The Birth of Christianity

770 Pages·2010·3.57 MB·English

by  Crossan

The Birth of Christianity
Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution
of Jesus
John Dominic Crossan
In memory of
my younger brother,
Daniel Joseph Crossan, Jr.
Contents
Preface: The Lost Years
Prologue: The Content of Your Vision
Part I Continuation and Reconstruction
Chapter 1 Voices of the First Outsiders
Chapter 2 Reconstructing Earliest Christianity
Part II Memory and Orality
Chapter 3 The Mystique of Oral Tradition
Chapter 4 Does Memory Remember?
Chapter 5 A Tale of Two Professors
Chapter 6 Chasm or Interface?
Part III Gospels and Sources
Chapter 7 Admitting Gospel Presuppositions
Chapter 8 Relating Gospel Contents
Chapter 9 Comparing Gospel Manuscripts
Part IV Methodology and Anthropology
Chapter 10 The Problem of Methodology
Chapter 11 Cross-Cultural Anthropology
Part V History and Archeology
Chapter 12 Judeo-Roman History
Chapter 13 Galilean Archeology
Part VI Kingdom and Eschatology
Chapter 14 A Comparison of Two Early Gospels
Chapter 15 Apocalyptic and Ascetical Eschatology
Chapter 16 Ethical Eschatology
Part VII Healers and Itinerants
Prologue: The Meaning of Healing
Chapter 17 Negating Apocalyptic Eschatology
Chapter 18 Affirming Ethical Eschatology
Epilogue: The Social Status of Jesus
Part VIII Teachers and Householders
Chapter 19 Criticizing the Householders
Chapter 20 Controlling the Itinerants
Chapter 21 Interpreting the Commands
Chapter 22 A Divided Tradition
Part IX Meal and Community
Chapter 23 The Common Meal Tradition
Chapter 24 Communities of Resistance
Part X Story and Tradition
Chapter 25 The Other Passion-Resurrection Story
Chapter 26 Exegesis, Lament, and Biography
Epilogue: The Character of Your God
Appendixes
Bibliography
Subject Index
Author Index
Text Index
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PREFACE
The Lost Years
If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be
convinced even if someone rises from the dead.
Luke 16:31
This book is about the lost years of earliest Christianity, about the 30s and
40s of the first century, about those dark decades immediately after the
execution of Jesus. Those years are cloaked in a silence similar to that shrouding
Jesus’ own early life. Where did Jesus go, it is sometimes asked, in those
decades before he emerged to public life as a follower of John the Baptist? He
went, it is sometimes answered, to India and learned wisdom. I no more believe
that story than that he went to Ireland and learned Gaelic. Be that as it may, there
is, for earliest Jesus and earliest Christianity, a parallel period of empty years
and darkened decades. But it is more surprising to have such lost years for a
social movement than for an individual person. It is not at all unusual that the
ancient record of a personal life should begin at full maturity. The emperor
Augustus, who died on August 19 of 14 C.E., left his autobiography to be
inscribed on bronze tablets in front of his mausoleum in Rome. That story began
with the words “at the age of nineteen.” Neither does Luke 2:46–47 pierce the
lost years of Jesus with any historical information. At the age of twelve, Jesus
was found by his parents “in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to
them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his
understanding and his answers.” Josephus records a similar precocious situation
for himself in his Life 9: “While still a mere boy, about fourteen years old, I won
universal applause for my love of letters; inasmuch that the chief priests and the
leading men of the city used constantly to come to me for precise information on
some particular in our ordinances.”
But how does it happen that the early years of Christianity are so shrouded in
silence? The obscurity of the 30s and 40s can be emphasized by the comparative
brilliancy of the 50s. For that later decade we have the letters of the apostle Paul.
From them we know about Christian communities in four Roman provinces,
Galatia and Asia in central and western Turkey, and Macedonia and Achaia in
northern and southern Greece. From them we learn about urban churches in
Philippi, Thessalonica, and Ephesus. From them, with sociological analysis
wedded to theological exegesis, we can almost fill a small library on the
personalities and problems of the Corinthian congregation alone. From them we
catch glimpses of past events in the 30s and 40s at Damascus, Antioch, and
Jerusalem. From them we catch glimpses of future plans for the 60s in Italy and
Spain. From them, above all else, we receive the temptation to gloss speedily
over the 30s or 40s and move swiftly to those better-documented 50s. This book
intends to resist that temptation and to ask instead these questions: What forms
of Christianity were present in the 30s for Paul the persecutor, before he became
Paul the apostle, to persecute? What forms of Christianity were present before
Paul, without Paul, and even if Paul had never existed?
There is an obvious objection. Do we not have precious information in what
we call the Acts of the Apostles about those lost years of the 30s and 40s? We do
