Now here’s a conundrum: Who founded Christianity? Did Jesus really intend to ‘found’ a religion after the manner, say, of Buddha or Mohammed? When I was studying at the seminary an interesting book came out that caused quite a stir: Jesus the Jew by Geza Vermes. He argued that Jesus should be seen as a Jewish holy man (hassid) and that Judaism defined all that he was and taught. About the same time this work appeared (1973) another life of Jesus appeared by another distinguished scriptural scholar, C.H. Dodd, with the unequivocal title, The Founder of Christianity; obviously it took quite a different line. So what are we to make of all this? Or, as Vermes asked, if the picture of Jesus the Jew clashes with ‘traditional, dogmatic…Christianity, what are we to do?’
It is noteworthy that a central feature of the teaching of Jesus was opposition to the uncritical assumptions of established tradition. In his opening presentation in the synagogue at Nazareth we see him picking up where the prophet Isaiah left off by claiming he has come ‘to bring good news to the poor’ (Lk 4:18). Here Luke is also reiterating a theme previously announced in the radical sentiments of the Magnificat, which pictures God dethroning princes and exalting the lowly (Lk 1:52). Continuing with this theme of the dawn of a new era of justice, Luke begins Jesus’s ‘inaugural discourse’, often called ‘the Sermon on the Plain’ by describing ‘the poor’ as possessors of the ‘kingdom of God’ (Lk 6:20).
But what exactly does ‘the poor’ mean and who are they? Elsewhere in scripture we find another word anawim, that has a different meaning. The ending of the Second Book of Kings reports the utter destruction of Jerusalem and the deportation to Babylon of the population in 598 BCE (2 Kgs 25:8-12). We are told that the Babylonians left behind only ‘some of the humbler people of the land (anawim) as vineyard workers and ploughmen.’ In other words, ‘the poor’ are the stateless, despised non-persons who have no kingdom. I cannot resist offering a cross reference to an equivalent modern day anawim: the Palestinians of the West Bank. These are the pariahs and victims of a seemingly endless spiral of violence, but recent DNA testing of samples of the population has revealed traces of descent from the Jews who survived not only the Roman devastation and mass deportation but also the seventh century Arabic conquest, when they were obliged to convert to Islam or die.
In the context of the New Testament message it is from the stateless anawim that a new people will arise – a people without ethnic or national defining features who therefore possess a moral equivalence and equal status. St Paul depicts this new dispensation very concisely when, in words that probably reflect a baptismal creedal statement of the early church, he writes, ‘For all baptised in Christ…there no longer exist distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female…’ (Galatians 3:28). This statement is so radical that two thousand years later an American theologian could write of his experience of the church in the United States, that ‘the church is the last truly segregated public space in America,’ and that, ‘an ancient Christian credo declaring solidarity across ethnic lines, class division, and gender difference sounded a little unbelievable to someone who had come to see the Christian church as more a symbol of social ills than idealistic utopian dreams.’
Can a similar radicalism be seen in Jesus’s understanding of deity? Already such later prophets as Hosea had been moving towards a more feminine view of the nature of the divine love – one like Hebrew hesed, that of a mother for her child, or tenderness and loving-kindness (Hosea 2:19-20). Though Jesus refers to the deity using the Aramaic paternal term abba, (‘father’) – his apparent intention is to express a degree of intimacy characterised not so much by gender as relationship: ‘What father among you would hand his son a stone when he asked for bread…?’ In the Torah this sense of intimate dependency is expressed in the Hebrew word emunah. This usage was characteristic of the targums or Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible in use at the end of the first century BCE in Galilee. It was these texts that would have been known to Jesus.
This brings us to the crucial difference between the ways that Jesus and his teaching were understood among his early followers. Throughout the letters of St. Paul and the Acts of the Apostles we find repeated indications of tensions and even open conflict between Paul and the Jerusalem church under the leadership of Peter and Jesus’s brother James. Likely enough, the New Testament accounts of these differences have been intentionally smoothed over and harmonised – particularly by Luke, who wrote the Acts of the Apostles – to present a pleasing and monolithic narrative that unfolds in accordance with divine design. Still, it is clear that his irenic account of the so-called Council of Jerusalem (written about 85 CE) varies from Paul’s more abrasive account in Galatians 2, written some thirty years earlier. In this letter Paul also refers to ‘two missions’, one to the Gentiles that has been entrusted to him and the other to the Jews entrusted to Peter.
