Table Of ContentA Social History of Christian Origins
A Social History of Christian Origins explores how the theme of the Jewish
rejection of Jesus – embedded in Paul’s letters and the New Testament Gospels –
represents the ethnic, social, cultural, and theological conflicts that facilitated the
construction of Christian identity.
Readers of this book will gain a thorough understanding of how a central theme
of early Christianity – the Jewish rejection of Jesus – facilitated the emergence of
Christian anti-Judaism as well as the complex and multi-faceted representations
of Jesus in the Gospels of the New Testament. This study systematically analyzes
the theme of social rejection in the Jesus tradition by surveying its historical and
chronological development. Employing the social-psychological study of social
rejection, social identity theory, and social memory theory, Joseph sheds new
light on the inter-relationships between myth, history, and memory in the study
of Christian origins and the contemporary (re)construction of the historical Jesus.
A Social History of Christian Origins is primarily intended for academic
specialists and students in ancient history, biblical studies, New Testament
studies, Religious Studies, Classics, as well as the general reader interested in the
beginnings of Christianity.
Simon J. Joseph is Lecturer in Early Christianity at the University of California,
Los Angeles (CA). He holds a Ph.D. in Religion (New Testament) from Claremont
Graduate University. He is the author of five books, including, most recently,
Jesus, the Essenes, and Christian Origins.
Routledge Studies in the Early Christian World
Reconceiving Religious Conflict
New Views from the Formative Centuries of Christianity
Edited by Wendy Mayer and Chris L. de Wet
The Slave Metaphor and Gendered Enslavement in Early Christian
Discourse
Double Trouble Embodied
Marianne Bjelland Kartzow
Between Jews and Heretics
Refiguring Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho
Matthijs den Dulk
The Silencing of Slaves in Early Jewish and Christian Texts
Ronald Charles
A New Perspective on the Use of Paul in the Gospel of Mark
Cameron Evan Ferguson
Valentinus’ Legacy and Polyphony of Voices
Piotr Ashwin-Siejkowski
Carpocrates, Marcellina, and Epiphanes
Three Early Christian Teachers of Alexandria and Rome
M. David Litwa
Living Martyrs in Late Antiquity and Beyond
Surviving Martyrdom
Diane Shane Fruchtman
A Social History of Christian Origins
The Rejected Jesus
Simon J. Joseph
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www. routledge. com/
Routledge- Studies -in -the -Early- Christian -World /book -series/ SECW
A Social History of
Christian Origins
The Rejected Jesus
Simon J. Joseph
First published 2023
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© 2023 Simon J. Joseph
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-032-28849-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-28850-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-29880-9 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/b22959
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Introduction 1
PART I 25
1 The Jewish Problem 27
2 Jewish Jesus, Christian Christ 42
3 Theorizing Rejection 83
4 Criteria of Rejection 94
5 “Do This in Memory of Me” 101
PART II 113
6 “He Was Despised and Rejected by Men” 115
7 The Rejection of the Law 136
8 The Rejection of Israel 156
9 The Rejection of the Collection 160
10 The Jewish Rejection of Jesus 170
Conclusion 181
Bibliography 184
Index 240
Acknowledgments
The publication of this study – my fifth monograph on the Jesus tradition –
marks the culmination of a long-term research project focused on the relation-
ship between early Judaism and Christian origins. Over the last five years, I have
had the privilege of teaching full-time as Lecturer in Early Christianity in the
Interdepartmental Program for the Study of Religion at the University of California,
Los Angeles, CA. I would like to thank Carol Bakhos, Bill Schniedewind, and
my other colleagues in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures
for the welcoming academic environment within which I have researched and
written this work. Teaching religion at a public university – in one of the most
religiously diverse cities in the United States – comes with special challenges,
not least of which is creating a safe intellectual space for critical discourse in the
academic study of religion. The present work reflects this welcoming but chal-
lenging discursive environment. Here I revisit a range of topics I have explored
elsewhere related to the study of the historical Jesus, the Gospels, and Christian
origins within a new critical framework utilizing the interrelationships of ethnic-
ity, identity, and memory. I would like to thank Amy Davis-Poynter and Marcia
Adams of Routledge for facilitating the publication of this study as well as the
press’s editorial team for shepherding it through the publication process. I would
also like to thank the three reviewers who made numerous constructive sugges-
tions for revision. Special thanks to William E. Arnal and Zeba A. Crook for their
constructive comments. This book is dedicated to my wife, Jennifer, who made it
both possible and worthwhile.
