Session 6 How Jesus Became Christian - by Barrie Wilson
Ch 11 - The Jesus Movement Fades Away
Ch 12 - Paul the Radical
"What Christianity achieved in the post-Constantine fourth-century era represented the marketing victory of all times. It is especially ironic that a movement that started off as a radical challenge to the Pax Romana succeeded in becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire. ... But the victory came at a tremendous price. Simply put, the teachings of Jesus himself were smothered by the religion of Paul." ... p255

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Index Commentary Discussion References
Commentary - Jock
Wilson has shown us the early history of the Christian Church and the times that made it. Unlike the linear story presented in the New Testament, we've learned that there were huge historical forces in play, and a more complicated story needed telling. Wilson has challenged our religious understanding about Jesus and shown us the historical Jesus - that is, the religion OF Jesus. How Jesus' charismatic call to an awareness of the Kingdom of God meant a prophetic return to Torah and its Justice. We learn that the clash between Greco-Roman and Jewish culture led to much rebellion - including outright war. There were many dissidents and quite a few "messiahs".

When Jesus was crucified, his family and followers continued to share his vision for a better future. His brother James became its leader, and in every apparent respect, this earliest "church" (that Wilson calls the Jesus Movement) was still completely Jewish.

Jewish monotheism and morality was attractive to many Gentiles, and Jesus seemed to amplify this natural interest. The call for Justice is resonant when the world is full of exploitation. So the Jesus Movement under James was seriously responding to this new and greater audience. The Didache gave us an insight into this. The Jesus Movement was expanding into the larger world.

The New Testament tells us how Paul who had not known Jesus, had a powerful mystical direct experience of Jesus. It transformed his life. And by a combination of divine and human hand, a new synthesis came into history called the Christian Gospel. Wilson shows us these two views, not as complementary, but as a growing fight between sects.

Then this general Jewish rebellion led to war again and caused the Romans to destroy Jerusalem in 70 CE. No more temple. No more priesthood. From these ashes, the Pharisees raised the phoenix of Rabbinic Judaism. What a distilling force was the brutal suppression of all that had been Jewish. And what powerful distillates came from it.

I would seem then, that the vision of Jesus faded from history. Not so. Rather, four visions came forward. The Jesus Movement, Pauline Christianity, and Gnostic Christianity. The Gnostic tradition is not part of this study, though it was a significant voice in the early church. See links below. Briefly, it was another adaptation of Jesus/Jewish ideas into a pagan mystery format. From this time and place of grand historical fusion, the people that heard the voice of Jesus calling for justice, inclusion and holy hope raised up Christianity. Also the religious tradition that raised the voice of Jesus calling for reform, raised also up the new and vital Rabbinic Judaism. So do voices of dissent and insight move forward from their own time.

Now, in these two chapters, Wilson reviews the transition between the first two christianities - that of James and that of Paul. Of one fading, the other advancing. It is an effective presentation. But do keep in mind the sequence of time. (There is a good summary timeline in Wilson's appendices.) Luke and Acts were written somewhere between 90 and 120. That's four generations from Jesus, and three from James and Paul. A missing voice from this story is Peter's. There is little extant in the circles of current scholarship. And of course the Catholics consider him their first Pope.

Crossan in "The Birth of Christianity - Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus", makes note of more diverse circumstances in these early times. He traces the earliest church not to Jerusalem but to Galilee. There, the form of their activity he calls a "dialectic of itinerants and householders." Itinerants carryed the message of Jesus, householders provided the meeting places and the communal meals. This pattern was the essential structure that missionized the larger world. It is described in some detail in The Didache.

Crossan also references "the divided tradition". He calls these two, the "Life Tradition" and the "Death Tradition". The Jesus movement was about the the life and words of Jesus - about the obligations of God. The Pauline Church focused on the gift of God's salvation - about belief in a resurrected Jesus. Even the communal meal shifts focus. A sharing meal, becomes a memorial ritual. The Jesus Movement found itself anti-Rome for reasons of poverty and justice. But it was Paul that turned up the persecution angle. For Jesus to be proclaimed a "Son of God" and regarded as each Christian's "Lord" was just plain treason to Romans.

When Jerusalem was razed in 70, what had been the Jerusalem church had no home. The new Judaism had no need these Jesus sectarians. And the new Christianity was unabashedly Gentile. Where could the Jesus Movement go except by itself? Then under Constantine in 380, the new Christianity got official status and began to eradicate dissent by its own light. It's light by that time had changed from a candle to a fire. Heretics were rooted out. Their words silenced or burnt. Christians destroyed the famous library at Alexandria in 391. Some Christian remnants went to remote areas. Gnostics, Ebionites, the Ethiopian Church, The Coptic Church of Egypt, The Thomasine remnants in India, etc.