This idea was first suggested by Ferdinand Baur in 1831. It was taken up again in 1994 by Michael Goulder, who in A Tale of Two Missions brilliantly argued in its favour with incisive and rigorous forensic textual analysis. What emerges is that these ‘two missions’ had very different understandings of a whole range of issues – the validity of the Jewish dietary laws; whether the kingdom of God had arrived; the place of work, sex and money in daily life; the nature and place of the ‘gifts of the spirit’ within church governance; and last but not least the nature of Jesus’ divinity. With the passage of years these divisions deepened to a point of such outright hostility between members of the two missions that in 2 John 7 we find one denouncing the other as ‘the devil’s seed’.
The Pauline mission was focused on reaching out beyond the constraints of Judaism to the gentile world. In practical terms this meant abandoning specifically Jewish practices such as circumcision and kosher regulations together with the rituals associated with the distant temple in Jerusalem. These topics were largely replaced by lay-led celebrations, not of the sabbath but kyriakon (Day of the Lord). All this was inspired by the transformative vision Paul had had of the resurrected Christ, through which he became convinced that God had decisively intervened in history through Jesus and that the end of time was imminent.
The Petrine mission based in Jerusalem had a somewhat different view. Though recognising Jesus as a hassid (holy one) of whom an angelic power called Christ had taken hold at baptism and whose Resurrection had shown his exalted status, this was a church whose members had known Jesus and his family and whose brother James was a leading figure. This community continued to practise the Jewish dietary laws and attended Temple services, but believed a new eschatological dimension had been added to life. Accordingly, they observed a radical new way of communal living in which all wealth was shared.
The resolution of these differences came in a dramatic and unexpected way when in 70CE the Romans brutally suppressed a Jewish revolt by destroying Jerusalem and slaughtering or enslaving most of the population. This left the field clear for the mission and theology of St Paul, that would shape the New Testament and our understanding of Christianity.
The more we return to his Jewish roots – as the scholars of the Jesus Seminar have attempted – the more radical Jesus and his teaching seem to become. What is surprising about this teaching is how soon it would be forgotten! By the end of the century some texts of the New Testament had become marked by their anti-Semitism, accommodation of slavery, and anti-feminism. In the apologetics of Justin Martyr (c.100-165 CE) we see how a new Hellenic philosophical/theological understanding, shaped by a belief in a pre-existent logos, deemed the ‘old’ covenant of God with the Jewish people to be replaced with a new covenant (testament) with Christians. Now in place was the Hellenic ‘high’ Christology of the Pauline churches reflected in the divine logos of St John – a doctrine that had come to replace the Hebraic ‘low’ Christology of the Petrine churches. Christianity as we know it had arrived.
In summary, we can now see how the Christianity that has come down to us was shaped by numerous cultural, linguistic and historical factors that in many ways were arbitrary and coincidental. When Mark wrote the first gospel some forty years had elapsed since the death of Jesus. How were his words transmitted; how were they to be interpreted or translated; how was he himself to be understood? By the time the New Testament was collated in the third century CE not only had the teaching of Jesus been significantly edited but the Hebraic cultural world, of which he was a part, had been destroyed: Jesus the Jew had become apotheosised into an Imperial Roman Lord. As for my initial conundrum concerning who founded Christianity, we can now see that St. Paul has the best claim. As for the historical Jesus, the Jewish hassid or holy man from Galilee who challenged and inspired his audiences with a radical message beyond expectation – might one say that much of him has been lost in translation?
Dominic Kirkham’s book From Monk to Modernity was published in Britain by SOF in 2015, followed by a US second edition. His latest book Our Shadowed World is published by Wipf and Stock (Eugene OR, 2019).