A Social History of Christian Origins: The Rejected Jesus PDF
Preview A Social History of Christian Origins: The Rejected Jesus
A Social History of Christian Origins A Social History of Christian Origins explores how the theme of the Jewish rejection of Jesus – embedded in Paul’s letters and the New Testament Gospels – represents the ethnic, social, cultural, and theological conflicts that facilitated the construction of Christian identity. Readers of this book will gain a thorough understanding of how a central theme of early Christianity – the Jewish rejection of Jesus – facilitated the emergence of Christian anti-Judaism as well as the complex and multi-faceted representations of Jesus in the Gospels of the New Testament. This study systematically analyzes the theme of social rejection in the Jesus tradition by surveying its historical and chronological development. Employing the social-psychological study of social rejection, social identity theory, and social memory theory, Joseph sheds new light on the inter-relationships between myth, history, and memory in the study of Christian origins and the contemporary (re)construction of the historical Jesus. A Social History of Christian Origins is primarily intended for academic specialists and students in ancient history, biblical studies, New Testament studies, Religious Studies, Classics, as well as the general reader interested in the beginnings of Christianity. Simon J. Joseph is Lecturer in Early Christianity at the University of California, Los Angeles (CA). He holds a Ph.D. in Religion (New Testament) from Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of five books, including, most recently, Jesus, the Essenes, and Christian Origins. Routledge Studies in the Early Christian World Reconceiving Religious Conflict New Views from the Formative Centuries of Christianity Edited by Wendy Mayer and Chris L. de Wet The Slave Metaphor and Gendered Enslavement in Early Christian Discourse Double Trouble Embodied Marianne Bjelland Kartzow Between Jews and Heretics Refiguring Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho Matthijs den Dulk The Silencing of Slaves in Early Jewish and Christian Texts Ronald Charles A New Perspective on the Use of Paul in the Gospel of Mark Cameron Evan Ferguson Valentinus’ Legacy and Polyphony of Voices Piotr Ashwin-Siejkowski Carpocrates, Marcellina, and Epiphanes Three Early Christian Teachers of Alexandria and Rome M. David Litwa Living Martyrs in Late Antiquity and Beyond Surviving Martyrdom Diane Shane Fruchtman A Social History of Christian Origins The Rejected Jesus Simon J. Joseph For more information about this series, please visit: https://www. routledge. com/ Routledge- Studies -in -the -Early- Christian -World /book -series/ SECW A Social History of Christian Origins The Rejected Jesus Simon J. Joseph First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Simon J. Joseph The right of Simon J. Joseph to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-28849-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-28850-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-29880-9 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/b22959 Typeset in Times New Roman by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Contents Acknowledgments vi Introduction 1 PART I 25 1 The Jewish Problem 27 2 Jewish Jesus, Christian Christ 42 3 Theorizing Rejection 83 4 Criteria of Rejection 94 5 “Do This in Memory of Me” 101 PART II 113 6 “He Was Despised and Rejected by Men” 115 7 The Rejection of the Law 136 8 The Rejection of Israel 156 9 The Rejection of the Collection 160 10 The Jewish Rejection of Jesus 170 Conclusion 181 Bibliography 184 Index 240 Acknowledgments The publication of this study – my fifth monograph on the Jesus tradition – marks the culmination of a long-term research project focused on the relation- ship between early Judaism and Christian origins. Over the last five years, I have had the privilege of teaching full-time as Lecturer in Early Christianity in the Interdepartmental Program for the Study of Religion at the University of California, Los Angeles, CA. I would like to thank Carol Bakhos, Bill Schniedewind, and my other colleagues in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures for the welcoming academic environment within which I have researched and written this work. Teaching religion at a public university – in one of the most religiously diverse cities in the United States – comes with special challenges, not least of which is creating a safe intellectual space for critical discourse in the academic study of religion. The present work reflects this welcoming but chal- lenging discursive environment. Here I revisit a range of topics I have explored elsewhere related to the study of the historical Jesus, the Gospels, and Christian origins within a new critical framework utilizing the interrelationships of ethnic- ity, identity, and memory. I would like to