, Chicago; in Lincoln Cathedral as part of a series on ‘The Uniqueness of Christianity’; in Lynchburg College, Virginia; and in Denver Theological Seminary, Colorado. At the annual symposium on ‘The Task of Interpreting Scripture Theologically’ at North Park Seminary in October 2000, I was able to develop key themes from chapter 6 under the title ‘Ex Ako3 PisteZs’. The key thesis of the whole volume (chapter 8) was tried out in a wonderful colloquium in Israel, under the inspired leadership of Doris Donnelly, and also in the British New Testament Conference in September 2000 in Bristol, and at the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) conference in November 2000 at Nashville, under the title ‘Jesus in Oral Memory’. Parts of chapter 9 made up a paper for the ‘Jesus and Archaeology’ conference in Jerusalem, August 2000. Sections of chapter 12 provided a paper for the ‘Historical Jesus’ seminar at the Society for New Testament Studies annual conference in Montreal, August 2001 and for the Festschrift for Peder Borgen. Material from chapters 9 and 14 contributed to papers on ‘Jesus and Holiness’ for a Durham interdisciplinary seminar organized by Stephen Barton in November 1999, and to a paper on ‘Jesus and Purity’ delivered at the SBL conference in Denver, Colorado, in November 2001. Material for chapters 15 to 17 was first worked through thoroughly in contributions to two symposia, one of them the Festschrift for my old friend David Catchpole. And sections from chapter 18 have contributed to yet another Festschrift, this one for my former colleague Sandy Wedderburn. More interactive and generative of more feedback, the bulk of the first fourteen chapters provided the main feature of the programme of the Durham New Testament Research Seminar for two terms in the first half of 2001. These were particularly stimulating and challenging sessions, and I am grateful to the members of the Seminar for their comments and criticisms, particularly my imxv
preface mediate colleagues, Stephen Barton, Loren Stuckenbruck, Crispin Fletcher Louis, and (as with my Theology of Paul) especially Walter Moberly. Charlene Moss saved me from several British English idioms which would have been unfamiliar to speakers of American English. Of my own postgraduates, the overlap of interest, above all with Marta Cserhati, researching ‘the third quest of the historical Jesus’, and Terence Mournet, researching oral tradition in the Gospels, has been highly instructive and productive. I am grateful not least to Jeffrey Gibson, who persuaded me to post my ‘Jesus in Oral Memory’ in his XTalk on-line Seminar. The two-week daily dialogue with other members of the Seminar focused not so much on the ‘nitty-gritty’ issues of the Synoptic data, as I had hoped, but more on the implications of my understanding of the oral traditioning process for subsequent church formation and the emergence of the Gospels. So the benefits of the dialogue will extend into the second volume of the projected three-volume study of Christianity’s beginnings. But I found that the experience helped recharge the little grey cells and several of the contributions were very pertinent, especially those of Mark Goodacre, Brian McCarthy, Bob Schacht and Ted Weeden. I also consulted or sent various parts of the manuscript in first or second draft to friends and colleagues and found their feedback invariably helpful: in Durham itself, Richard Britnell, David Brown, Joe Cassidy, Colin Crowder, Sheridan Gilley, Margaret Harvey and Robert Hayward; elsewhere in the UK, Richard Bauckham, Bob Morgan, Ron Piper, Graham Stanton and Anthony Thiselton; and in North America, Jim Charlesworth, Helmut Koester, John Kloppenborg, and particularly John Meier and Scot McKnight. Many individual points have been nuanced more appropriately as a result, and for that I am very grateful, though at other points, after further consideration, I have restated my earlier view. Needless to say, the remaining misjudgments and infelicities are my own. Any who have worked in this field will be well aware that each of the following Parts of volume 1 could have been expanded into full-length monographs. It was clear enough to me from the beginning that I could not seriously hope to review all exegetical options or to provide extensive bibliographical documentation of the various opinions even for key texts and motifs. That would have made the volume impossibly long and even more unwieldy than it now is. My primary concern has been rather to draw attention to the principal (mainly textual) data which have to be taken into account when considering whether a tradition can be traced back to Jesus, or as I would prefer to say, to the initial impact made by Jesus’ teaching and activity. For both reasons I have made no attempt to consult the immense range of commentaries on the Gospels now available to us, but have concentrated principally on those which go into some detail on the tradition history behind the Gospels and do not hesitate to ask historical questions regarding the origin of these traditions. Questions on how the individxvi