Introduction
Skandalon, paradox, disowned, and “forsaken,” he walks the world homeless,
like a ghost, wandering through the ruined remains of the ancient past, still
searching for a friendly face or a willing hand. He comes to us now from that
time and place, challenging our assumptions with his first-century Otherness. In a
common cliché misattributed to Albert Schweitzer, the “quest” for the historical
Jesus has been compared to peering into a well, only to find one’s own image and
likeness,1 allegedly rendering such “quests” problematic insofar as the independ-
ent researcher is unable to extricate their subjective presuppositions from their
critical analysis of the historical sources. Schweitzer’s scathing criticism of such
“quests” did not prevent him, however, from providing his own idiosyncratic
interpretation of the historical Jesus. Nor has it deterred subsequent scholars from
periodizing post-Schweitzerian research into different kinds (or even eras) of
“quests.”2
Historically speaking, the critical study of Christian origins has long been
“dominated” by ideological and “theological agendas,”3 particularly those appeal-
ing to Christianity’s unique, exceptional, and/or incomparable status in the history
of religion.4 Since the Enlightenment, however, the study of Christian origins has
made significant advances by utilizing the methods and theories derived from the
social sciences and the comparative study of religion.5 The category of religion,6
like all conceptual categories,7 is socially constructed.8 Like all categories, “reli-
gion” can also be ideologically deployed and implicated in discourses of power.9
Nonetheless, Religious Studies (Religionswissenschaft), insofar as it relativizes
and “subordinates” confessional truth-claims to the critical principles of analogy
and comparison,10 problematizes the relationship between confessional and criti-
cal perspectives,11 and so challenges the theoretical privileging of a sui generis
conceptualization of religion,12 suggests that analogical comparisons drawn from
other religious traditions can shed new light on the Jesus story.13 As an emergent
“science,” the study of religion depends on and presupposes the description of
“religious” phenomena, but also aspires to provide critical and theoretical expla-
nations of “religious” phenomena.14
The posthumous publication of Hermann Samuel Reimarus’s Apologie oder
Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes as anonymous “Fragments”
explicating “The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples” (1774–1778), for example,
DOI: 10.4324/b22959-1
2 Introduction
has long been credited with introducing the concept of an essential discontinuity
between Jesus and the early “Church.”15 For Reimarus, Jesus was born, lived, and
died as a Jew, a failed political messiah whose disciples (falsely) claimed had
been raised from the dead.16 Similarly, in 1835, David Friedrich Strauss published
Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet, an exploration of the Gospel story as myth.17
Steering a middle way between rationalistic reductionism and apologetic super-
naturalism, Strauss’ appeal to the language of myth was controversial in his day,
but his “basic claims – that many of the gospel narratives are mythical in charac-
ter, and that ‘myth’ is not simply to be equated with ‘falsehood’ – have become
part of mainstream scholarship.”18 After Strauss, the category of myth became
increasingly common in New Testament studies.19 The emergence of The Jesus
Seminar in 1985 – 150 years after the publication of Das Leben Jesu, kritisch
bearbeitet – further explored the possibility of redescribing Jesus along critical
lines of inquiry by carefully sifting through the sayings of Jesus, rendering the
principle of discontinuity virtually axiomatic in Jesus Research.20
Since the mid-1990s, the Redescribing Christian Origins project has utilized a
range of theoretical perspectives derived from the social sciences in identifying
alternative methodological approaches to the study of Christian origins. These
experiments include reconsidering the messianic conception of Jesus, the early
Jerusalem community, and Paul’s use of the Greek term Christos, each analyzed
as constituent elements in an emergent “Christian myth.”21 The study of Christian
origins is thus now characterized by explorations of the power of myth,22 including
the “myth of Christian uniqueness” (where “uniqueness” is virtually synonymous
with and a cipher for superiority),23 the Christian “myth of persecution,”24 the
Christian myth of Jewish persecution,25 and/or the “myth of a Gentile Galilee.”26
The idea that Jesus was a myth is now also part of this wider trend,27 although