Wilson name the Shema, the Amidah and the Eurcharist as containing some of the power of ancient ritual. Indeed. The most ancient Jewish prayer us us the Shema Israel. The Call to the God of Israel. The second most ancient Jewish prayer song is the Amidah or 18 blessings - a summary of Jewish hopes. Below are moving performances of these prayer songs by modern performers. Then a celebration of the Eucharist in a Greek Orthodox setting together with some fitting words from Paul. Another sharing experience of the internet.

Wilson examines Paul in "Paul the Radical" and is primarily concerned to show his intolerance to "the Jews". He lays down the beginnings of his arguments that Christianity has long harboured anti-semitism. Paul radicalized the message of the Jesus Movement. In reaching out to Gentiles, he took the authority away from Torah. Jewish traditions became irrelevant. Even Paul's Jesus was stripped of his Jewishness. Even the Messiah tradition surrounding Jesus was changed from political understanding to spiritual understanding. So evolved this new/old religion Christianity.

Crossan also examines Paul. "In Search of Paul - How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom".

A new and startling idea of Crossan's is the idea that Paul poached the "god-fearers" from the Jewish synagogues all over the Diaspora.
    "We argue that Paul went to Jewish synagogues not to convert Jews (despite those stories in the Acts of the Apostles), but to "unconvert" their pagan sympathizers. That convert poaching was inflammatory in the highest possible degree. He was, where successful, stripping a local synagogue of some or all of its most important religious, political, social, and financial defenders, all still operating fully in the urban civic world. That central focus explains many big questions about Paul.
     First, his gentile converts could readily understand his theology, because they were already familiar with Jewish practices, traditions, and scriptures. Second, such convert poaching would have generated stiff opposition ... Third, that explains Paul's polemical descriptions of Judaism in his letters. ... Fourth, that explains why Paul could move so fast from one major provincial capital to another and could consider his work in the eastern Mediterranean finished when he wrote his letter to the Romans in the mid-50's. He was setting up small cells around those now Christian God-worshipers and letting them bring in other, purely pagan, converts. The Pauline express thundered along on God-worshiper rails, and Paul moved fast because he did not have to lay track." (prologue)
Paul was indeed a radical, as Wilson says. He was the one in the trenches so to speak, needing to think through the conversation with the pagan Roman world he was reaching with the Gospel. That is why the letters are so deep and so theological. They are not about the life of Jesus, the wisdom of his sayings, nor the call of Jewish law. In a chapter "Who and What Controls Your Banquet?", Crossan examines Pauls thinking things through. He shows us how thoroughly that world depended upon patronage - at all levels, and in all cases. He contrasts that with the Christian idea of brotherhood and sisterhood.

When Vesuvius buried Pompei and Herculaneum in 79 CE, it permitted our modern eyes to see how they lived. The principle unexpected thing was how people lived not separated in communities of priviledge, but together in the bonds of patronage. Paul's christianity was in this sort of place with it's small apartments. Houses were complexes of a few thousands of sqare feet. The principle families lived in the centre in some luxury, while the workers worked in workshops on the street perimeter with their living in dark apartments over the shops, everyone in close proximity separated only by social conventions. And because archives of papers survived the years, we know much of the ordinary aspects of ancient living. In this world, Paul's message must have seemed impossible and rediculous. Paul's vision was of cooperation, this world was highly competive. Paul's vision was of equality, this world was entirely about rank and privilege.

Again through the sharing of the internet, below are 2 excellent photo collections by Juergen Seim of Germany. Crossan uses this archeology in considering how the early church actually formed and practiced. This amazing revealing of Herculeum as the ash is now removed is a glimpse into the Greco/Roman world of Paul.

It was Paul's Christianity, not only that "won", but found ready ears to hear, and that took the Gospel through the ages. As Jesus had said, "Whoever has ears, let them hear." (matt 11:15)

Crossan idenitifies three "tectonic plates" of history: civilization - imperialism - that says first peace, then justice; anti-civilization - terrorism - that says first death, then peace; and post-civilization - utopia - that says first justice, then peace.

He says "Paul ... like Jesus before him, had a divinely mandated program that secondarily and negatively resisted imperial Rome, but that primarily and positively incarnated global justice on the local, ordinary and everyday level. Here and now." Then he finishes his book quoting Paul (Romans 8:35, 37-39).
Who will separate us from the love of Christ?
Will hardship or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present,
nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation,
will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.