Preface ual traditions function within each Gospel are for a later volume. It will not surprise those who know the commentary literature, therefore, that I have found the greatest help and most fruitful dialogue with W. D. Davies and Dale Allison on Matthew, Rudolf Pesch on Mark, and Joe Fitzmyer on Luke. Others are certainly drawn in where appropriate, but the frequency of reference to those named indicates the extent of my debt. I have also endeavoured to limit what would otherwise have become an all-inclusive bibliography by focusing entries on the primary subject matter of the volume, but including neither dictionary articles nor most of the once-mentioned articles on individual texts. I hope the footnotes to each chapter are sufficiently detailed to indicate further reading as well as my own engagement with it. In 1979, when I had nearly completed the manuscript of my inquiry into the origins of the doctrine of the incarnation, I was disappointed to learn that the intended title ‘The Beginnings of Christology’ had been pre-empted by other authors. In some frustration I turned to John Bowden, Editor of the SCM Press for advice. He responded at once that a better because stronger title would be Christology in the Making. I warmed to the title immediately and used it for the 1980 publication. The strength of the phrase still resonates for me, and so, in the (no doubt vain) hope that I will not cause too much confusion on booksellers’ shelves, I have christened the three-volume project Christianity in the Making. May the reading of volume 1 give as much pleasure and profit as I received in the writing of it. January 6 (Epiphany), 2002
A major compositional concern in the chapters which follow has been to leave the main text as uncluttered as possible, to facilitate continuity of reading. The footnotes are there to document points made in the text, to justify assertions made too baldly, and to indicate the wider scope of debate and bibliography regarding issues referred to. Those less interested in such finer details should have no qualms in passing over the footnotes with only an occasional glance. They are for those who want to be kept aware of how tentative some of the claims have to be, or to follow up points of detail, or to consult some of the varied (though far from complete) bibliography provided. At least they may give readers less familiar with the myriad debates some assurance that the more controversial opinions voiced in the following pages have not been reached without substantial reflection and consultation. Read well!
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CHAPTER 1
Christianity in the Making
Christianity is without doubt the most significant and longest-lasting influence to have shaped the character and culture of Europe (and so also of ‘the West’) over the last two millennia. To understand Christianity better, its own character and the core elements which made its beliefs and values so influential, remains therefore an important task and a continuing challenge for historical inquiry. Within that larger enterprise, the beginnings of Christianity call for special consideration. Partly because the origins of such a major religious and social force are always of interest for the student of history. And partly because Christianity is itself named after the first-century ce figure, Jesus of Nazareth (Jesus Christ), and regards the earliest Christian writings (the New Testament) as definitive (‘canonical’) for these beliefs and values. To focus thus on Christianity’s beginnings is not to claim that only the ‘original’ is ‘authentic’, or that ‘the apostolic age’ was alone ‘pure’. It is simply to affirm the continuing relevance of formative factors in the determination of features of Christianity which have been integral to its lasting impact. And for Christianity itself the challenge of setting the texts which attest these beginnings within their historical context and of understanding them better can never be less than a challenge to Christianity’s own self-understanding. The task here envisaged was one more frequently tackled by earlier generations. Subsequent to the influential overviews of F. C. Baur (particularly 1845 and 1854)1 and the generally disregarded Ernest Renan (1863-81),2 we could mention, for example, Carl Weizsäcker’s Das apostolische Zeitalter der christlichen Kirche 1. F. C. Baur, Paul: The Apostle of Jesus Christ (1845; ET 2 vols. London: Williams and Norgate, 1873, 1875); The Church History of the First Three Centuries (1854; ET 2 vols. London: Williams and Norgate, 1878-79). 2. E. Renan, Histoire des origines du christianisme in 5 volumes, beginning with his Vie de Jésus (1863), ET The History of the Origins of Christianity (London: Mathieson, n.d.).
