B. L. Mack's "Who Wrote the New Testament" (excerpts)

RESEARCH AND INTERESTS OF THE LATE VERNAL HOLLEY

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Burton L. Mack
Who Wrote the New Testament?
(San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995)

Transciber's comments

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WHO WROTE THE NEW TESTAMENT?

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CONTENTS

1 Prologue: The Mystique of Sacred Scripture

PART 1: Jesus and the Christ

19 1. Clashing Cultures

43 2. Teachings from the Jesus Movements
(Q, Pronouncement Stories, Gospel of Thomas,
Miracle Stories, the Pillars in Jerusalem)

75 3. Fragments from the Christ Cult
(Christ Myth, Ritual Meal, Christ Hymn)

PART 2: Christ and the Hinge of History

99 4. Paul and His Gospel
(1 and 2 Thessalonians, Galatians)

123 5. Paul's Letters to Greeks and Romans
(1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, Philemon, Philippians)

147 6. Gospels of Jesus the Christ
(Mark, Matthew, Luke)

175 7. Visions of the Cosmic Lord
(John, Colossians, Ephesians, Hebrews, Revelation)

199 8. Letters from the Apostles
(Pastoral Epistles, Catholic Epistles, James,
Johannine Letters)

PART 3: History and the Christian Myth

225 9. Inventing Apostolic Traditions
(Acts, Didache, 1 Clement, Ignatius)

251 10. Claiming Israel's Epic
(Marcion, Valentinus, Justin Martyr)

275 11. Creating the Christian Bible
(Canons, Mishnah, Eusebius, Jerome)

293 Epilogue: The Fascination of the Bible

311 Appendix A: Early Christian Literature

312 Appendix B: The Contents of Q

314 Appendix C: The Pronouncement Stories in Mark

317 Works Cited

321 Index

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PROLOGUE:

THE MYSTIQUE OF
SACRED SCRIPTURE

Fascination with sacred scriptures seldom surfaces for observation or remark. Their mystique is subtle, something that most persons in a culture would hardly recognize even if mentioned. I have been pondering that mystique, asking why the Bible has such a curious hold on our minds and imaginations. I have not been thinking about the obviously embarrassing public displays of foolish obsessions with the Bible in our time, listening for the hoofbeats of John's four horsemen of the apocalypse, for instance, or citing Paul to prove that gays are sinners in the eyes of God. Madness of that sort can pop up in times of social and cultural crisis no matter what the issue or the mythic authorities might be. I am thinking instead about all of the seemingly innocent ways in which the Bible is taken for granted as a special book, and about all of the ways in which it works its magic in our culture without ever being acknowledged, consulted, or read.

The range of procedures for consulting the Bible is astounding. Students tell me that their grandmothers used to seek "a word for the day" by letting their Bibles flop open to a "verse for the day." Ministers, priests, rabbis, preachers, and teachers by the thousands pore over these texts in quest of some lesson or message fit for their classes or congregations. Groups are now forming outside the formal boundaries of institutional religion to study the Bible in the hope of discovering some fundamental truth felt to have been lost in our recent past. Think of the intellectual labor invested in the academic study of the Bible, the production of scholarly studies and guides for interpreting the Bible, and the huge flow of literature that constantly pours forth from church houses and commercial publishers of books on the Bible. One might well wonder at all this activity swirling around a single book.

This constant consultation of the Bible is partially explained by the important role assigned to the Bible in our religious institutions. Readings from the Bible are essential to liturgies, lessons from the Bible are basic for teachings and doctrines, and references to the Bible are felt to be necessary in the construction of theologies by those charged with the intellectual life of religious traditions. The remarkable thing

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Christian Bible that has influenced our culture. We shall see that the New Testament was linked to the Jewish scriptures of the Old Testament in just a certain way, and that it is this link which gives the Christian Bible its peculiar logic and force. This linkage is what we eventually need to understand in order to have some public discussion about the Bible's continuing attraction in our own time. But in order to understand that link and its logic, we need to see why the New Testament writings were written in the first place and how they eventually became the New Testament of the Christian church.

As I toyed with the idea of writing such a book about the New Testament, I found myself confronted with a sort of catch-22. The catch is that for most people the New Testament is taken as proof for the conventional picture of Christian origins, and the conventional picture is taken as proof for the way in which the New Testament was written. The conventional picture comes to focus on a very small set of persons and events as storied in the gospels. It is the story of Jesus' appearance in the world as the son of God. A divine aura surrounds this special time that sets it apart from all the rest of human history. Most people suspend their disbelief and let the story stand as the miraculous moment that started the Christian religion. All that followed, including the transformation of the disciples into apostles, the birthday of the first church in Jerusalem, the conversion of Paul, and the writing of the New Testament gospels and letters by the apostles, is thought to be a response to those first incomparable events. Thus the unfolding history is imagined on the model of dominoes falling in place when triggered by an original impulse. This creates a circular, interlocking pattern of authentication in which the New Testament is both the result of and the documentation for the conventional view of Christian beginnings.

For this reason the New Testament is commonly viewed and treated as a charter document that came into being much like the Constitution of the United States. According to this view, the authors of the New Testament were all present at the historic beginnings of the new religion and collectively wrote their gospels and letters for the purpose of founding the Christian church that Jesus came to inaugurate. Unfortunately for this view, that is not the way it happened. Scholars locate the various writings of the New Testament at different times and places over a period of one hundred years, from the letters of Paul in the 50s of the first century, through the writing of the gospels of Mark and Matthew in the 70s and 80s, the gospels of John and Luke around the turn of the second century, and on to the acts, letters, and other writings during the first half of the second century, some as late as 140 to 150 C.E. (appendix A). This fact alone introduces another history of Christian beginnings that is not acknowledged by or reflected in the writings of the New Testament.

To make matters worse for the conventional view, these writings stem from different groups with their own histories, views, attitudes, and mix of peoples. In some cases it is possible to trace the connections between two different writings. An example would be the way in which the gospel attributed to Matthew was dependent

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upon the gospel attributed to Mark. But even in cases such as these a careful reading of two related writings always produces a long list of their differences. No two writings agree upon what we might have thought were fundamental convictions shared by all early Christians. Each writing has a different view of Jesus, for instance, a particular attitude toward Judaism, its own conception of the kingdom of God, a peculiar notion of salvation, and so on. This means that the impression created by the New Testament of a singular collection of apostolic documents, all of which bear "witness" to a single set of inaugural events, is misleading.

We now know that there were many different responses to the teachings of Jesus. Groups formed around them, but then went different ways depending upon their mix of peoples, social histories, and discussions about the teachings of Jesus and how they were to be interpreted and applied. Some were of the type we call Jesus movements. Others became congregations of the Christ whose death was imagined as a martyrdom to justify a mixture of Jews and gentiles as equally acceptable in a new configuration of the people of God (or "Israel"). Still others developed into enclaves for the cultivation of spiritual enlightenment or the knowledge (gnosis) Jesus had taught. Each of these branches of the Jesus movements, including many permutations of each type, imagined Jesus differently. They did so in order to account for what they had become as patterns of practice, thinking, and congregating settled into place. And they all competed with one another in their claims to be the true followers of Jesus. Many of these groups had their own gospels (R. Cameron 1982), and some produced rather large libraries that are still available to us from the second, third, and fourth centuries. As for the New Testament, it turns out to be a very small selection of texts from a large body of literature produced by various communities during the first one hundred years. These New Testament texts were collected in the interest of a particular form of Christian congregation that emerged only by degrees through the second to fourth centuries. Toward the end of the book I will begin referring to this type of Christianity as "centrist," meaning thereby that it positioned itself against gnostic forms of Christianity on the one hand, and radical forms of Pauline and spiritist communities on the other. It was centrist Christianity that became the religion of empire under Constantine, collected together the texts we now know as the New Testament, and joined them to the Jewish scriptures to form the Christian Bible. When these writings were first written there was no centrist tradition, and none of them fully agreed with the others with respect to their views of Jesus, God, the state of the world, or the reason for the Jesus movements.

It is also the case that, with the exception of seven letters by Paul and the Revelation to an otherwise unknown John, the writings selected for inclusion in the New Testament were not written by those whose names are attached to them. Many modern Christians find this fact difficult to comprehend, if not downright unnerving. The problem seems to be that, if so, someone must have been lying. A better way to understand this phenomenon is to realize (1) that most literature of the early Christian period was written anonymously, (2) that the concept of an apostolic age

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was a second-century creation, and (3) that the later attribution of this literature to names associated with apostles can be explained in ways that show it was not considered dishonest. One helpful observation is that anonymous authorship of writings intended for use in social institutions such as schools, temples, and royal bureaucracies was standard practice in the scribal traditions of the ancient Near East. Another is that, in the early period of collecting lore, interpreting teachings, and trying out new ideas fit for the novel groupings spawned by the Jesus movements, many minds, voices, and hands were in on the drafting of written materials. No one thought to take credit for writing down community property even though authorial creativity is everywhere in evidence. Even the earliest collections of teachings and stories about Jesus, such as the Sayings Gospel Q, the Gospel of Thomas, and the little sets of anecdotes and miracle stories from the pre-Markan tradition bear the marks of literacy and creativity, though none was signed by an author.

As for the later attribution of anonymous literature to known figures of the past, that also was a standard practice during the Greco-Roman period. In the schools of rhetoric, for example, teachers had their students write speeches and letters appropriate for such figures to see if the student had fully understood the importance of a historical figure. It was what a recognized figure stood for that was deemed important, not his personal profile. Scholars agree, in any case, that for these and other reasons, most of the writings in the New Testament were either written anonymously and later assigned to a person of the past or written later as a pseudonym for some person thought to have been important for the earliest period. Striking examples of the latter are the two letters said to have been written by Peter, both of which are clearly second-century creations.

Thus, over the course of the second and third centuries, centrist Christians were able to create the impression of a singular, monolinear history of the Christian church. They did so by carefully selecting, collecting, and arranging anonymous and pseudonymous writings, assigned to figures at the beginning of the Christian time. As they imagined it, this history was foretold by the prophets of the Old Testament, inaugurated by Jesus and his sacrifice for the sins of the world, established by the apostles in their missions, and confirmed by the bishops in their loyalty to the teachings of that illustrious tradition. And because all the New Testament writings were now regarded as written by apostles and their associates, the differences among their views of Christian beginnings were effectively erased. In the centrist Christian imagination, the four gospels merged into an amalgam of the one gospel story, and the letters of Paul and the other apostles were read as "witnesses" to these dramatic events that inaugurated the Christian time. This means that the impression modern readers have of the New Testament as a charter document for Christianity, a kind of constitution written in concert by a college or congress of apostles, is thoroughly understandable. That is exactly what the centrist Christians of the fourth century intended. The problem is that this charter was created for the fourth-century church by means of literary fictions. It is neither an

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process of being reconsidered and realigned in light of the novel social vision they called the kingdom of God.

As everyone knows, however, these early Christians did more than argue about power and purity or test the conventional codes of behavior by violating table etiquette. They also entertained some very extraordinary ideas, especially in regard to Jesus, his transformation into a divine cosmic being, and his status as lord of all history and creation. And the claims these Christians made about knowing the mind of God, his ways with the world, and the apocalyptic ending to all human history when the kingdom of God would finally be "revealed" were nothing short of fantastic. If we cannot say how these early Christians came to such ideas, and for what reasons, we shall not be able to escape the catch-22 even though we may catch sight of their many social formations. It would still be possible to think that the events imagined in their mythology had really overwhelmed them. That is the way the conventional myth of Christian origins paints the picture: first the miraculous and incomparable events surrounding the appearance of Jesus as the son of God, then the preaching of this gospel and the formation of the church. If we want to change that sequence we shall have to explain the emergence of these mythic ideas some other way. That other way will be to pay attention to mythmaking in the process of social experimentation.

That early Christians engaged in mythmaking may be difficult for modern Christians to accept. The usual connotations of the term myth are almost entirely negative. And when it is used to describe the content of the New Testament gospels there is invariably a hue and cry. That is because, in distinction from most mythologies that begin with a "once upon a time," the Christian myth is set in historical time and place. It seems therefore to demand the belief that the events of the gospel story really happened. And that means that the story cannot be "myth." It may help some to note (1) that mythmaking is a normal and necessary social activity, (2) that early Christian mythmaking was due more to borrowing and rearranging myths taken for granted in the cultures of context than to firsthand speculation, and (3) that the myths they came up with made eminent sense, not only for their times and circumstances, but also for the social experiments in which they were invested. That, at least, will be my challenge. That is what I want to show by writing this book. But how do myths make sense? And what kind of sense does the Christian myth make?

Every culture has a set of stories that account for the world in which a people find themselves. These stories usually tell of the creation of the world, the appearance of the first people, ancestral heroes and their achievements, and the glorious beginnings of society as a people experience it. Terrain, village patterns, shrines, temples, cities, and kingdoms are often set in place or planned at the beginning of time. Scholars understand these myths as the distillation of human-interest stories first told in the course of routine patterns of living together, then rehearsed for many generations. Telling stories about one another is what we do. It belongs to the

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life and work of maintaining human relations and constructing societies. Telling stories is how we do our catching up, checking one another out on views and attitudes, and gathering information to justify judgments we need to make about something we call character. It does not take long before there are too many stories to recall and retell. Even in a brief family history, sorting takes place naturally over time, and only the most vivid stories are ever rehearsed. Some, however, are told again and again. These become stories that several generations might share. As the size of a social unit expands, the number of shared stories shrinks. These stories invariably become dense icons, packed with features characteristic for the people as a whole. As the past generations fade from memory, these stories are allowed to slip into a "once upon a time" where a honing of ancestral symbols takes place.

In cultures where there is interest, capacity, and circumstance to remember more than three or four generations, where writing is invented and records kept, it is customary to develop a "historical" imagination as a kind of linear basket to hold the stories of importance for the collective memory of a people. Now only the most compact and generalized icons collect "at the beginning," the point in the past beyond which the human imagination cannot reach. The others may be sprinkled here and there through the "history," but, sequence is not always important, and many of the stories in the basket may not be connected to one another in any particular way. Rhyme and reason may be superimposed, however, in the interest of borrowing some of the luster of the past for the present shape of the society. When that happens, we can begin to speak of an epic. Epic is a rehearsal of the past that puts the present in its light. Setting the present in the light of an illustrious past makes it honorable, legitimate, right, and reasonable. The present institution is then worth celebrating. Naturally, both the past and the present may be highly romanticized or idealized, for epic is myth in the genre of history. The stories of Gilgamesh in ancient Sumerian and Akkadian civilizations were epic. For the Greeks, Homer was epic. Pindar's poetry of illustrious family lines was epic on a small scale. The local histories of shrines, temples, and peoples in the eastern Mediterranean during the Hellenistic period were epic on a medium-sized scale. And the history of Israel, which, from the very beginning of the world aimed at the establishment of a temple-state in Jerusalem, was epic for the Jews.

When the second temple was destroyed in 70 C.E., the Jews had a problem on their hands. Not only their ancient history, contained in the five books of Moses, but an immense body of literature from the Hellenistic period documented their intellectual investment in the temple-state as the proper goal of human history from the foundation of the world. Christians also had a problem. They had no right to claim the history of Israel as their own. But early Jewish Christians had wanted to think of themselves as the people of God, heirs of the promises to Israel, or even the new Israel for a new day. It was natural to do so in order to feel right about the new Jesus movements. And so, before the destruction of the temple, early Jesus people and Christians had already started to point to this or that feature of the history of Israel in order to claim some link with the illustrious traditions of Israel. As we shall

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PART 1

Jesus and the Christ

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1

CLASHING
CULTURES

Cultures clashed in Greco-Roman times, and the Eastern Mediterranean filled to bursting with a heady and volatile mix of peoples, powers, and ideas. Confusing for most, exhilarating for some, the energies unleashed by these uncertain times peaked during the first century C.E. and resulted in extravagant social experimentation and imaginative intellectual projections. The reason for the outpouring of intellectual energy, and for the struggle to find new ways to group, was that the cultural traditions flowing into the mixing bowl were no longer supported by the social institutions that had produced and sustained them. People were on their own to manage as best they could with only the memory of provincial values to guide them in a helter-skelter cosmopolitan age. Most rose to the challenge, and the inventiveness of some proposals for dealing with multicultural forces and surviving the machinations of the blind goddess called Fate (tyche) was nothing short of genius. We need to understand both the malaise and the creativity of these times, for it was just at this juncture that Judaism and Christianity emerged. As we shall see, the attractiveness of early Christianity is best explained as one of the more creative and practical social experiments in response to the loss of cultural moorings that all peoples experienced during this time.

Three model societies were in everyone's mind during the Greco-Roman age (second century B.C.E. to second century C.E.): the ancient Near Eastern temple-state, the Greek city-state (polis), and the Roman republic. Eventually, they all came tumbling down in the aftermath of Alexander the Great's campaigns. We are accustomed to thinking of Alexander as the enlightened ruler who introduced the peoples of the ancient Near East to the glories of Greek culture and so created the Hellenistic age, where we locate the foundation for Western civilization. We do not usually consider the negative effects of his campaigns which brought to an end the last of the illustrious empires of the ancient Near East, especially those of the Persians and the Egyptians, and tarnished the classical Greek ideal of the polis by using its model for imperialistic purposes. These effects must be in mind as we proceed. After

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allowed for a savvy critique of the status quo. And it forced the question of whether it was possible for anyone to live with integrity in the Greco-Roman world with its confusions about laws and the fact of illegitimate uses of power.

This question resulted in a purely personal, individualistic approach to the question of virtue. Philosophers and teachers in the schools of popular ethical philosophy, Stoics especially, but Cynics as well, gave up on the idea that building abstract models of perfect societies might change the world for the better. They instead turned all their attention to the plight of the lone individual. Personal virtue was all that mattered, they said. And anyone could be virtuous by living in accordance with (the laws of) nature. Virtue was, after all, the highest and noblest human pursuit. Why not accept the fact that the individual was all alone in the universe without the support of a social world that guaranteed well-being? Wasn't it possible for a person to know what needed to be known about the structure of the universe and do what needed to be done in order to live "according to nature" (physis) and so achieve honorable character? The world was filled with popular philosophers, teachers, books, and self-help guides for living with integrity even under the untoward circumstances of the Greco-Roman age.

The Stoic recommendation was particularly popular. The idea was that a person could learn or discern what was "naturally" right and live "according to nature" if one only would. The goal was to be unaffected by the crowd, untouched by the accidents of life that otherwise would be felt as pain, and unmoved by the power that tyrants and others might have over you. The Stoics were fully aware that this would require a heroic effort, and might even get you in trouble with the powers that be. But therein lay the reward of a chance to manifest true nobility. And then a funny thing happened. The Stoics learned how to use the social model of the ideal king as an icon for personal meditation. The only true king was a sage, they said, and as for the mark of the sage, it was knowing and living in accordance with nature. If one did that, they said, one would truly be a citizen of the great world city. One would become a cosmopolitan, a sovereign example of virtue at its highest imaginable level of human achievement. This philosophy was a radically individualistic response to the breakdown of cultures in the Greco-Roman age, and it spread like wildfire. The Stoics had succeeded in reducing the entire system of cosmos, polis, and anthropos to the status of a psychological metaphor.