Wayne's Commentary.

It is interesting that Wilson proposes that the appearance of the Gospel of Matthew and the Letter of James (reflecting the Jesus Movement of the early church) appear in the New Testament canon. Wilson believes that all the other books accepted into the New Testament canon were reflective of the Christ Movement.

James has always been a thorn in the side of Christian theologians who were strongly influenced by Paul. Our Protestant tradition, initiated by men link Luther and Calvin were profoundly upset with the presence of the book of James. James countered the "faith alone" arguments of Paul with a "show me by your good works that you have faith and I will believe you."

Luther called James "an epistle of straw," and wanted this book removed from the canon because James against Paul (in Galatians) and especially in Romans where the message was that "only those with faith are made right before God as their good works simply would not save them." The Roman Catholic Church has tended to do a better job of balancing the messages of James and Paul than has the Protestant tradition.
Summary of Discussion Notes
Question for Small Group Discussion:

Are the messages of James and Galatians truly competitive or are they complementary?

Feedback from Small Group discussion:

We should add the term "confusing" to "competitive" and "complementary" noted above!

Paul was a good politician. He was able to fit his message of Jesus into many diverse settings. There were obviously many schisms and factions in the early church but there was also an underlying commonality which we may forget if we listened only to Wilson.

The Jews, in their attempts at religious/cultural preservation were very reticent to assimilate into other religions and cultures. Paul had to distance himself from these exclusionist tendencies because of his understanding of the universality of Christ. We need to celebrate this about Paul.

Wilson makes a lot of the Jesus Movement, but how strong was it, really, during its heyday? How many belonged to it? 100? 500? 1,000?

Just how influential was James beyond Jerusalem?

Compared to this, Paul and the Christ Movement quickly garnered the numbers and the momentum. Do numbers and momentum make it true? No, but in the end, Christianity survived, then thrived, because of Paul and his achievement.
References Related to Chapters
HODOS "HODOS is a Greek term (meaning "way" or "path") used by early Christians to identify themselves as followers of the vision taught by Jesus of Galilee. This egroup aims to be a cyber community where people can be intentional in shaping their lives by the wisdom and the practice of the historical Jesus."
To put these discussions in some local perspective, one might say that our liberal mainline United Church is some considerable distance to the "right" from these folks.
Lately these lively discussions have included topics within Wilson's themes, particularly Church Origins, and Paul and Galatians. Check out some of these conversations, and perhaps subscribe to the list. If you are not a present member of Yahoo's free services, you will be asked to register.
HODOS
Paper
Christian Origins, Paul - a Paper by Dennis Dean Carpenter. As mentioned above, HODOS is a lively discussion forum that is presently discussing themes similar to Wilson's book. Here is a 20 page paper just written as part of that conversation. The conversation is highly theological and very current. It illuminates the way modern electronic discourse makes idea development more vital. The paper is also illuminating in its overview of 2000 years of theological thought of which it becomes a part.
SHEMA The Shema Yisrael. This is the most ancient of Jewish prayers. Here is a traditional rendition of the first part Det 6:4-9 on YouTube. Here is the text of the full traditional song in Hebrew together with English. And here is an excellent modern interpretation by Sarit Hadad after her father's death with English Subtitles. This last well communicates the power of this ancient prayer.
AMIDAH The Amidah, Shemoneh Esrei, or 18 blessings is also cited by Wilson. Here is it's history and the words. Here is a performance of it at Shavuot ( Christian Pentacost) with Wailing Wall and other Jerusalem footage.
EUCHARIST Wilson shows how Paul made the communal meal also into a ritual of resurrection. Here is a reverent summary of Paul's words with images from the Greek Orthodox tradition.
Part One
Part Two
Juergen Seim of Germany has posted two excellent photo-essays of Herculeum. It is mentioned in Crossan's study of Paul, and is a glimpse into that ancient world, where Christianity took root. About 9 minutes each. The restoration of the city is extensive now.
gnosis
.org
The Gnostics are mentioned by Wilson as one of the early significant streams of Christianity, but this book does not explore that stream. Much current attention is because of the discovery in 1946 of the Nag Hammadi library. This website is a good example of top scholarship and free distribution of information, not otherwise available. Including the Nag Hammadi texts. Here is a good introductory essay.
earlychurch
.org.uk
An excellent general history site in the UK for matters surrounding the early church. It has separate pages indexed for about 50 of the names that show up. Like Philo
Clicking the icon left will activate the e-mail on your machine and direct your comments to us. Comments are welcome and will be posted with usual editorial courtesies. St. David's United Church.Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Jan 2008