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(1886),3 Alfred Loisy, La Naissance du Christianisme (1933) and Les Origines du Nouveau Testament (1936),4 and Maurice Goguel’s three-volume Jésus et les Origines du Christianisme (1932, 1946, 1947).5 From America came the slighter A. C. McGiffert, A History of Christianity in the Apostolic Age (1897).6 But the most substantive treatments,7 and nearest models for the current project, are Eduard Meyer’s three-volume Ursprung und Anfänge des Christentums (192123)8 and particularly Johannes Weiss’s Das Urchristentum (regrettably incomplete when he died in 1914).9 These were marked, the last most impressively, by the attempt to draw together the fruits of historical, literary and theological investigations which were so lively at that time. English-speaking scholars have not generally attempted such ambitious overviews or syntheses,10 and throughout the twentieth century were content to focus on specific issues or to contribute at the level of introductory or semi-popular treatments.11 The one real exception is the recently undertaken multi-volume treatment by N. T. Wright — Christian Origins and the Question of God (so far two volumes, 1992, 1996).12 Substantial though these volumes are, and much as I agree with major features of the undertaking, however, I have serious reservations about the central hypothesis which so far forms the spine of the work. To have Wright, now bishop of Durham, as a dialogue partner is one of the pleasures of the present project. The beginning of the third millennium, as (mis)dated from the birth of Je3. ET 2 vols. The Apostolic Age of the Christian Church (London: Williams and Norgate, 1907, 1912). 4. ET The Birth of the Christian Religion and The Origins of the New Testament in a single volume (New York: University Books, 1962). 5. La Vie de Jésus (Paris: Payot, 1932), ET The Life of Jesus (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1933); La Naissance du Christianisme (Paris: Payot, 1946), ET The Birth of Christianity (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1953); L’Église primitive (Paris: Payot, 1947), ET The Primitive Church (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1964). 6. Edinburgh: Clark, 1897. 7. Also worthy of mention are the initial volumes of larger-scale projects on church history by H. Lietzmann, A History of the Church. Vol. 1: The Beginnings of the Christian Church (ET London: Lutterworth, 1937, revised 1949), and J. Lebreton and J. Zeiler, The History of the Primitive Church (ET 2 vols; London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1942, 1944). 8. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1921-23. 9. ET Earliest Christianity: A History of the Period AD 30-150 (1937; New York: Harper, 1959). 10. McGiffert gave only a brief treatment of Jesus and limited his study to the NT period. 11. The most recent volumes of note are C. Rowland, Christian Origins: An Account of the Setting and Character of the Most Important Messianic Sect of Judaism (London: SPCK, 1985), and P. Barnett, Jesus and the Rise of Early Christianity: A History of New Testament Times (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1999). 12. The New Testament and the People of God (London: SPCK, 1992); Jesus and the Victory of God (London: SPCK, 1996).
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Christianity in the Making
sus, is an appropriate time to gather together the fruits of the last two centuries in a fresh statement and assessment of the status quaestionis after two thousand years. More important, however, are the recent developments in the field which call for a more or less complete reevaluation of previous assumptions and approaches. I mention here only the three most significant factors. (a) In terms of methodology, the crisis for the hitherto self-assured historical-critical method of analysing sources and traditions, a crisis occasioned by post-modernism in its various forms, needs to be addressed at some depth. (b) The interaction with social-scientific disciplines, particularly sociology, has shed a good deal of fresh light on the NT texts and Christianity’s beginnings, which needs to be incorporated, but critically, into any such overview. (c) The discovery of new texts, particularly the Dead Sea Scrolls and the codices from Nag Hammadi, has undermined the older wisdom which had previously determined scholarly views on the emergence of Christianity in its distinctiveness from its Jewish matrix and within the religious melting pot of the first- and second-century Mediterranean world. Although these texts were discovered more than fifty years ago, their impact continues to ripple through scholarship on earliest Christianity, and the current debates which they occasioned remain confused at many key points. Needless to say, I hope to contribute in some measure to these debates. There are three great questions for students of Christianity’s beginnings: (1) What was it about Jesus which explains both the impact he made on his disciples and why he was crucified? (2) How and why did it come about that the movement which took off from Jesus did not after his death remain within firstcentury Judaism and became unacceptable to emerging rabbinic Judaism? (3) Was the Christianity which emerged in the second century as a predominantly Gentile religion essentially the same as its first-century version or significantly different in character and kind? These are not new questions. Already in his Paul book, Baur posed the second question in setting out his programme for a history of earliest Christianity, when he claimed that the idea (of Christianity) found in the bounds of the national Judaism the chief obstacle to its universal historical realization. How these bounds were broken through, how Christianity, instead of remaining a mere form of Judaism, although a progressive one, asserted itself as a separate, independent principle, broke loose from it, and took its stand as a new enfranchised form of religious thought and life, essentially differing from all the national peculiarities of Judaism is the ultimate, most important point of the primitive history of Christianity.13 13. Baur, Paul 3 (my emphasis).
