From Jesus to His First Followers: Continuity and Discontinuity: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives

341 Pages·2017·1.42 MB·English

by  Adriana Destro

From Jesus to his First Followers: Continuity and Discontinuity
Biblical Interpretation Series
Editors in Chief
Paul Anderson (George Fox University)
Jennifer Koosed (Albright College, Reading)
Editorial Board
A.K.M. Adam (University of Oxford)
Roland Boer (University of Newcastle, Australia)
Colleen M. Conway (Seton Hall University)
Vernon Robbins (Emory University)
Annette Schellenberg (Universität Wien)
Carolyn J. Sharp (Yale Divinity School)
Johanna Stiebert (University of Leeds)
Duane Watson (Malone University)
Ruben Zimmermann (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz)
VOLUME 152
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bins
From Jesus to his First Followers:
Continuity and Discontinuity
Anthropological and Historical Perspectives
By
Adriana Destro and Mauro Pesce

LEIDEN | BOSTON
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Destro, Adriana, author, editor. | Pesce, Mauro, author, editor.
Title: From Jesus to his first followers : continuity and discontinuity :
 anthropological and historical perspectives / edited [and written] by
 Adriana Destro and Mauro Pesce
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2017. | Series: Biblical interpretation
 series, ISSN 0928–0731 ; volume 152 | Compilation of essays originally
 published by the authors in English, German, or Italian, most previously
 published at conferences, in journals, or as chapters of other
 publications. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016047286 (print) | LCCN 2016057663 (ebook) | ISBN
 9789004251373 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9789004337664 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Church history—Primitive and early church, ca. 30–600.
Classification: LCC BR165 .D43 2017 (print) | LCC BR165 (ebook) | DDC
 270.1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016047286