For other thinkers, especially those with cultural roots in the eastern Mediterranean provinces, radical individualism was hardly an answer. Ancient Near Eastern cultures had developed a strong sense of the importance of belonging to a people. Theirs was a social anthropology that placed high value on family, kinship, genealogy, tradition, purity, social justice, cultic law, and religious piety. These values were very deeply ingrained in the collective unconscious, and they determined the way in which people thought about the world. In response to the troubled times, for these people, only a social vision would do. And it would not be enough to construct an ideal kingdom simply on the foundation of systematic thought and logic. It would

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have to honor the achievements of the past, reflect the promise of the past, account for the present malaise, and project an imaginable future for all the people who were now crowding into the picture. The ideal kingdom would have to offer a social alternative to the social confusion of the Greco-Roman age.

This social approach to cultural critique led to passionate interest in the grand epic traditions that every people brought with them to the Greco-Roman mix. The Greeks had their combination of Homer, Hesiod, and age-old tales about the gods and heroes. The Syrians had their chronicles; the Samaritans their books from Moses; the Egyptians their dramatic cycles of Isis and Osiris; the Romans their records of Romulus and Remus; and the Jews their history from the foundation of the world. Every aristocratic family, local shrine, and city with any pretense at all also had its genealogy and history intact even though its power and glory were threatened or gone. What was left from the past was illustrious epic, but of course all epics were now tarnished. Some intellectuals thought, nonetheless, that the epics were still of value. Epics contained information that a study of the cosmos could not provide. Epics brought the gods into the story. Epics might go all the way back to the creation of the world where the connections were first made between the cosmic order and the origin of civilization. Epics were the reservoir of the wisdom of the past. They revealed the characteristics of a people, explained their attitudes toward neighboring peoples, recorded failures and achievements, and marked the moments when certain features of a social order were established. Epics were instructive. Epics accounted for a people as a people. They must hold the clues to what went wrong. They might provide some hints about how to set things right again. They could at least be used to mourn the loss of ancient glories and view the Romans with disdain.

Two epics attracted the most attention, and competition between them was fierce. Homer had the edge because the dominant culture was Greek. But the story of Israel also created a great deal of interest even outside Jewish circles. That is because Jewish culture drew upon its epic tradition in order to undergird a set of ideas and values that, although threatened by the Greco-Roman age, were still found attractive. The concepts of a righteous god, a divine law, a creation designed to enhance both wonder and morality, a vision of society based on social justice, and rituals for the observance and celebration of sane, rational, family-centered life could all be gathered from their epic. It was a story of the people that stretched from the creation of the world to the construction of the temple-state in Jerusalem. It was a reasonable contrast to the stories of fickle gods and arrogant heroes with which the Greeks had to make do. And Moses, the author of the five books called torah (instruction), was clearly a match for Homer. Some said Moses was earlier than Homer, that he had lived somewhere near the very beginning of human history, and that whatever Homer knew, he must have learned from Moses. But the more important advantage was that the "law of Moses" was not just law, even though everyone had learned to translate torah with nomos, but real epic. Creation, the origin of the

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species, and culture bringers, along with violence, folly, the rainbow's promise, patriarchal legends, eternal covenants, and the destiny of a people all took shape before laws in the narrower sense ever entered the picture. It was something to think about. And many did.

Scholars with social questions in mind became obsessed with the books of Moses as the second-temple history ran its course. Some retold the story at length in the interest of saying how grand the history of Israel had been and how respectable the Jewish people were (Josephus, Jubilees). Others highlighted aspects of the story that gave the present shape of society its epic constitution, leaving out the parts that did not fit (Sirach 44-50; Mack 1985). And others still read Moses and the prophets to lift up a forgotten ideal, use it to criticize the status quo, and say what had to happen in order to set things right (Qumran). In every case, the strategy was the same: revising the epic in light of present circumstances from a particular point of view to support a critical judgment about the present state of affairs. Historians of religion would say that these Jewish scholars followed a typical pattern of mythmaking.

This pattern works in the following way. The current state of affairs is not living up to the promise of the past. The recent past comes under critique. The stories of the more distant past are rehearsed to make sure of the promise. The aim is to see the promise more clearly, more precisely, and test the reasons for having thought that it was true. This brings focus to bear upon a certain moment, epoch, or feature of the history that can serve as a key to its fundamental logic and promise. Reseen, and lifted from its ancient history as an ideal model, the figure can then be used as an image of what the people and their culture were, are in essence, or should be. The image can then be used as a contrast to the present situation in order to render a critique, provide a model for rebuilding, or project a hopeful future. In our time, this pattern of thinking can be recognized in the frequent reference to the Judeo-Christian tradition, the American dream, or the Constitution of the United States. In second-temple times, the epic of Israel was a rich reservoir of ideal types, and all of them were used at one time or another in the process of mythmaking. Adam, Abraham, the covenants, Moses, the exodus, the law, the temple charter in Leviticus, the entrance into the land, David, Solomon, the building of the temple, the kingdoms, the prophets, and so forth could all be cast as icons of Israel's sociology and used for comparison and contrast with the contemporary situation.

The Jews did not need to learn a new set of tricks to use their epic this way. Jews had been revising their epic history since the time of David and Solomon. Reimagining the past was their way of mythmaking. The past provided standards for contemporary social critique. It could also lend authority to proposals for shaping society anew. Biblical scholars count four major revisions of the epic before the deportation of Jews in 587 B.C.E. brought to an end the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. These revisions are traditionally known as J for the Yahwist, E for the Elohist, D for the Deuteronomist, and P for the Priestly school. In each case, these revisions markedly changed the constitution of Israel by rewriting the epic. In the case of P,

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for instance, the book of Leviticus was added to Moses' instructions and the stories of sacrificial covenant were added to the legends of the patriarchs in order to locate the legal foundations for the temple-state at the beginning of the epic. After the exile no one dared to actually rewrite the story in this way, for the five books of Moses were now in many hands in many lands, "published," as it were, so that changing the text itself was not the thing to do. But other ways were found to rehearse the story from a revisionist perspective. The author of Chronicles rewrote the history in a separate account, adding some things and leaving out some things to make it read another way. Ben Sira summarized the epic in a poem that gave him the opportunity to recast it radically. At Qumran and in the synagogues of Alexandria, two different methods of writing commentaries on the Jewish scriptures were devised. Everyone was involved in retelling the story of Israel.

The problem with this approach as a response to the Roman era was that an ethnic bias belonged to every national epic. How could reading a provincial epic ever produce enlightenment fit for a multicultural scene? Jewish intellectuals were painfully aware of this problem, especially in the diaspora where the cultural mix was a fact of daily life and the Jews were on display with their meetings, associations, and schools. It was there that scholars with a philosophic bent tackled the problem of Jews and "the nations" (ethne, later translated by the old Latin, gentilis, "foreign," from which we get the English "gentiles."). A great deal of speculation centered on the figure of Adam, the first human being. It is important to realize that, in early Jewish thought, a personified abstraction could be storied as an individual without losing its generic or social significance. Thus "Adam" meant humankind, and "Israel" meant the people of Israel, even though each could also be pictured and storied as a particular person. One of the two stories in Genesis about the origins of the human race said that humankind had been created in the image of God. That was certainly cause for reflection, and scholars in the wisdom tradition, from Ben Sira, through the author of the Wisdom of Solomon, to Philo, lingered long over that text. The story of Noah, also, was a good place to reflect on the standing of the nations in the eyes of the God of Israel. The rainbow's promise was not the private property of the Jews. And even Abraham, the figure with whom the story of Israel actually began, was curiously blessed and chosen by God to receive the promises long before the divine instructions were given to Moses. What about the way God treated Abraham as a sign that the gentiles must be welcomed into the family of God? It may seem strange to us that, given the availability of very sophisticated anthropologies and psychologies in the Greek philosophical traditions, Jewish thinkers would prefer to work out their classifications of human beings by worrying these old stories into making a point or two about where the gentiles stood in the larger scheme of things divine. But to see the point about the gentiles there in one's own epic, that is what made the point telling.

This approach did not break out of the ethnic bias inherent in the Jewish epic, but it did allow Jewish intellectuals to recognize their multicultural world and deal

^{38 WHO WROTE THE NEW TESTAMENT?}

with it without having to give up on their own grand traditions. And it did force the issue of exclusivity. Philo's allegorical commentaries on the five books of Moses document a major effort in the Alexandrian synagogue to interpret the laws of Moses so that gentiles could understand them, appreciate them, and keep them. We now know that non Jews found diaspora synagogues to be a very attractive subcultural association, and that gentiles did gather around to study the scriptures, rehearse the epic, honor the one God, celebrate the feasts and festivals, and learn to keep the Jews' laws with their high ethical standards. Naturally there were debates galore about whether the gentiles would have to go all the way in order to belong to the association of Israel. That would have meant being circumcised, keeping whatever form of kosher was in practice, and perhaps paying a temple tax. Some Jews said yes, they should go all the way. Others said no, it did not matter. But either way, the result of the Jewish preoccupation with their scriptures was that Homer and the Greek philosophical tradition were not the only resources available for doing social critique or for thinking about better and less better ways to live together in the Greco-Roman age.

Galilee happened to be a perfect place to experiment with social critique and try out new ideas about a better way to live. Its people were wide awake, worldly wise, and protective of their way of life. They had survived the foreign rule, at one time or another, of all the powers in the ancient Near East without, apparently, taking sides. There is no record of Galileans fighting under their own banner, trying to rid their land of unwanted foreign kings. They had no capital city to defend and no king to rule them. They granted token allegiance to each new foreign king and then looked for ways to protect themselves from the king's long arm. They could do that because they enjoyed a bit of distance from the cultural and political forces that swirled around them. That was because Galilee was not open to or easily annexed by either the kingdoms to the north or to the south. It formed a little inland district of its own, bounded by mountains to the north, west, and south, and the Lake of Genneseret (or Sea of Galilee) to the east. Their way of life was worth protecting. They lived among rocky hills and gentle valleys, dotted with small villages and abundantly watered by springs and rains. They were self-sufficient, producing a healthy economy of fish, wine, grains, olives, and fruits, as well as crafts. There were mineral hot springs at Tiberias and Gadara. These, and the tropical climate around the Sea of Galilee, made the area attractive as a health resort. And with major roadways open to the main north-south highways, one along the seacoast and another across the highlands of the Transjordan to the east, Galilee had constant contact with the rest of the world.

It is important to remember that Galilee was ruled by the kings of Jerusalem only twice in the preceding one thousand years, and then for only brief periods of time. David did add Galilee to his kingdom, it is true, and the old stories tell about the tribes of Naphthali, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, and Dan settling there. However, these stories also say that the tribes of Israel were not able to drive out the indigenous

^{CLASHING CULTURES 39}

inhabitants. And as for belonging to the kingdoms of David and Solomon, an arrangement that lasted less than eighty years (1000 to 922 B.C.E.), Solomon gave twenty Galilean cities back to Hiram, king of Tyre, in exchange for building materials. Then, what was left of Galilee was part of the old northern kingdom of Israel centered at Shechem (Samaria), not Jerusalem. After that kingdom came to an end in 722 B.C.E., Galilee was ruled by Damascus, Assyria, Neo-Babylonia, Persia, the Ptolemies, and the Seleucids before it was again overrun by kings in Jerusalem (the Hasmoneans) in 104 B.C.E. There is nothing to suggest that the Galileans were happy about this annexation. The people who lived in Galilee were Galileans, not Syrians, not Samaritans, not Jews. It was, as the later rabbis would say, the "district of the gentiles."

During the Hellenistic period, Galilee was introduced to Greek language, philosophy, art, and culture through the founding of cities on the Greek model in strategic locations up and down the Jordan river valley (Caesarea Philippi, Philoteria, Scythopolis), on the eastern side of the Sea of Galilee (Bethsaida, Hippos, Gadara), along the seacoast to the west (Ptolemais, Dora, Caesarea), and eventually within Galilee itself (Sepphoris, Tiberius, Agrippina). With them came Greek learning, Greek schools with their gymnasia, theaters, forums, and political institutions. During the time of Jesus there were twelve Greek cities within a twenty-five-mile radius of his hometown, Nazareth.

Jesus grew up in Galilee and apparently had some education. He was certainly bright enough, judging from the movements that remembered him as their founder. But as we are now coming to see, it is all but impossible to say anything more about him as a person, much less write a biography about his life. The "memories" of him differ, and they are so obviously mythic that the best we can do is to draw a conclusion or two from the earliest strata of the teachings attributed to him. These teachings belonged to the movements that started in his name. We have to infer what kind of a teacher he was from the teachings that developed in these movements. He must have been something of an intellectual, for the teachings of the movements stemming from him are highly charged with penetrating insights and ideas. He also must have been capable of suggesting ways to live with purpose in the midst of complex social circumstances. But he was not a constructive, systematic thinker of the kind who formulate philosophies or theologies. He did not create a social program for others to follow or a religion that invited others to see him as a god. He simply saw things more clearly than most, made sense when he talked about life in his world, and must have attracted others to join him in looking at the world a certain way. What we have as evidence for this is the way his followers learned to talk about living in the world. They said that Jesus had talked that way too.

The tenor of that talk can be seen in the teachings of Jesus his followers preserved. These teachings are really a collection of pithy aphorisms that strike to the heart of ethical issues, not the usual proverbs, maxims, or principles that one would expect from the founder-teacher of a school tradition. But a close analysis of these

^{40 WHO WROTE THE NEW TESTAMENT?}

aphorisms reveals the interweaving of two themes that mark the genius of the movement. One is a playful, edgy challenge to take up a countercultural lifestyle. This challenge was made in all seriousness, but it was marked by humor, and one can still sense the enjoyment these Jesus people took in watching the conventional world do double takes at the very thoughts they expressed and the behavior they enjoined. The closest analogy for this kind of invitation to live against the stream is found in Cynic discourse of the time. It does appear that Jesus was attracted to this popular ethical philosophy as a way for individuals to keep their integrity in the midst of a compromising world. The other theme is an interest in a social concept called the "kingdom of God." This concept was not worked out with any clarity, but the ways it was used show that something of a social vision appeared in the teachings of Jesus. The kingdom of God referred to an ideal society imagined as an alternative to the way in which the world was working under the Romans. But it also referred to an alternative way of life that anyone could take at any time. In this sense the kingdom of God could be realized simply by daring to live differently from the normal conventions. The kingdom of God in the teachings of Jesus was not an apocalyptic or heavenly projection of an otherworldly desire. It was driven by a desire to think that there must be a better way to live together than the present state of affairs. And it called for a change of behavior in the present on the part of individuals invested in the vision. Thus the teachings of Jesus can be described as the creative combination of these two themes, or a challenge to the individual to explore an alternative social notion.

If so, Jesus' genius was to let the sparks fly between two different cultural sensibilities, the Greek and the Semitic. The Greek tradition of philosophy had been forced to focus on the question of individual virtue as a last-ditch stand for human dignity and integrity in a world without a polis, one that was no longer structured as a sane society. The Cynic-like challenge in the teachings of Jesus picked up on this bottom line from the grand traditions of Greek philosophy. The ancient Near Eastern legacy said that individualism would not do. People were only people when they lived together. A person had to belong to a working society in which ethical values addressed the well-being of the collective. A social anthropology determined that some social vision give guidance to a critique of the Roman world and suggest a better way to live together. By bringing the two cultural traditions together and making contact between them, the pitch for a change in personal lifestyle and the vague but potentially powerful symbol of an alternative society, the electrodes short-circuited, and Jesus started a movement. Everything essential was present in the package: social critique, alternative social vision, divine sovereignty, and personal virtue. And yet, nothing was present except general ideas. Nothing was spelled out. Everything was left to more talking, thinking, and experimentation with the new ideas.

And that is exactly what happened. Kingdom talk started with the teachings of Jesus and then attracted more and more people. We can't be sure of all the ways little groups formed, or how the kingdom movement spread from place to place.

^{CLASHING CULTURES 41}

What we do know is that, by the time writings from the Jesus people began to appear, talk about the kingdom had resulted in the formation of wondrously different kinds of association. One line can be traced from the earliest Jesus movement, through Matthew's gospel, to later communities that understood themselves as Jewish Christians. These people emphasized lifestyle and found a way to bring the behavior of the Jesus movement into line with more traditional Jewish codes of ethics. This approach produced communities that lasted for centuries, such as the Ebionites and Nazareans. But they were not the ones that gave birth to the Christianity of the Bible. Another line takes off from the Sayings Gospel Q, runs through the Gospel of Thomas where Jesus' teachings were understood to bring enlightenment about one's true self, and ends up in gnostic circles. These people cultivated the invitation to personal virtue and thought of the kingdom of God as an otherworldly dimension of spiritual existence where true human being had its origin and end. This approach may have been the most attractive form of Christianity during the second to fourth centuries. But it was finally squelched by the institutional form of Christian tradition that called itself the church. The church's trajectory had worked its way through northern Syria and Asia Minor where the Christ cult formed to justify the inclusion of both gentiles and Jews in the kingdom of God. It was this trajectory that converged on Rome, developed the notion of the universal church (from catholicus, meaning "general"), and created the Bible as its charter.

And so a new religion emerged. As we prepare to enter into the provincial world of its first manifestations in Galilee, trying to keep up with its rapid spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean, eventually to see it become the religion of the Roman Empire, a word of caution may be in order. The ways these Christians addressed the issues of their time will often appear to be silly, sometimes absurd, frequently extravagant, and only once in a while breathtaking. We will need some good shoes with very sharp spikes to keep from falling off the logs as we jump from text to text in this period of rapid social and cultural change. The present chapter was written to help us keep our balance as we proceed. Every feature of the Greco-Roman age mentioned here will return for reconsideration in the early history of Christianity: law, kings and tyrants, kingdoms, associations, meals, myths, rituals, cosmologies, cosmogonies, the gods, the mystery cults, noble deaths, redeemers, oracles, epic history, and ethics. That Christianity emerged just when it did, that it drew now upon some Jewish roots, now upon Greek ideas, and that it eventually found itself infatuated with the thought of Roman power, are all crucial for the story about to be told. Only by keeping the larger world in view will it be possible to see that these early Christians were not gullible, eccentric, or mad, given to ecstasies, visions, and religious experiences of personal transformation. Though their claims were often wild and extravagant, we need to see that they were actually engaging their troubled times. Early Christianity was a creative, if daring, response to the multicultural challenge of the Greco-Roman age.

