Beginning from Jerusalem: Christianity in the Making, Volume 2

By James D. G. Dunn

The second volume in the magisterial Christianity in the Making trilogy, Beginning from Jerusalem covers the early formation of the Christian faith from 30 to 70 CE. After outlining the quest for the historical church (parallel to the quest for the historical Jesus) and reviewing the sources, James Dunn follows the course of the movement stemming from Jesus “beginning from Jerusalem.” 

Dunn opens with a close analysis of what can be said of the earliest Jerusalem community, the Hellenists, the mission of Peter, and the emergence of Paul. Then he focuses solely on Paul―the chronology of his life and mission, his understanding of his call as apostle, and the character of the churches that he founded. The third part traces the final days and literary legacies of the three principal figures of first-generation Christianity: Paul, Peter, and James, the brother of Jesus. Each section includes detailed interaction with the vast wealth of secondary literature on the many subjects covered.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Mar 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781467460613

James D. G. Dunn

James D. G. Dunn was for many years the Lightfoot Professor of Divinity in the Department of Theology at the University of Durham. Since his retirement he has been made Emeritus Lightfoot Professor. He is credited with coining the phrase "New Perspective on Paul" during his 1982 Manson Memorial Lecture.

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Preface

This is the second volume in a projected trilogy Christianity in the Making, in which I attempt to trace and examine the history of Christianity’s beginnings well into the second century. The first volume, Jesus Remembered, focused exclusively on the person to whom the origins of Christianity can undoubtedly be traced. It included an exposition of the critical historical method on which the whole enterprise is undertaken, including recognition of the fact of faith as part of the historical data and of the function of faith as integral to the critical historical dialogue. These methodological considerations continue to guide the historical studies of the present volume. Some of the first volume’s critique of the sources available to us for the period is also relevant here.

Volume 2, Beginning from Jerusalem, covers from 30 to 70 CE, a much longer period than the (probably) three years of Jesus’ mission. These two periods and subjects — Jesus’ mission and the first generation of the movement which began from Jesus — are probably the most thoroughly investigated periods and subjects of all history. The amount of secondary literature, particularly over the last thirty years, has grown exponentially and is impossible to cover thoroughly, even in monographs devoted to particular aspects of the much more extensive subject matter. In what follows, of course, I have given primary attention to the source documents and historical data from the period available to us. In addition, I have attempted to draw on or to consider as much as I could of what I deemed to be the most relevant of the secondary literature to illuminate the source material. For the most part I have focused on the more recent secondary literature, principally to ensure that I engage as fully as possible with the current discussion on the numerous individual issues discussed, but also bearing in mind that many of the recent monographs and essays on particular subjects carefully review earlier debates and take up or engage with the most salient points from these earlier debates.

However, so far as possible, as in Jesus Remembered, I have endeavoured to limit the interaction with the secondary literature to footnotes. My hope is that the main text will have been kept sufficiently uncluttered to allow those who do not wish to engage with the often interminable disagreements of scholars on individual points to maintain a steady forward momentum in their reading. At the same time, the footnotes should provide at least a start for those who wish to pause or simply to consider these more detailed issues. Even so, I need hardly add, the secondary literature referred to has had to be selective; it has been no part of my intention to provide an exhaustive bibliography — the volume is large enough as it is! No doubt in consequence I have treated several classic expositions too lightly and have missed a fair number of contemporary monographs and articles which may well have influenced my views on one point or another. To any such contributors I give my apology, and I invite them to draw my attention to the more grievous omissions. I should add that, in common with my common practice, in order to limit what would otherwise be an inordinately lengthy bibliography, I have not included dictionary articles in the bibliography.

As part of the enterprise I have thought it necessary to consider in some detail the key texts within the New Testament which relate most closely to this period — particularly the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of Paul. In the case of Paul’s letters I regard the treatment offered in the following pages as complementary to my earlier study The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans/Edinburgh: Clark, 1998). In an important sense The Theology of Paul was an enterprise which I had to clear out of the way before I could turn to the task of Christianity in the Making. In the lecture courses which prepared the way for the trilogy, I had regularly found the progression of the exposition of Christianity’s beginnings being sidetracked and stalling because I had to give adequate consideration to Paul’s theology. But now, with The Theology of Paul out of the way, I can maintain the progress of the story of Christianity in the Making. At the same time, I can in effect respond to those critics of The Theology of Paul who think that the only way to explore Paul’s theology is in terms of each individual letter. It is partly for this reason that I decided that a brief summary statement of the contents of each of Paul’s letters would be insufficient for the purposes of this volume — insufficient, that is, to assist the readers of the volume to enter into (so far as possible) Paul’s intention and thinking in writing these letters. The fact that we thereby see also Paul’s theology, or better his theologizing, as it was being formulated in relation to particular churches and their particular situations is a bonus and should be a reminder of the existential character of Paul’s theology/theologizing.

Focusing on particular texts as I have done raised the further bibliographical problem that the production of commentaries on these texts seems to be unending. Fortunately, in most cases there have been two or three substantial and high-quality commentaries recently published on each text. These commentaries almost always include coverage or review of earlier issues and contributions. Rather than attempt a dialogue with the principal commentary tradition stretching back across the generations, therefore, it seemed wiser to me to concentrate my commentary references and dialogue to these two or three commentaries in each case. Of course, it would have been folly to attempt to engage with every exegetical issue of moment in each text, but I hope I have done enough to make readers aware both of the key issues in each case and of the interpretations of the data which differ from my own. In the bibliography I have listed separately the commentaries consulted for each of the key NT texts, which I hope is helpful.

This volume is the principal product of my research since I retired in 2003. Retirement has diminished somewhat the opportunities for personal interaction with colleagues at home and elsewhere. So I am more grateful than I can express to those who were able to respond positively to my tentative requests for other specialists to cast critical eyes over the early drafts of the material. Others, sadly, were already overburdened and had to decline. I am particularly grateful to Loveday Alexander, Anthony Bash, Lutz Doering, John Kloppenborg, Bruce Longenecker, Barry Matlock, Scot McKnight, Bob Morgan, Greg Sterling, Steve Walton and Michael Wolter, some of whom must have spent many hours trailing through my material. They have saved me from many infelicities, spared me more than a few embarrassments, and given me cause to pause and think again at numerous points, and on a goodly number of occasions to re-write. The remaining infelicities are my own. Nor was I persuaded at all points raised, but in most instances I hope that I have been able to strengthen the case made. In all this I include my publisher, William B. Eerdmans, whose willingness to send out various draft chapters to scattered destinations has been exemplary and whose encouragement has been unbounded. I am particularly grateful to my editor, Craig Noll, who has taken immense pains over a massive manuscript to ensure correctness of detail and consistency of style, and who has saved me from many a slip. And above all, I thank my beloved wife, Meta, who both tolerates and encourages my commitment to continuing my teaching and writing ministry.

