The New Testament and the People of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God Book 1)

by N.T. Wright

Can we be sure that anyone would ever understand Acts 1–4, or indeed the beginning of Act 5, well enough to make all the required moves in the later parts of Act 5? The answer must surely be no.

Hence, the necessity of humility and charity.

To sum up: I am proposing a notion of ‘authority’ which is not simply vested in the New Testament, or in ‘New Testament theology’, nor simply in ‘early Christian history’ and the like, conceived positivistically, but in the creator god himself, and this god’s story with the world, seen as focused on the story of Israel and thence on the story of Jesus, as told and retold in the Old and New Testaments, and as still requiring completion.

with knowledge comes complexity.

Western Christian scholarship is in the middle of a long-drawn-out process of repentance for having cherished false views about Judaism.

I shall be attempting to uncover the worldview of second-temple Judaism by means of a study of its key aspects: the regular practical day-to-day life, the physical symbols such as the Temple, the retellings of the nation’s story, and in particular the belief-system, the set of basic answers to basic questions that can be securely inferred from the mass of data at our disposal.

the present mood in the study of first-century Judaism is in my view overly atomistic and positivistic.

Second, the atomistic readings which I am implicitly criticizing are themselves just as much ‘interpretations’ as my own.

Third, as a matter of fact the boot is on the other foot. I intend to describe the authentic first-century Jewish worldview, so often obscured in subsequent Christian reflection, in order thereby to correct some normal ‘Christian’ understandings of Jesus, Paul and early Christianity.

Many ‘Christian’ readings of the gospels have screened out the political overtones of Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom;

The critical realism I am advocating must go beyond any merely inductive approach. The circle of literature, history and theology can be broken into at any point.

literature itself is (as we saw earlier) part of a wider circle which includes symbol, story, question and praxis. There is therefore a good deal to be said for studying it as part of that larger whole rather than in a position of privileged priority.

The sources which are particularly relevant for our purposes are those which reflect the situation in Palestine before the two great rebellions of AD 66–70 and 132–5, and particularly before the first of these.

The most important non-Christian source is of course Josephus, whose two great works The Jewish War and The Antiquities of the Jews dominate the landscape, and whose shorter autobiographical Life and defence of Judaism Against Apion also constitute valuable material.

Behind Josephus there stand the first two books of the Maccabees, and the two subsequent books which continued to retell the same story from different perspectives, and which thereby reveal something both of the events to which the books purpo...

The rabbinic literature, which all comes from a later period when circumstances had changed dramatically from those which obtained in the middle of the first century, contains much valuable material which, when carefully pr...

As Jacob Neusner says: From the rabbinic traditions about the Pharisees we could not have reconstructed a single significant, public event of the period before 70—not the rise, success, and fall of the Hasmoneans, nor the Roman conquest of Palestine, nor the rule of Herod, nor the reign of the procurators, nor the growth of opposition to Rome, nor the proliferation of social violence and unrest in the last decades before 66 AD, nor the outbreak of the war with Rome … 9 It is wise, therefore, to treat the...

We are on safer ground by far in using the apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, and the Scrolls, as witness to Jewish attitudes in our period; though of course with those too we must constantly remind ourselves that by no means all Jews knew and read t...

The Targums, translating the archaic Hebrew into a contemporary Aramaic, and adding some explanatory material as they did so, eventually became a fixed tradition in their own right. A good many of the apocryphal and pseudepigraphical works, and of the Scrolls, consist in large part of new ways of reading the same old texts, of making them available to address the needs of a new generation. The grids of interpretation thus offered constitute the key variations in the first-century Jewish worldview.

After Alexander conquered Palestine in 332 BC, in all sorts of ways things were never the same again. For a full three hundred years before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, Greek influence had been everywhere. Greek was everybody’s second language, everybody’s second culture.

The Qumran sect, who set themselves apart from all things pagan (and a good many things Jewish, too) used language and ideas which themselves borrowed from a variety of Hellenistic sources.

Any idea of a hidden curtain between Judaism and Hellenism, in the sense of a geographical line at which it might be said that the one stopped and the other began, must be completely rejected.

Rome kept the peace by means of military might, crushing dissent and resistance with ruthless efficiency. Taxes had to be paid to Rome as well as to one’s local country, taxes which were used to keep Rome in luxury while her massive empire continued in relative or actual poverty.