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Baur’s formulation of the issue reflects the supreme self-confidence of nineteenth-century German scholarship and the triumphalism of a view of Christianity as the ‘absolute’ expression of ‘the universal, the unconditioned, the essential’14 which grates intensely for a post-Holocaust sensibility. But, as we shall see further in volume 2, Baur set the agenda for attempts to clarify the history of primitive Christianity for the rest of the nineteenth century. And the issue of Christianity’s emergence from within Judaism has reappeared in the second half of the twentieth century, posed all the more sharply by the Holocaust, as one of the absolutely crucial subjects for any analysis of the formative period of both Christianity and Judaism.15 The turn of the twentieth century brought the third great issue to the fore, summed up in the phrase, ‘the Hellenization of (the earliest form of) Christianity’.16 This was the principal concern of the history-of-religions school — to locate Christianity as it emerged into the Graeco-Roman world within the context of other religions of the day and to trace the influences from the wider context on that emerging Christianity. The issue is nicely focused on the disparity between the message of Jesus in the Gospels and the gospel of Paul in his letters, where the assumption or conclusion (?) was that several key features of the latter had to be attributed to the influence of mystery cults and early Gnostic ideas.17 The consequences for our appreciation of Christianity’s beginnings are clearly signalled in William Wrede’s famous description of Paul as ‘the second founder of Christianity’, who has ‘exercised beyond all doubt the stronger — not the better — influence’ than the first founder, Jesus.18 Here again are questions best left till volume 2. But one of the key insights of the twentieth century has been the recognition that the historical developments could not be neatly compartmentalized, as though one could simply distinguish Jesus and Jewish Christianity from Paul and Hellenistic/Gentile Christianity, from the Apostolic Fathers and the emerging Great Church, and from Jewish14. Baur, History 4-6, 33, 43, 47. 15. See my The Partings of the Ways between Christianity and Judaism and Their Significance for the Character of Christianity (London: SCM, 1991) 1-17. The importance of the plural (Partings) has usually been recognized in reactions to this volume; but it is equally important to recognize the importance of the final phrase (for the Character of Christianity), intended to draw Christianity’s attention to this central feature of its beginnings. The significance for historic (rabbinic) Judaism needs also to be part of the agenda for the ongoing dialogue between Jews and Christians. 16. In his famous lectures, A. Harnack, What Is Christianity? (1899-1900; ET Williams and Norgate, 31904) defined ‘the greatest fact in the history of the Church in the second century’ as ‘the influx of Hellenism, of the Greek spirit, and the union of the Gospel with it’ (203, his italics). 17. For details see below, vol. 2 (§20). 18. W. Wrede, Paul (1904; ET Boston: Beacon, 1908) 180.
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Christianity in the Making
Christian and Gnostic heretical forms of Christianity. The breakthrough was made by Walter Bauer’s Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum (1934, 21964),19 which argued that the earliest forms of Christianity in several major Mediterranean centres may have been what subsequent ‘orthodoxy’ came to regard as ‘heresy’. In other words, the earliest forms of Christianity were much more of a ‘mixed bag’ than had previously been thought. Was there ever a ‘pure’ form of Christianity?! Bauer’s own thesis is again subject matter for a subsequent volume. But the issues he raised could not be confined to the second century. In one of the most important twentieth-century contributions to the reconstruction of Christianity’s beginnings, James M. Robinson and Helmut Koester followed up Bauer’s insight in the light of the Nag Hammadi texts and concluded that the same verdict had to be delivered on first-century Christianity as well.20 Was there ever a single form of Christianity? Is the Christianity of the New Testament simply the deposit of that form of Christianity which endured and/or overcame its (Christian!) rivals?21 Both these large-scale issues — the emergence of Christianity from within Judaism, and into the wider Hellenistic world — have inevitably impacted back on the first, on the attempt to understand the mission and message of Jesus himself and its determinative influence. On the one hand, the (re)assertion that Jesus was a Jew has become one of the commonplaces of contemporary NT scholarship. But the more firmly Jesus is located within the Judaism of his day, the more pressing become the questions Why then was he crucified? and How then did the movement which sprang from his mission cease to be part of Judaism (to be Jewish!) so quickly? On the other hand, the likelihood is frequently canvassed today that the pluralism detected by Bauer was a feature of Christianity from the first, that is of the very first hearings of Jesus’ own preaching. Or even that the influence of Hellenism which Harnack described as a feature of the second century is already to be traced in Jesus’ own message. These last are among the most important issues to be discussed in the following pages (vol. 1). But the point here is that the questions which motivate historical inquiry into Christianity’s beginnings can no longer be neatly apportioned to separate volumes. A history of earliest Christianity can no longer treat the mission and message of Jesus simply as prolegomenon, nor confine itself to the period and documents of the NT. Unless 19. ET Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971). 20. J. M. Robinson and H. Koester, Trajectories through Early Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971). 21. In my Unity and Diversity in the New Testament: An Inquiry into the Character of Earliest Christianity (London: SCM, 1977, 21990) I followed up Robinson and Koester to the extent of drawing attention to the diversity of earliest Christianity, that is, the diversity within the New Testament. But I did not really address the issue of a diversity of which the NT itself was only part.