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TEACHINGS FROM THE
JESUS MOVEMENTS

Jesus movements started in Galilee during the 30s and 40s of the first century C.E. Loosely knit groups of people gathered around a novel combination of three ideas that had been in the air since the breakdown of traditional cultures characteristic of the Greco-Roman age. The combination of these ideas generated a great deal of excitement. One was the vague notion of a perfect society conceptualized as a kingdom. This was a notion that many groups had used to imagine a better way to live than suffering under the Romans. The Jesus people latched onto this idea and acted as if the kingdom they imagined was a real possibility despite the Romans. They called it the kingdom of God.

A second idea was that any individual, no matter of what extraction, status, or innate capacity, was fit for this kingdom and could act accordingly if only one would. The idea of personal responsibility for virtue, or actually living in accordance with one's view of the world, had been thoroughly discussed by popular philosophers of all persuasions during the Hellenistic period. The Jesus people said, in effect, "Come on, you can do it, you can live as if you belonged to the kingdom of God," and "If you do, the kingdom of God will surely take place in this very world."

The third idea was a result of the combination of the first two. It was the novel notion that a mixture of people was exactly what the kingdom of God should look like. What a heady social concept that must have been, cutting across social and cultural boundaries, putting together a radically individualistic appeal with a thoroughly social aim, and insisting that the gap between an unbelievable ideal and its social incarnation could actually be bridged! No wonder these people attracted attention.

Imagine yourself going to market in the next larger village and overhearing two or three persons talking about these ideas. You smile, think they are engaging in adolescent craziness, and move on to the next stall. But a line or two may have caught your attention, and on the next market day you cannot resist looking to see if they are there again. They are not, and you ask a man selling pots if he remembers

^{44 WHO WROTE THE NEW TESTAMENT?}

them, knows anything. He does remember but knows nothing. You ask around. Two or three others had listened in and knew the village where one of the young persons, lived. So little by little you are drawn into an informal network of unlikely acquaintances, some of whom become rather regular contacts, until finally you find yourself meeting once in a while with a small group of friends who have gotten quite serious about the novel set of ideas.

At first the talk has to be about the ideas themselves, how everyone in the group understands them, and what anyone in the group may have heard that others in other groups said. You find yourself startled to see how many different thoughts and; views there are. You thought you knew what a kingdom was and what the word goal meant. You say that "kingdom" has to mean kingdom, does it not, and "god," God, doesn't it? The others look at you, smile, ask whose god you have in mind, tease you about being Jewish, then get serious and listen while you spell out what you think: these big words mean. And so it goes until, having reached a few agreements among yourselves on what the kingdom of God must look like, your group starts to wonder what is wrong with the world that it works another way. Now social and cultural critique become the order of the day, until finally you catch one another's eyes across the room and someone says, "Well, why don't we, at least, treat each other as if we belonged to the kingdom?"

And so the Jesus movements began. Each group or small network of groups worked out the details as they went along. We can see at once that different cultural and personal histories would determine the way in which a given, group came to its own understanding of the kingdom of God. For the first forty years we are able to identify at least seven different streams within the Jesus movement, though there may have been many more. We are fortunate to know anything, because this was a very experimental period when rapidly expanding groups were radically changing their views. At first no one thought to record any of this history, and besides, there was little to report except lore, hearsay, and ad hoc conversations. That we have any written materials from this period at all is a combination of sheer historical accident on the one hand, and laborious scholarly investigation on the other. The historical accident is that some of the first attempts to write things down, and share ideas were saved, embellished, and eventually reworked by later writers' whose writings happened to be included in the New Testament. If that had not happened, most of the memories and records of the early period would have been lost forever, for neither the early movements nor the later church were interested i keeping these early memory traditions alive.

From this early period we can identify five different groups of Jesus people from whom we have some documentary evidence, plus a "family of Jesus" group for which there are only a handful of clues, and the congregations of the Christ to which we shall turn in the next chapter. I will refer to the five groups within the Jesus movement as (1) the Community of Q who produced the Sayings Gospel Q. (2) the Jesus School that produced the pre-Markan pronouncement stories, (3) the

^{TEACHINGS FROM THE JESUS MOVEMENTS 45}

True Disciples who produced the Gospel of Thomas, (4) the Congregation of Israel who composed the pre-Markan sets of miracle stories, and (5) the Jerusalem Pillars about whom we have only an early report from Paul in his letter to the Galatians.

Each of these groups differs from the others in important ways, but they do share some characteristics. One common feature has already been noted, namely their investment in the idea of the kingdom of God and the fact that they all were engaged in some kind of group formation. Another feature that may have been shared, though it is more difficult to document in every group, is the practice of meeting together for meals. And, of course, all of them considered Jesus the founder of their movement. But after that, each group developed differently, and the different views and practices that developed are evidence for the fact that Jesus did not provide a program for starting a new religion. If he did, his followers did not understand what it was. The many views they came up with, both about what the kingdom should be and about what Jesus must have been, tell against a clear and common conception of the kingdom. We are thus faced with the fact that many people were involved in thinking about the kingdom and drawing conclusions about what their group should be like. The road from Jesus to the Christian religion that finally emerged in the fourth century, with its myth of Jesus as the son of God solidly in place, is a very long and twisty path. Christianity was not born of an immaculate conception. It was the product of myriad moments of intellectual labor and negotiated social agreements by the people investing in the experiment.

This discovery has been difficult for many Christians to accept. That is because the traditional picture of Christian beginnings starts with a Jesus who knows in advance what is required of him and his disciples in order to establish the Christian religion. The way Luke tells the story in his two-volume history of Christian origins, for instance, is that after his death but before his ascension Jesus announced the establishment of the First Christian Church of Jerusalem by means of the outpouring of God's Spirit on the next day of Pentecost (Acts 1-2). We now know that Luke wrote his gospel and the Acts of the Apostles in the early second century, seventy-live or more years after the time of Jesus, and that he had his reasons for wanting to imagine things that way. We shall explore those reasons later. For now, the point to be made is that there is not a trace of evidence in any of the early Jesus materials to support such a view. No early Jesus group thought of Jesus as the Christ or of itself its a Christian church. We will have to account for such ideas when we encounter them for the first time in later texts from more developed communities. In the present chapter, our task will be to give the Jesus movement its due, describing each of the groups we know about separately, and treating them as understandable, human efforts to respond to the challenging idea of the kingdom of God in the midst of the Greco-Roman world.

But what, then, about the historical Jesus? Should not a book about Christian origins and the New Testament start with a chapter on the historical Jesus? The answer is no. It is neither possible nor necessary to say very much about the historical

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THE SAYINGS GOSPEL Q

Q will put us in touch with the first followers of Jesus. It is the earliest written record we have from the Jesus movement, and it is a precious text indeed. That is because it documents the history of a single group of Jesus people for a period of about fifty years, from the time of Jesus in the 20s until after the Roman Jewish war in the 70s. The remarkable thing about this group is that they developed into a tightly knit community and produced a grandly sweeping mythology merely by attributing more and more teachings to Jesus. They did not need to imagine Jesus in the role of a god or tell stories about his resurrection from the dead in order to honor him as a teacher. The earliest layer of the teachings of Jesus in Q are the least embellished of any of his sayings in any extant document. That means that Q puts us as close to the historical Jesus as we will ever be. Thus the importance of Q is enormous. It has enabled us to reconsider and revise the traditional picture of early Christian history by filling in the time from Jesus until just after the destruction of Jerusalem when the first narrative gospel, the Gospel of Mark, was written.

Q is from the German word Quelle, meaning "source." The text got that name when scholars discovered that both Matthew and Luke had used a collection of the sayings of Jesus as one of the "sources" for their gospels, the other being the Gospel

^{48 WHO WROTE THE NEW TESTAMENT?}

of Mark. Scholars have known for over 150 years that something like Q must have existed, but they took it for granted until recently. After all, we already knew what the content of the document was, for the teachings from it were right there in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. And besides, since we did not have an independent manuscript of Q, that having been lost in the shuffle early in the second century, extremely detailed knowledge of both Matthew and Luke would be necessary should one want to reconstruct the original text they had in common. One would have to line up the sayings from Matthew and Luke in parallel columns and decide between them in cases where the wording differed slightly. What a surprise it was, then, when a few scholars got curious, started to reconstruct a unified text, and took a close look at Q as a piece of literature all its own, a piece of literature that had sustained a Jesus movement for half a century before Matthew and Luke ever thought to merge it with Mark's story of Jesus. Voila. An entirely different world of Christian beginnings came into view. I have told that story in my book The Lost Gospel (1993), where the reader will find an English translation of the text of Q and a more detailed history of the Community of Q.

Since the text of Q will not be found printed separately in anyone's copy of the New Testament, I will have to refer to its contents in this book by citing chapter and verse in the Gospel of Luke. Luke is preferred over Matthew because, in the majority of cases, Luke did not alter the terminology and sequence of the sayings as much as Matthew did. I will therefore quote Luke as if I were citing Q (thus Q 11:1-4 = Luke 11:1-4). The disadvantage of this approach is that, without having the text of Q in hand, you may not find it easy to reimagine how these familiar sayings must have sounded coming from the mouth of another kind of Jesus, one that was not on. his way to Jerusalem to die according to the plot of Mark's story. The Greek text in parallel columns is available in John Kloppenborg's Q Parallels (1988). A critical edition of the unified Greek text is being produced by the International Q Project under the direction of James Robinson at Claremont.

Q brings the early Jesus people into focus, and it is a picture so different from that which anyone ever imagined as to be startling. Instead of people meeting to worship a risen Christ, as in the Pauline congregations, or worrying about what it meant to be a follower of a martyr, as in the Markan community, the people of Q were fully preoccupied with questions about the kingdom of God in the present and the behavior required if one took it seriously. The picture is busy. People are bumping into one another in the country villages, on the road, at one another's homes, and in the towns. There are mothers and neighbors, farmers and lawyers, tax collectors and Roman soldiers, all crowding into the picture. It is a picture of life in the public arena of first-century Galilee, life defined as the encounter with other human beings in their various social roles. The people of Q were taking it on the bounce, intrigued with what happened when one chose to deviate from the usual norms of behavior and live by the rule(s) of the kingdom of God.

^{TEACHINGS FROM THE JESUS MOVEMENTS 49}

Recent scholarship has found it possible to identify three layers of instructional material in Q. Each of these layers corresponds to a stage in the history of the Q community. That makes Q an especially precious document, for it allows us to trace the history of the early Jesus movement through periods of change in the way it talked about the kingdom and understood itself in relation to that idea. No other text or set of texts from the first century lets us fill in an entire history of an early "Christian" community-in-the-making in this way. Scholars now refer to these three layers as Q1, Q2, and Q3. The earliest layer, Q1, consists largely of sayings about the wisdom of being a true follower of Jesus. Q2, on the other hand, introduces prophetic and apocalyptic pronouncements of judgment upon those who refused to listen to the Jesus people. And Q3 registers a retreat from the fray of public encounter to entertain thoughts of patience and piety for the enlightened ones while they wait for their moment of glory in some future time at the end of human history. An outline of Q divided into its layers of tradition is given in appendix B.

The remarkable thing about Q1 material is that it argues for a countercultural lifestyle by turning aphorisms into behavioral prescriptions. An outrageous retort, such as "Let the dead bury the dead," can be isolated at the core of a small cluster of sayings that turn it into a principle for behavior befitting the new kingdom. In this case, the behavior recommended is that of single-minded commitment to the kingdom (Q 9:57-62). These units of composition were not completely destroyed in the subsequent rearrangements and additions to the collection, thus giving modern scholars the chance to recognize the earlier material. The resulting themes of seven blocks of Q1 material can be summed up as follows. The first rather large unit (Q 6:20-49) consists of Jesus' teaching on such things as those to whom the kingdom of God belongs ("the poor, the hungry, those who are crying"), how to treat others ("as you want people to treat you, do the same to them"), and making judgments about others ("don't judge and you won't be judged"). The second block of Q material is about becoming a follower and working for the kingdom of God (Q 9:57-10:11). The third is about having confidence to ask for God's ("the Father's") care (Q 11:1-13). The fourth says that one should not be afraid to speak out (Q 12:2-7). The fifth explains that one should not worry about food and clothing and that the desire for personal possessions is foolish (Q 12:13-34). The sixth teaches that, like weed seeds and leaven, the kingdom will eventually take over (Q 13:18-21). And the seventh is about the cost of being a follower and the consequences of not taking the movement seriously (Q 14:11, 16-24, 26-27, 34-35). If we date this material about 50 C.E., toward the end of the first twenty years of the movement, we can see what the Jesus people had been doing. They had been deeply involved in defining exactly what it meant to belong to the school of Jesus. And they had spent a great deal of thought and intellectual effort in finding arguments for a certain set of attitudes and actions as definitive for the kingdom of God. Can we sharpen the profile of the lifestyle they were recommending?

^{50 WHO WROTE THE NEW TESTAMENT?}

If we make a list of the imperatives that lie close to the core of the smaller units of Q1 material, we can begin to see that a program of some kind must have been in the minds of these early Jesus people. The list includes the following imperatives or rules of kingdom behavior:

Love your enemies. (Q 6:2 7)
If struck on one cheek, offer the other. (Q 6:29)
Give to everyone who begs. (Q 6:30)
Judge not and you won't be judged. (Q 6:3 7)
First remove the stick from your own eye. (Q 6:42)
Leave the dead to bury their dead. (Q 9:60)
Go out as lambs among wolves. (Q 10:3)
Carry no money, bag, or sandals. (Q 10:4)
Say, "The kingdom of God has come near to you." (Q 10:9)
Ask, and it will be given to you. (Q 11:9)
Don't worry about your living. (Q 12:22)
Make sure of God's rule over you. (Q 12:31)
A rather risky program seems to have been in effect. If we ask about the overarching rationale for such behavior, themes begin to surface that suggest a thoroughgoing critique of conventional culture. Riches, misuse of authority and power, hypocrisies and pretensions, social and economic inequities, injustices, and even the normal reasons for family loyalties are all under suspicion. The kingdom ideal is being set over against traditional mores by directing that the followers of Jesus should practice voluntary poverty, severance of family ties, renunciation of needs, fearlessness in speaking out, nonretaliation, and, in general, living as children of the God revealed in the natural order of the world who "makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good" (Matt. 5:45; cf. Q 6:3 5). Quite a program. Does it make any sense?

The answer is yes, indeed. The lifestyle of the Jesus people bears remarkable resemblance to the Greek tradition of popular philosophy characteristic of the Cynics. Cynics also promoted an outrageous lifestyle as a way of criticizing conventional mores, and the themes of the two groups, the Cynics and the Jesus people, are largely overlapping. The Cynics saw themselves as "spies" on the foolish ways of conventional behavior, "physicians" whose profession was to diagnose the ills of society, and "disciples" of a simple way of life "according to nature." You can read about this in Epictetus' Discourse III, chapter 22, "On the calling of a Cynic," and in Diogenes Laertius' Lives of Antisthenes, Diogenes of Sinope, and Crates. Cynics were well-known figures throughout the empire, and everyone seemed to understand them. They were gadflies whose social critique had a point, and who made it with strikingly humorous twists of memorable gestures and sayings. Popping pretensions and pointing up the foolishness of normal standards of honor and shame were exactly what everyone expected from the Cynics. And their willingness to become the butt of their own biting but humorous style of critique had been a part of

^{TEACHINGS FROM THE JESUS MOVEMENTS 51}

the social scene for centuries. Cynics helped the common people gain a little perspective on the way their world was working, take potshots at those in power in their palaces, and keep their sense of balance and humanity with knowing nods and humor. So people would have had no trouble understanding what the Jesus people were saying.

The difference between the Jesus people and the Cynics was the seriousness with which the Jesus people took the new social vision of the kingdom of God. This reflects the influence of a Jewish concern for a real, working society as the necessary context for any individual well-being. It was this interest in exploring an alternative social vision that set the Jesus movement apart from a merely Cynic-like call for an authentic lifestyle only in the interest of individual virtue or integrity. One can still detect some Cynic-like humor in the aphoristic style of the core sayings: "Where your treasure, there your heart" (Q 12:34); "Can the blind lead the blind?" (Q 6:39); "Everyone who asks receives" (Q 11:10). Thus the earliest phase of the Jesus movement must have been characterized by a more playful spirit than that characterizing the Q1 material as we now have it. But the process of forming groups and taking themselves seriously as groups set a serious, non-Cynic attitude. All of the blocks of Q1 material reveal a studied attempt to spell out a clear set of codes for the Jesus movement as a social formation, codes that rotate around the need to know who truly belonged. The instructions in Q 10:1-11, for example, are for proper behavior when representing the Jesus movement in another town. These instructions show that a network of small house groups came into existence and could be counted upon to support the movement. Thus an early period of trying out a new kingdom idea by means of a Cynic-like lifestyle had evolved into a much more complicated enterprise. The focus was not just on a list of codes for defining a true disciple, but on setting standards for recognition and authentic relationships within the community of fellow followers of Jesus. The social formation of the Jesus people and the social vision of the kingdom of God had started to mirror each other.

The mood in Q2 is drastically different. The process of social formation had taken its toll. Families had been torn apart, a Jewish code of strict behavior had been held up by others to chide or ostracize the Jesus people, certain towns had told them to bug off, and some erstwhile members had decided that the stress was too much. Loyalty was now the issue, and some Jesus people had to decide between the movement and their families. Those who stayed true despite the social tensions found some new reasons for saying yes to the Jesus movement, but most of these reasons were the flip side of rather extravagant, arguments as to why their opponents were so wrong. "Shame on you Pharisees. You are like graves, outwardly beautiful, but full of pollution inside" (Q 11:42; cf. Matt. 23:27). "I am telling you, Sodom will have a lighter punishment on the day of judgment than that town" (Q 10:12).

Thus, instead of a playful, aphoristic style of social critique characteristic of the earliest period of social experimentation, or even the more serious tone of instruction that defined the later development at the Q1 level, these Jesus people had taken up a

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decidedly judgmental stance toward the world. Threatening apocalyptic pronouncements of doom were being directed against those who refused the kingdom program. It was now a matter of who was right, we or they. And the time for the kingdom's full realization had been postponed until the eschaton (last thing, end of history). It is obvious that the God who clothed the lilies and provided for the daily bread of any who asked would have to get involved with human history and its conflicts if the Jesus people were to project a future for their kingdom. But that apocalyptic future meant, in effect, yet another time of testing, a final testing, even for the followers of Jesus. And so, to the already high cost of discipleship had been added the threat of a final failure. If one's loyalty ever slackened, one might not enter the kingdom at the final judgment: "I tell you, everyone who has will receive more, and from the one who does not have, even what he has will be taken away" (Q 19:26). That some were willing to pay that price can mean only that the Jesus movement had somehow continued to be a very attractive alternative to the social ills of the time.