As the first volume was dedicated to Meta, so this volume is dedicated to our three children, who are indeed the best of us. It goes out with our hope and prayer that it may prove beneficial to those who want to understand the beginnings of Christianity better and to teachers who wish to instruct such seekers after historical truth.

October 2007

PART SIX

WRITING A HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY’S BEGINNINGS

CHAPTER 20

The Quest for the Historical Church

‘The quest of the historical Jesus’ is one of the few phrases and concerns to have escaped the ‘closed shop’ of New Testament and theological specialist scholarship. This is wholly understandable, given the fascination which such an epochal figure is bound to arouse and the diverse outcomes of the quest as it has actually been pursued. This quest has been the principal subject of volume 1, Jesus Remembered. But the quest for the historical church has been equally fascinating, and equally fraught with possibly challenging or even threatening outcomes. And it has absorbed scholarly research in equal measure, although it has made much less impact outside ‘the groves of Academe’.

A curiosity of twentieth-century scholarship has been that the more unknown or unknowable Jesus was claimed to be, the more confident scholars have often been that they knew sufficient about the historical church. The present forms of the Jesus tradition could be assumed to tell us more about the church(es) which used the tradition than about Jesus, to whom the tradition bore witness. The obvious protest against this argument, that the primitive church(es) were (on such a reckoning) as much an unknown as Jesus,¹ was not heard with as much effect as it deserved.

So, what can be said about the initial emergence of Christianity, following the departure of Jesus from the scene? How did this religion which was to shape the history and culture of Europe (and beyond) for the next two millennia come to be? After Jesus, how did it all begin? As these questions indicate, the focus for this volume is on beginnings, on the first phase of Christianity’s existence. The obvious terminus AD quem of this volume is 70 CE, when Jerusalem was captured by the Roman legions of Titus and the Temple destroyed. That date marks the formal end of Second Temple Judaism. It coincides roughly with the end of the first generation of Christianity, including the death of the three leading figures in earliest Christianity (Peter, James and Paul), all, probably, in the 60s. And with the Gospel of Mark dated usually to about that time, the date 70 forms a sort of dividing line between the earliest NT writings (the letters of Paul) and the new phase of second-generation Christian writing (most if not all of the rest of the NT!). In the development of Christianity as well as of Judaism, it makes sense to speak of ‘pre-70’ and ‘post-70’. This volume will examine the pre-70 period, Christianity’s emergence during the forty years following the epochal events Christians remember as Good Friday and Easter Sunday — 30-70 CE.

By way of introduction, however, it will be both necessary and of cautionary value to provide some definitions and scene-setting. As with ‘Judaism’ (Jesus Remembered §9), we need first to clarify the ‘what’ of our key term, the subject matter of our investigation (§20.1). And as with the quest of the historical Jesus, a review of the quest for the historical church should be equally salutary in pointing up key issues and findings of continuing relevance and importance (§§20.2-3).

20.1. Defining Terms

It began in Jerusalem. That affirmation certainly summarizes the account of Christianity’s beginnings according to the Acts of the Apostles. Whether and the extent to which that Acts account needs to be qualified is a subject addressed in the following chapters (§21.2, §§22-23). But first we must be clear on what is being referred to by ‘it’. What was the ‘it’ which ‘began in Jerusalem’?

This question, once asked as a crucial issue for appropriate historical description,² is now often passed over as though the definition of the subject matter was self-evident. But even where such a question has been asked, the answer has usually been offered in objectively historicist terms, as though it was primarily a matter of listing the names used of the group(s) in view, that is, of describing what names they were known by.³ To describe the birth of a religious movement from outside, with all the hindsight awareness of what that movement became, is of course a thoroughly respectable goal for a historian. The more challenging task, however, is to describe that historical sequence from within, to ask how the participants understood themselves and what was happening, when horizons were limited and outcomes unknown.⁴ That is not to imply that such in-the-event-provisional views were or should be definitive or of lasting significance. But historical honesty forbids us even more to assume the opposite: that those involved clearly foresaw and worked to achieve what in the event happened. Historical processes, religious movements not excepted, are much more complex and messy than that. The attempt to penetrate into and to clarify something of that complexity and messiness signals both the fascination and the frustration of historical study.

As a matter of procedure, then, we are looking for an appropriate term or terms which will serve as a social description but which will also give us something of an insider’s view of developments.

The obvious answer to the opening question (What was the ‘it’ which ‘began in Jerusalem’?), as already implied, is (1) Christianity. But here at once we have to take seriously the methodological considerations just voiced; we must pause and grasp the fact that such an answer is strictly speaking anachronistic. That is to say, to use the term ‘Christianity’ at this stage is historically inaccurate. Properly speaking, ‘Christianity’ did not yet exist. The term ‘Christians’ was first coined, as a neologism, some way into Luke’s account in the Acts.⁵ And the term ‘Christianity’ itself first appears in our sources in the 110s,⁶ that is, some eighty years after the events narrated by Luke in Acts 1–5, or their historical equivalents. Of course, we can make the working assumption of a direct continuity from the beginnings of ‘it’ to the ‘Christianity’ of Ignatius and the subsequent centuries. We can no doubt speak of ‘embryonic Christianity’, or ‘emergent Christianity’, without falsification.⁷ But what we must not do is to allow any use of the term itself (‘Christianity’) to presume the corollary that the distinctives of full-grown Christianity were already present in these beginnings.⁸ To use the term ‘Christianity’ in description too quickly would pre-empt what is one of the key issues: what are the distinctives of Christianity, and when did they first emerge? Better not to use the term, heavily freighted with centuries of significance as it is, than to run the risk of pre-judging the historical reality of our subject matter.