thank Amy Davis-Poynter and Marcia Adams of Routledge for facilitating the publication of this study as well as the press’s editorial team for shepherding it through the publication process. I would also like to thank the three reviewers who made numerous constructive sugges- tions for revision. Special thanks to William E. Arnal and Zeba A. Crook for their constructive comments. This book is dedicated to my wife, Jennifer, who made it both possible and worthwhile. Introduction Skandalon, paradox, disowned, and “forsaken,” he walks the world homeless, like a ghost, wandering through the ruined remains of the ancient past, still searching for a friendly face or a willing hand. He comes to us now from that time and place, challenging our assumptions with his first-century Otherness. In a common cliché misattributed to Albert Schweitzer, the “quest” for the historical Jesus has been compared to peering into a well, only to find one’s own image and likeness,1 allegedly rendering such “quests” problematic insofar as the independ- ent researcher is unable to extricate their subjective presuppositions from their critical analysis of the historical sources. Schweitzer’s scathing criticism of such “quests” did not prevent him, however, from providing his own idiosyncratic interpretation of the historical Jesus. Nor has it deterred subsequent scholars from periodizing post-Schweitzerian research into different kinds (or even eras) of “quests.”2 Historically speaking, the critical study of Christian origins has long been “dominated” by ideological and “theological agendas,”3 particularly those appeal- ing to Christianity’s unique, exceptional, and/or incomparable status in the history of religion.4 Since the Enlightenment, however, the study of Christian origins has made significant advances by utilizing the methods and theories derived from the social sciences and the comparative study of religion.5 The category of religion,6 like all conceptual categories,7 is socially constructed.8 Like all categories, “reli- gion” can also be ideologically deployed and implicated in discourses of power.9 Nonetheless, Religious Studies (Religionswissenschaft), insofar as it relativizes and “subordinates” confessional truth-claims to the critical principles of analogy and comparison,10 problematizes the relationship between confessional and criti- cal perspectives,11 and so challenges the theoretical privileging of a sui generis conceptualization of religion,12 suggests that analogical comparisons drawn from other religious traditions can shed new light on the Jesus story.13 As an emergent “science,” the study of religion depends on and presupposes the description of “religious” phenomena, but also aspires to provide critical and theoretical expla- nations of “religious” phenomena.14 The posthumous publication of Hermann Samuel Reimarus’s Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes as anonymous “Fragments” explicating “The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples” (1774–1778), for example, DOI: 10.4324/b22959-1 2 Introduction has long been credited with introducing the concept of an essential discontinuity between Jesus and the early “Church.”15 For Reimarus, Jesus was born, lived, and died as a Jew, a failed political messiah whose disciples (falsely) claimed had been raised from the dead.16 Similarly, in 1835, David Friedrich Strauss published Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet, an exploration of the Gospel story as myth.17 Steering a middle way between rationalistic reductionism and apologetic super- naturalism, Strauss’ appeal to the language of myth was controversial in his day, but his “basic claims – that many of the gospel narratives are mythical in charac- ter, and that ‘myth’ is not simply to be equated with ‘falsehood’ – have become part of mainstream scholarship.”18 After Strauss, the category of myth became increasingly common in New Testament studies.19 The emergence of The Jesus Seminar in 1985 – 150 years after the publication of Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet – further explored the possibility of redescribing Jesus along critical lines of inquiry by carefully sifting through the sayings of Jesus, rendering the principle of discontinuity virtually axiomatic in Jesus Research.20 Since the mid-1990s, the Redescribing Christian Origins project has utilized a range of theoretical perspectives derived from the social sciences in identifying alternative methodological approaches to the study of Christian origins. These experiments include reconsidering the messianic conception of Jesus, the early Jerusalem community, and Paul’s use of the Greek term Christos, each analyzed as constituent elements in an emergent “Christian myth.”21 The study of Christian origins is thus now characterized by explorations of the power of myth,22 including the “myth of Christian uniqueness” (where “uniqueness” is virtually synonymous with and a cipher for superiority),23 