The social conflicts reflected in Q2 probably took place during the 50s and 60s, although some of the sayings are best understood as language coined in the very shadow of the Roman Jewish war. With this kind of language ringing in their ears, the scribes in the Jesus movement had to revise their handbook of instructions from Jesus. They retained the earlier blocks of wise ethical instruction that we now identify as Q1, for these had become the standard teaching for the community. But they added prophetic and judgmental material to match the new mood. And they arranged the new handbook very carefully, weaving the judgmental material in and out of the earlier set of instructions to give the impression that the earlier material had originally been given with the final judgment in mind. This design is high-lighted in the outline of Q in appendix B. However, two conceptual problems had) to be solved in order to make such a revision work. One was that the Jesus people were accustomed to thinking of Jesus as a wisdom teacher and now needed to imagine him as having also been an apocalyptic prophet. That required a big shift in characterization. The other was that, having experienced failure and having postponed the fulfillment of their vision until a final day of vindication, the community was now in need of being very sure they were on the right track. That required a much broader horizon of cosmos and history than this community had I ever considered or needed. Both of these conceptual problems were solved by imaginative revisions of their picture of Jesus and his place in the epic history of Israel. These revisions were ingenious. Their first move was to introduce the figure of John (the Baptizer) and let him step forth first as a prophet of judgment and preacher of repentance (Q 3:7-9). Their second move was to have John predict a certain "coming one" who would separate the wheat from the chaff on "his threshing floor," wherever and whenever that might be (Q 3:16-17). Then, these scribes let John and Jesus talk about each other to see what each knew about the other (Q 7:18-19, 1

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22-28, 31-35). As these scribes imagined it, Jesus recognized John as the last of the prophets of Israel and thus the "one to come;" and John predicted an even "greater" one to come, who, of course, was Jesus. Jesus was "greater," according to the scribes, because he was both a sage and a prophet. He was a sage by virtue of his Q1 teachings. He was a prophet by virtue of the apocalyptic judgments that soon would be heard from his lips. The astonishing possibility given with this simple bit of imaginary history was that, as the child of wisdom, Jesus could know what God had wanted from the beginning of creation. And as an apocalyptic prophet, he could know what would happen at the end of time. Result: Jesus became the seer of history past and the prophet of history's end. His followers could slow be sure they were right where they ought to be, linked up with God's great plan for Israel and ready to take their places when the final judgment occurred. That imaginative solution to their conceptual problems has to be judged as a stroke of ingenious mythmaking no matter what one thinks of the myth itself. As for the historical John (the Baptizer) and the relation of his movement to that of Jesus, scholars are still puzzling over several options. The important thing for our purposes is that John entered the picture of the Q community's imagination of Jesus at a second stage of mythmaking in order to reimagine Jesus' own role (Cameron 1990). With such a Jesus as one's teacher, how could the Community of Q go wrong? They already knew the standard God would use at the end of time to judge between them and the rest of the world.

The Q3 additions were made some time after the Roman Jewish war. They include the lament over Jerusalem (Q 13:34-3 5), the story of Jesus' temptation (Q 4:1-13), statements about the importance of the Mosaic law (Q 16:16-18), and a final promise to the faithful: "You who have followed me will sit on thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel" (Q 22:28-30). Q3 was not a major revision of the hand-hook, but it did introduce a number of new ideas about the relationship of the Q people to the history of Israel, and it did upgrade the mythology of Jesus to the level If a divine being who could be imagined talking to God as his Father and debating with Satan as his tempter. The topic in both cases was Jesus' own "authority over all the world" (Q 4:6-7). It seems that the dust had settled from the Q2 period and that the people of Q had toned down their sharp responses to those who were critical of them. Perhaps the war had taken care of erstwhile antagonists or changed the social landscape so drastically that the prewar stance of the movement now looked silly even to the Jesus people. In any case, the book of Q received a few additions that dulled the radical edge of the earlier material and made a kind of peace with more traditional ways of being the people of God while waiting for the kingdom. It was t he book of Q at the Q' level that attracted the attention of other Jesus groups, was copied and read for another generation within the Jesus movements, and was event incorporated into the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Then it was lost to history until modern scholars reconstructed it.

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THE PRONOUNCEMENT STORIES

The synoptic gospels include many little stories about Jesus that scholars call pronouncement stories.

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Anecdotes of the kind told about Jesus were especially frequent among the Socratic, Cyrenaic, and Cynic traditions. Since that is so, it will be helpful to compare the stories just cited with a few typical Cynic anecdotes. A game of sorts seems to have been played with the Cynics by those courageous enough to confront them. Since Cynics lived in a kind of negative symbiosis with society, espousing indifference to its conventions, but actually being fully dependent upon it for their livelihood, almost any typical situation could be turned into a trap. The trick was to catch the Cynic in some inadvertent inconsistency by pointing out his lack of complete independence from society. The Cynic reveled in these encounters, taking them as opportunities to expose normal expectations as ridiculous. Thus the anecdote was a perfect medium for distilling the nature of such exchanges. In order to win, the Cynic had to put an altogether different construction upon things as if the challenger had not understood the situation. Strategies ranged from playful put-downs, through erudite observations and insights about human existence, and biting sarcasms, to devastating self-deprecations. But the retort was always phrased with a sense of humor in order to ease the blow. Here are some examples from Diogenes Laertius. I have numbered them for reference by using C for Cynic:

(C-1) When censured for keeping bad company, Antisthenes replied, "Well, physicians attend their patients without catching the fever." (DL 6:6)

(C-2) When someone said to Antisthenes, "Many praise you," he replied, "Why, what wrong have I done?" (DL 6:8)

(C-3) When someone wanted to study with him, Diogenes gave him a fish to carry and told him to follow after him. When for embarrassment the student soon threw it away and left, Diogenes laughed and said, "Our friendship was broken by a fish." (DL 6:36)

(C-4) "Most people," Diogenes said, "are so nearly mad that a finger makes all the difference. If you go about with your middle finger stretched out, people will think you mad, but if it is the little finger, they won't." (DL 6:3 5)

(C-5) When someone reproached him for frequenting unclean places, Diogenes replied that the sun also enters the privies without becoming defiled. (DL 6:63)

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(C-6) When asked why he was begging from a statue, Diogenes replied, "To get practice in being refused." (DL 6:49)

(C-7) When asked by someone whether he should marry, Bion answered, "If your wife is ugly she will be your bane, if beautiful you will not keep her to yourself." (DL 4:48)

(C-8) Crates declared that ignominy and poverty were his native land, a country that fortune could never take captive. (DL 6:93)

(C-9) When one of his students said to him, "Demonax, let us go to the Asclepium and pray for my son," he replied, "You must think Asclepius very deaf that he cannot hear our prayers from where we are." (Lucian, Demonax 27)

The Greeks measured response by its humor and cleverness, and a certain logic was involved in getting off the hook unscathed. The French classicists Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant have used the term metis, or cunning intelligence, for the kind of crafty wisdom required (1978). Whereas sophia was the wisdom appropriate to conceptual systems and stable orders, metis was the savvy needed for contingent and threatening situations. Metis was the wisdom practiced by rhetors, doctors, navigators, and actors, as well as any who found themselves threatened by stronger forces or opponents. Metis was the skill required to size up the situation, bend to the impinging forces, feign entrapment, then suddenly shift positions in order to escape or, if lucky, turn the tables to come out on top. In the case of net fighting, for instance, the weaker would feign vulnerability, wait for the opponent's overreach, then grab his net and swing it back upon him. The Cynic anecdote is an excellent example of metis in the genre of riposte.

The logic worked as follows. A questioner put the Cynic on the spot (C-5): How can you frequent places that are socially unacceptable (more than likely a euphemism' for houses of prostitution)? The first move was to identify the issue underlying the challenge. In this case it was the notion of being "contaminated" by visiting an "unclean" place, that is, a socially unacceptable place. The second move was to shift focus and find an example of "entering unclean places" in which contamination did not occur. The sun, for instance, "enters" privies without getting dirty The clever discorrelation between the two instances of entrance into unclean places created the humor. Explicit instruction was not the object. The interlocutor might not go away to meditate on theories of things clean or unclean. But he may well have laughed and let the Cynic go his way, or even caught the point about the arbitrary nature of the category unclean when used for a specific social circumstance. As for the Cynic, having accepted the challenge and having managed a momentary confusion in the logic of the situation, he was able to escape entrapment.

The anecdotes attributed to Jesus operate by the same logic. In every case the Cynic swerve is characteristic of Jesus' rejoinder. The shifts in orders of discourse are easily identified. In J-1, the issue of contamination is scuttled by shifting thf focus from meal codes to medical practice. It is similar to the anecdote about

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Antisthenes in C-1. In J-2 the discrepancy pertains to times when fasting was appropriate and times when it was inappropriate. J-3 rides on the distinction between two sabbath rules, one a proscription and the other an allowance. In J-4 the incongruous is created by juxtaposing meal codes with a scatological observation. It is similar to Diogenes' response in C-5, which confuses social and natural contaminations. The put-downs in J-5 and J-6 ride on the critique of common social values having to do with class. The ambiguity of the terms is used to advantage in statements of contrast, much the same as in the response of Antisthenes when told he was being praised by many (C-2). In J-7 there are two twists. One is to shift from the question of ability to a consideration of difficulty, thus appearing to say yes, the rich might be able to enter the kingdom. But the other is to use an example of difficulty so ridiculous as to say no, there is not a chance. In J-8 the political (legal) and the religious (natural) orders are conjoined in a conundrum. As a conundrum, the answer is similar to Bion's response to the question about marriage in C-7. In J-9 two notions of blessedness are set in contrast but then confused by a shift in the orders of social relationship in view. And the Jesus anecdote in J-10 is quite like a large number of Cynic anecdotes in which students are sternly corrected for some misperception and thrown back upon their own resources for seeing things more clearly and for taking up the Cynic way. A milder form of the teacher's stance toward a would-be student is illustrated in C-3.

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So Jesus came to be imagined as the founder-teacher of a movement that had worked out its self-definition in debate with Pharisaic teachings. This gives us a picture that is quite different from the Community of Q or, as we shall see, the "Thomas people, the Congregation of Israel, and the Jerusalem Pillars. A particular Jesus group, innocently and heavily invested in thinking of itself as okay by both Jewish and Jesus standards, though open to non Jews as a matter of course, experienced a social history that forced it to clarify its position in regard to Pharisaic rules. These people fell back on normal Hellenistic practice for a school tradition, namely to attribute all their reasons for thinking the way they did to their founder. But they did not have many reasons. They had not developed any theory or myth of Jesus' authority as a divine man, savior, or martyr for the new cause. And they had not developed an apocalyptic view of divine judgment upon their opponents at the end of History. What they did was to cast Jesus in the role of a lawyer, just like the stereotype of the scribes of the Pharisees, but then enhance his rhetorical skill in order to pest the scribes at their own game.

Since part of the scribes' game was to appeal to the Hebrew scriptures as precedent law, these Jesus people also turned to the Hebrew scriptures to find some arguments for their champion. What they looked for were stories that could work both ways, as embarrassing contradictions for the scribal position as well as positive precedent for the Jesus people. An example would be the reference to what David did in Mark 2:23-28. When David and his companions were hungry, he did what was "not lawful," namely eating the bread from the altar in the temple, just as Jesus' and his disciples were charged by the Pharisees for "picking grain" unlawfully on the sabbath. The argument was that just as David was justified in breaking the temple law, so Jesus should be thought of as justified in breaking the Pharisees' code. This kind of reasoning was apparently the best this group could come up with.

An exceptionally irregular feature occurred when these people decided to use Jesus anecdotes to register their debate with the scribes of the Pharisees. One learned in school how to turn a chreia into the story of a little debate between the protagonist and his challengers. One also learned how to "elaborate" the point of a chreia by providing a coherent set of arguments in its favor. In this case, the arguments were one's own, not those of the protagonist of the chreia. As the Jesus people

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developed chreiai into more elaborate argumentations, however, they chose not to take the credit for the arguments they had found. Instead, just as with the attribution of new teachings to the founder of a school, they let Jesus take the credit both for the chreia and for the arguments in its favor. And it so happened that the standard outline for the elaboration of a chreia ended with an authoritative pronouncement (Mack and Robbins 1989). This resulted in giving Jesus two prominent pronouncements in each elaborated chreia, with the last statement invariably making a pronouncement on the correctness of his own views. Thus, at the end of the chreia about plucking grain on the sabbath, Jesus says, "The sabbath was made for people, and not people for the sabbath. So the son of man is [circumlocution for "I am"] lord even of the sabbath" (Mark 2:27-28, emphasis added). Thus, whether inadvertently or on purpose, the Jesus School produced a self-referential authority for their founder-teacher. At first such a picture of Jesus seems fragile, if not foolish, and the logic of such argumentation weak. Should this self-referential style of Jesus' teachings be combined with other mythic roles for Jesus, however, an extremely impenetrable symbol of authority could result. We shall see one example of just such a development when we come to the Gospel of Mark. In the meantime, how should the Jesus School now take their place in the world, having cut themselves off from a prominent definition of Jewishness, one that apparently had been important enough for them to have taken the Pharisees' challenge very seriously? We cannot tell for sure, for we have only the Gospel of Mark as the next window into their thinking. Looking through that window, however, it does appear that the Jesus School suffered a period of deep disorientation and anger in the process of becoming an independent sect.

THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS

In 1945 a collection of Jesus' sayings came to light among the Coptic-Gnostic texts of the now famous Nag Hammadi library. The incipit, or title, reads: "These are the hidden sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Judas Thomas the Twin recorded." The signature at the end reads: "The gospel according to Thomas." Scholars were stunned. Here was a real manuscript very much like the hypothesized Q, proving that Jesus people had actually produced gospels consisting only of his teachings. Of course it was in Coptic, and some of the sayings sounded gnostic, so at first it was difficult to see where the Gospel of Thomas might fit into the picture of Christian origins. Subsequent research has demonstrated that the importance of this discovery for reconstructing the early Jesus movements is enormous. The Coptic text is available with an English translation in a recent publication by HarperCollins (Marvin Meyer 1992). A commentary in the Hermeneia series is promised by Ron Cameron. The Coptic manuscript is a translation from an original Greek text that scholars date during the last quarter of the first century.

Like the Sayings Gospel Q, the Gospel of Thomas consists only of the sayings of Jesus. In both cases there is a narrative scene at the beginning to set the stage for the

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rest of the document. In Q the appearance of John (the Baptizer) is used to introduce Jesus as an exceptional combination of prophet and sage. The Gospel of Thomas begins with thirteen sayings that introduce Jesus as the source of esoteric knowledge and that set Thomas apart from the other disciples. At the end of this introductory section there is a touch of narrative in which Jesus takes Thomas aside and "spoke three words to him." When Thomas returns to his friends, they ask him what Jesus said to him, and he replies, "If I tell you one of the sayings he spoke to me, you will pick up rocks and stone me, and fire will come from the rocks and consume you" (GTh 13). Despite this narrative scene, however, a scene which is not set in any recognizable time or place, there is no biographical interest in Jesus' life, whether in Galilee or in reference to a crucifixion and resurrection in Jerusalem. The Thomas people, like the Q people, were interested only in Jesus' teachings. They thought of themselves as the True Disciples of Jesus.

A comparison with the book of Q is instructive. Both documents are about the same length and both consist of the same kind of material: pithy aphorisms, instructions on behavior, analogies and parables to explain the kingdom of God, and statements that criticize those who are in the wrong. Of even greater significance is the fact that approximately one-third of the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas have parallels in Q, and 60 percent of these are from the earliest layer of Q (Butts and Cameron 1987; Bradley McClean 1995; Kloppenborg 1990). Since scholars have not been able to find any indication that the Gospel of Thomas copied these sayings either from Q or from the synoptic gospels, it means that the Thomas tradition saved sayings from an early period when the Jesus movements shared similar teaching material. A few of those sayings having parallels in Q are even less obviously interpreted than in Q. However, many of the sayings are not only different from any found in Q but enigmatic and purposefully riddlelike. The conclusion must be that, like Q, the Gospel of Thomas documents a Jesus movement with its own distinctive history.

Unraveling that history is a bit more difficult than in the case of the Q people. That is because scholars have not yet found a way to assign sayings in the Gospel of Thomas to layers in the history of its transmission. The collection did not grow in a way similar to that of Q, saving entire blocks of material that belonged to an earlier stage of composition. However, it is possible to make some observations about several kinds of material that must reflect stages in the history of the Thomas people.

Starting with the last stage of collection, it is clear that a gnostic interpretation was intended for the collection as a whole. The first saying is about all of the sayings: "Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death" (GTh 1). One can see that the point of Jesus' instruction at this last stage of the collection was understood as some kind of enlightenment with respect to a disciple's own destiny. Reading through the collection with that in mind, one sees that the disciple's enlightenment had to do with understanding one's true identity as a spiritual being. If the topic is the kingdom of God, the hidden interpretation is that "the kingdom is inside you and it is outside you" (GTh 3), or that it is "spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it" (GTh 113). If the question concerns the world

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the interpretation is that it is a "carcass" (GTh 56), a (mere) "body" (GTh 80), or a "field" that belongs to someone else (GTh 21). Jesus himself is not a "teacher" like other teachers. Instead, those who have arrived at the true interpretation of his teachings have become enlightened just as he is the enlightened one. They will no longer need him once they have come to see the light: "I am not your teacher. Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring that I have tended" (GTh 13). "Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me; I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to that person" (GTh 108). Thus Jesus is the symbol of enlightenment, the light itself: "I am the light that is over all things. I am all: From me all has come forth, and to me all has reached. Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there" (GTh 77). This means that the true disciple must "Look to the living one as long as you live, or you might die and then try to see the living one, and you will be unable to see" (GTh 59). But "looking to the living one" is the same as coming to know one's own true being, and "When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living father" (GTh 3). A disciple who comes to see that he or she does not belong to the world but to the kingdom of God becomes a "passerby" with respect to the world (GTh 42) and a "single one" with respect to union with the divine. At the end of one's life there will be a return to the kingdom of light from which one originally came into the world (GTh 49-50).

To end with a gnostic interpretation of the teachings of Jesus means that the Thomas people took a turn at some point in their history that the people of Q did not take. Fortunately for our purposes, the circumstances that accompanied that turn can still be discerned in a subtheme that courses through the Gospel of Thomas from beginning to end. That theme features "the disciples" of Jesus and the questions they ask of him, something completely lacking in the book of Q. The reference to the disciples is frequently collective. But Peter, Matthew, James, Thomas, Salome, and Mary are mentioned by name. James and Thomas serve as guarantors of the tradition. Salome and Mary say the right things and represent the True Disciples. Peter, Matthew, and "the disciples" collectively represent some group or groups of Jesus people with whom the Thomas people disagree.

Throughout the text, these disciples ask the wrong questions and have to be corrected. Two themes occur repeatedly. One is that the disciples keep wanting to know about the future, when and where the kingdom will appear, and how they will know when it appears. It is obvious that some apocalyptic interpretation of Jesus' teachings was in view. Jesus treats their interest in the future as a gross misunderstanding of his teaching and goes on to explain that the kingdom is already present. The other theme has to do with ritual behavior. The disciples want to know whether and how they should fast, pray, give to charity, wash, diet, and whether circumcision is required. In every case Jesus treats their questions as silly and then goes on to turn the mention of the practice into a metaphor of enlightened self-understanding.