If not ‘Christianity’, then what? We could certainly speak of (2) the church (‘the quest for the historical church’),⁹ principally because from the second century at least it became a prominent if not the preferred self-designation.¹⁰ And such a use would be more immediately validated by the use of the term (ekklēsia) within the earliest Christian literature.¹¹ There is also the possibility that it provides a bridge to Jesus’ own intentions¹² and that it reflects the self-designation of the first disciples of Jesus as ‘the church (qahal) of God’.¹³ But here too it is wise to pause. For the use of the singular (‘the church’) is equally fraught with the possibility of misleading significance. For one thing, to speak of ‘the church’ (singular) implies a unified entity, which has certainly been a theological ideal from early days,¹⁴ and which remains an ecumenical aspiration to this day. But for that very reason its use too early may easily serve as rose-tinted spectacles through which we perceive these beginnings. As noted earlier,¹⁵ it was precisely such an idealized perception of embryonic Christianity which Walter Bauer called into question. And as we have already seen in some detail, perspectives influenced by the Nag Hammadi texts have called even more sharply into question whether there was ever a single (positive) response to Jesus’ mission or ever a single ‘pure form’ either of the Jesus tradition or of ‘the early church’.¹⁶ Here again such issues must not be pre-empted by casual use of ‘loaded’ terms. Perhaps more to the point is the fact that the earliest references use the term (‘church’) most typically in the plural (‘churches’),¹⁷ or to describe an assembly in a particular place.¹⁸ Here again, then, the dangers of anachronism and of unwittingly promoting misleading implications need to be taken seriously. A ‘safer’ and historically more accurate title for this chapter would be ‘the quest for the historical churches’!

Other terms appear to be still less satisfactory. (3) Synagogue (synagōgē) might not seem to be much of a contender, since the antithesis between ‘church’ and ‘synagogue’ is deeply rooted in the history of Christian anti-Jewish polemic.¹⁹ But the term itself was still in transition from ‘assembly’ to ‘place of assembly’,²⁰ and in our period it had not yet become the technical designation for a distinctively Jewish ‘place of assembly’.²¹ So it is no surprise that it appears occasionally in early Christian literature as a description of a ‘Christian’ gathering.²² Such a usage, however, simply reminds us that synagōgē was not yet a technical term (‘synagogue’) and still in broader use (‘assembly’), and its infrequent appearance in first-century literature for the gatherings of those who identified themselves by reference to Jesus hardly makes it appropriate to serve as the regular reference term for which we are looking. At the same time, these observations provide a further reminder that any attempt to draw out clear lines of definitional distinction, particularly from ‘Judaism’, for the beginnings of Christianity would be historically irresponsible.

A more hopeful candidate is (4) disciples (mathētai), which would certainly provide a link back into the mission of Jesus and his immediate circle.²³ More to the point, in Acts it attains an almost technical status (‘the disciples’) for those committed to the new body.²⁴ On the other hand, it does not appear elsewhere in the NT outside the Gospels and Acts. This could suggest that the first ‘disciples’ continued to see/define themselves in terms of their earlier teacher-disciple relationship with Jesus,²⁵ or that Luke chose to extend that usage and image in his own record.²⁶ But the silence of the rest of the first-century writings hardly suggests that it was a widespread self-description in the first century. And if the suggestion just offered for the initial usage is sound, the same silence may well suggest in turn that a self-understanding in terms of disciple-to-teacher, familiar in the ancient world,²⁷ was soon perceived as inadequate among the first ‘Christians’.²⁸ That in itself would be a highly significant conclusion to be able to draw, and we shall have to return to the issue as we proceed.

In NT literature (5) believers is actually the first collective term to be used of the emergent community,²⁹ and it well catches what was evidently a key distinguishing feature of the earliest groups. As such it will be the most obvious term for us to use, not least because its usage seems to have been so distinctive for its time.³⁰ More to the point, central to any inquiry into Christianity in the making must be the what and the when of such faith: what were the content and direction of that faith at any one time, how distinctive, how diverse was it? and can we trace the way(s) in which this believing developed through these earliest years? Bearing in mind the conclusion already reached, that Jesus himself was remembered as calling for ‘faith’, but not for faith in himself as such,³¹ the issues call for sensitive handling. Do we see here that crucial transition already accomplished, from believing in response to Jesus to believing in Jesus?³² If so, we must inquire how that came about. Here not least we will have to take care lest we beg too many questions in the terms we use.

Alternatively we could use the longer, more cumbersome phrase (6) those who call upon the name of the Lord. The phrase certainly has the ring of a self-description in a number of passages³³ and reflects the influence of Joel 2.32 (LXX 3.5).³⁴ The first believers presumably saw themselves in the light of the Joel passage, in somewhat the way that the Qumran community saw itself in the light of Habakkuk (1QpHab). This suggests that Luke had good reason to date its influence very early when he attached it to his account of the events of the day of Pentecost (Acts 2.17-21). ‘To call on (the name of) God’ in prayer is, of course, language regularly used in Greek as well as Hebrew religion.³⁵ What made the early Christian usage so distinctive is that ‘the Lord’ whose name is called upon is more often than not Jesus,³⁶ a fact which will call for further attention below.³⁷

What other terms can we use with historical responsibility? (7) Brothers is certainly a term much used, all the way across the spectrum covered by the NT writings.³⁸ Moreover, if Mark 3.31-35 recalls an episode from Jesus’ mission,³⁹ the term also spans the gap between pre-Easter mission and post-Easter expansion, and more effectively than ‘disciples’. Its value also is that it characterizes the movement within which it was used as a (fictive) family association, and that certainly tells us something about the character of the movement as perceived (felt) from within.⁴⁰ The trouble is that the usage was not distinctive of the new movement, since such usage is attested within other religious communities, including Qumran.⁴¹ And while the term works well in personal address and to denote internal relationships within the movement,⁴² there is little encouragement in NT usage (apart from 1 Peter) to speak of the new movement as ‘the brotherhood’.⁴³

(8) Saints is another descriptive term used particularly in the Pauline letters and in Revelation.⁴⁴ But this too is a term which makes sense only from within the movement, as a way of claiming participation in the heritage of Israel.⁴⁵ Since it embodies a claim to theological status,⁴⁶ it does not serve well as a social description of the movement which made the claim. The gradual disappearance of the term after the middle of the second century, noted by Harnack, signals both a shift to a more polemical attitude towards Israel and the growing tendency, once again (as with ‘disciple’ and ‘brother’), to restrict the term to special subgroups within Christianity (‘holy orders’).⁴⁷

Not listed by Cadbury, but as obvious a contender as ‘saints’ is (9) the elect, ‘the chosen’ (people/ones), a central term in Jewish self-understanding,⁴⁸ including not least the Dead Sea sect.⁴⁹ In earliest Christian use it serves to advance Paul’s concern to demonstrate continuity between his converts and the Israel of old;⁵⁰ and the use of the term elsewhere in earliest Christianity indicates that Paul was not alone in that concern.⁵¹ Whether, like ‘saints’, the usage was a claim to participate in Israel’s heritage, or rather to take it over, is an issue which will have to be confronted later.⁵² At any rate, like ‘saints’ it describes a theological claim, meaningful only in an intra-Jewish dialogue and hardly serviceable as a social description.

