CHRISTIANITY, DIASPORA JUDAISM, AND ROMAN CRISIS

Robert M. Price

Acts of the Apologists

I Ž rst came to the study of the Bible as a would-be theologian, which meant I wanted to take the great menagerie of texts and genres and feed them into a meat grinder that would give me neatly packaged sausages called “ theology.”1 It was, as some Postmodernists like to say, “Logocentric,” at least an exercise in abstraction. I wanted to press Scripture into the service of so-called Systematic Theology. When I thought I had jumped the track and changed my focus to New Testament and Early Christianity as a descriptive discipline, lit- tle did I suspect I was still trying to play the same game. I was try- ing to construct an abstract template of “Christian Origins,” as church historians had always done, and then Ž t all the data of the New Testament and the Church Fathers into that symmetrical systematic outline. I began with the traditional outline, accepted by Christian historians since Eusebius in the fourth century. According to this schema, Christianity began with Jesus Christ who taught true doc- trine to his disciples, the apostles. The sum and substance of this faith was preserved in the Apostles’ Creed. The apostles in turn taught the true doctrine to their appointed successors, the bishops, who in turn trained their own successors, the next generation of bishops, and so on down the line. As the o Ycial version had it, Satan waited till the last of the original apostles died and then began to train and send out heretics to corrupt the church with false doc- trines. Had the devil not done this, there would have been no real diversity of belief or practice among Christians. And since it was the devil’s doing, the approach to diversity could not be one of friendly

1 Gerhard Loh Ž nk, The Bible: Now I Get It: A Form Criticism Handbook (Garden City, 1979), p. 65, illustration by Bill Woodman.

©Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2002 Review of Rabbinic Judaism 5.3 christianity , diaspora judaism , and roman crisis 317 dialogue. No, it had to take the form of suppression, polemic, even- tually of persecution. It was war, not love. But eventually I began to see the wisdom of more recent schol- ars like Ferdinand Christian Baur, Walter Bauer, Walter Schmithals, and others, 2 who had redrawn this map. They showed in great detail how the texts of the New Testament and other early Christian writ- ings made much better sense if you pried the traditional puzzle apart, reshuZed the pieces, and started over again. The approach was more inductive, derived from the data read as much as possible on its own, not deductive, trying to make the facts Ž t a later creed super- imposed on them in the name of institutional dogma. 3 History began to be done for its own sake, not to reinforce a party line. It was coming to be real history, not just theology in disguise. Naturally, there is never any complete escape from systematic paradigms as heuristic tools through which to construe the data as data, as Collingwood 4 would remind us: evidence for what? Without some theoretical framework through which to Ž lter raw data, we are left dumbly facing the blooming, buzzing confusion of the undi Verentiated manifold of perception, as we do every day until the evening news tries to make sense of it for us. But the paradigm we employ may arise from our consideration of the data themselves, insofar as we can momentarily shelve our expectations about them and approach them with Zen-like wonder. Or the paradigm can be imposed out of some extraneous interest (and it is this that we hope to avoid). In this sense at least, we may

2 Ferdinand Christian Baur, Paul the Apostle of Jesus Christ, His Life and Work, His Epistles and His Doctrine (London, 2nd ed., vol. I, 1876, vol. II, 1875); Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (Philadelphia, 1971); Walter Schmithals, The OYce of Apostle in the Early Church (New York, 1969); Schmithals, Gnosticism in Corinth (New York, 1971); Schmithals, Paul and the Gnostics (New York, 1972); Schmithals, Paul and James (London, 1965); Schmithals, The Theology of the First Christians (Louisville, 1997); James M. Robinson and Helmut Koester, Trajectories Through Early Christianity (Philadelphia, 1971); James D.G. Dunn, Unity and Diversity in the New Testament: An Inquiry into the Character of Earliest Christianity (Philadelphia, 1977); Burton L. Mack, The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins (San Francisco, 1993); Who Wrote the New Testament? The Making of the Christian Myth (San Francisco, 1995). 3 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scienti Žc Revolutions (Chicago, 1962). 4 R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (New York, 1956), p. 281: “ Nothing is evidence except in relation to some de Ž nite question.” Cf., Stanley Fish: “ some- thing very important about evidence: it is always a function of what it is to be evi- dence for, and is never independently available” Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, 1980), p. 272.