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the major transitions, from Jesus to Paul, from the NT to the early Fathers (and ‘heretics’!) are also appreciated, neither the significance of Jesus nor that of Paul, neither the Christianity of the NT writings nor that of the early Fathers can be adequately comprehended or fully grasped. In other words, what is envisaged in Christianity in the Making is the attempt in three volumes to give an integrated description and analysis, both historical and theological, both social and literary, of the first 120 or so years of Christianity (27-150 ce). Volume 1 will, inevitably, focus on Jesus. Part One will examine what has become universally known as ‘the Quest of the Historical Jesus’, focusing on the crucial insights gleaned in the course of the two-hundredyear-old quest and asking whether or in what degree they are still valid. It will argue that the Gospel traditions provide a clear portrayal of the remembered Jesus since they still display with sufficient clarity for present purposes the impact which Jesus made on his first followers. Part Two will evaluate the sources available to us and describe the historical context of Jesus’ mission as concisely as feasible, alert to the current debate regarding these sources and drawing on the most recent archaeological and sociological studies. The most distinctive feature of the present study will be the attempt to freshly assess the importance of the oral tradition of Jesus’ mission and the suggestion that the Synoptic Gospels bear testimony to a pattern and technique of oral transmission which has ensured a greater stability and continuity in the Jesus tradition than has thus far been generally appreciated. Parts Three to Five will then attempt to gain an overview of Jesus’ mission (as remembered by his first followers), dealing in succession with its main themes, some much controverted, others surprisingly not so; also, inevitably, the questions of what Jesus’ hearers thought of him, what he thought of himself, and why he was crucified. The volume will conclude with a discussion of how and why the belief that Jesus had been resurrected arose and what were the claims it embodied. Volume 2 will begin with a section methodologically equivalent to Parts One and Two of volume 1 — on the quest for the historical ‘primitive community’ and the value of the sources available, including not just the Acts of the Apostles, but also what can be deduced from the Gospels and the Epistles. In trying to sketch out the earliest history and the emergence of ‘the Hellenists’ (Acts 6.1), it is important to appreciate the character of the early Nazarene sect within the ‘sectarianism’ of late Second Temple Judaism. The earliest expansion of the new movement, its causes and course, require careful detective work and sifting of the evidence, not least in regard to the expansion which the Acts does not record. A particular concern at this point will have to be an evaluation of the increasingly vociferous claims that there were diverse and alternative forms of Christianity as early as those attested in the canonical NT. Given the place of Acts and the Pauline letters within the NT, the dominant 6
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figure through the latter half of this period is bound to be Paul. But Paul’s life and work need to be built into an integrated picture, and Paul needs to be fitted into the much larger picture of a Nazarene sect ‘beginning from Jerusalem’. The emergence of the distinctives which were to mark out Christianity and result in its becoming a separate religion was a much more complex process, involving many others than Paul, but their contributions are much more difficult to bring to light and to tease out. Nevertheless, the (probably) quite close conjunction of Paul’s death and the beginning of the first Jewish revolt (66 ce) point to 70 ce, when, properly speaking, Second Temple Judaism came to an end with the destruction of the Temple, as the natural terminus ad quem for the second volume. At the time of writing this Introduction, the form of volume 3 is not yet settled. The intention, however, is to cover what can roughly be classified as the second and third generations of Christianity (70-150). This is the period in which most of the NT texts were written, but the task of correlating them with other data from the same period, particularly Jewish and Graeco-Roman texts and epigraphical data, and of producing a coherent overall picture is extremely daunting. Moreover, 150 takes us into the period when the challenge of Bauer’s thesis is at its sharpest and the confrontations between nascent Christianity/ies and its/their chief competitors are already clear. 150 was also Weiss’s cut-off date, and though fairly arbitrary it should be sufficient to ensure that the gap between the NT and ‘post-apostolic’ Christianity has been fully bridged and that the trends and tendencies which formed Christianity’s enduring character are sufficiently clear. And so to Jesus.