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.
issn 0928-0731
isbn 978-90-04-25137-3 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-33766-4 (e-book)
Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
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Contents
Introduction 1
part 1
Jesus’ Strategy: Interstitiality and Conflict
1 The Interstitial Movement of Jesus and the oikos 11
2 The Conflict of Jesus with the Society of His Time 34
3 Between Family and Temple: Jesus and Sacrifices 50
4 Kinship and Movement: Closeness and Distance in John’s
Perspective 68
part 2
Religious Practice as Continuity with Jesus
5 The Practice of the Heavenly Journey: The Case of Paul 85
6 Practices of Contact With the Supernatural: From Jesus to
His Followers 112
part 3
Different Groups of Jesus’ Followers, before Christianity
7 The Places of Jesus’ Followers in the Land of Israel: Local Origins of the
Gospels’ Sources 135
8 Divergent Lines of Transmission and Memory: The Passion Narratives in
Mark and John 176
9 A Persecuted and Antagonistic Minority: The Strategy of Matthew 203
vi contents
10 ‘Mise en histoire’ and Social Memory: The Politics of the Acts of the
Apostles 223
11 Investigating Domestic Slavery in John 232
part 4
Separation Between Jews and Christians
12 The Separation of the Jesus’ Followers from the Jews: The Case
of Burial Space 253
Bibliography 273
Index of Names 325
Thematic Index 331
Introduction1
The transition from Jesus to the first groups of his followers is at the center
of interest of this book. After Jesus’ death those who followed him were con-
fronted with a number of new situations and new perspectives. It is hardly sur-
prising that a process of deep transformation began, which was characterized
by both continuity and discontinuity.2
With the course of years, the groups of Jesus’ followers inevitably differenti-
ated as they looked for concrete solutions to emerging difficulties. The diffusion
of early groups of followers took place in a multireligious context (including
Jewish environments). This brought about a variety of effects. It became clear
that Jesus had left no instructions about the future internal organization of his
movement and no answers to relevant theological questions that the followers
gradually had to face.
The essays collected in this volume have in common the attention to Jesus’
and his followers’ style of life and to the social forms that they adopted in order
to integrate into society and justify their aims and activities. In particular, this
book highlights the social dynamics triggered by the way of life that Jesus’
groups practiced. Historical documentation and socio-cultural investigation
are here combined to call attention to the influence of the style of life and
the social interchanges of Jesus and his followers on the surrounding society.
These social interrelations appear somehow historically more important than
theological conceptions.3 This means that we start from the conviction that
the real meaning and impact of ideas can be understood only if we grasp the
link that connects notions and theories to the kind of life that Jesus chose.
This methodological option is the reason that led us some years ago to write
Encounters With Jesus. The Man in His Place and Time,4 entirely dedicated to
Jesus’ concrete practices of life. Knowing such practices is the precondition for
understanding Jesus’ message. In that book, we wanted to stress that Jesus had
abandoned his family group, work, and home, that he lived moving constantly
1  We are indebted to editors and publishers for allowing us to publish revised and updated
versions of previous articles. At the beginning of each chapter we give the bibliographical
indication of the first publication. Chapters 7 and 8 have never been published before.
2  See our book on the death of Jesus (Destro – Pesce 2014a).
3  This book is the result of the collaboration between a cultural anthropologist (Adriana
Destro) and a historian and exegete of early Christian writings (Mauro Pesce). It is intended
to spread the dialogue between different disciplinary fields.
4  Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2011.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004337664_00�
2 Introduction
from place to place, asking for hospitality for himself and his followers to pri-
vate households. He entered many domestic environments and was exposed to
welcome but also to refusal. This means that Jesus was rooted in ordinary life of
people. He always looked for a direct face-to-face relationship and unmediated
contact. In his itinerancy he remained far from the cities and chose the villages
as the setting of his activities.
Jesus largely practiced commensality including all individuals, without
distinction. He shared food without privileges and balanced exchanges and
considered this sharing as the highest example of encounter between human
beings. In his view, it was condivision of essential resources that made people
part of the same design or project. Individuals were required to live together
not on the basis of a pure theological conception but because of an active daily
participation to a common praxis.
In Part One of the book we highlight two characteristics of Jesus’ rela-
tion with the society of his time: interstitiality5 and conflictual attitude. The
social form that Jesus chose to aggregate his followers was discipleship. A
group of disciples can be considered a voluntary association that dialecti-
cally confronted with other basic forms of aggregation, especially those of
family and household, but also with major institutions such as synagogues
and the Temple of Jerusalem. The social organization created by Jesus does
not tend to set up a group detached and opposed to other social bodies. Jesus
wants to be present within private and public spaces. He meets people in the
houses, in the streets, in the places where individuals work. He proposes an
alternative lifestyle within the existing social spaces. He does not create
an alternative religious space to the already present social aggregates and/or
organizations. In this sense, his activity is powerful but interstitial in the sense
that Jesus does not seek to overthrow institutional structures and does not try
to install himself permanently in private and family areas.
The initial chapter deals with the relation between the social form of the
discipleship of Jesus and the configuration of the households. Belonging to
the group of disciples often involves a conflict with the members of the house-
hold. Jesus demands that his closest followers abandon house, work, and fam-
ily. The social logic of the movement is incompatible with that of the private