It is possible that the earliest community of believers in Jerusalem thought of themselves as (10) the poor, as those referred to, for example, by the Psalmist (Pss. 69.32; 72.2). Such a self-reference may be implied or echoed in Paul’s explanation of the need for a collection to be made for ‘the poor among the saints in Jerusalem’ (Rom. 15.26).⁵³ In so doing they would have been claiming to be among the poor and oppressed who are God’s special care, in much the same way as those behind the Psalms of Solomon and the sectarians at Qumran did.⁵⁴ It would also be a further mark of asserted continuity with Jesus’ mission to ‘the poor’.⁵⁵

Other terms of self-designation listed by Cadbury do not call for much consideration, as being too episodic or context specific to provide a general term of description, particularly (11) friends,⁵⁶ (12) the just/righteous,⁵⁷ and (13) those being saved⁵⁸ — all highly expressive of an insider’s self-definition.

But four other terms come closer to what we are looking for — that is, a term which was used by others (‘outsiders’) in the earliest days as a means of referring to the movement, but one which also characterizes its members and what they stood for. Three occur only in Acts, and the fourth virtually so (in its capacity as a referent to the earliest believers); but in this case that may indicate a temporary and/or local use which actually preserves an early, hesitant usage that may soon have been left behind.

The first is (14) the way (hodos) — the first believers as those ‘belonging to the way, both men and women’.⁵⁹ The image clearly reflects the Hebrew idiom of conduct as walking (halak) along a path, an imagery, untypical of Greek thought, which Paul continued to use⁶⁰ — hence the new movement as a ‘way’ of life, of living. The association of ideas between conduct as ‘walking’ and the resulting way of life as a ‘path’ followed is clear in Qumran thought; Qumran usage, in fact, provides the closest parallel to the term as it appears in Acts.⁶¹ More striking is the fact that the Qumranites evidently drew their inspiration for the usage from Isa. 40.3: ‘In the desert prepare the way (derek) …’ (1QS 8.14). Since it is precisely this text which the early Jesus tradition related to the Baptist (Mark 1.3 pars.), the intriguing possibility emerges of a linkage in thought from Qumran, through the Baptist, to the earliest Christian community.⁶² Alternatively put, there is the possibility of a similar sense of the vision of Isaiah 40 having achieved eschatological fulfilment in each of the three parties: ‘the way of the Lord’ had been realized. The imagery can hardly have been unrelated to the motif of two ways, traditional throughout the ancient world, where choice has to be made between one and another;⁶³ but no doubt it was the Jewish version which most bore upon the earliest disciples, as implied by the tradition of Matt. 7.13-14 in particular.⁶⁴ In which case the implication of the title (‘the Way’) is that those who claimed the title thereby asserted also that they had made the right choice and that theirs was the (only) way to salvation.

Not least in significance is Luke’s description of Jesus’ followers as a (15) sect (hairesis) (Acts 24.14; 28.22), ‘the sect of the Nazarenes’ (Acts 24.5). This presumably indicates that Luke regarded Jesus’ early disciples as a ‘sect’ (or party, faction, school of thought),⁶⁵ like the ‘sect’ of the Sadducees (5.17) and the ‘sect of the Pharisees’ (15.5; 26.5). This in turn suggests that among fellow Jews, Jesus’ disciples, as soon as they were perceived as a significant body, were regarded as yet another of the factions which were a feature of late Second Temple Judaism, as distinctive, and as ‘sectarian’, as better-known factions like the Pharisees.

(16) Nazarenes (Acts 24.5) puts us still more closely in touch with a distinctively Jewish way of describing the first believers. It was a natural tendency to designate Jesus’ disciples as followers of the man from Nazareth, the Nazarene.⁶⁶ So far as we can tell, the name gained no currency outside Jewish Christian tradition. But within that tradition it retained its vitality. As H. H. Schaeder observes, ‘Nazarenes’ persisted as the name for Syrian Christians, and was adopted also by the Persians, the Armenians and later the Arabs.⁶⁷

Here, finally, should be mentioned also (17) Galileans, which occurs only twice in Acts (1.11; 2.7), but which appears later as a term of scorn by outsiders.⁶⁸ Like ‘Nazarenes’, the term similarly links the movement back to its origins in Jesus’ Galilean mission.⁶⁹ And, a point worth noting, it probably provides confirmation that the earliest leadership of the movement was provided by Galileans. But this inference itself raises again an issue (was there a Galilean ‘church’, or distinctive Galilean community — ‘the Q community’?) to which we must return (§22.1).

Even such a cursory survey of terms actually used within the earliest traditions for infant Christianity is sufficient to highlight a number of important considerations, worthy of note before we go any further.

First, there is no single term which served to designate or describe those who participated in the sequel to the death of Jesus and its immediate aftermath. That fact itself should give us pause. To use one of these terms on our own part, predominantly or as the consistent referent and definition of what is in view, would be misleading. For similar reasons it might be equally objectionable to use a single term of our own choosing (like ‘group’, ‘community’, or ‘movement’), since such terms import their own word-pictures and associations which may equally prejudge the evaluation of the material. Of course, it would be easy to become over-sensitive on the subject; on any subject or issue we cannot avoid using language whose word-pictures and associations may not quite ‘fit’ and may even skew the description which employs that language. The more realistic inference to be drawn is that we will be wise to use a variety of descriptive terms, just as Acts does, so that no single image becomes fixed and unduly normative.