Perceiving that the Jews would rather die en masse than offer pagan worship, the pragmatic Romans permitted them instead to sacrifice to their own god on the emperor’s behalf.

Rome needed Palestine for part of her corn supply, and as a safeguarding of the larger supplier, Egypt; the whole area also provided, for Rome, a Middle-Eastern buffer zone against the major threat of Parthia. Palestine was not just a backwater of the empire. It was important to Rome strategically, militarily, and economically.

The prevalence of all these deities meant that the average town or city was full of reminders of the pagan way of life: temples, shrines and altars; sacred pillars and cult-objects, some shocking to a Jewish conscience; sacred prostitution everywhere; sacrificial animals being taken for slaughter, their meat to be offered for sale in the markets. Pagan religion in one form or another was taken for granted. The Jewish (and then the Christian) protest that there was one god, who required none of these things and indeed hated them, came as a major challenge to a long-established worldview.

Since paganism basically deified different parts of, or forces in, the natural order, it was not an odd step either for some, such as the Stoics, to see all the parts coming together and producing pantheism, in which god is everything because everything is god.

One of Stoicism’s major competitors, the philosophy of Epicurus, moved in a different direction: the gods exist, but they live a life of blessedness removed from the world inhabited by humans. Epicureanism, at the theological level, thus offers a kind of proto-Deism.

The larger question, though, concerns the extent to which a serious systematic Gnosticism already existed prior to the rise of Christianity. A hypothesis to this effect used to be widely believed, and was the basis for much of Rudolf Bultmann’s reconstruction of early Christianity. It has come under severe attacks in the last forty years, and many have abandoned it; but there are signs that it is making a comeback,

And if the Jews had no image of their own god, how much less would they worship those of others. The Jews thus appeared as a strange race, who kept to their own ancestral customs even when away from their land, and who were potentially a danger or threat to society.

In Palestine, of course, it was exceptionally galling for the Jews to find themselves confronted with paganism being practised on their own territory, and this inevitably fuelled anger and resentment against all who were seen as representatives of Hellenism.

The self-understanding of Jews at this time was determined by the pressing question as to whether they should attempt to be distinct from this alien culture, and if so how. Pressure to assimilate was strong in many quarters, as is suggested by the evidence for Jews attempting to remove the marks of circumcision.

Judas Maccabaeus and his companions accomplished the unthinkable, and organized a guerrilla revolt that drove out the tyrant. Three years to the day after the Temple’s desecration (December 25, 164 BC) Judas cleansed and reconsecrated it. A new festival (Hanukkah) was added to the Jewish calendar.

Most Jews—the ones who wrote no literature, led no marches, had no voice—struggled to maintain their livelihood and their loyalty, their allegiance to national and cultural symbols, as best they could, always under the social pressures of warring theologies. It was this pluriform response to the ambiguities of the second century BC that created the pluriform Judaism known by Jesus and Paul.

Granted this mood, it was perhaps inevitable that Herod the Great (37–4 BC) would never be accepted as the genuine king of the Jews.45 He made every effort to legitimate himself and his successors as genuine kings: he married Mariamne, who was the granddaughter of Hyrcanus II and thus a Hasmonean princess; above all, he set in motion the rebuilding of the Temple, as the true coming king was supposed to do.46 But his actions had the opposite effect from that intended. The rigorists saw the new Temple as thoroughly ambiguous, and never accepted any of Herod’s successors as the genuine heaven-sent leader for whom some of them persisted in waiting.

Revolution remained in the air during the early years of the new century, and, after the revolt led by Judas the Galilean in AD 6, Rome deemed it safer to make Judaea a province in its own right.

Pontius Pilate, the third of the Judaean prefects (AD 26–32), was one of a line, perhaps no worse but certainly no better than most of the others. Isolated protests were put down with sporadic violence, and the embers of potential rebellion smouldered on, ready to be fanned into flames of expectation and aspiration. Sooner or later the covenant god would act once more to vindicate his name, to restore the symbols (particularly the Temple) which expressed his covenant with Israel, and of course to liberate Israel herself.

Belief that the covenant god would step into history and act to vindicate himself and his people is not necessarily the most efficient basis on which to plan a military uprising. It led to a fissiparous situation in which different factions, each believing that they were the true chosen warriors, fought against each other with as much or more violence as against the Romans.48 As more than one would-be prophet had predicted, the Romans were bound to be the eventual winners. The Temple was burned, and the city taken, in AD 70; Masada followed in 74.