households, self-centered and basically concentrated on their livelihood and
growth. The passage of Luke 12:52–53 (// Matthew 10:34–36) is the emblematic
5  Following M. Douglas, individuals can be interstitial “from the perspective of one internal
sub-system to which they do not belong, but in which they must operate” (Douglas, 1996,
103). Jesus assumes, for example, an interstitial position when he is present within a house-
hold, without assuming a domestic function and without enjoing permanent hospitality in it.
Introduction 3
representation of the conflict in which a member of the house who decides
to follow Jesus is involved. S/he has to fight against the rest of the household.
This chapter also clarifies the way in which the interstitial presence of
Jesus in the households takes place and influences their lives. It is true
that Jesus and his disciples abandon their homes, but it is also true that wher-
ever they go they ask to live in the homes of others, which offer a space for
their teaching and convivial encounters. When Jesus is present, the houses are
converted into places of inclusion. The interstitial presence in the domestic
areas allows Jesus to propose the transformation of what he considered the
basis of the society of his time (private environments and households). This
presence is intelligible only if we keep in mind that the contrast between the
logic of voluntary association of disciples and that of households brings about
specific social dynamics. This contrast sets in motion vast sectors of the society
and motivates people towards new objectives.
In Chapter Two, Jesus is regarded as a person who faces the society of his
time with a critical and conflictual attitude. He undertakes a struggle whose
outcome can only be the complete annihilation of the enemy. The enemy is
represented by those who are opposing what Jesus believes to be God’s will.
With this people there can be no compromise. The alternative is simply victory
or defeat. The ultimate root of this conflictual attitude was Jesus’ acute percep-
tion of what was inconsistent with the divine will. The sentence “you cannot
obey God and mammon” is the emblem of Jesus’ denunciation of any behavior
that is incompatible with the will of God. This condemnation of anything that
can prevent radical obedience to God brings Jesus to fight a series of practices
and beliefs that his opponents perceived as consistent with the traditional reli-
gion. The conflicts in which Jesus is involved are therefore not effect of his
alleged opposition to Judaism, as Christian anti-Jewish theology anachronisti-
cally thought for centuries. They come from his perception of the discordance
of some practices with an absolute orientation to God.
Jesus’ attitude towards the sacrifices and towards some observances of ritual
purity (Chapter Three) must be interpreted in a similar way. Jesus does not
deny the value of the sacrificial cult, nor the rules of Biblical Levitical purity,
but shifts the emphasis on behavior. It is the mutual forgiveness between peo-
ple rather than the ritual of Yom ha-Kippurim that obtains the cancellation of
sins. The rules of purification lose their importance in front of the basic need
for justice and reconciliation. In this question, Jesus is in continuity but some-
how also discontinuity with many Jewish religious groups and with John the
Baptist (to whom he had been very close).
As the title of the book indicates, our analysis is also interested in the
evolutions and changes that took place after Jesus’ death (Chapter Four). In
the Gospel of John, the contrast between Jesus’ discipleship and households
4 Introduction
become less relevant and acute. The reason is that at the end of the century
the logic of private households has again taken over the logic of Jesus practice
of discipleship. At this time, itinerancy is no longer the prevailing form of life
of Jesus’ followers. In John, the demands of Jesus to the disciples to leave home,
work, family and possessions disappear. Jesus’ followers are now organized as
groups settled and integrated in homes. The domestic ethos takes over on Jesus’
request of radical renounces and/or profound social transformations.
In Part Two of the book, we present another aspect about the primacy of
the practice of life of Jesus and his early followers. In Chapter Five, we take
into account the fact that many religious forms were widespread in numer-
ous cultural areas of the ancient world. The search for the heavenly journey,
for example, was for many centuries largely present in Middle-Eastern, Jewish,
Greek and Roman-Hellenistic worlds. We believe that the heavenly journey
was primarily a religious practice and not a literary motif or an abstract theo-
logical topos. It was one of the common religious forms or practices in antiq-
uity (like prayer or sacrifice). It is therefore a mistake to interpret the episode
described by Paul in 2 Cor 12:1–4 only in the light of a supposed Jewish (apoca-
lyptic) framework. The fact that this religious phenomenon was so widespread
(despite its various and divergent interpretations) lets us understand what
kind of experience was implied in it. Our hypothesis is that the presumed
experience of the heavenly journey could have its source in a certain type of
psychic-somatic attitude that can lead to a kind of detachment or opposition
between two parts of the self.
We maintain in Chapter Six that the continuity of behavior of the disciples
with Jesus practice of life may be observed also in some forms of contact with
the supernatural (exorcisms, prayers, visions, healings, etc). Apparently the
disciples had learned these practices from Jesus himself. In essence, we sug-
gest that the continuity or discontinuity of the followers with Jesus should not
be primarily examined on the basis of theological conceptions, but of religious
experiences and performances. This leads to a different understanding of the
plurality of interpretations of the figure of Jesus and his message that took
place immediately after his death. What the disciples have in common with
Jesus is a set of practical behaviors with which they try to reach the divine
world. It is therefore understandable that different practices could lead to
divergent supernatural revelations, to dissimilar positions and consequences.
We basically assume that the multiplication of forms of contact with the
supernatural that characterizes the first Jesus’ followers after his death should
not be explained as a novelty. They were not mainly due to the influence of
Hellenistic models. On the contrary, these practices originated from Jesus’ way
of life. A certain number of gospel texts actually induce to think that Jesus’