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So, for example, when the disciples ask Jesus, "Tell us how our end will be," Jesus responds by saying, "Blessed is the one who stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and will not taste death" (GTh 18).

This material is clearly polemical. The Thomas people knew that other Jesus groups had developed into apocalyptic communities on the one hand, and what might be called Jewish-Christian communities on the other. They were at pains to distinguish themselves from both these groups and did so by having Jesus himself counter the wrongheadedness of each. In order to do that, they developed two different rhetorical strategies. One was simply the put-down: No, you do not understand. "What you look for has come, but you do not know it" (GTh 51). This strategy meant that brand new sayings had to be crafted. The other approach was to take a treasured saying that seemed to say what the Thomas people did not want Jesus to say and interpret it away from its obvious meaning. An example is the apocalyptic saying, "Two will rest on a couch; one will die, one will live" (GTh 61). In Q, a similar saying is clearly intended in an apocalyptic sense: "I tell you, on that night there will be two in one bed; one will be taken and the other left" (Q 17:34). In the Gospel of Thomas, by contrast, this saying is reinterpreted by having Salome understand correctly that the reference was not to an event of separation at the eschaton (end of time), but to an event of enlightenment involving Jesus and herself, for Jesus had lain with her at her table and taught her the true meaning of "die" and "live" (GTh 61-62).

Thus we can be sure of at least three moments in the history of the Thomas people. They began as a Jesus movement that may have had much in common with the earliest phase of the Q movement. At some point they found themselves taking issue with two developments that others were entertaining, the cultivation of an apocalyptic mentality and a codification of ritual activities similar to Jewish practices. Having resisted both options, each of which was linked to a different view of what the community of Jesus people should be like, the Thomas people developed an ethos of detachment from the social world and cultivated the notion of an imaginary kingdom of light as the real world. This light-realm was thought to be a haven from the vicissitudes of a world seen as greedy, violent, and destructive. Many sayings in the Gospel of Thomas see the world as a place where one could be "gobbled up" or "eaten alive." By living "from" the light and "in" the light of true self-awareness, one could realize self-sufficiency and the sense of detachment that the gnostics called "repose." The goal was to remain "untouched" by the people, events, and concerns that motivated and controlled the social world.

But what about the turn that the Thomas people took away from the people of Q and other branches of the Jesus movement? Was it any sharper than the turn taken by the Q people when they made their shift toward an apocalyptic view of history? Probably not. Both movements had their roots in the same tensive combination of ideas that was characteristic of Jesus' teaching, a call to change lifestyles and to manifest the kingdom of God. The Q people were haunted by the social vision that

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came with the language of the kingdom of God; the Thomas people picked up on the radical individualism of the lifestyle challenge. Neither was able to keep the original tension in balance, but both developed in ways that were understandable as responses to the troubled times.

As for the social aspect of the kingdom of God, it appears that the Thomas people must have had a sense of community despite the radical reduction of all the kingdom symbols to metaphors of inward vision. The sayings are addressed to would-be disciples in the plural; there are instructions about how to view and treat one another as True Disciples; and there are a few hints that the group was interested in the symbolic significance of some rituals, such as baptism and table fellowship. So, although we cannot be sure of their practices, the Thomas people must have met together in order to cultivate their quest for personal transcendence.

It is extremely important to see that the Thomas people developed the mythology of a Jesus movement by investing the sayings of Jesus with private and esoteric significance. Although these teachings counted as teachings of Jesus, they were actually the teachings of the Thomas community, for the Thomas community developed as any Hellenistic school tradition would have, by continuing to attribute new ideas to the founder of the school. But since the Thomas people knew that other movements held other views about the teachings of Jesus, they would have seen things differently. They would have said, "These are the hidden sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Judas Thomas the Twin recorded."

Some scholars have been troubled by the term living Jesus, thinking that it must refer to the mythology of Jesus' resurrection from the dead. That would mean that the Thomas people were Christians who had turned the crucified savior into a gnostic redeemer. It is likely that the Thomas people were aware of Christian mythologies, and it is possible that their use of the term living Jesus was intended to bounce off such a mythology. But it is not the case that their view of Jesus as the embodiment of "light," "life," and "wisdom" was dependent upon a mythology of the resurrection. The wisdom of God, a female divinity with an elaborate mythology, could "exalt her sons" (Mack 1973). And the great figures of the history of Israel, such as Moses in the eyes of a Philo of Alexandria, could easily be imagined as having been transformed into the cosmic logos, or a "second god," without dying a sacrificial death. So Jesus became the symbol of incarnate light and life because that is what his teachings dispensed. There was no need for Jesus to perform miracles, prophesy the end of the world, die on the cross as a savior, or come again for the final judgment. His ubiquitous presence was already known everywhere his hidden teachings were correctly interpreted.

THE MIRACLE STORIES

Mark's story of Jesus is packed with preposterous stories of miracles that Jesus performs and of miraculous things that happen to Jesus. These stories create the impression of a divine power dramatically entering human history in the person of

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STILLING THE STORM
(4:35-41)

THE GERASENE DEMONIAC
(5:1-20)

JAIRUS' DAUGHTER
(5:21-23, 35-43)

THE WOMAN WITH A HEMORRHAGE
(5:25-34)

FEEDING THE 5000
(6:34-44, 53)

WALKING ON THE SEA
(6:45-51)

THE BLIND MAN AT BETHSAIDA
(8:22-26)

THE SYROPHOENECIAN WOMAN
(7:24B-30)

THE DEAF-MUTE
(7:32-37)

FEEDING THE 4000
(8:1-10)

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THE PILLARS IN JERUSALEM

At some point during the first twenty years of the Jesus movements, a group formed in Jerusalem, presumably made up of Galileans. They left no written records or documents that we know of, but secondary reports can tell us some things about them. It is important to reconstruct what we can, simply because the picture most of us have in mind is highly mythologized and will frustrate our redescription of Christian origins unless we subject it to some analysis.

The earliest report we have is from Paul's letter to the Galatians, written in 55 C.E. In this letter he tells of two visits he made to the "pillars" in Jerusalem for the purpose of comparing his gospel with theirs. Unfortunately, Paul does not go on to give us an account of their "gospel," but he does mention the names of Cephas (Peter), James, and John, and he does indicate the main issue. The overriding question had to do with the acceptance of gentiles into the kingdom movement, and especially whether

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the pillars in Jerusalem would demand that a gentile be circumcised. It is important to see that this was a question Paul himself wanted to have answered. It reflects issues that he had encountered in the Christian congregations to which he had been converted and especially in those he had founded. So we cannot be sure that the Jerusalem group had ever thought about such a problem, much less would have shared Paul's concern or interest in such a question. From Paul's report of the meeting, however, it is significant that they agreed that gentiles need not be circumcised and that their only request of Paul was that he "remember the poor," most probably a reference to themselves and their impoverished constituency. That is not much to go on, but it does allow us to think that the Jerusalem group must have been a Jesus movement, not a Christian congregation of the Pauline type, a distinction to be discussed in the next chapter.

Three features of the Jerusalem group allow us to build a profile: (1) We have the names of its leaders, Cephas (Peter), James, and John; (2) Their location in Jerusalem and interest in residing there is taken for granted; (3) And there is the (apparent) acceptance of some distinctly Jewish ideas and practices, such as the purity codes governing table fellowship. The problem of making sense out of these three features is that no other early Jesus movement of which we have knowledge shared any of them. That Jesus had disciples (or students) is an idea integral to the Community of Q, the Congregation of Israel that produced the miracle story sets, and the Jesus School of the pronouncement stories. But none of these groups mentions Peter, James, and John, or any other disciple by name. The next mention we have of these named disciples, after reading about them in Paul's letter, is in Mark's gospel, written in the 70s, and Mark's story puts them in a bad light as students who did not understand their teacher. The same is true of the role played by Peter and "the disciples" in the Gospel of Thomas. These disciples were too dense to get the picture of the kingdom Jesus painted. We have to wait for Matthew's story, written in the 80s or 90s, to find the triumvirate rehabilitated as the perfect understudies of Jesus to whom the "keys to the kingdom" were given (Matt. 16:17-19). So we do not know very much about the real Peter, James, and John, the pillars at Jerusalem.

As for other groups thinking that Jesus had any interest in Jerusalem, there are only two sayings in the material we have from the Jesus movements that bear on the question, and both are merely sidelong glances on the destruction of the temple in 70 C.E. One is the lament in Q', "O Jerusalem.... How often would I have gathered your children together.... Behold your house is forsaken and desolate" (Q 13:34-3 5). The other is the saying of Jesus that "predicts" the temple's destruction, a most problematic saying in the Gospel of Thomas because, in its Markan form, it appears to be a Markan creation (GTh 71; Mark 14:58; Mack 1988, 294). That means that the motivation for the pillars to have taken up residence in Jerusalem has to be left to speculation, for there is no indication that other groups of Jesus people made a connection between Jesus, the Jesus movement, the kingdom of God, and the city of Jerusalem.

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That leaves the matter of the pillars' adherence to Jewish purity codes. Where questions of ritual purity surface in all of the other Jesus movements, the answer is the same: the Jesus people do not keep these codes. There is, in fact, a tendency to take pride in rejecting such an approach to group respectability and self-definition. So what are we to make of the fact that the pillars were on the other side of the issue?

It is extremely difficult to understand what the Jerusalem group may have been thinking. There is nothing in the teachings of Jesus or in the early stories about him that would suggest a motivation for Jesus and his disciples going to Jerusalem in the first place, much less for Galileans to move there after Jesus was gone. Mark's story does not help, as we shall see, for three important reasons. One is that the plot he devised to get Jesus to Jerusalem could have been imagined only after the Roman-Jewish war. The second is that, if we were to accept Mark's story of Jesus' march to Jerusalem to confront the Jewish establishment, and he was killed as a great threat to the temple-state for something as innocuous as teaching and demonstrating in the temple courtyard, it is hard to imagine why his followers would not also have been threatened or killed when they took up residence to promote his program (M. Miller 1995). The third reason Mark's story doesn't help is that, according to Mark, Jesus and his disciples were bent on violating Jewish purity codes, not supporting them. So we need to come up with some other scenario that can make sense of the data we have from Paul.

Mark was tendentious and critical in his portrayal of the disciples. That means that the disciples he had in mind must have represented a position with which Mark strongly disagreed. Might it have been a difference of opinion with regard to purity codes? In the Gospel of Thomas, Peter and the disciples do represent interest in keeping the Jewish purity codes. And that agrees with Paul's characterization of Peter and the pillars in Jerusalem. If Paul and the Gospel of Thomas are right about Peter and purity, that would certainly fit as the position against which Mark was writing. Thus, though we have no way of knowing for sure, it seems that Peter and company simply drew a set of conclusions about the kingdom of God in the teachings of Jesus that differed from other Jesus groups.

We might note that the Jerusalem experiment was apparently short-lived. At the end of Mark's story, Peter and the disciples are told to go to Galilee, perhaps instead of staying in Jerusalem to form a Christian congregation there. Mark may have known that Peter and the Jerusalem group were no longer residing in Jerusalem. Later traditions tell of the "flight" of the Jerusalem group to Pella on the eve of the war (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3,5,3), and Paul mentions that Peter later resided in Antioch (Gal. 2:11). As for James, it is said that he was martyred in the year 62 C.E., also during the buildup of hostilities that precipitated the outbreak of the Roman Jewish war in 66 C.E. What we are left with are fragmentary clues to a group that resided in Jerusalem for a relatively short period of time. Piecing these clues together, it seems that James, who was Jesus' brother, together with Peter and others, made some connections between Jesus' teaching about the kingdom of God

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and the temple-kingdom in Jerusalem. What those connections may have been is unclear. Since they regarded the purity codes as compatible with Jesus' teaching, a position with which Matthew, writing much later, would agree, they may have appeared to many merely as a Pharisaic sect. But taking up residence in Jerusalem adds a touch of seriousness that indicates some political agenda. Perhaps they thought of themselves as a leaven, appropriately placed in Jerusalem to lift up the ideals of piety and thus contribute to its sustenance or regeneration as the city of the great king. The lament over Jerusalem in Q was written from just such a perspective, so we know that thoughts such as these were possible within the Jesus movements, even if not everyone held them. Unfortunately for the pillars, supposing that they thought Jesus' teachings about the kingdom were most appropriate for a school in Jerusalem, the destruction of the city meant the end of their mission as well.

CONCLUSION

Many other groups may have formed in the wake of the historical Jesus. The few we have discussed are enough, however, to let us see what the first forty years of the Jesus movement was like. At the beginning, Jesus was remembered as a teacher who challenged individuals to think of themselves as citizens of the kingdom of God. The concept of the kingdom of God was apparently timely. It brought people together who were aware of the troubled times and gave them a forum for both talk and action. But the concept of the kingdom, though drawing upon notions that were already in the air and thus not completely vacuous, was nevertheless vague and inviting rather than clear and programmatic. Thus the various groups that formed in the schools of Jesus were experimental. They experienced rapid change as they attracted others by their talk of the kingdom, developed their own social practices and group identities, and responded to the pressures of giving an account of themselves as a little society with big ideas. The common strategy was to attribute the wisdom they had achieved to Jesus, putting it in the form of instruction from him by revising his teachings to match the school of thought they were developing. They did this just as any Hellenistic school of philosophy would have done. And the result of such a development was that the voice and thus the image of Jesus, their founder, was repeatedly recast as well. As we have seen, the portrayals of Jesus are strikingly different as one moves from group to group within the Jesus movement.

The need to imagine Jesus as an authority for what a group had become is not difficult to understand. And the way in which that was handled by most Jesus groups, namely by attributing their teachings to him, can be explained as Hellenistic practice. But one other dimension of this early form of mythmaking is a bit less obvious and thus deserves a final observation. It was the way in which each of these groups tried to link its picture of Jesus to the grand traditions of Israel. Attributing the group's current teaching to the founder of its school of thought was not enough to grant the kind of authority required of a new movement that thought of itself as

^{TEACHINGS FROM THE JESUS MOVEMENTS 71}

more than a school of philosophy. The Jesus movements were being guided by a comprehensive social vision to which persons found themselves granting fundamental loyalties and from which they were demanding a full range of identification as members of "a people." To be legitimate as "a people" meant that Jesus had to be imagined as more than a teacher. He had somehow to be authorized to offer the kind of radical instruction he gave for thinking of oneself differently, as if one belonged to a society or ethnos (race, tribe, nation) other than one's own. And so, for these reasons, and for others which we shall come across in the course of our investigation, models from the past, both of Israel and of the roles of Israel's leaders, soon came to mind.

The ways the early Jesus groups thought of themselves as reconstituting Israel not only gave, them illustrious social models to work with, but it gave them a sense of heritage as well. The ways in which Jesus was associated with images from the past not only enhanced his stature as an important person but also laid claim to the authority such roles had in the history of the people Israel. Although these early attempts to align Jesus and the Jesus movements with the history of Israel were ad hoc, experimental, and tentative, they tell us that the investments people were making in these new social formations were serious business. That is because the attempt to align themselves with the history of I srael was not a simple task. It required considerable ingenuity. It should be seen as a remarkable intellectual achievement, for it was mythmaking against great odds, achieved under tense and trying circumstances. Suggestions had to click into place with only brief periods of time to test them and find them acceptable. And these mythic ideas had to be accepted not only as appropriate to the self-understanding of the group, but also as plausible. These early Jesus people were engaged in a form of mythmaking that can be called epic revision.

The revision of Israel's epic history will become a theme as we proceed with our investigation of early Christian literary and mythmaking activity. We can already see that epic revision began at a very early period in all forms of the Jesus movement. The Q community started with memories of Jesus as a Cynic-like sage, found it helpful to expand that to the role of a prophet, then further enhanced that role in order to account for all the knowledge being attributed to him. They ended by thinking of him as the envoy of divine wisdom and the son of God, two roles that had the effect of turning the historical teacher into the appearance of a divine being and his teachings into a revelation of cosmic arrangements. Before they were finished, the Q people had positioned themselves toward the end of a sweeping view of history from its beginning at the creation of the world to its ending with a judgment scene in which either God or Jesus would use the Book of Q as the standard for admission to the final form and manifestation of the kingdom of God.

Mythmaking in the Jesus School, among those who produced the pronouncement stories, did not proceed as rapidly or entertain such extravagant claims as within the Community of Q. Belonging to Israel was apparently taken for granted by the Jesus School, or at least had not become a serious issue for them until they

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ran into trouble by rejecting the Pharisaic purity codes. When that happened, they responded by thinking of Jesus as more than a match for the Pharisees. That resulted, however, in turning Jesus into an interpreter of the legal aspects of the epic in its function as Torah or constitution. They may have thought of Jesus as a super interpreter with extraordinary wisdom, but they do not seem to have gotten very far with finding precedent in the scriptures for the epic importance of such a figure, or for themselves as a legitimate form of God's people. They had just finished a round of argumentation in which Jesus won by rejecting the (Pharisaic interpretation of the) law. That was hardly a firm foundation for making a claim to be the legitimate heirs of the epic's promise. They did toy with comparing David and Jesus in the story about plucking grain on the sabbath (Mark 2:23-28) and they discovered the conundrum in Psalm 110:1 about who it was that David referred to as "my lord" (Mark 12:35-37). But forays such as these into the scriptures were desperate attempts to argue for independence from the Pharisees by finding contradictions within the Pharisees' own scriptures. The figures with which Jesus was implicitly associated, king David and a scribe of the Pharisees, actually canceled each other out because kings and scribes played different roles. They did not produce a mythic role for Jesus appropriate for the claims to legitimacy that would have to be made by the Jesus School. We will have to wait for Matthew's time before the role-of Jesus as an interpreter of the law could be successfully combined with a mythology of his role as wisdom's child and both seen as a fulfillment of the goal toward which the epic of Israel had been moving.

The True Disciples who produced the Gospel of Thomas were much more interested in reconceiving the nature of the cosmos than in revising the history of Israel. But they too found it necessary to take a position against Pharisaic codes and ward off associations with major Jewish symbols such as the temple and its sacrificial system. If we note the incidence of androgynous images throughout the gospel, and their positive valence, it does appear that the Thomas people thought of Adam, the first human being, as God's intention for humankind, an ideal status that was lost when the "fall" happened as the story in Genesis relates. They had taken a big, imaginary leap over the entire history of Israel to land at the beginning when the world was first conceived in the mind of God. If Jesus' wisdom helped an individual to see himself or herself as part of the cosmos as originally designed, that must have counted as a kind of epic revision as well as a moment of gnostic enlightenment and transformation. The Thomas people had, in effect, "revised" the Israel epic by rejecting it.