The new rabbinic movement, bitter and grieving over the loss of Jerusalem and the Temple, organized itself (so this view holds) into a great Synod at Jamnia and introduced measures which effectively excluded Christians.

The young church, flexing its muscles, responded to polemic with polemic. Sayings, many of them bitterly hostile to Judaism, were put in the mouth of Jesus, even though they reflected the conditions in the 80s and 90s rather than the period of Jesus’ own ministry or the first generation of the church. A sense that the gospel and the Torah were incompatible grew up for the first time. In many works that have taken this line, there is the constant implied suggestion: if only we could get back to the pure early period, prior to such hostility, how much happier things would be.52 Sadly for that noble hope, history simply does not support what has recently been called ‘the “Council of Javneh” Myth’.

The myth has been easy to perpetrate, because of our comparative ignorance about the two generations between 70 and 135, on either the Jewish or the Christian side.

When we attempt this task strictly on the basis of the sources, we find a picture very different from the popular one imagined by recent apologists. It looks roughly as follows.

The destruction of the Temple created, not one reaction, but a variety.

We must, instead, envisage a Judaism which comprehended at least three strands: (a) the anguish of 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch, lamenting the fall of the Temple as if their hearts would break; (b) the pragmatism of Johanan ben Zakkai, calmly recognizing that Hosea 6:6 had long ago spoken of Israel’s god desiring deeds of lovingkindness rather than sacrifice; and (c) the smouldering fire of rebellion, crushed once again by pagan might but seeking nevertheless the way by which to reverse the catastrophe and to build the true Temple.56 (We might also include (d) the young Christian church, still thinking of itself as in some way part of a wider ‘Judaism’ but interpreting the fall of Jerusalem in the light of its own theology.)

is highly probable that Johanan ben Zakkai, regarded uniformly by much later Rabbinism as the new founder of Judaism, established an academy at Jamnia, a small town near the coast about fifteen miles south of modern Tel Aviv and about twenty-five miles east of Jerusalem.

Gradually—it can only have been a gradual process—this academy began to exercise an authority over Jews still living in Palestine comparable with that held by the old Sanhedrin in Jerusalem.

The theory has been advanced that Jamnia propounded a modification of the twelfth clause within the ancient prayer known as the ‘Eighteen Benedictions’, which invoked a curse on heretics in general and Christians in particular and thus made it impossible for Christians to continue worshipping in synagogues, which, according to this theory, many of them had been happily doing until this point.

However, though there is good reason to trace the developing story of worsening Jewish—Christian relations along a line which, beginning very early, sooner or later intersects with the promulgation and popularity of such an anti-heretical ‘benediction’,64 it must also be noted most clearly that ‘there is little evidence for “witch-hunting” in general and anti-Christian activity in particular’ in the period between 70 and 135.

Some of Kimelman’s conclusions are worth quoting in full, since in the decade since his article was published they have not had their full impact even though they have never been refuted: There is no unambiguous evidence that Jews cursed Christians during the statutory prayers. There is abundant evidence that Christians were welcome in the synagogue. Thus birkat ha-minim does not reflect a watershed in the history of the relationship between Jews and Christians in the first centuries of our era. Apparently, there never was a single edict which caused the so-called irreparable separation between Judaism and Christianity … 69

This period of transition came to an abrupt and bloody end with the rebellion against the emperor Hadrian in AD 132–5.70 Hadrian had passed a law forbidding circumcision as a barbaric practice (the Jews were not the only people who practised the custom, but the ban struck them especially due to the centrality of circumcision within their worldview). He had also founded a pagan city, Aelia Capitolina, on the site of ruined Jerusalem, with an altar to Zeus on the site of the Temple itself.

Simon ben Kosiba began a revolt which quickly roused the whole land. He himself was hailed as Messiah by the great rabbi Akiba, among others, and given the title Bar-Kochba, ‘Son of the Star’ (referring to the prophecy of Numbers 24:17).71 Not everyone agreed with this designation: some sages controverted Akiba, perhaps for reasons of speculative chronology, while the Christians resident in the area, recognizing a rival to Jesus, refused to join in the movement and (according to Justin and Eusebius) were accordingly subjected to fierce persecution.