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PART ONE
FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS
CHAPTER 2
Introduction
It began with Jesus — ‘it’ being Christianity. Whether he began it, or it looked back to him as its beginning, are matters to be clarified. Either way, and whatever qualifications might prove to be appropriate or necessary in the light of more detailed analysis, the assertion can stand: it began with Jesus. An inquiry into Christianity’s beginnings, therefore, must inevitably start with this Jesus, who by common consent flourished in the land of Israel, otherwise known as Palestine, round about the year 30 of the common era (ce). A historical figure of such immense significance as Jesus has always been and will always be a subject of human curiosity and fascination. In earlier centuries such interest in historical people and events of religious significance was usually expressed primarily in pilgrimage, the ancient equivalent of tourism and sight-seeing. The grand tour of the Holy Land by Queen Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine in the fourth century to identify the sites of Jesus’ ministry, thenceforward gave focus to Christian interest in the ‘where’ of the events of that ministry. The Crusades were motivated by concern to maintain pilgrim access to the places made holy for Christians by what the Christian Gospels recorded as having taken place there. And in an age of widespread illiteracy the details of Jesus’ life could be given visual concreteness by artistic reproductions of episodes from the Gospels, as so finely illustrated in the artwork of Chartres Cathedral. However, the last five hundred years of European history have witnessed a (for the most part) increasing interest in the historical figure of Jesus, as we shall soon see. An important and probably unavoidable consequence has been an increasing tension between such historical interest and the traditional claims of Christian doctrine regarding Jesus, classically expressed in the ecumenical Christian creeds1 and the artistic representations of Christ the Pantocrator (Al1. The Niceno-Constantinopolitan creed, known familiarly as the Nicene creed from its
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mighty, Ruler of the Universe) so characteristic of Byzantine iconography.2 This tension continues to the present day, often as a positive tension, but frequently experienced and perceived as a negative or even destructive tension. This too should become clear as we proceed. The ongoing discussion has had three important dimensions. Since these provide the interweaving warp and woof of the following discussion, it is well to be clear on them, at least in broad terms, before proceeding further. The three can be summed up most simply in the three terms, ‘faith, history and hermeneutics’. (1) By ‘faith’ I mean that dimension of the discussion formed by Christian belief in Jesus. The traditional terms of that belief have already been indicated in the formal language (and rather daunting conceptuality) of the classic creeds cited in the previous paragraph (n. 1). But the term itself (faith) embraces any conviction that Jesus has provided ‘a window into the divine’ (almost a definition of an icon),3 and/or that in some sense his death achieved salvation from sin, and/ or that he was raised by God from death to a life beyond death.4 The point is that such faith inevitably influences and shapes any attempt on the part of one who stands within the Christian tradition (as I do) to make an evaluation of the historical figure. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, whether such a faith perspective should or can be bracketed out, or whether such faith can be sufficiently open to critique from without (and from within) are all questions which have bounced back and forth during the last few centuries and will form much of the grist for what follows.
use in eucharistic liturgy, affirms: ‘We believe . . . in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten from the Father before all ages, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father, through whom all things came into existence, who because of us men and because of our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became man . . .’. The same council which endorsed this creed (Chalcedon, 451) also asserted against the teaching of Eutyches that Christ had ‘two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation’ (ODCC 336-37, 1145-46; text of the creed in J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds [London: Longmans, 21960] 297-98). 2. The icon seeks to express the invisible God become visible in Christ, so that what is depicted is ‘a humanity suffused with the presence of divinity’, ‘the “deified” body of Christ’, ‘the dogma of the two natures of Christ, the divine and the human’ (J. Pelikan, Jesus through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture [New Haven: Yale University, 1985] 92-93). 3. A very early conviction, variously expressed in such passages as Matt. 11.27; John 1.18; and Col. 1.15. The conviction is nicely caught in the teasing title used by J. A. T. Robinson, The Human Face of God (London: SCM, 1973). 4. The earliest Christian creeds or confessional formulae (that is, within the first twenty years of Jesus’ crucifixion) focus on the significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection (data and bibliography in my Theology of Paul the Apostle [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans/Edinburgh: Clark, 1998] 174-75).