And as for the myth of origin constructed of miracle stories, we have seen how different it was from either the apocalyptic history of the Community of Q, the reinterpretation of the ethical intention of the Torah within the Jesus School, or the cosmic anthropology of the Thomas community. The Congregation of Israel picked up on the exodus story and delighted in the thought that, though their group was an unlikely bunch compared to contemporary notions of Israel as defined by

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ethnically pure Jews, the Jesus movement in their time was like the formation of Israel in Moses' time. They seized on miracle stories to recall epic precedent and to dramatize the change that was taking place in their lives as they came in contact with the Jesus people. This challenged them to think of themselves differently, as if they had found a new social identity.

So serious mythmaking had begun. But none of these early attempts to associate Jesus with the history of Israel was systematic, as if a programmatic concept of the Jesus movement were being matched by a complex conception of Israel. They were instead suggestions based on single associations. They said, in effect, "Think of Jesus as a prophet" or "Think of us as a congregation-in-the-making on the model of Israel-in-the-wilderness." And each group came up with suggestions that differed from the others. This finding is significant. It means that the Jesus movement attracted new people on some basis other than its attempt to revise, reform, or revolutionize Judaism. The attractiveness of the movement was based on its invitation to experiment with the notion of the kingdom of God in the teachings of Jesus, and it flowed from the energies people were investing in the groups that began to form. And yet, just because the social notion had its roots in Jewish mentality and its lineage in the epic of Israel, the attempts to revise that epic in the interest of finding precedent for the kingdom of God would have to be part of the mythmaking enterprise that defined Christianity. We shall see that epic revision was a constant factor in early Christian mythmaking for the next three hundred years.

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3

FRAGMENTS FROM
THE CHRIST CULT

Social movements change over time. They do so in response to new circumstances and also because experience within a group often introduces new patterns of behavior and thinking. Leaders rise and fall. Moods ebb and quicken. And strategies shift, sometimes abruptly. We watch, fascinated, because living in groups defines the human enterprise, and a people in the process of changing their patterns of life and thought always catches our attention. We might learn something, both about others and ourselves. The learning would be especially meaningful if it were focused on the formation of a pristine community whose strategies for living together still haunt us as a legacy left over from the foundational chapters of our own cultural history. Such a process of social formation is exactly what we are privileged to observe as the Christ cult emerged from the Jesus movement.

Beginning somewhere in northern Syria, probably in the city of Antioch, and spreading through Asia Minor into Greece, the Jesus movement underwent a change of historic consequence. It was a change that turned the Jesus movement into a cult of a god called Jesus Christ. At first sight it is difficult to imagine that the Christ cult was at one time a Jesus movement, for the change was so drastic and appears to have happened so suddenly. But if we spread the process out, taking our time to move slowly through the complex developments of about twenty-five years of social experimentation, noting the clues that scholars have discovered for the reasons that underlay the transformations that took place, a very understandable history comes into view.

The Christ cult differed from the Jesus movements in two major respects. One was a focus upon the significance of Jesus' death and destiny. Jesus' death was understood to have been an event that brought a new community into being. This focus on Jesus' death had the result of shifting attention away from the teachings of Jesus and away from a sense of belonging to his school. It engendered instead an elaborate preoccupation with notions of martyrdom, resurrection, and the transformation of Jesus into a divine, spiritual presence. The other major difference was the

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forming of a cult oriented to that spiritual presence. Hymns, prayers, acclamations, and doxologies were composed and performed when Christians met together in Jesus' name. Meals and other rituals of congregating celebrated both Jesus' memory and the presence of his spirit. These features are distinctive and mark the Christ cult as strikingly different from all the Jesus movements we have observed. How to account for that difference has been our task as scholars, and we have finally learned enough to track the shift from a Jesus movement to the Christ cult. This chapter will tell the story of that transition and offer an explanation for the myths and rituals these Christ people produced.

Evidence for the Christ cult comes mainly from the letters of Paul written during the 50s. Were it not for his correspondence with these congregations we might never have known that such a cult existed, at least not at such an early period and surely not as the vigorous and spirited communities scholars have been able to reconstruct. We would not have known because even the slightly later forms of community that continued the Christ cult tradition were not able to comprehend the complex mythologies of the early Christ cult reflected in the letters of Paul, or to sustain its exuberant spirit. And had we only the early Jesus traditions from which to construct Christian origins, no modern scholar would have imagined that anything like the Christ cult would have or could have developed from them. So the letters of Paul are a precious bit of evidence for a first-century social experiment otherwise unimaginable. His letters are as important for our knowledge of the Christ cult as, for instance, the Dead Sea Scrolls are for our knowledge of the Qumran community.

However, Paul's letters tell us much more about Paul and his own understanding of the Christ than about the cult to which he was converted. So we need to distinguish between the two if we want to understand the Christ cult as a development that was already in existence before Paul encountered it. The Christ people must have been making their presence felt in a way that aroused Paul's hostility when first he encountered them. And yet, they must have been attractive enough to have occasioned his later conversion. We shall explore the letters and the mind of Paul in the next two chapters. In the present chapter it is the Christ cult reflected in these letters that we want to understand.

Fortunately, quite a bit of textual material from the Christ cult is available to us from the letters of Paul. That may seem strange, given the fact that the letters are clearly Paul's own compositions. But the happy circumstance is that Paul incorporated in his letters, not only the ideas he had gotten from these Christians, but also fragments from their literary production. These fragments of literary composition cannot be pieced together to give us a single, larger composition of any kind, so we have no composite text from these early communities. But the small units that have been preserved share a tenor and manifest other literary features such as poetic conventions that make of them a coherent set. This set of poetic fragments gives us enough information to paint a most interesting picture of the people Paul hated but couldn't resist. Because these people were the ones who first used the term Christ when referring to Jesus, we may think of them as the first Christians.

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THE CHRIST MYTH

The most important texts for working out the logic of the Christ myth are found in Paul's letters to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 15:3-5) and Romans (Rom. 3:24-26 and 4:2 5). All focus on the significance that early Christians attributed to Jesus' death, and each brings to expression a distinctive if complementary view of the meaning of his death. Taken together, they contain all the clues we need to discover the rationale for their myth. Each deserves a closer look.

I Corinthians 15:3-5

This fragment has been called the kerygma (proclamation or gospel) of the early Christian community in keeping with Paul's description of it as the content of his preaching (1 Cor. 15:1-3). He also said that it was a "tradition" he had received and passed on in his preaching. The tradition was:

That Christ died for our sins
according to the scriptures;
and that he was buried;
and that he was raised on the third day
according to the scriptures;
and that he appeared
(to Cephas, then to the twelve ...).
The first thing to notice is that this text is formulaic and carefully composed. Four events are in view (death, burial, resurrection, appearance), two of which are fundamental, namely the death and the raising of the Christ. Each of these introduces a unit of composition that offers an interpretation of the event. The two units are

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balanced formally, that is they are composed of lines or thoughts that correspond to similar lines in the other unit. This feature is clearest in the reference to the scriptures, which is repeated in each unit, but it is also true of the rhetorical function of each subordinate event. The burial underscores the reality of Christ's death, just as the appearance underscores the reality of his having been raised. Only in the case of the primary significance of the death and the raising is there a slight bit of imbalance, namely that the death occurred "for our sins," while the raising occurred "on the third day." What we have is poetry, and it is polished. This kerygmatic formula was not created in a moment of inspiration. It reflects a lengthy period of collective, intellectual labor, including agreements about the value of focusing on Jesus' death as the event of significance for the community, what that significance was, the use of the name Christ (instead of Jesus), the thought that Christ had been raised, the importance of the reference to the scriptures, and the kind of argument that would make the two pivotal events seem real (burial and appearances).

In order to get at the thinking packed into this creedal formulation, two mythologies that provide the logic underlying the entire enterprise need to be explained. One is the Greek myth of the noble death. The other is the Jewish myth of the persecuted sage, which has sometimes been called a wisdom tale. The concept of the noble death can be traced back through the history of Greek thought to its origin in the honor due the warrior who died for his country (or people, city, or its laws). With Socrates the application of the honor broadened to include philosophers and teachers who suffered banishment or death because of their teachings. In this case death was considered honorable if the teacher remained true to his teachings and died for them. This concept of the noble death was absolutely fundamental to Greek views of citizenship, honor, and virtue. It was prevalent during the first century, and examples quickly came to mind whenever a person of repute was condemned for his views by a government that found him inconvenient and sought to put him aside.

The shift from warrior to teacher enhanced the significance of the noble death by turning the person who died nobly into a martyr for a cause. The standard for assessing the virtue of such a death was a person's integrity (with respect to the teaching or cause for which one was willing to die) and endurance (or loyalty to the cause, even unto death). And so it was that martyrdom came to represent the ultimate test of virtue, and obedience unto death the ultimate display of one's strength of character. As for the cause, it also was ennobled by having engendered such integrity. Stoics, Cynics, and other schools of popular ethical philosophy claimed and cultivated the image of Socrates and other martyrs who had died for the truth of a teaching rejected by the politicians of their time. Thus the image of the martyr was available during the Greco-Roman period as a template for assessing the strength or truth of a teaching, school of thought, political philosophy, or an embattled or disenfranchised cause (Seeley 1990).

Within Jewish circles the concept of martyrdom took yet another turn. Drawing upon the older image of the warrior who died for his country and the significance of

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Romans 3:21-26

This text from Paul's letter to the Romans puts us in touch with a very early period in the development of the Christ myth. It documents a stage in the thinking of the first Christians that predates the refined formulations of the kerygma. The death of Jesus was in view, and its significance as a martyrdom had been worked out without any need to imagine a resurrection. Paul found the formulation of these ideas much to his liking, and he all but erased the original saying in the way in which he cited it. Fortunately, scholars have been able to reconstruct the gist of the pre-Pauline fragment.

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I cite the reconstruction worked out in a detailed study by Sam Williams (1975). The parentheses are his; I have added the material in brackets for clarity:

In times past God overlooked the sins of the gentiles.
But now God has regarded Jesus' death as a means of expiation because of
his faith(fulness).
He [God] did this to show his righteousness,
and to justify (or make righteous) the one whose faith[fulness] stems from
Jesus' own faith(fulness).
Four ideas converge in this interpretation of Jesus' death. The first is that God took note of the problem facing the new community, namely that the inclusion of gentiles had to be justified. The second is that God worked it out by regarding Jesus' death as an expiation for their sins. The third is that the effectiveness of Jesus' death was due to his faith(fulness). And the fourth is that one who learns to be faithful on the model of Jesus' faithfulness is justified in the sight of God.

The logic of this mythology is extremely interesting. It is based on a martyrology, for Jesus is said to have been "faithful," and the word for that is pistis, a term that occurs in the stories of the martyrs to express their essential virtue. It means something like "committed," and, along with the term endurance, refers to the martyr's steadfastness even in the face of death. The cause to which Jesus was faithful is not expressed, but it is possible that the early Christians started down this line of thought by imagining Jesus to have been loyal to his own teachings and/or vision of the kingdom of God. That would have been an easy step to take, imagining the manner of death befitting a founder figure whose integrity was unquestioned. If so, we can see how the transition from a Jesus movement to the Christ myth may have been accomplished. In any case, this early martyrology is about Jesus, not the Christ. The factor that turned his martyrdom into an event that justified the new community, and so allowed the thought that the new community was the cause for which he had died, was derived not from Jesus' own intentions, but from the way in which God was understood to have viewed the event. Being sure of that must have taken some long and hard thinking. But the important words were there to work it out.

The terms settled upon for justifying the inclusion of gentiles in a movement that thought of itself on the model of Israel, the people of God, were sins and righteousness. As we have seen, sinners was a generic designation for any and all who did not live according to Jewish standards of piety. Those who did were called the righteous. Thus the terms worked as a pair and could distinguish Jew from gentile with respect to acceptance or nonacceptance of Jewish laws as the standard for righteousness. As such, the terms were completely appropriate to the situation of a group troubled about its mixed constituency. All we need to do is see that the words for righteous, righteousness, and justify (acquit as righteous), the terms that are

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THE RITUAL MEAL

Another important window into the congregations of the Christ is the picture Paul paints of the community at meal in 1 Corinthians 11. The text is familiar to Christians for, along with the story of Jesus' last supper with his disciples in the synoptic gospels, it provides the script for the Christian celebration of the Eucharist, or Mass. In the Christian imagination, the Pauline text is based upon a memory of the last supper at which Jesus anticipated his sacrificial death by giving the bread and wine symbolic meanings and instructed his disciples to continue the practice as his proper memorial (the so-called words of institution). A close look suggests another interpretation, one that fits better in the setting of the Christ cult than that of the imagined time of Jesus with his disciples.

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I Corinthians 11:23-25

This is another text that Paul called a "tradition" he had "received" and passed on to the Corinthians at some earlier time. The tradition reads as follows:

that the Lord Jesus on the night he was handed over took bread,
and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said,
"This is my body which is for you.
Do this in remembrance of me."
In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying,
"This cup is the new covenant in my blood.
Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me."
Astonishment may well be the first response of any modern reader of this text. Even after coming to terms with the grisly imagery and tortured logic of the Christ myth, one is hardly prepared for this shocking portrayal of Jesus calmly announcing his imminent immolation. And New Testament scholars have not been much help in making sense of it. Part of the problem is that the history of Christian liturgy and iconography has overloaded the scene with pious depictions of a totally divine persona representing absolute serenity at the thought of sacrificing himself to save the world from perdition. That image tends to frustrate critical analysis. But another part of the problem is that the dominant scenario for Christian origins automatically places this scene in the narrative context of the gospels and treats it as historical. If one does that, the task of analysis will be to imagine how it could have happened, how it could possibly fit with what we know of the historical Jesus, how his followers could have understood it, and what Jesus could have meant by it. This set of questions, arising from the assumption that it must have happened, has led nowhere. So the first thing to notice about the scene depicted in this text is that it does not make sense as history. The scene assumes that the death of "the Lord Jesus" was a martyrdom and, as we now know, that thought was an interpretation specific to the Christ cult. The scene is not historical but imaginary. It was a creation of the congregations of the Christ in keeping with their mythology. The reasons for the mythology are clear. What we now need to understand are the reasons for imagining the icon of Jesus at the table.

The place to begin is with the observation that the icon depicts a meal. Since early Christians gathered for meals, and since Paul used this supper text to say some things about the way in which the Corinthians were behaving when they gathered for meals, the suspicion would be that the Jesus icon might have something to do with early Christian meal practice. Note that the words of Jesus are spoken over the breaking of bread and the drinking of a cup of wine. Bread and wine were shorthand for food and drink, the two natural symbols that everyone used when referring to common meals. And note, also, that the text separates the moments of recognition by placing the word about the bread at the beginning of the meal, and the word

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about the wine "after supper." This means that the icon had its setting in normal meal practice and would have been recognized as such.

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THE CHRIST HYMN

Christ hymn is a name that modern scholars have given to a genre of praise poetry that apparently was quite popular in early Christian circles. There are several examples in the New Testament (Phil. 2:6-11; Col. 1:15-20; Eph. 2:14-16; 1 Tim. 3:16; 1 Pet. 3:18-22; Heb. 1:3; and John 1:1-18) and many more from later Christian literature, including rather large collections such as the Odes of Solomon. The earliest example is the poem in Philippians 2:6-11, another pre-Pauline fragment:

Although he was in the form of God
he did not think equality with God was anything worth grasping,
But emptied himself and took the form of a slave,
born in the likeness of humankind.
And when he appeared on earth as a man
he humbled himself and was obedient to the point of death.

Therefore God exalted him on high
and gave him the name above every other name,

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That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
And every tongue should confess that
"Jesus Christ is Lord," to the glory of God the Father. The hymn contains two stanzas, each having three double lines. The stanzas balance one another in a pattern of composition called a chiasm (from the Greek letter chi, X). The chiasm was an outline whereby a progression of thought narrowed, took a turn, then opened up again, retracing the pattern in reverse order to end with a line that matched the first line of the first stanza. In this case the first stanza describes three stages in the "descent" (or "humiliation") of a person "in the form of God," whereas the second stanza describes three stages in his "exaltation" (or "ascent"). The pattern reminds one of the Christ kerygma with its shift from death to resurrection, but the focus here in the Christ hymn is no longer on a martyrdom. To be sure, the line about being "obedient to the point of death" shows that the Christ myth was in the background and still in mind. But reflection upon the death as a crucifixion and the resurrection as a vindication of the martyr is no longer the primary interest. (Some scholars have thought so because of the phrase "even death on a cross" in verse 8, but most agree that it was Paul who added that line.) According to the Christ myth, Jesus became the Christ by virtue of his obedience unto death. Here, in the Christ hymn, Jesus is the incarnation of a divine figure who possessed "equality with God" already at the very beginning of the drama and had every opportunity to be lord simply by "taking" possession of his kingdom. His glory, however, is that he did not "grasp" that opportunity (or take advantage of it for himself) but took the form of an obedient slave. Because of this, God exalted him to an even higher lordship, one that was higher than any other imaginable. This new myth with the descent/ascent pattern all but erased the kerygma. Instead of a martyrology, the early Christians now had a myth of cosmic destiny on their hands. Thus the poem is not really about Christ; it is a hymn about Jesus Christ as lord.

This is mythmaking on the cosmic scale. Throughout the Greco-Roman world lord meant sovereign. One needed only to know the name of the lord in question in order to locate his or her domain. The God of Israel was the lord for Jews. Serapis was the lord of his mystery cult. Other gods were lords of their people. Egyptian kings and queens ruled as lords by virtue of their divinity. And the Roman emperors, unable to withstand the seductive notion of being regarded and treated as gods, were also encouraging obeisance and allowing themselves to be addressed as lords. The poem says that Jesus Christ is the name of the lord that is above every other lord. That is an absolutely stupendous claim. Just the thought is mind-boggling. Think of every knee bowing, every tongue confessing, that the Christians' martyr by the name of Iesous Christos was lord of all, and that if such homage should actually happen throughout the cosmos, including the heavens and the underworld, God the Father would be pleased to receive the glory for it. What a picture!

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The audacity of this poem is only partially due to the exaggerations of its imagery. In the cultural turmoil of the Greco-Roman age even the gods had to compete, and in order to outrank other deities extravagant claims had to be made. Isis, for example, claimed to be the "lord of every land," and her devotees claimed that Isis was the "true name" of every female deity with whom she had been identified in all of these lands (Grant 1953, 128-33). So the Christ hymn does not contain thoughts that others would have found strange or outlandish per se, if they were claims made in the name of a known god. The audacity, rather, was to think of Jesus as such a god in the first place. To make such claims for Jesus the martyr would certainly have turned some heads. So we need to ask what caused the thought that Jesus had been or was a god.