Second, as an immediate corollary of greater significance, we should also note that the variety of terms used is an indication of the inchoate character of the group of first disciples. The range of terms just reviewed evidently indicated various facets of their corporate identity, but we should not assume that from the first these various facets cohered into a single ‘Christian’ identity. ‘Identity’ is a term naturally reached for at this point, and one which is in great vogue today in such discussions. Here it is especially appropriate, since the sociologists rightly remind us that identity is multiform — the single individual who is a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother, a pupil, a teacher, a colleague, a friend, and so on.⁷⁰

The implication is clear: the ‘Christianity’ which was beginning to emerge in the early 30s was not a single ‘thing’ but a whole sequence of relationships, of emerging perspectives of attitude and belief, of developing patterns of interaction and worship, of conduct and mission. A key question for us, then, is not so much whether we can speak of a single thing (movement, church, body of believers) but whether the various and diverse facets caught by the terms reviewed above (and more recent alternatives) form a coherent whole, or rather cloak a diversity which from the first could hardly be described as a unity.

Third, one such factor for coherence — indeed, arguably the chief factor for coherence (in prima facie terms) — is present in a number of the terms reviewed, namely, the continuity with the mission of Jesus. The feature is most obvious in ‘disciples’, ‘brothers’ and ‘the poor’, but also in ‘Christians’, ‘Nazarenes’ and ‘Galileans’, and is probably implicit in talk of the ‘church’ and ‘the way’. During Jesus’ mission Jesus himself, and their personal relation with him as his followers or disciples, was sufficient of itself to identify them. But with Jesus no longer ‘on stage’, that identifying factor (cf. Acts 4.13) would quickly lose its effect. The more striking feature, then, is given by the phrase ‘those who call upon the name of the Lord (Jesus)’, where the relationship is transformed from that of disciple to that of devotee or even worshipper. Self-identification by reference not only to Jesus, but to Jesus as Lord, constituted a massive step in the basic self-understanding of the early disciple groups, to which careful consideration will have to be given in due course. This will include the role of formulae like ‘in his name’, the way Jesus was spoken about in preaching and apologetic, the issue of whether and how quickly Jesus was worshipped, and (more controversially) the use made of the Jesus tradition.⁷¹

Fourth, another factor for coherence, which certainly holds together a number of the aspects reviewed above, is their distinctively Jewish character — particularly ‘church’, ‘synagogue’, ‘saints’, ‘elect’, ‘poor’, ‘way’ and ‘sect of the Nazarenes’. The perspective from ‘inside’ Second Temple Judaism which such terms express indicates clearly enough that in the beginning, embryonic Christianity was self-consciously Jewish in its self-designation and claims and was so perceived during that beginning period. We recall, of course, that Second Temple Judaism itself was diverse in character.⁷² The point is that in the beginning, the new movement which was embryonic Christianity was part of that diversity, wholly ‘inside’ the diversity of first-century Second Temple Judaism. That is a large conclusion to draw from what is merely a survey of names, and it will have to be tested and qualified as we proceed. Whether, and the extent to which, that preliminary conclusion (drawn only from terms of description and designation) is confirmed by our further investigations is a major concern of this volume. And if confirmed, the question of the conclusion’s significance for an ongoing understanding of Christianity becomes one of the most important questions for the whole three-volume exercise.

20.2. From Jesus to Paul

The last two observations (the link to Jesus, and the Jewish character of the emerging sect) nicely introduce the two main puzzles which have intrigued students of Christianity’s beginnings for more than two centuries. One is how to bridge the gap (or gulf) between Jesus and Paul: to explain how it was that Jesus’ message of the kingdom became Paul’s gospel of the crucified Jesus as Lord; how Jesus, the preacher of the good news, became its content; how the gospel of Jesus became the gospel about Jesus. The other puzzle or challenge is to explain how a Jewish sect became a Gentile religion: how a mission so much within the diversity of Second Temple Judaism became a movement which broke through the boundaries marking out that Judaism to emerge as a predominantly Gentile religion; how a kingdom preaching so much directed to the restoration of Israel became a claim by Gentiles to participate in, even to take over, Israel’s name and heritage.

In his work on Jesus, E. P. Sanders made much of what he called ‘Klausner’s test’ of a good hypothesis regarding Jesus’ intention: the hypothesis ‘should situate Jesus believably in Judaism and yet explain why the movement initiated by him eventually broke with Judaism’.⁷³ That is indeed a good test of a Jesus hypothesis. But it applies equally to any attempt to reconstruct Christianity in the making, and to ‘the quest of the historical church’ as much as to ‘the quest of the historical Jesus’. A good hypothesis regarding Christianity’s beginnings should equally be required to explain how Christianity emerged from Jesus and how the movement which thus emerged within the matrix of Second Temple Judaism so quickly broke out of that matrix. And always the underlying issue is that same tantalizing question about identity: did the developments remain true to the initiating impulse provided by/embodied in Jesus? and did emerging Christianity retain the same identity throughout or evolve into a different species?

The heart of the first conundrum is christology. It is the other side of what I characterized as ‘the flight from dogma’ in volume 1.⁷⁴ There we looked at the reaction against the Christ of dogma, the Christ of faith, a reaction which initially fuelled the quest of the historical Jesus. Here it is the fact that high claims were being made for Christ from a very early period,⁷⁵ which provokes questioning and fuels suspicions. ‘From Jesus to Paul’ signals puzzlement that such a transformation could have been effected so speedily and encourages scepticism that it could have so happened without either some deceit or serious damage to the fundamentals of Jesus’ own mission and message.

a. Hermann Reimarus

As with the quest of the historical Jesus, it was the English Deist Thomas Chubb⁷⁶ and the German rationalist Hermann Reimarus who first drew attention to the discontinuity between the message of Jesus and the early teachings of Christianity. And as in the former case, it was Reimarus who provided the most penetrating and devastating of the critiques. As regards christology, he urged that Jesus ‘was born a Jew and intended to remain one’;⁷⁷

it was not his intention to present a triune God or to make himself God’s equal … nor did he intend to introduce a new doctrine that would deviate from Judaism.