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(2) By ‘history’ I mean all that is involved in taking seriously the fact that, whatever else he was, Jesus was a figure in history, and, to that extent at least, is amenable to the methods and tools of historical study. What these methods and tools are, what are or should be the working assumptions behind their employment, and whether historical inquiry can or should try to escape completely from the pre-conditioning of some ideology (‘faith’ or other), these too are questions which form part of the daily diet for protagonists on our theme and must feature prominently in what follows. Here it should simply be noted that the fact of faith, belief regarding Jesus, however expressed, is itself a historical datum, one which has itself to be taken into consideration in any historical account of Christianity’s beginnings, even when a particular historical method may attempt to bracket out a faith perspective from the assumptions lying behind that method. (3) By ‘hermeneutics’ I mean the theory of interpretation, and by extension the science, or perhaps better, art of interpreting the data available to us regarding the historical figure of Jesus. The data in question have consisted primarily of the testimony of the NT writings, particularly the Gospels, including, of course, their own faith claims. The wish that there could be other sources has often been expressed, and a significant body of contemporary opinion would claim that that wish has been fulfilled through the discovery of more documents from the earliest centuries ce during the last fifty or so years. This claim too will be a matter for further discussion. But whatever the extent of the data base, the task of interpreting it remains. The hermeneutical task itself has been seen to have many facets in recent years. But the principal concern for the present historical study will be what might be called the hermeneutical dialogue between faith and history.5 Hermeneutics, I suggest, provides a kind of bridge between faith and history. Whether that is in fact the case, whether it can be sustained as such a bridge, and whether, if so, the bridge will be sustainable only in a lopsided way, firmly rooted on one side but with only a shallow hold on the other, are once again questions which lie behind and motivate all that follows. The task in front of us has usually been described as ‘the quest of the historical Jesus’, to use the title popularised by the English translation of Albert Schweitzer’s magisterial study at the beginning of the twentieth century.6 This period of Life of Jesus research was described by Schweitzer as ‘the greatest 5. The faith-history tension is closely related to the tension between the NT as Scripture and as a set of historical documents, but the latter would be more restrictive than the dialogue here envisaged. 6. A. Schweitzer, Von Reimarus zu Wrede (1906, but since 1913, Geschichte der LebenJesu-Forschung); ET The Quest of the Historical Jesus (London: Black, 1910). The Quest has been republished as the ‘first complete edition’, with revised translation, Schweitzer’s Preface to the sixth German edition (1950), and a Foreword by D. Nineham (London: SCM, 2000). I will distinguish the two English editions as Quest1 and Quest2.
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achievement of German theology’.7 That is an overblown estimate, expressive of the high self-confidence of German biblical scholarship of the time8 — a selfconfidence which, ironically, Schweitzer himself was about to puncture; and its almost exclusive focus on the German ‘quest’ did too little justice to the interest in such questions in scholarly circles outside Germany. Nevertheless, the estimate did express the sense of intellectual excitement which the quest generated within German scholarship. And the fact remains, for better or worse, that for many decades it was the German questers who drew the scholars of other countries along in their train. Since Schweitzer’s great study, the quest as such has been further analysed and summarised on countless occasions, and there is no need to retrace in detail the paths so familiar to most students of the NT and of previous research into the life of Jesus.9 However, ‘the quest of the historical Jesus’ as described by 7. Schweitzer, Quest1 1, Quest2 3. 8. The opening words (in the preceding paragraph) are: ‘When, at some future day, our period of civilisation lies closed and completed before the eyes of later generations, German theology will stand out as a great, a unique phenomenon in the mental and spiritual life of our time’ (Quest2 3). 