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PART 2

Christ and the Hinge of History

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4

PAUL AND
HIS GOSPEL

After Jesus, a single personality dominates the traditional picture of the way Christianity began. This person, an intellectual Jew named Paul, looms so large in the pages of the New Testament that what he called his gospel has served for the Christian church as the definition of the new religion. Unfortunately, many scholars also continue to imagine Christian origins in keeping with Paul's views. The reasons for this impression are obvious. His (partially pseudonymous) authorship accounts for over one-half the books in the New Testament. His letters from the 50s are the earliest Christian writings for which we have manuscript documentation. These are the only texts from the first century that scholars consider authentic, which means that they were actually written or signed by the author whose name was attached to them. All the many other writings and text fragments from the first century were either written anonymously or lost to the vicissitudes of history. From Paul's letters, moreover, the first autobiographical sketch of the life and thought of a real live Christian emerges. So Paul has counted as the first convert to Christianity, the first Christian who did not know Jesus "after the flesh," as he said, and thus the first witness to the faith that must have started with Jesus' resurrection from the dead.

There are two problems with this view. One is that Paul's conception of Christianity is not evident among the many texts from the early Jesus movements. The other is that Paul's gospel was not comprehensible and persuasive for most people of his time, including many other Christians, as we shall see. For historians this means that the traditional picture of Christian origins derived from Paul's letters is suspect and needs to be revised. Instead of reading the material from the Jesus movements through the eyes of Paul, we need to read Paul as a remarkable moment in the history of some Jesus movement. It is the difference between the picture painted by the Jesus movements and the picture painted by Paul that requires explanation. The groundwork for doing that has already been laid in the last chapter. Now we need to revise the traditional understanding of Paul's own conversion, mission, and message.

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Paul was converted to a Jesus movement that had already become a congregation of the Christ. That much is clear from his own account. It was, he said, a "revelation" from God that Jesus Christ was God's son (Gal. 1:12, 15-16). That must refer to the Christ myth, not to any of the views of Jesus from the other Jesus movements. He also said that before he changed his mind about Christians, he "pursued" them as a threat to his own religious convictions (Gal. 1:13). If that is so, we need to understand the reasons for his hostility and subsequent change of mind in order to appreciate his gospel and the reason for its place of privilege in the New Testament.

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THE THESSALONIAN CORRESPONDENCE

First Thessalonians is the earliest letter we have from Paul, and it is the very first Christian writing for which we have an independent manuscript. From the letter we

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learn that Paul had spent some time at Philippi before arriving at Thessalonica (I Thess. 2:2), after which he and his co-worker Timothy had gone on to Athens where he had decided to send Timothy back to Thessalonica to encourage the newly formed congregation in their "faith" (1 Thess. 3:1-2). The letter was written later, probably from Corinth in the year 50 C.E., after Timothy's return with the good news that the Thessalonians were indeed keeping the faith (1 Thess. 3:6-7). The letter is important, for it gives us both a sketch of Paul's missionary activity far from home and, by indirect reflection, a glimpse of the people who had been attracted to his gospel. Paul was apparently the founder of this congregation, for he refers to their becoming Christians as a result of his gospel (1 Thess. 1:5-6), and he refers to himself as an apostle of Christ among them (1 Thess. 2:7) who behaved "like a father with his children" (1 Thess. 2:11).

Thessalonica was a large, prosperous seaport on the main overland trade route from the Adriatic to the Bosporus (Via Egnatia). It was a thoroughly Hellenistic city, founded by Cassander, one of the successors to Alexander the Great, and it had played an important role as a city of power in the politics of the empires that had clashed during the three hundred years of its existence. When Paul arrived, it was the capital city of the Roman province of Macedonia, a city where Pompey had made his headquarters during the Roman civil war. Strong and rich, with a worldly-wise air and a mixed population of peoples and cultures, Thessalonica was apparently ready to entertain an itinerant evangelist talking about a new association that had sprouted from the roots of a known and respected ancient religious tradition.

Paul's letter is priceless evidence that his mission in Macedonia was successful. Were it not for the letter, we would never have imagined that people in Thessalonica would have found Paul's gospel attractive. That they did is evident from the signs of the Christ cult visible in Paul's offhand references to the congregation there. They were "called" into God's kingdom, had "turned" to God from idols, knew themselves to be "chosen," recognized Jesus Christ as lord, "imitated" the lord "in spite of persecution," were inspired by the spirit, regarded one another as brothers and sisters in the new family of God, and received instruction on how to live together in accord with a high standard of morality. Even if we allow for a Pauline perspective and a bit of exaggeration in the rhetoric, it does appear that the Thessalonians had formed a Christian congregation.

Paul's plan had succeeded. He had turned the Christ myth into a gospel capable of proclamation, and the proclamation had proven capable of winning adherents to form a congregation. It is the formation of the congregation that is telling, and the fact that it saw itself as the family or kingdom of God. The essential attraction must therefore have been similar to that for both the Jesus movements and the Christ congregations to which Paul had been converted, namely the invitation to join with others in the pursuit of a new social arrangement that dramatically expanded the (fictive) family of Israel's Father God. This fits with Paul's sense of mission, the urban setting of Thessalonica, and the presence of a Jewish colony there. And his emphasis throughout the letter on holiness, blamelessness, purity, and the Jewish

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A second letter to the Thessalonians is not Pauline. It lacks the personal warmth, reminiscences, and references characteristic of the authentic letters of Paul (Schmidt 1990). Almost one-third of it is a verbatim copy from the first letter. The signature is suspicious. And the eschatology reflects a development of Christian apocalyptic thinking of the kind that took place only after the Roman Jewish war around the turn of the first century. I mention it here as the most appropriate place for its discussion, but it adds nothing to our knowledge of Paul's gospel. Its only importance is in documenting the fact that Paul's letters continued to be copied and read after his time in the churches of Greece and Asia Minor and that those who belonged to his school continued to write letters in his name. This phenomenon, called pseudonymous writing, was a common practice and will be thoroughly explored in chapter 8. At this point it is enough to emphasize that, although the author of 2 Thessalonians belonged to the school of Paul, his concept of the eschaton was not Pauline.

In 1 Thessalonians there is mention of rescue "from the wrath that is coming" (1 Thess. 1:10) and the promise that "God has destined us not for wrath but for... salvation" (1 Thess. 5:9). A contrast between the rescue of some and the destruction of others was standard in many Jewish apocalypses, where the point was always a theodicy in favor of the righteous. Paul's mention of God's wrath must have been derived from this apocalyptic dualism. But Paul did not say with whom God was angry, nor would it have made much sense to the Thessalonians had he been more specific. Wrath was mentioned merely as the other face of God, the one that did not countenance immorality and uncleanness. This view of God's wrath changes dramatically in the second letter to the Thessalonians, where "the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance... on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. These will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction...." (2 Thess. 1:7-9). This does not sound like Paul, and it tells us that those who continued to work as preachers and teachers in the Pauline tradition had no trouble attributing new ideas to him. It was written by someone who was willing to name the target of God's wrath and who, contrary to Paul's own caution about timetables (1 Thess. 5:1), was eager to spell out a sequence

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of events that had to take place before the end finally arrived (2 Thess. 2:1-12). This person was apparently intrigued with Paul's apocalyptic scenario in the first letter to the Thessalonians, perhaps because it was an unusually graphic depiction, and he thought to use Paul's authority to validate his own version of the eschaton.

Another indication of editorial activity in the Pauline school should be mentioned. It has to do with the addition of some material to the first letter (1 Thess. 2:14-16). The person who made this change was interested in directing Paul's apocalyptic preachments against those who opposed the Christian mission and did so by inserting a small unit aimed specifically at the Jews who "killed Jesus" and "drove us out," for which reason "God's wrath has overtaken them at last." Nothing in all of Paul's letters comes close to such a pronouncement (Pearson 1971). The idea seriously tarnishes the inclusive logic of the Christ myth, and it presupposes the logic of Mark's passion narrative which, as we shall see, runs counter to that of the Christ myth. And since, according to this addition, it was the Jews upon whom God's wrath had (already) fallen, the reference must surely be to the destruction of the temple in 70 C.E., an event that Paul did not live to see. So Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians, written only as an occasional instruction, picked up layers of interpretation on its way into the New Testament. It was supplemented by the addition of a second letter to form a Thessalonian correspondence, copied many times over, edited as we have just seen, and used to claim Paul's authority for later versions of the Christian view of history and its apocalyptic finale. Looking back, it is doubtful that Paul would have been pleased.

THE LETTER TO THE GALATIANS

Paul's letter to the Galatians is much more important to our project than the Thessalonian correspondence. That is because the concerns addressed in the Thessalonian correspondence, though real, were ancillary to the core logic of the Christ myth. In Galatians, however, a situation developed that involved a critical challenge to Paul's gospel at the very center of its basic rationale. Other persons had entered the picture with "another gospel" (Gal. 1:6-7; 4:17) and, like some nightmare for Paul, were saying that the Galatian Christians would have to be circumcised (Gal. 5:2-12; 6:13). "Damn them," Paul wrote, "damn them" (Gal. 1:8-9). "I wish those who unsettle you would castrate themselves!" (Gal. 5:12). It is clear that a central Pauline nerve had been pinched.

We can't be sure exactly where this happened. The letter is addressed to a number of churches in Galatia, the Roman province in central Asia Minor (Gal. 1:2), a region in which Paul must have been active before reaching Philippi and Thessalonica, though the only record we have of that is Luke's later account in Acts. Exactly when he was there, whether on the journey that took him to Macedonia or earlier, how he discovered the situation that developed subsequently, and from where he wrote the letter are all matters of uncertainty. However, many scholars

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have concluded that the letter was written from Ephesus sometime between 52 and 54 C.E., shortly before Paul's Corinthian correspondence, also written from Ephesus. One thing is obvious from the letter, namely that Paul was well acquainted with the church or churches he addressed, for he felt no need to begin with the usual thanksgiving and commendation. He got down to business immediately, repeatedly alluded to specific aspects of the persons and views that had enraged him, and even dared to charge the Galatians with folly: "You foolish Galatians," he said, "who has bewitched you?" (Gal. 3:1).

Who were these "bewitchers"? They have often been called "Judaizers," a term that scholars have used to refer to Jewish Christian missionaries who followed in Paul's footsteps to counter his gentile mission of freedom from the law. There is very little evidence for such a movement, although part of Paul's argument does seem to implicate some connection with the Jesus people in Jerusalem. He mentions both "false brothers" at Jerusalem (Gal. 2:4) and "people from James" in Antioch (Gal. 2:12), both of whom insisted on the keeping of Jewish purity codes. But we need not think of a movement in general that was propagating such a view, much less one that was organized to hound Paul in particular. The question of what to do with gentile proselytes was, as we have seen, a burning issue throughout the Jewish diaspora, including Asia Minor. And wherever a Christian congregation formed in proximity to a diaspora synagogue, the question would have been raised by Jews and new Christians alike. It was to Paul's own advantage to insinuate that those who held such views had, in every case, infiltrated Christian circles from outside. The important observation is that in Galatia the issue had been raised after Paul had moved on. And at least some of the Galatians had apparently been persuaded that Christians should keep the Jewish laws.

This does not mean that Galatian gentiles were overjoyed at the prospect of being circumcised. Circumcision was the price they would have to pay for the benefits of full membership in the Jewish community. But that was Paul's point. If that's what they wanted, there was no need to be Christian (Gal. 5:2-4). So the issue was not just about circumcision but about really becoming a Jew in order to enjoy the benefits of belonging to the people of Israel. There is mention of the Galatians wanting to keep the law (Gal. 3:2; 4:21), their observance of special days, months, and years (a reference to the cycle of Jewish feasts and festivals; Gal. 4:10), and even the working of miracles (presumably by means of the power and protection granted by the Jewish God; Gal. 3:5). Thus the situation was serious. It is the first indication we have that gentile Christians, not Jews, questioned the credibility of Paul's gospel of freedom from the law. No wonder he was furious.

Paul developed two arguments in response to this issue. The first was that he had successfully defended his gospel in debate with James and Peter, the leaders of the Jesus people at Jerusalem. We have already noted the importance of this account for reconstructing Paul's conversion. The point he made of it in relation to the Galatian issue was that both his authority as an "apostle" and the content of his "gospel for

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thee uncircumcised" had been accepted even by the "pillars" in Jerusalem. We have to imagine that the Galatians already knew something about the Jesus people at Jerusalem and that the point of Paul's argument would have been understood, whether they accepted it or not.

The second argument was much more complex. And it is of enormous interest for our project, for it tackled the Galatian challenge to Paul's gospel straightforwardly, and it forced Paul to attempt a major revision of the Israel epic. If gentiles slid not need to become Jews and live like Jews, so the question can be phrased, how in the world could they claim to be Jews? Paul's strategy was to go back to the stories of Abraham where the beginning of Israel's promise and election were lodged. If Christians could not claim to be Jews, perhaps they could claim to be "children of Abraham." The thought was ingenious. If Paul could pull it off, he would have redefined the constitution of Israel and found a way to anchor the once upon a time of the Christ myth both in recent human history and in the epic of Israel. Paul's letter to the Galatians is actually a lengthy, passionate, and convoluted argument in support of that claim. It is the earliest recorded revision of Israel's history that tries to align the Christ myth with that history. It is the first systematic argumentation that the covenants foundational to Israel were set in anticipation of the coming of the Christ. It is the first elaboration of the Christ myth's logic that gentiles could belong to the people called Israel. And it documents the first serious effort to research the Hebrew scriptures as the way to support such a claim.

Briefly, Paul started with Abraham as the acknowledged patriarch of Israel, and among the stories of Abraham he found repeated mention of a promise God made to him that "his seed," or children, would be without number and that "all the nations would be blessed in him" (Gen. 12:1-3, 7; 15:5-7; 17:1-8; 18:17-19; 22:17-18). Never mind that the obvious reference here was to physical lineage. Never mind that the promise was made to Abraham and his children, while the blessing was for the nations. Notice, Paul said, that the blessing was promised because of Abraham's faith and righteousness, for "Abraham believed God," it says, "and it was reckoned to him as righteousness" (Gen. 15:6; Gal. 3:6-9, emphasis added). What happened, Paul asked, to the promise and the blessing? The promise to Abraham occurred 430 years prior to the revelation of the Mosaic law (Gal. 3:17). That means that the law was "added" to the promise, Paul said. Why? Because of transgressions (Gal. 3:19). The law, he said, could not make anyone righteous; it was a curse to those who relied upon it and served only as a guardian "until the offspring would come to whom the promise had been made" (Gal. 3:10-24). And who do you suppose that was? Since the law could not abrogate the promise, he concluded, the promise to Abraham must have been fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ who, like Abraham, was "faithful" and "righteous," and because of whom God had regarded the nations (gentiles) as "faithful" and "righteous" as well.

As one can see, subjects, objects, antecedents, and the plain sense of the passages in Genesis were all violated in order to put the construction upon them that Paul

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Copyright © 1995 by HarperCollins -- All rights reserved.

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5

PAUL'S LETTERS TO
GREEKS AND ROMANS

We have learned three things about Paul and his gospel from his letters to the Thessalonians and Galatians. The first is that he understood the logic at the heart of the Christ myth, a mythology aimed at justifying a mixed congregation of Jews and gentiles as the children of the God of Israel. The second is that, as he worked out the implications of that myth for his own mission to the gentiles, Paul's Jewish mentality determined every new construction he put upon it. This included such moves as appealing to the Abraham legends, arguing from the Jewish scriptures, imposing Jewish ethics, and creating apocalyptic scenarios in order to spell out the significance he saw in the kerygma at the bedrock of his gospel. And the third thing we have learned is that Paul's gospel was his very own construction. It was not the way that others in the Jesus movements or the congregations of the Christ understood the import of Jesus and God's plan for a kingdom.

And so, while Paul was preaching his gospel and trying to keep his congregations in line, the Jesus Christ movement was attracting adherents on its own initiative without much concern for the problem Jewish intellectuals were having with their law. And once the Christ myth was in place, in support of a novel social vision, Christian congregations found themselves with a most interesting myth on their hands. Social experimentation exploded, and the Christ myth spiraled out of control. It did not take long for those familiar with Greek mythology and Hellenistic mystery cults to catch the spirit of the resurrected Christ. And it did not take long for people with some knowledge of Greek psychology to translate the Christ myth into a symbol of personal transformation via contact with the spirit of Christ. If spirit (pneuma) was the all-pervasive element that gave the cosmos its structure and soul, as well as the primal principle that generated the spark of divinity in humans, and if the spirit of Christ was available to those who joined a congregation of the Christ, the sky was the limit as far as personal Christian experience was concerned. At Corinth, for instance, the Christian congregation became a place for a most amazing display of extravagant

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spiritual behavior, including ecstatic utterance, sexual license, mystical experience, poetic gifts, ritual power, and baptisms for the dead.

Paul was not prepared for such a display of personal spiritual aggrandizement. It made him nervous. It threatened both his Jewish sense of community and his Christian vision of the kingdom of God. He had to counter this trend, and in the shift of focus that occurred, from the gentile mission to the governance of the Christian congregation, Paul gave the Christ myth yet another twist. The Christ myth does set the pattern for Christian experience, he said. But notice that the crucifixion precedes the resurrection, and that, while the Christian may experience the "deaths" of past commitments, identities, practices, and desires, being "resurrected" to eternal life must wait until the eschaton. In the meantime, the cross of Christ should set the pattern for humility and service to one another in the interest of "building up" the congregation. And by the way, at the eschaton there would be a judgment to see whether everyone had lived in accord with this new ethic of service to the Christian community.

The Christ myth was not born of considerations such as these, nor did its elaboration demand them. It was Paul who focused attention on "the cross" (1 Cor. 1:18) instead of the resurrection and who added an apocalyptic framework to the mythology of Jesus Christ as lord. He did this to counter a fascination with the mythology of the resurrection he thought dangerous. It was a fascination many early Christians found irresistible. If one thought of the myth as a pattern to be imitated, it suggested an offer of spiritual transformation and transcendence. Paul thought such a cultivation of the Christ myth gave rise to personal religious experiences that ranked and divided the community by allowing some individuals to claim superior spiritual status. Paul had to be careful, of course. He had argued for apostolic authority on the basis of his own personal call. But that was a call, not an experience of the resurrected Christ. What if he put the two together, his call experience and the Corinthians' claim to experience the risen lord? Then he could argue that his call was an experience of seeing the risen lord, and that their experience should also be understood as a call to serve the Christian mission. And what was the Christian mission but the formation of Christian congregations? He did it, and it seemed to work.

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THE CORINTHIAN CORRESPONDENCE
At Corinth, Paul's gospel of freedom from the law and new life by means of the spirit of Christ spun out of control. Corinth was a lively new city, Greek to the core and thoroughly Hellenistic in spirit, although Roman in recent design. Its long and illustrious history as a prominent, independent, and smart Greek city, the city that watched over the crossing between Achaea and the Peloponnese, had come to an end at the hands of the Romans in 146 B.C.E. During the next one hundred years the Romans realized their role as a colonial power, and Julius Caesar rebuilt Corinth as a Roman colony in 44 B.C.E. It flourished, and in 27 B.C.E. Caesar, now Augustus, designated Corinth as the capital city of the Roman province of Greece. Corinth was hardly a match for Athens as a center for the continued cultivation of classical Greek philosophy and learning, but it was the city where Greek thought and culture poured into the mixing bowl of peoples and ideas that had been thrown together during the Greco-Roman age. It was a busy seaport and a center for commerce, industry, and the Isthmian games. There were temples and sanctuaries for Apollo, Aphrodite, Asclepius, Poseidon, and Demeter, as well as for Isis, Serapis, and the Asian Mother of the gods. Sailors, merchants, philosophers, and travelers passed through. Roman government officials, craftsmen, merchants, and performers contributed to a bright and bustling public life. And prostitutes brought Corinth fame as the city of sex, pleasure, and immorality. The temple of Aphrodite Pandemos

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("Goddess of love for all the people") overlooked the city from a massive acropolis and blessed the intercourse below.

