A Historical Introduction to the New Testament by Robert M
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A Historical Introduction to the New Testament by Robert M. Grant Introduction The purpose of this book is to deal with the New Testament (and other early Christian literature as reflecting the historical life of the early Christian Church. This literature was produced in this Church, by members of this Church, for the use of this Church. The Church is the primary historical reality which stands behind the literature, and without the ‘hypothesis’ of the Church the literature does not make sense. The New Testament consists of twenty-seven heterogeneous books which were written at various times and under various circumstances; some of them were accepted and used by Christians almost at once, but as a whole the collection was not universally, or almost universally accepted until the fourth or fifth century. It was the ‘mind of the Church’ which finally recognized the significance of all twenty seven books as setting forth the basic statement of what the earliest Christianity was. No other literature has anything of value to say about Christian origins and the earliest Christian movement. To be sure there are a few ‘traditions’ recorded in apocryphal writings or in the works of the Church Fathers, but their historical or theological importance is practically nil. In so far as they can be checked, they have to be checked in relation to the primary documents which the Church recognized. At the same time, the primary documents are not self-explanatory, as Christians have recognized since very early times. In our present collection we find four gospels, a book of Acts, fourteen letters ascribed (with varying degrees of plausibility) to the apostle Paul, seven general or catholic letters, and a book of Revelation. This scheme of arrangement does little to indicate the meaning and significance of the various writings. In order to understand them, we must look for the history which stands behind the books. This is to say that we are trying to deal historically with the New Testament writings. The central historical problems in relation to the New Testament can be defined in several ways, but before they can be approached we need to consider the periods into which early Church history can be divided. The question of periodization arose in the second century and has been examined by church historians ever since. Generally speaking, historians have differentiated three periods in the life of the early Church: 1) the period of the Incarnation, or the lifetime of Jesus of Nazareth; (2 the apostolic age, from the resurrection or the ascension to the reign of the emperor Nero; and (3) the sub- apostolic age, from Nero’s reign to some later date, not usually defined with any clarity. The real significance of this periodization is to be found not in the periods of time involved but in the characteristics of the Church’s life in the various periods and in the key events which mark the transitions from one age to another. In dealing with the characteristics and the events we must recognize that there were continuities and discontinuities; there was sameness and change. We must be on our guard against assuming too readily that either sameness or change was dominant. At the same time, we must remember that the community, usually conscious of its self-identity, was likely to lay more emphasis on continuity than can always be justified by the extant texts. The simple chronological periodization mentioned above may obscure significant changes related to the basic directions which the Christian movement took. First we should say something about the primary elements which provided continuity. These were to be found in (1) the relation of Christian disciples to the Old Testament with its revelation of God and its proclamation of his future acts; (2) the relation of Christians to Jesus and the community which he brought into existence, and (3) their life of worship and mission in this community. Without these elements there would have been no Church and there would have been no New Testament. But, second, these elements were expressed in different ways because of the different historical circumstances in which Christians lived and in which they carried on the mission. Several of these historical circumstances can easily be identified. (1) The first disciples of Jesus were called in Galilee and accompanied him to Jerusalem; even though there are occasional indications that they moved outside Judæa and Galilee, their primary location was in this area; their mission was addressed to Palestinian Jews; Jesus himself, as Paul said (Rom. 15:8) , was ‘minister to the circumcision on behalf of God’s truth’. It may even be possible, though the evidence is far from clear, to point to differences in emphasis between his proclamation in Galilee and that in Jerusalem. Certainly there are later differences between Galilean and Judæn Christianity. (2) There is also a difference between the life of the early Church in Jerusalem and the life of the gentile communities which gradually came into existence. This difference is reflected in Paul’s account of the Jerusalem council (Gal. 2) and in the viewpoints set forth in the materials in Acts which describe events from the standpoints of Jerusalem and of Antioch. The difference is also present even within the Gospel of Matthew, with its two contrasting statements, Go not into a way of the gentiles, nor enter a Samaritan city’ (10:5) and ‘Go, make disciples of all nations’ (28.19). (3) There are differences in the ways in which early Christians looked back at the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Not only are there differences between the Gospel of John and the synoptic gospels as a group; there are also differences between each synoptic gospel and the others and between each and John. To some extent these differences can be explained if we attempt to provide historical settings for the various books and relate them to the life of various kinds of community. (4) There is also a difference between the literature which is clearly apostolic and that which is less certainly so. The most obvious example is to be found in II Peter, with its mention, of the Christian goal as sharing in the divine nature (1.4) and, of entrance into the eternal kingdom of Christ (1:11). In II Peter the earlier idea of the kingdom as inaugurated by Jesus but still to come in power has disappeared. The future coming of Christ has been almost entirely neglected in favour of his past coming (1:16). Another example probably occurs in the Pastoral Epistles as a group. In them the primary emphases of the major Pauline epistles have been, so to speak, domesticated. They reflect the life of churches which live in relation to ‘faithful sayings’ and are concerned with organizational problems. (5) At the end of the New Testament period come the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, in which we see how the gospel and the life of the Church are being still further interpreted in relation to new environments and new circumstances. There is a difference between these writings and the earlier documents which cannot fully be explained simply in relation to their settings. In the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, as in II Peter and the Pastoral Epistles, the Church has almost become ‘established’ -- not in relation to the State, but in some measure in relation to the various cultures of the Græco-Roman world. This movement becomes more clearly defined as we move through the Jewish and gentile forms of Christianity in the early second century towards the works of the Apologists. Our purpose in discussing the history of the New Testament is to see how the Church came into existence, what its life was like, and how it expressed its mission in relation to the various environments in which it lived. Our starting point and our ending point will be the same: the Church as the congregation of believers brought into existence in response to the event of Christ. This event includes his ministry in Galilee and Jerusalem and his crucifixion, but it finds its climax in his resurrection, which can be defined as the creation of the new community. Even though Luke, like the later Gnostics, set an interval between the resurrection and the origin of the Church, such an interval is nowhere reflected in the Pauline epistles, and we may suppose that it is due to an attempt to provide historical periodization at a point where it is not really useful. The Church is the resurrection community; the apostles were apostles of the risen Lord. Our purpose in dealing with the materials provided by the New Testament and other early Christian literature is not, however, simply to make affirmations or pronouncements about them. It is to deal with these materials in a sober and cautious manner in order to show what is actually known, what is actually not known, and how we can perhaps proceed from the known to the unknown. This is not to suggest that the documents or their contents will somehow miraculously arrange themselves in order to prove our points. There is a kind of dialogue between ourselves and the materials, a dialogue in which we do not lose our own subjectivity although we may hope that it will be modified by what the materials say. We do not necessarily or entirely become ‘objective’; but we check our own subjectivity in the light of the subjectivities of those who created and transmitted the materials and (it may be) in the light of others farther back in the chain of tradition. This kind of checking is what one can hope to acquire by means of critical methods.