The Fallible Gospels, Part 50: Before “Christianity”: The problems of the earliest Christians
In dealing with their problems, their starting point would have to be the fact that persons and events of significance were always expressed in terms of being chosen, accomplished, inspired or guided by God. It was their natural way, their only way, of expressing meaning. It was the way they inevitably thought. And what concepts could they draw on? They would have been tugged in different directions by their own backgrounds, preferences, and characters, but most of them were Jews. The only ideas and explanations possible for them would come from Judaism: it was the wallpaper of their consciousness.
What were their problems? They had to find ways to express their feelings about the significance of Jesus. If they wanted to defend and justify their position, then inevitably — as people with beliefs and with a cause always do — they had to convert others, to make them understand and accept their views. Therefore, they had to demonstrate that there was divine authority for their claims.
Naturally, different individuals would have different opinions about what was important. A difference of emphasis would create a wide variety of perceived problems and solutions. For example, an emphasis on the life of Jesus could lead to collecting and preserving his sayings of wisdom. The preference for that approach is the result of a different kind of mentality from those who would prefer to demonstrate divine authority by means of miracle stories. That was also a most significant option if they were to persuade fellow Jews that Jesus was the Messiah.
Jesus had not been willing to play the role of Messiah, but now he was no longer around to argue about it. Some of them decided that their suspicions had been right all along and he had been the Messiah after all. As the Messiah was by definition chosen by God, popular expectation would be that he would be able to display supernatural power. The historian Josephus tells us that miracles were attributed to others who claimed to be the Messiah. In the telling, of course, events would be exaggerated and interpreted. Like wisdom sayings, miracle stories would be collected together for ease of memorising and for preaching purposes.
Emphasis could instead be placed on the meaning of his death rather than just events of his life, confronting the problems of scripture, of prophecy and law. It was a serious challenge to persuade Jews that an execution could confirm rather than deny that their teacher was the Messiah.
Some of them would have been more concerned with resurrection, but even within this concept we must remember there are different approaches. It is simply not necessary to be either superstitious or naïve. Consider the significance of the following. In Acts, Peter speaks to the congregation about choosing a replacement for Judas. Once it had been decided that there had to be a significant group of twelve apostles, the Judas story would make this replacement necessary, or subsequent historical references could not have been to the Twelve rather than the Eleven.
“We must therefore choose someone who has been with us the whole time that the Lord Jesus was travelling round with us, someone who was with us right from the time when John was baptising until the day when he was taken up from us — and he can act with us as a witness to his resurrection.” (Acts 1.21–22)
Well, what a giveaway. This passage is surely of huge significance in underlining the meaning of “resurrection” as the continuing spiritual presence of Jesus with his followers. If resurrection is understood as a proveable physical event, miraculous but historical, that you could have captured on videotape, then how on Earth could a group of Christians take a vote on choosing a “witness” after the event?
To be “raised” from death can easily mean to have been rewarded and justified by God, to have been granted an exalted status and having ascended to heaven. This is a way of expressing significance and destiny, not about reviving dead bodies.
Talk of resurrection can be talk of dreams and visions, or talk of the transformation of Jesus to a spiritual state. Was Jesus not still with them in their hearts and minds when they broke bread? Might they not use raising from the dead as a way of trying to explain to others this feeling of his continued influence over their lives, as well as to justify and explain what his life had meant? The continued presence of Jesus could be experienced in life even if they had not been favoured with a vision.
Others would be concerned with his absence rather than his presence. It would be perfectly possible to ignore any idea of an earthly resurrection and to imagine Jesus as having gone to the presence of God; and to combine this with anticipating his triumphant return at the future coming of the kingdom. There would always have been those who preferred the popular idea of the coming of the Son of Man at the Last Judgment, when they would finally show the Romans who’s boss, to the more subtle appreciation of the present kingdom that was all around them if only they would learn to see it.
Jesus, it seems, “appeared” to, or “revealed” himself to, different people in different ways: wisdom, lifestyle, vision, scripture. People who cared more about Jesus than about Judaism would prefer sayings, visions, miracle stories. Others understood the serious obstacles in the way of justifying a claim to the destiny of Israel by claiming the status of Messiah for their departed founder. Other groups had claimed the right to inherit the traditions of Israel and interpret them as their own, the Essenes for example; but it would seem an extremely courageous and pretentious idea for a group of Galilean Jewish peasants.
They needed to persuade other Jews that Jesus had been the Messiah, and that although he had been executed, he would return to Earth to complete his Messianic role and overthrow the Romans as expected. They knew that the best justification they could possibly have would be the fulfilment of prophecies, “evidence” that what had happened to Jesus had been foretold in the sacred scriptures; that his suffering and death had been in accordance with the word of God.
It seems to me that it is likely to be because of these problems that the leadership in Jerusalem was handed over from Peter to James. Peter had the authority of a long association with Jesus, but he was an illiterate fisherman. He was in no position to search sacred texts for justifications. Furthermore, James was the brother of Jesus himself, and could easily have claimed the right of succession as group leader because of this.
James was pious, involved with scribes and Pharisees. Perhaps he was responsible for introducing into the Jesus groups some of those early learned and literate followers, who would have far more interest in the intellectual exercise of scriptural interpretation and justification, than in preaching that used miracle stories.
It was a considerable challenge. How could Jesus possibly have been chosen by God for a special role and yet suffer what had happened to him? It was more than difficult enough having to cope with the fact that he had been executed by the accursed method of being “hung on a tree”. The decree from Deuteronomy must have made an enormous impact on the mind of the early Church, as it echoes throughout the New Testament (John 19.31, Acts 5.30, 10.39, Galatians 3.13).
They had to search for scriptures that would demonstrate that suffering and death could be part of a deliberate plan by God, rather than signs of defeat. The death of Jesus had to be shown to be a fulfilment of prophecies, but also a postponed victory, a beginning rather than an end. And so prophecy and history became mirror and image, and father and child to each other. People who did not know what had happened to Jesus after his arrest gathered appropriate scriptural references from prophets and psalms, out of which a connected “Passion narrative” grew. Then it could be claimed that the texts from centuries before had been written with Jesus in mind.
Next, in Part 51: The Messianists and the Suffering Servant