the key question here is whether critical scrutiny of the sources sufficiently war-
rants this conclusion.28 The overwhelmingly vast majority of qualified experts in
the fields of Biblical and Religious Studies hold that it does not. Nonetheless, it
is now common to refer to Christianity in “mythic” terms, although this use of
the term myth should not be confused with popular conceptualizations relegating
myth to the realm of the irrational, the counter-factual, and/or the untrue. Rather,
in this context, a myth is regarded as a legendary narrative of sacred origins,29 an
“ideology in narrative form.”30 Accordingly, the figure of Jesus – that is, the first-
century Jew described by Paul as “born of a woman,” “born under the Law” (Gal
4:4), “born of the seed of David according to the flesh” (Rom 1:3), and whose
“brother” led a movement after his death (Gal 1:19; 2:9) – can be regarded as a
mythic element in an emergent “Christian” tradition provided we understand the
sacralization process in and through which Jesus became “messiah.” This appeal
to the language of myth presupposes a critical historiographical principle: that the
historical Jesus is theoretically distinct from the Jesus of the Gospels, the latter
of which represents a historical figure transformed by post-Easter Christology.31
That is, there is no historical Jesus without the willingness, in principle, to distin-
guish between the Gospels’ (re-)presentation(s) of Jesus and the historical figure
Introduction 3
of Jesus, including the categories, characterization, and canonical boundaries of
that figure.32
*
This study is an exploration of the themes of social rejection and (dis)continu-
ity in the early Jesus tradition.33 Previous studies have explored the relationship
between the Jesus tradition and early Jewish texts, messianism,34 mysticism,35
asceticism,36 sacrifice,37 violence,38 and halakhic discourse.39 The present project
expands on these studies by further exploring the social history of the Jesus move-
ment in terms of ethnicity, identity, and memory,40 proposing a new explanatory
model of early Christian origins as a sociological process of contradistinction
fueled by the perception and experience of social rejection.
Briefly, this study proposes that the rapid transformation of the early Jesus
movement’s initial inclusion of Gentiles within a Jewish/Gentile binary into a
Jewish/Christian dichotomy was the result of a socio-ethnic conflict within the
Jesus movement that quickly developed into an ethno-religious conflict between
“Jews” and “Christians.” This transformation produced the myth of the Jewish
rejection of Jesus and later justified the Christian rejection of Jews. The rhetorical
construction of “the Jew(s)” as rejecting (Jesus) in Paul’s soteriology facilitated
the idea that “the Jew(s)” had rejected Jesus as a “people/ethnos” and that the
covenant now belonged to “Christians.” Simply put, the social, ethnic, cultural,
and theological circumstances in and through which early Christ-followers con-
structed the mythic trope of “the Jewish rejection of Jesus” created significant
“memory distortion” in the early Jesus tradition.41 The present project, therefore,
is not intended simply to provide my own reconstruction of Christian origins; it
is also intended to better elucidate the historical processes in and through which
Christianity emerged as well as the discursive disciplinary framework within
which reconstructions of Christian origins must proceed: the identification of
Jesus as a first-century Jew within a structurally “Christian” discourse.42
The historical datum that “Jesus war kein Christ sondern Jude” has long
informed critical biblical scholarship.43 The Jewish Jesus of history was native
to the land, language, culture, customs, religion, and people of Judea. That is,
the historical Jesus was an indigenous Judean.44 While the term indigenous is
normally reserved for Native/First peoples who live within a complex nexus of
land, language, and kinship relations,45 it is also a relational category that can be
used more generally to describe politicized relationships and counter-narratives.
As such, indigeneity acknowledges discontinuity, facilitates a diachronic critical
analysis of competing and coexisting cultural contexts, and recognizes ambigu-
ity in the construction of social identities navigating contested ideological terrain
within a post-colonial context. The ongoing discussion over whether Ἰουδαῖος
should be translated as “Jew” or “Judean” illustrates, for example, how appeals to
Jesus’s Jewishness can profitably be seen as attempts to re-indigenize a Christian
tradition still searching for its historical roots in first-century Judaism.