indeed, but with several difficulties. First, it is hard, without independent
vectors, to separate history from theology and tradition from redaction in that
writing. Second, Luke gives us a very general picture. It is like a summary of
1944–1945 asserting that the Allies landed on the beaches of Normandy and
pushed eastward to Berlin. That is absolutely true, but—apart from omitting
details such as Bastogne—it says nothing about the Russians pushing westward
toward the same destination. It describes the past in a way that renders the future
incomprehensible. Luke’s Acts of the Apostles moves Christianity on the
westward Jerusalem-to-Rome axis with nothing said about northward Syriac or
southward Coptic Christianity. Third, you would know from that text about
Christianity in Jerusalem, but you would know nothing about Christianity in
Galilee. In fact, when you put together Luke and Paul on the 30s and 40s, you
would conclude that Christianity operated exclusively from Jerusalem. This
book intends to give equal attention to Christianity in both Galilee and
Jerusalem. It also refuses to replace the old ascendancy of Jerusalem with a new
one of Galilee. Both, then, not either.
There are no documents from those 30s and 40s dated as Paul’s letters are to
the 50s. How, then, is reconstruction possible or anything new worth saying
about those decades? It is a question of new method and new material. My new
method is an interdisciplinary combination of anthropological, historical,
archeological, and literary disciplines. It establishes the sharpest possible context
before any Christian text is studied within that matrix. My new material is
obtained from the earlier strata or larger sources of Christian texts we already
have available to us. It is especially significant where two independent early
Christian texts share common traditions that must, therefore, be earlier than
either of them. But no matter what sources or texts I am using, they are always
used to illumine the Christianity of the 30s and 40s in the Jewish homeland. That
is what this book is about.
My title is The Birth of Christianity, and that requires two explanations.
First, about the word birth. Conceptions are usually more private and hidden
than births. Christianity’s conception was the kingdom-of-God movement as
Jesus and his first companions lived in radical but nonviolent resistance to Herod
Antipas’s urban development and Rome’s rural commercialism in Lower Galilee
of the late 20s. Christianity’s birth was in that movement’s continuation as those
same companions wrestled not only to imitate Jesus’ life but also to understand
Jesus’ death. This book is about that birth. It presumes conception but does not
go on to growth or maturity. Birth, in other words, is the 30s and the 40s. Now
about the word Christianity. If you can hear that term only as a religion separate
from or even inimical to Judaism, you are not hearing it as intended in this book.
I use Christianity to mean Christian Judaism, just as I use Essenism, Pharisaism,
or Sadduceeism to mean Essene Judaism, Pharisaic Judaism, or Sadduceean
Judaism. They are all divergent, competing, and mutually hostile options within
the Jewish homeland as it struggled to withstand Greek cultural internationalism
and Roman military imperialism. What was Christian Judaism before Paul and
without Paul?
I conclude with Luke 24:13–33, which summarizes in a single paragraph
what it will take me a whole book to develop. Two Christians travel from
Jerusalem to Emmaus on Easter Sunday. One is named and male; his
companion, unnamed, is presumably female, given the protocols of
Mediterranean patriarchy. The risen Jesus joins them on their journey. But the
road to Emmaus is not the road to Damascus. This is an apparition without
blinding light or heavenly voice. This is a vision without slow demonstration or
immediate recognition. Even when Jesus explains the scriptures about the
suffering and glorification of the Messiah, the travelers do not know who he is.
But then they invite the stranger to stay and eat with them. He does not invite
them. They invite him.
As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as
if he were going on. But they urged him strongly, saying, “Stay with us,
because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So he went in
to stay with them. (Luke 24:28–29)
You will notice how that invitation is emphasized. The pair have presumably
arrived at their village home and, but for the invitation, the stranger would have
passed on and remained unrecognized. The pair are, in terms to be used later in
this book, itinerants who become householders, but it is invitation that leads to
meal that leads to recognition. “Then their eyes were opened, and they
recognized him; and he vanished from their sight,” as 24:31 puts it. Resurrected
life and risen vision appear as offered shelter and shared meal. Resurrection is
not enough. You still need scripture and eucharist, tradition and table,
community and justice; otherwise, divine presence remains unrecognized and
human eyes remain unopened. That is exactly what this book is about.