When Jesus calls himself God’s Son he means to imply only that he is the Christ or Messiah particularly loved by God;

it is the apostles who first sought something greater in this term.⁷⁸

In regard to the law, Reimarus’s conclusion is

that the apostles taught and acted exactly the reverse of what their master had intended, taught, and commanded, since they released not only the heathen from the law but also those who had converted from Judaism.… the apostles strayed completely from their master in their teaching and in their lives, abandoning his religion and his intention and introducing a completely new system.⁷⁹

Referring to Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom, Reimarus concludes:

only after Jesus’ death did the disciples grasp the doctrine of a spiritual suffering savior of all mankind. Consequently, after Jesus’ death the apostles changed their previous doctrine of his teaching and deeds and only then for the first time ceased hoping in him as a temporal and powerful redeemer of the people of Israel.… Now, however, that their hope is disappointed, in a few days they alter their entire doctrine and make of Jesus a suffering savior for all mankind; then they change their facts accordingly.⁸⁰

Not content to insert the knife so expertly between the intention of Jesus and the subsequent teaching of his followers, Reimarus gave it a final savage twist. The explanation for the transition and transformation is crude. The motives which had led the disciples first to follow Jesus were those of worldly ambition, hopes of future wealth and power, lands and worldly goods (Matt. 19.29). When with Jesus, they had been well cared for by his friends and supporters; they grew out of the habit of working. But when Jesus died, only poverty and disgrace awaited them — until they realized that it need not end. It was this desire for wealth and worldly advantage which motivated them to fabricate the resurrection (they themselves removed Jesus’ body) and the doctrines so strange to and at odds with the intention and message of Jesus.⁸¹

Reimarus’s own final attempt to bridge the gulf from Jesus to Paul was a sad travesty, probably more indicative of his own long-concealed disillusion with the traditional claims of Christianity than of a fair-minded reading of the data. But he again put his finger on features of the data, puzzles and tensions, which cannot be ignored in any attempt to explain how the move from Jesus to Paul came about so quickly. The issues he raised have not achieved a final resolution, so that his bringing them to focus remains one of Reimarus’s major contributions to the Jesus/Paul debate.

The more fully Jesus is set within the Judaism of his time, including the expectations of Jewish apocalypticism, the more pressing becomes the question: How and why did the beliefs about and claims regarding the divine status of Jesus come about? And are they at odds with any convictions Jesus is remembered as having uttered about himself?

The more fully Jesus is set within the Judaism of his time, as a Torah-observant Jew who did not teach against the law, the more pressing becomes the question: How and why did it prove acceptable to leading disciples like Peter and John when Paul insisted that Torah-observance should not be required of Gentile converts?

The more fully Jesus’ teaching on the kingdom of God is set within the Judaism of his time, as proclaiming the fulfilment of Israel’s hope of redemption, the more pressing becomes the question: How and why did a gospel for all, particularly the belief in Jesus’ death as a sacrifice for all, first emerge?

The questions are posed avoiding some of Reimarus’s more outdated language. But they are his questions, and they continue to demand attention.

b. The Jesus of History vs. the Christ of Faith

As a result of the rationalist challenge to traditional Christian dogma, the contrast, if not outright antithesis, between Jesus’ own intention and what earliest Christianity made of him became a central preoccupation through most of the following two centuries. But to set ‘the Jesus of history’ over against ‘the Christ of faith’ required the historian of Christianity’s beginnings not only to penetrate (and leave behind) the latter in order to rediscover the former (‘the quest of the historical Jesus’). It required the historian also to explain how it was that a Jesus so different from the Christ of faith nevertheless became the Christ of faith and so speedily.

David Friedrich Strauss first posed the issue sharply in these terms. His extensive and biting critique of Schleiermacher’s Life of Christ was in fact entitled The Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History.⁸² In his Foreword he characterizes Schleiermacher’s christology as ‘a last attempt to make the churchly Christ acceptable to the modern world’ and responds cuttingly: ‘Schleiermacher’s Christ is as little a real man as is the Christ of the church’.

The illusion … that Jesus could have been a man in the full sense and still as a single person stand above the whole of humanity, is the chain which still blocks the harbor of Christian theology against the open sea of rational science.⁸³

Strauss was not concerned with the historical issue of how Jesus became ‘the Christ of the church’. His critique was directed against Schleiermacher’s dependence on John’s Gospel ‘as apostolic and trustworthy’.⁸⁴ But the implication is clear that the rift between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith is already mirrored in the contrast between the Synoptics and John’s Gospel. In the Fourth Gospel the Jesus of history is already lost behind the Christ of faith.⁸⁵

When subsequently the great historian of Christian dogma, and greater historian, Adolf Harnack addressed the equivalent question, he attributed the transition to Paul. In a famous sentence he insisted that ‘the Gospel, as Jesus proclaimed it, has to do with the Father only and not with the Son’. And he later quotes Wellhausen approvingly: ‘Paul’s especial work was to transform the Gospel of the kingdom into the Gospel of Jesus Christ, so that the Gospel is no longer the prophecy of the coming of the kingdom but its actual fulfilment by Jesus Christ’.⁸⁶ Here the challenge is as stark in its own way as that made by Reimarus: Jesus claimed no significance for himself; it was Paul, well before the Fourth Evangelist, who created the Christ of faith.

Another who made the contrast between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith central to his analysis was Martin Kähler in his critique of ‘the so-called historical Jesus’ in favour of ‘the historic biblical Christ’.⁸⁷

The risen Lord is not the historical Jesus behind the Gospels, but the Christ of the apostolic preaching, of the whole New Testament.

The real Christ, that is, the Christ who has exercised an influence in history … is the Christ who is preached. The Christ who is preached … is precisely the Christ of faith.

The recollection of the days of his flesh and the confession of his eternal significance and of what he offers to us are not separated in the New Testament.

The passionately held dogma about the Savior vouches for the reliability of the picture transmitted to us by the biblical proclamation of Jesus as the Christ.⁸⁸

Whereas Strauss saw the transition to ‘the Christ of faith’ most clearly in John’s Gospel, and Harnack saw it already happening in Paul, Kähler saw it in ‘the apostolic preaching’. He dismissed the possibility of retrieving a ‘historical Jesus’ who was different from ‘the biblical Christ’ because the only Jesus proclaimed by the NT writers, including all the Gospel writers, is ‘the Christ of faith’. Kähler thus inaugurated a theme which ran through two further generations of German scholarship: the NT writings as the preaching of the early church, with the implication that the transition to ‘the Christ of faith’ had already happened in the first preaching of Christ.

Rudolf Bultmann built directly upon Kähler when he justified his No to ‘the quest of the historical Jesus’ by insisting that Christ ‘meets us in the word of preaching and nowhere else. The faith of Easter is just this — faith in the word of preaching.… The word of preaching confronts us as the word of God. It is not for us to question its credentials’.⁸⁹

So once again it is the effectiveness of preaching, the existential challenge which was its self-authentication for Bultmann, which provided sufficient indication that it must have been so from the first. Now the Jesus of history/Christ of faith antithesis is recast as the antithesis between the historical Jesus and the kerygmatic Christ, with the implication that already with the earliest kerygma (the faith of Easter so defined) the decisive transition from one to the other had taken place; from the first, the myth (of cross and resurrection) had begun to obscure and to prevent access to the historical person.