Paul was hardly prepared for Corinth. He did receive an eager hearing for his gospel there, apparently, and he did find himself deeply involved in the life of this new congregation, returning to it again and again in person, spirit, and by letter, as he said, long after he had moved on to Ephesus and other places to continue his gentile mission. But Paul was not the only teacher to which these Christians were listening, and it is clear that his views on the meaning of the "cross of Christ" and the "law of Christ" were difficult for the Corinthians to accept and understand. They were impressed rather with the chance to experience the spirit of the new god called Christ and to manifest the spiritual signs that proved they had entered his kingdom. The way the Corinthian Christians displayed these signs of spiritual power produced a remarkable congregational behavior. Nothing we know about the Jesus movements or the congregations of the Christ prior to Paul's Corinthian correspondence, as fanciful as some of these other movements and mythologies were, is enough to explain what happened in Corinth. What the Corinthians did with the Christ myth therefore comes as a great surprise. Paul himself hardly knew what to make of it. The Corinthians saw the Christ myth as an invitation to experience the spirit of that spiritual realm over which Christ ruled, and they took delight in various forms of public display aimed at demonstrating their immediate contact with that spirit. Paul was alarmed. It was certainly not the kind of congregation he had in mind. We can see him backpedaling on freedom, changing his mind about the spirit, and being forced to take positions that seem to contradict his earlier views. Obviously, the problem Paul faced in Corinth was due to the fact that these Corinthians were thoroughly at home in the Hellenistic environment of Greek life and thought. Their reasons for being interested in the Christ myth were not the same as Paul's.

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THE LETTER TO THE ROMANS
Paul's letter to the Romans is a theological essay, quite different in content and style from his letters to other Christian congregations. One reason for the difference is that the occasion for writing this letter was not the same as with the others. The other letters were written to Christian communities where Paul had been active, and several of them had been written in response to questions that had arisen after Paul's departure. Most scholars agree that Paul intended to visit Rome, as he said, and that he wrote the letter to the Christian congregation there in preparation for his visit (Rom. 1:7, 15; 15:23-24, 28-29, 32). But he had not yet been to Rome, had not founded the congregation there, and thus was not personally acquainted with it.

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Another reason for the difference in style and content is that, based on his remarks in chapter 15 about finishing his work in Asia Minor and Greece and preparing to take the offering he had raised there to the saints in Jerusalem (Rom. 15:19-26), Paul was at a point in his career where setting forth a summary of his views would have been an understandable desire. In any case, the Romans essay is the most mature statement we have of Paul's religious ideas, and it must have been written with all his co-workers and congregations in mind, not just the Christians in Rome.

The letter is actually a comprehensive elaboration of Paul's gospel and thus the earliest systematic treatise we have of a rationale for Christian myth and ritual. Systematic theologians have often regarded it as the most important text in the New Testament, and it has played a profoundly influential role in the history of Christian thought from Augustine at the turn of the fifth century, through Martin Luther and the reformers in the sixteenth century, to Karl Barth and other Protestant theologians of the twentieth century. We need to remind ourselves that later theologians interpreted Paul's letter in the light of later Christian thought. What we now want to understand is Paul's own theology. And since the letter was not addressed to a specific congregational situation, the only background we have against which to highlight its conceptual achievements is the earlier work, views, and letters of Paul.

From the letter it is clear that Paul's purpose was to make the case for his gospel to the gentiles, and that he had gentile ears in mind no matter where they happened to reside. Romans is thus a programmatic essay of the type the Greeks would have called a protreptic, or reasoned argumentation for a particular philosophical position. The rhetorical style of the letter bears this out, for it moves through a set of theses elaborated according to Greek rules of argumentation, and it sets up straw men as opponents, which was customary practice in Greek schools of rhetoric and philosophy (Stowers 1981). This means that Romans gives us a marvelous opportunity to see Paul at work on the logic and significance of his gospel project as a philosophical or theological enterprise. The familiar Pauline building blocks are all present: the promise to Abraham; God's plan to include gentiles among his children; the argument against circumcision; the proclamation of the Christ myth; the contrast between living under the law and living by faith; the spirit of life; the body of Christ; the ethic of holiness; and the day of judgment. In each case, however, a change in nuance has taken place when compared with earlier letters. These conceptual refinements give an entirely new tenor to Paul's emerging system of thought. Some are changes in terminology, emphasis, or the interpretation of the significance of some feature of his gospel. Other shifts in Paul's thinking can be detected in the softening of sharp edges characteristic of earlier polemics. All of these turns are related to a single factor, namely Paul's desire to make his gospel understandable to gentiles. That was not an easy task, given the decidedly Jewish mentality in the core logic of the Christ myth. After all, the claim to know what the God of Israel intended for the world of Jews and gentiles lay at the heart of the whole intellectual enterprise. So spelling out his gospel plan of salvation for Greek ears to hear may

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not have impressed Greek philosophers uninterested in Jewish theological questions. But for gentile Christians who had been attracted to the congregations of the Christ for other reasons, Paul's attempt to translate the logic of the Christ myth into recognizable philosophical concepts may have given them something to think about. At least Paul had to hope so.

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THE LETTER TO PHILEMON
A runaway slave, Onesimus, joined Paul's company in Ephesus and became a Christian. What was Paul to do? He was personally acquainted with the slave's master, Philemon, also a Christian and apparently the host of a house-church in Colossae where Paul had been active (Philem. 1-2; cf. Col. 4:9). "In Christ" there was no longer slave and free (Gal. 3:28), but only "brothers and sisters" in the new family of God's children. In the Roman world, however, the institution of slavery was not in question, and the laws that governed the treatment of slaves were clear. Paul was in danger of abetting a runaway, and that meant full legal and financial responsibility for damages due to the owner for the loss of his slave. So Paul was faced with a serious dilemma. The question was not only what to do, but how to live in the Roman world as a Christian. What real difference did it make for a slave to join the fictive family of God? Paul the apostle and Paul the citizen were at odds, as were the kingdom of God and the Roman Empire, when faced with Onesimus. Paul's response was both practical and sage. In the last analysis, social relations in the new Christian community were a matter of attitude and regard, not a rejection

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of the social institutions and codes that governed life in the real world. So Paul sent Onesimus back to Philemon with this letter, asking Philemon to receive him without punishment as a "brother" and as Paul's own "child." Paul told him that Onesimus had been of service to him in his imprisonment (onesimos means useful), and for that reason Paul was thankfully indebted to Philemon even as Philemon was now indebted to Paul. Paul hoped that Philemon would welcome Onesimus even as he would welcome Paul.

This letter is an extremely valuable document. It spotlights an actual situation in which Christians had to confront the gap between the kingdom of God as a mythic ideal and Roman society as the real world in which they lived. After spending so much time in the fantastic worlds of Paul's lively imagination, seeing him struggle with practical considerations comes as a great relief. Here we learn that he fully understood the place Christians occupied as a religious association or a philosophical school within a larger, working society. He somehow understood what we would call the social function of myth. As with myths in general, the Christian myth was a projection onto the cosmic screen whose purpose was to imagine ideals, canvass desires, and create a space for reflecting upon the actual state of affairs. When confronted with this concrete case, however, Paul did not use the notion of the one body of Christ to question the institution of slavery. As he would put it in his correspondence to the Philippians, also written from prison at about the same time, Christians should be "blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, in which you shine like stars in the world," because "our citizenship is in heaven" (Phil. 2:15; 3:20). There is no indication that the Christ cult developed a social program aimed at calling the institutions of the Greco-Roman world into question. Paul's letter to Philemon shows only that the Christ cult fostered a certain circumspection with respect to the Roman world and that it could encourage critical thinking about social relations with the Christian ideal in mind.

THE PHILIPPIAN CORRESPONDENCE
Paul's letter to the Philippians is the icing on the Pauline cake. Paul is off guard. Preachments, polemics, and defensiveness are at a minimum. An especially close and friendly relationship with the Christian congregation at Philippi sets a tone of intimacy. Paul writes freely about his desires, joys, and sorrows. It is the closest we can get to an inside view of Paul's personal experience of the Christ.

The letter is actually composed of three letter fragments, accidentally saved as it appears and crudely joined together at some later time by those who collected the letters of Paul in the name of the Pauline school (Phil. 4:10-20; 1:1-3:1; 3:2-4:9). The first two seem to have been written from Ephesus around the time of Paul's imprisonment there (ca. 54-55 C.E.), or five to eight years after Paul first established the congregation in Philippi. Epaphroditus had arrived with gifts from Philippi for

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Paul's support, and Paul looked back on earlier occasions when the Philippians had sent their gifts to him (Phil. 4:15-18). Epaphroditus stayed with Paul for a while and suffered an illness before Paul sent him back to Philippi with Timothy, bearing a letter of thanks (Phil. 2:19-30). The third letter fragment is more difficult to place (Phil. 3:2-4:9). The address is missing and there is no express mention of the Philippian congregation. The situation addressed is also difficult to place, for Paul writes against persons who were pestering the congregation with the need to be circumcised and perhaps with extravagant views about spiritual perfection. It is possible that this third letter fragment was not originally addressed to Philippi at all but inserted between the other two letter fragments because of the personal tone. In any case, the Philippian correspondence is marked by unguarded statements about Paul's personal feelings.

What strikes the reader most is the contrast between the way Paul refers to the Christ myth and the way he writes about himself. The Christ myth is referred to matter-of-factly; Paul's own involvement with it is passionate. What we see is the extent to which Paul the apostle and preacher convinced Paul the person of the reality of the imaginary world he had constructed. The Christ myth fills the horizon even as he writes about himself, his imprisonment, his concern for the well-being of the Philippians, his conversion, his manner of life, and his desire to reach the goal at the end of his life, namely to "attain the resurrection from the dead," "the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus" (Phil. 3:11, 14). What a remarkable attestation of personal conviction in the objective reality of his gospel! It is also a remarkable self-disclosure for a Jewish Christian at the end of a twenty-year mission under the banner of a collective, corporate, social vision. Paul the person wanted to be saved! "I want," he said, "to know Christ and the power of his resurrection...; not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but... I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call..." (Phil. 3:10-14). Paul actually wanted to experience personally the power of Christ's resurrection, an event of transformation that he had proclaimed as a unique occurrence in the case of Christ and as an eschatological drama in the case of the collective destiny of Christians. How could Paul have become so enrapt in the thought of personally stepping into the mythic world of Christ's death and resurrection, "sharing his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead" (Phil. 3:10-11)?

The answer is that Paul's intellectual efforts to accommodate both Greek and Jewish ways of thinking in the interest of his gospel had affected both his imagination of the Christ myth and his own relation to it. He had been a missionary and broker of cultural merger since his conversion, a call to be an apostle to the gentiles, inviting them into the kingdom of Israel's God. But as the mission advanced, Paul's lofty vision of a single family of God for both Jews and gentiles had to be defended against those who championed conflicting values on both cultural fronts. Caught in the middle, Paul worked out his own definitions of the gospel by drawing upon each

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cultural tradition even as he drew the line against what he considered views an,~ practices that endangered the balance of cultures basic to the vision. In the course this mythmaking, the figure of the Christ became a dense, symbolic repository o two cultural mentalities and their patterns of thought. As we have seen, the Christ was overlaid with mythic and anthropological concepts from both the Semitic and the Hellenistic worlds. In Paul's mind, the Christ was now a historic person, now the son of God, a "corporate personality" representing a collective humanity, a cosmic king, a spiritual power pervading the cosmos, the hidden meaning behind the significant events of Israel's history, and the incarnation of the very mind, promise, and intention of God for humankind. That is an extremely dense symbol. A Jewish penchant for personified abstractions and divine agency merged with a Greek predilection for conceptual abstractions and cosmic order. The Christ had become an overwhelming, all-encompassing symbol of the agency of a Jewish God in a Greek world.

We need to add only one other ingredient to the picture in order to understand Paul's desire. It is the Greek notion of mimesis, or "imitation." Paul's discourse in Philippians turns on the desire for mimesis. He set forth the Christ hymn as a pattern to be imitated (Phil. 2:6-11). He described his own pattern of life as an example, be imitated (Phil. 3:7-17). He wanted the Philippians to imitate the "mind... that was in Christ Jesus" (Phil. 2:5). He wanted the Philippians to imitate his example (Phil. 3:17). And he himself wanted to "become like" Christ in his death and resurrection (Phil. 3:10-21). The concept of mimesis, to copy a pattern or an example, strikes deeply into the Greek tradition of philosophy, education, and ethical teaching (Castelli 1992). The English terms imitation and copy do not get at the significance of the concept. Pattern expressed structure, character, and the very being of things. To imitate the pattern of an example meant to become like it, to share its character and being. What had happened to the Christ symbol in the cultural merger was that a representative human figure had been deified as a cosmic spirit. And the Christ myth was the story of its transformation from the one to the other. The combination was apparently overpowering. Paul continued to resist the Corinthian temptation of claiming to experience the spirit of the resurrection before the eschaton. But he could not withstand the thought of becoming so like Christ in his death that he would personally experience the power of his resurrection. The question was, when would that resurrection happen? A close reading shows that Paul cleverly avoided the problem this created for his customary reservation of "the" resurrection for the final, collective apocalyptic drama. But the euphemism of "straining forward to what lies ahead... [to] press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus" belies the seduction of anticipating a personal resurrection in the near future. Paul would not be the only Christian unable to resist such a desire, as we shall see. Personal salvation as spiritual transformation, offered by imitating the Christ of the cosmos, would become the hallmark of a major stream of Christianity.

Copyright © 1995 by HarperCollins -- All rights reserved.
Only limited, "fair use" excerpts reproduced here.

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6

GOSPELS OF JESUS
THE CHRIST

War broke out in Palestine in the year 66 C.E. A ridiculous Roman procurator, Gessius Florus, was not able to control street fighting in Caesarea between Jews and Greeks over a property dispute next to the synagogue, or a public demonstration in Jerusalem to mock his pilfering of temple treasury funds. Two little sparks are all these were, but they landed in a tinderbox, and Florus left Jerusalem in retreat to Caesarea.

The political mood of Jews throughout the empire had been growing tense since the reign of Gaius Caligula, emperor from 37 to 41 C.E. Caligula had offended the Jews by planning to have his image placed in the temple at Jerusalem. Under Claudius (41-54 C.E.) and Nero (54-68 C.E.), who actively intervened in Palestinian politics without much wisdom, the situation worsened. The last Herodian king of Palestine, Agrippa I, who was knowledgeable enough about Jewish affairs to keep the peace in Judea, died in 44 C.E. A famine in 46 C.E., deteriorating economic conditions, a series of seven Roman procurators who were inept and hated, aristocratic family intrigues in Jerusalem, collaborations with the Romans, unpopular political appointments to the high priesthood, internal Jewish religious party strife, the emergence of several resistance groups, and a series of ruthless executions by the Romans set the stage for a popular uprising. No king, the wrong high priest, a compromised aristocracy, and a hated foreign power meant that the traditional structure of Jewish society had all but vanished.

Leaders of armed guerrilla movements took advantage of Florus' retreat from Jerusalem and vied for control of fortresses in Jerusalem, Judea, Idumea, and Galilee. Attempts to put down the resistance by Gallus, the governor of Syria, and Agrippa II, client king of cities in the north Transjordan, were not successful. In February of 67 C.E., Nero appointed Vespasian as special commander of Roman troops to suppress the Jewish rebellion, and Vespasian started his march toward Jerusalem. His troops easily routed what must have been a pitiful army of defenders in Galilee, quickly organized under Josephus who had been sent there by remnants

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of the temple establishment in Jerusalem. Galilean villages were razed, and fortress at Jotapata, a few miles north of Sepphoris where Josephus and his men h taken refuge, was overrun. Josephus survived the slaughter at Jotapata by deserting to the Romans, and Vespasian moved on to take control of Perea in the Transjordan and western Judea. He might then have taken Jerusalem except for a strategy of containment to let the several warring parties wear each other down. When Ne died in 68 C.E., Vespasian was acclaimed emperor by his troops and returned to Rome. The command of the Jewish war was then transferred to Titus, his son. In the meantime, chaos reigned in Jerusalem.

In The Jewish War, Josephus describes the confusion in Jerusalem during the temple's last two years (68-70 C.E.). Political factions were at war within the city. Leaders of various groups representing the aristocracy, the high priesthood, an Idumean party, Hasidic movements, and guerrilla bands from the several countrysides, including Galilee, had taken advantage of the confusion following Florus' retreat and converged on Jerusalem in the attempt to take control of the city. The reasons for the long list of intrigues, collaborations, betrayals, and internecine slaughters recounted by Josephus are difficult to follow. But one thing is clear. All factions were driven to desperate measures in the face of the Roman threat and the complete breakdown of social order throughout the land of Palestine. Many residents fled Jerusalem during these years, leaving the city to armed bands who fought each other to gain control of the temple and the citadel. It is also clear that, in addition to the uncontrollable surge of desires to press grievances, right wrongs, and gain political power, the reinstatement of the second temple was in everyone's mind. The office of the high priesthood. was contested, and contenders were slain. Faction leaders assumed the role of the king of the Jews and were killed. At the very end, when Titus invaded Jerusalem, he found only two faction leaders left, a certain John of Gischala who was hiding in a cave and Simon bar Giora, the ruthless leader of the Idumean faction who had come out on top. Titus found Simon standing in the temple clothed in purple robes. He leveled Jerusalem, sentenced John to life imprisonment, and took Simon back to Rome in chains for the traditional triumphal procession. After the procession, Simon was executed as the king of the Jews, Titus was deified, and the story of Rome's conquest of Jerusalem was memorialized on Titus' arch, still standing at the top of the Sacra Via in the ruins of the old Roman forum.

The Roman Jewish war destroyed more than a city, citadel, and temple. It brought to an end the history of the second temple. Jews of all persuasions had assumed the temple-state to be God's design for Jerusalem. But now the sacrifices ceased. The sacrificial system of priests, scribes, and courts came to its end. The establishment of the priestly aristocracies was gone. Dissenters such as the sect at Qumran no longer had any reason to exist, for they had hoped for an end to the current establishment of tainted priests, not for an end to the temple system itself. Now the temple lay in ruins. The city was desolate. The inhabitants who had not fled were sold into slavery, and the land became a Roman province.

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