9. Beyond dictionary articles and popular accounts, however, the roots of the quest and its embeddedness in the broader streams of philosophical thought need to be appreciated — as in C. Brown, Jesus in European Protestant Thought, 1778-1860 (Durham, NC: Labyrinth, 1985); see also W. Baird, History of New Testament Research. Vol. One: From Deism to Tübingen (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992). J. Riches, A Century of New Testament Study (Valley Forge: Trinity, 1993) chs. 1, 2, 6, and R. Morgan (with J. Barton), Biblical Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University, 1988) contain many relevant insights. C. Allen, The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus (Oxford: Lion, 1998) provides a well-informed and easyto-read account. W. Weaver, E. Baasland and J. H. Charlesworth are attempting to ‘do a Schweitzer’ on the twentieth century, of which only the first volume has been thus far produced: W. Weaver, The Historical Jesus in the Twentieth Century, 1900-1950 (Harrisburg: Trinity, 1999). For a review of the most recent phase of the quest see especially B. Witherington, The Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew of Nazareth (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1995); M. A. Powell, Jesus as a Figure in History: How Modern Historians View the Man from Galilee (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1998); B. B. Scott, ‘New Options in an Old Quest’, in B. F. LeBeau, et al., eds., The Historical Jesus through Catholic and Jewish Eyes (Harrisburg: Trinity, 2000) 1-49; D. A. Hagner, ‘An Analysis of Recent “Historical Jesus” Studies’, in D. Cohn-Sherbok and J. M. Court, Religious Diversity in the Graeco-Roman World: A Survey of Recent Scholarship (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2001) 81-106; D. S. Du Toit, ‘Redefining Jesus: Current Trends in Jesus Research’, in M. Labahn and A. Schmidt, eds., Jesus, Mark and Q: The Teaching of Jesus and Its Earliest Records (JSNTS 214; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2001) 82-124. The fullest and most recent bibliographical surveys are W. R. Telford, ‘Major Trends and Interpretive Issues in the Study of Jesus’, in B. Chilton and C. A. Evans, eds., Studying the Historical Jesus: Evaluations of the State of Current Research (NTTS 19; Leiden: Brill, 1994) 33-74; C. A. Evans, Life of Jesus Research: An Annotated Bibliography (NTTS 24; Leiden: Brill, revised 1996); S. E. Porter, The Criteria for Authenticity in
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Introduction
Schweitzer was itself only part of a longer period of historical interest in and inquiry concerning the figure of Jesus, a period which stretches back before Schweitzer and, of course, forward since Schweitzer. That longer period has produced several landmark studies and advances, both classical statements of key issues, historical and methodological, which remain issues to this day, and important findings which still remain valid in large measure and therefore foundational for subsequent studies. These statements and findings need to be brought together, reassessed and restated, not least because the intellectual climate at the end of the twentieth century seems to have been generally hostile towards the idea that such statements and findings should still be able to claim assent today. Such reassessment and restatement will be one of the primary tasks of Part One. Twenty-five years ago I taught a course on ‘Faith and the Historical Jesus’. Over the years and particularly since once again focusing my full attention on the subject, the conviction has been strengthened that the quest is best analysed in terms of the tension and dialogue between faith and history, if we are to appreciate what was seen to be at stake in the various phases of the quest, and still today. In the intervening years I have become more fully aware of the hermeneutical dimension of that tension and dialogue. With that addition or qualification, it still seems to me that the history of the quest can be profitably analysed in terms of, first, ‘the flight from dogma’ and then ‘the flight from history’. My objectives in Part One are therefore threefold. 1. To recall the roots of the quest: that they reach back well before the Enlightenment. However much, in retrospect, the Enlightenment may have bent the young sapling of renewed historical interest in Jesus and Christianity’s beginnings in a particular direction, there is no lack of stimulus and resource for the quest in the developments of pre-Enlightenment scholarship. 2. To note afresh both the genuine advances that have been made in the course of the quest, most of which should not be lightly abandoned, as well as the issues posed (historical, hermeneutical, theological) by the generally acknowledged classical contributions to the quest, most of which remain as issues today. In structuring my review in terms of ‘the flight from dogma’ and ‘the flight from history’, I am very conscious of imposing a particular schema on the data. I should emphasise, then, that I regard both ‘flights’ as uneven trends (Tendenzen) rather than consistent programmes or consciously chosen objectives. Also that the allocation of some authors to either ‘flight’ is more a matter of convenience than of justifiable critique. Historical-Jesus Research: Previous Discussion and New Proposals (JSNTS 191; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2000) ch. 1 (28-62).
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Nevertheless, I hope that the heuristic value of observing the persistence and recurrence of these particular Tendenzen will outweigh the defects of the schema. 3. In chapters 3-5 my objective will be primarily descriptive. Only in chapter 6, having recognized the advances made and acknowledged the issues posed by the earlier phases of the quest (and earlier), do I attempt to set out ‘my own stall’, and to indicate and argue for the historical, hermeneutical, and theological principles which will inform my own attempt to describe the beginnings of Christianity in Jesus of Nazareth.
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