the Christian “myth of persecution,”24 the Christian myth of Jewish persecution,25 and/or the “myth of a Gentile Galilee.”26 The idea that Jesus was a myth is now also part of this wider trend,27 although the key question here is whether critical scrutiny of the sources sufficiently war- rants this conclusion.28 The overwhelmingly vast majority of qualified experts in the fields of Biblical and Religious Studies hold that it does not. Nonetheless, it is now common to refer to Christianity in “mythic” terms, although this use of the term myth should not be confused with popular conceptualizations relegating myth to the realm of the irrational, the counter-factual, and/or the untrue. Rather, in this context, a myth is regarded as a legendary narrative of sacred origins,29 an “ideology in narrative form.”30 Accordingly, the figure of Jesus – that is, the first- century Jew described by Paul as “born of a woman,” “born under the Law” (Gal 4:4), “born of the seed of David according to the flesh” (Rom 1:3), and whose “brother” led a movement after his death (Gal 1:19; 2:9) – can be regarded as a mythic element in an emergent “Christian” tradition provided we understand the sacralization process in and through which Jesus became “messiah.” This appeal to the language of myth presupposes a critical historiographical principle: that the historical Jesus is theoretically distinct from the Jesus of the Gospels, the latter of which represents a historical figure transformed by post-Easter Christology.31 That is, there is no historical Jesus without the willingness, in principle, to distin- guish between the Gospels’ (re-)presentation(s) of Jesus and the historical figure Introduction 3 of Jesus, including the categories, characterization, and canonical boundaries of that figure.32 * This study is an exploration of the themes of social rejection and (dis)continu- ity in the early Jesus tradition.33 Previous studies have explored the relationship between the Jesus tradition and early Jewish texts, messianism,34 mysticism,35 asceticism,36 sacrifice,37 violence,38 and halakhic discourse.39 The present project expands on these studies by further exploring the social history of the Jesus move- ment in terms of ethnicity, identity, and memory,40 proposing a new explanatory model of early Christian origins as a sociological process of contradistinction fueled by the perception and experience of social rejection. Briefly, this study proposes that the rapid transformation of the early Jesus movement’s initial inclusion of Gentiles within a Jewish/Gentile binary into a Jewish/Christian dichotomy was the result of a socio-ethnic conflict within the Jesus movement that quickly developed into an ethno-religious conflict between “Jews” and “Christians.” This transformation produced the myth of the Jewish rejection of Jesus and later justified the Christian rejection of Jews. The rhetorical construction of “the Jew(s)” as rejecting (Jesus) in Paul’s soteriology facilitated the idea that “the Jew(s)” had rejected Jesus as a “people/ethnos” and that the covenant now belonged to “Christians.” Simply put, the social, ethnic, cultural, and theological circumstances in and through which early Christ-followers con- structed the mythic trope of “the Jewish rejection of Jesus” created significant “memory distortion” in the early Jesus tradition.41 The present project, therefore, is not intended simply to provide my own reconstruction of Christian origins; it is also intended to better elucidate the historical processes in and through which Christianity emerged as well as the discursive disciplinary framework within which reconstructions of Christian origins must proceed: the identification of Jesus as a first-century Jew within a structurally “Christian” discourse.42 The historical datum that “Jesus war kein Christ sondern Jude” has long informed critical biblical scholarship.43 The Jewish Jesus of history was native to the land, language, culture, customs, religion, and people of Judea. That is, the historical Jesus was an indigenous Judean.44 While the term indigenous is normally reserved for Native/First peoples who live within a complex nexus of land, language, and kinship relations,45 it is also a relational category that can be used more generally to describe politicized relationships and counter-narratives. As such, indigeneity acknowledges discontinuity, facilitates a diachronic critical analysis of competing and coexisting cultural contexts, and recognizes ambigu- ity in the construction of social identities navigating contested ideological terrain within a post-colonial context. The ongoing discussion over whether Ἰουδαῖος should be translated as “Jew” or “Judean” illustrates, for example, how appeals to Jesus’s Jewishness can profitably be seen as attempts to re-indigenize a Christian tradition still searching for its historical roots in first-century Judaism.
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