Here again issues are being posed which cannot be ignored:

the contrast between the Synoptic Jesus and the Johannine Jesus;

the difficulty of squaring Jesus’ focus on the kingdom of God with Paul’s focus on Jesus;

the challenge that the biblical Christ cannot or should not be correlated with the Jesus of Galilee and that the proclamation of Christ provides its own authentication.

I have already countered much of the thrust of this antithesis between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith by arguing that faith did not first begin with Easter, and that the continuity of impact made by Jesus, before as well as beyond Easter, points to a greater continuity between the two than has usually been recognized.⁹⁰ But the contrasts and the disjunctions just noted are not resolved by that counter-thrust, so that a challenge for any attempt to analyze Christianity’s beginnings is to describe, to explain as much as possible, and to understand if possible, the developments in christology which to a large extent determined the development of Christianity.

c. The Christology of Jesus?

The issues and challenges which focused in christology are already clear. But it is instructive to follow the debate further and to reflect briefly on its implications for the present study.

C. F. D. Moule provided a helpful diagrammatic illustration of how the contrast between ‘the Jesus of history’ and ‘the Lord of faith’ was treated in the late nineteenth-century quest and by Bultmann.⁹¹ If we regard them as two concepts, they can be represented as circles on opposite sides of a dividing line:

In the understanding of Harnack and his fellow Liberals, faith should be focused in the left-hand circle and cut off more emphatically from the right-hand circle:

For Bultmann, by contrast, the emphasis should fall on the right-hand circle, and the dividing line be drawn even thicker:

Moule’s illustration can be extended into the subsequent phase of the discussion. For in the post-Bultmannian generation the attempt was made to elide the dividing barrier, to find already in Jesus’ message an implicit christology.⁹² There is no gap between Jesus’ preaching of the kingdom and Paul’s gospel, since, in a classic formulation by Ernst Käsemann, ‘the issue in justification is none other than the kingdom of God that Jesus preached.… God’s Basileia is the content of the Pauline doctrine of justification’.⁹³ The thrust of such argument can be illustrated by showing the circles as touching at least tangentially, or even overlapping:

To formulate the matter thus, however, is in danger of simply confusing an issue which was formulated more clearly by Harnack and Bultmann, however misleadingly. For Jesus was proclaimed in the post-Easter communities in a way that, so far as we can tell, he never proclaimed himself; faith was called for in Christ in a way that Jesus never called for faith in himself; claims were soon made for Jesus that he never made for himself. Even when the evidence of the Jesus tradition is pressed as hard as it seems able to bear, there is still a substantial gap between Jesus’ own remembered self-estimation and the proclamation of Paul.⁹⁴ And to press it harder runs the risk of hearing only the elaborated form of the tradition and not the originating voice of Jesus himself. So the question remains: why and how did it come about that Jesus was so proclaimed? Alternatively, why or how did it come about that such richer overtones came to be heard in the Jesus tradition? The fact that the ‘new quest’ of the historical Jesus seems to have come unstuck or become bogged down on problems of methodology⁹⁵ is not unrelated to the fact that it has reached an impasse on the issue of continuity and discontinuity in the christology of the Jesus tradition.

d. The Question of Eschatology

In discussing the transition from Jesus to Paul it is rarely possible to side-step the issue of eschatology for very long. For the more Jesus’ talk of the coming of the kingdom is seen in terms of imminent expectation (à la Schweitzer), the more pressing the question: in what sense if any did what in the event happened meet the expectation of Jesus? Alfred Loisy’s famous quip still has bite: ‘Jesus proclaimed the kingdom, and it was the Church that came’.⁹⁶ The suggestion that Paul’s teaching on ‘justification’ somehow continues Jesus’ teaching on the kingdom⁹⁷ seems to be another (less ironic) attempt to resolve the failure of imminent expectation. And so far as the issue elides into the issue of Jesus’ own parousia (coming again, from heaven), I have already suggested that the idea may have emerged, in part at least, from a merging of Jesus’ own remembered hope of vindication with his equally remembered parables of owners who depart only to return unexpectedly.⁹⁸ But in any case, that could only be part of the answer, and the question will require further exploration.

Equally pressing on Paul’s side has been the problem of ‘the delay of the parousia’, already signalled by Reimarus⁹⁹ and frequently reappearing in ‘the century of eschatology’.¹⁰⁰ Was the delay of the parousia a major determining factor in the shaping of early Christian theology?¹⁰¹ Can it be used to explain the development of Paul’s theology?¹⁰² Does it provide a framework by means of which NT documents can be temporally located: the more intense the expectation, the earlier the writing; the less intense the expectation, the later the writing?¹⁰³ The question of failed expectation, already aired in Jesus Remembered,¹⁰⁴ raises its head again and cannot be ignored or lightly dismissed.

If we approach the question from the other side, the aspect of realized expectation, the problems of continuity/discontinuity appear equally fraught. No one of the past generation has posed the issue quite so sharply as Ernst Käsemann as he developed his own distinctive reconstruction of the theological impulses shaping Christianity’s beginnings. His basic argument is that Jesus himself did not share the Baptist’s apocalyptic imminent expectation; rather he ‘proclaimed the immediacy of the God who was near at hand’. It was Easter and the reception of the Spirit which caused primitive Christianity to (in a sense) replace Jesus’ preaching about the God at hand with ‘a new apocalyptic’. Hence one of Käsemann’s famous dicta: ‘Apocalyptic was the mother of all Christian theology’.¹⁰⁵ The challenge thus posed by Käsemann is clear: if, in simple terms, Jesus was non-apocalyptic, even though set between an apocalyptic Baptist and an apocalyptic primitive community, from what source does this apocalypticism, so determinative of subsequent Christian theology, derive? To affirm both that ‘apocalyptic was the mother of all Christian theology’ and that Jesus was non-apocalyptic seems to cut Jesus off from what followed him and to attribute the decisive impulse for Christianity to experiences whose connection back to Jesus may have been no more than accidental.

e. Recent Debates

The two strands of the most recent phase of ‘the quest of the historical Jesus’¹⁰⁶ have not advanced the issue very much. On the contrary, they have posed the same questions afresh. For on this issue both strands simply restate the dilemma as posed by the Liberal Protestants a century ago. On the one hand, what I have characterized as ‘the neo-Liberal quest’¹⁰⁷ finds Jesus to be (simply) a subversive sage and thus substantially distant from the crucified and risen Christ of Paul — with no real link from the one to the other beyond the assertion that there were radically different responses to Jesus. The further corollary, implicit or explicit, is that the Christ of Paul’s and of Mark’s Gospel is a corruption of the ‘original’ Galilean good news. On the other hand, the so-called third quest of the historical Jesus — that is, in the terms I have been using, the quest for Jesus the Jew¹⁰⁸ — may seem similarly to restore the emphasis to the pre-Easter Jesus. The consequent dilemma is that the more Jewish we see Jesus to have been, the harder it is to understand how and why the Christ of dogma emerged; where the latter obscured and blocked the way back to the former, now the former may seem to obscure and to form a block on the way forward to the latter.

Looked at from the side of primitive Christianity, the issues are evidently complementary. On the one hand, a current argument runs strongly that there was a continuing Galilean community of Jesus’ disciples who maintained his subversive wisdom teaching and mission and who showed no interest in a gospel of cross and resurrection.¹⁰⁹ And on the other, a forceful theological argument runs along the line of Barth and Käsemann to insist that Paul’s ‘revelation of Jesus Christ’ (Gal. 1.12) breaks through all historical continuity and transposes the whole process of salvation to a new plane (‘new creation’).¹¹⁰ Here the question of continuity between Jesus and Paul merges into the question of the diversity and disparity of the several groups and communities which constituted themselves by some reference to Jesus of Nazareth.

The issue of continuity has been posed most sharply in contemporary controversy on how speedily a very high christology emerged. As we shall observe below, there is a substantial consensus in recent scholarship that christology developed within a Jewish matrix (§20.3e). But was it the case that Paul (and his predecessors?) already thought of Jesus as pre-existent, partner in creation,¹¹¹ indeed as Yahweh,¹¹² or as included within the identity of the one God?¹¹³ Or is the use of wisdom language for Christ, the reference of ‘Yahweh texts’ to Christ, and the devotion offered through Christ¹¹⁴ to be understood not quite so straightforwardly?¹¹⁵ If the former, then indeed the forward gap to later dogma is much diminished, but the backward gap to Jesus’ own self-claims increases dramatically and the significance of his pre-passion mission recedes into the distance.

In short, however much we may question the various formulations of the confrontation between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith (and I have already made the point that ‘faith’ did not first begin at Easter), the fact that the confrontation continues to be formulated and reformulated points to a continuing and unresolved issue. Several facets have been highlighted in the preceding review:

How can we explain the transition from the Synoptic Jesus to the Johannine Jesus?

What is the significance of the relative disappearance or demotion within earliest Christianity of the theme so central to Jesus’ message, that is, his proclamation of the kingdom of God?

To what extent (if at all!) did Jesus’ own message influence the Pauline gospel and continue to be part of early Christian teaching?

How and why did the transition from Jesus the proclaimer to Jesus the proclaimed come about?

Did Easter primarily confirm and supplement what was remembered as a growing conviction of Jesus himself regarding his own role, or did it break upon a barely formed faith with the force of revelation, shifting perceptions of Jesus to an entirely different plane?

Did the developments in christology proceed so apace as to cast the significance of Jesus of Nazareth into deeply increasing shadow from the beginning?

In sum, the debate on continuity and discontinuity between the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter Christ, between the message of the former and the gospel about the latter, shifts back and forward without much progress. Can we move it forward?

20.3. From Jewish Sect to Gentile Religion

The debate on whether christology properly so called began with Jesus or only after his death is only one issue within a wider discussion — the make-or-break issue as it proved to be, but not the only crux. That wider discussion concerns the relation of Christianity to Judaism. The aspect which bears most immediately on our concerns is the question how and why Christianity emerged from Judaism — the second half of ‘Klausner’s test’.¹¹⁶

The question is posed immediately by our opening analysis of terms which might be used to describe the beginnings of Christianity. I have already noted the distinctively Jewish character of many of these terms, particularly ‘church’, ‘synagogue’, ‘saints’, ‘elect’, ‘poor’, ‘way’ and ‘sect of the Nazarenes’ (§20.1), and those mentioned in n. 52 above — ‘the people of God’, ‘the twelve tribes’ and ‘the seed of Abraham’. And I have not even mentioned the most controversial title of all — ‘Israel’.¹¹⁷ The use of such terminology among the first believers requires that the initial question be sharpened: How was a group or groups who used such language of themselves perceived and understood by others in relation to the heritage which gave them such language? Even sharper: How did those who used such language of themselves understand themselves in relation to that heritage and to other claimants on that heritage? On the face of it, this is ‘intra-Jewish’ or ‘intra-Israel’ language. But were those who used it perceived by others as within Judaism? Did those who used it perceive themselves as within Judaism? Or was the sect of the Nazarenes attempting to make exclusive claims on Israel’s heritage, analogous to those of the Qumran community: these epithets belong to us and nobody else?¹¹⁸ Did this new sect simply extend the factionalism already apparent within Second Temple Judaism?¹¹⁹

The sharpness of the issue is nicely posed by the context of thought in which the term ‘Christianity’ itself first appears. For it seems to be the case that Ignatius introduced that term precisely as a way of marking off this relatively new entity from the more established ‘Judaism’. Christianismos (‘Christianity’) was to be understood as something distinctive and different from Ioudaïsmos (‘Judaism’).¹²⁰ There is an interesting and somewhat ironic progression here: as the name Ioudaïsmos (‘Judaism’) was initially introduced to define what it referred to over against and in opposition to Hellēnismos (‘Hellenism’),¹²¹ so the name ‘Christianity’ was initially introduced to define its referent over against and in opposition to ‘Judaism’. As the Maccabean rebellion in effect defined ‘Judaism’ as ‘not-Hellenism’, so Ignatius in effect defined ‘Christianity’ as ‘not-Judaism’.¹²²

That definitional usage already represented what became the principal claim of Christianity in relation to Judaism: that Christianity had superseded Judaism, had taken over Israel’s status as ‘the people of God’, and had drained all the substance, leaving ‘Judaism’ only the husk.¹²³ I have already observed the extent to which that attitude has perverted Jewish/Christian relations throughout most of Christianity’s history, and how in particular it influenced ‘the quest of the historical Jesus’.¹²⁴ And we shall have to look more closely at the question