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Social tensions rooted in culturally conditioned values, taboos, and attitudes toward the other are not easily overcome.
And so it was that martyrdom came to represent the ultimate test of virtue, and obedience unto death the ultimate display of one’s strength of character.
the point should be made that the Christ myth was not a narrative of Jesus’ passion as we find in the later gospels.
But its first conception had little to do with historical reminiscence and no interest at all in setting the event in any historical context.
Thus the Christ hymn was the result of a Christian protestation to have no king but Jesus.
But what an audacious claim! Compared with other kingdoms of the world, or even with other groups with roots in ancient ethnic, national, or religious traditions (such as the mystery cults, associations, or Jewish synagogues), these Christians were nothing more than little ad hoc cells of unlikely people experimenting with a novel social notion. They had no status, no power, no cultural tradition of their own. And yet here they were, no longer thinking of themselves on the model of an association, content to promote a teaching, philosophy, or social vision. They were thinking of themselves as
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The Christ cult was not a worshiping community with an orthodox creed. It was a social space for those who wanted to create a brave new world.
the dialectic Paul worked out, favorably comparing Christ and Abraham while setting Jews in opposition to Christians, was destined to play a decisive role in the history of Christian thought.
And the third thing we have learned is that Paul’s gospel was his very own construction. It was not the way that others in the Jesus movements or the congregations of the Christ understood the import of Jesus and God’s plan for a kingdom.
All these gods from the east, whether the God of Israel, Isis of the Egyptians, or the Christians’ lord, shared a fundamental advantage in comparison with the gods of the Greeks, including Zeus. They were sovereign, transcendent, and in charge.
Christians invaded the thought world of the Greeks with a message about a different kind of God, one who was not only the creator of the world, revealer of law, and guarantor of justice, but whose primary concern was the well-being of his people.
The attraction of the Christian message was that one might have contact with the highest God, and that such contact would be inspiring, not frightening.
And freedom from social pressures to conform, as well as strength of personal integrity, was the standard, bottom-line ideal among most schools of popular ethical philosophy. There was even a strong stream of Cynic tradition to the effect that it did not matter whether one was ascetic or indulgent with regard to such things as sex and food, as long as one knew that such things did not really matter.
Actually, it was Paul’s Jewish sensibility that was offended. He found himself confronted with a social arena in which individuals were showing off their different spiritual gifts, differences of opinion were taken for granted, and competition motivated the drive for superior achievement in knowledge or spiritual power. None of that would have violated traditional Greek sensibilities. But it did violate Paul’s Jewish anthropology and sense of propriety that underlay his social ethic.
It was one thing to say that gentiles need not be circumcised and that adherence to the rituals of purity did not automatically confirm either Jew or gentile in the new kingdom of God. But it was quite another to behave as if common codes of morality no longer applied.
Paul thought them arrogant and licentious. It just would not do for Christians to behave that way.
The positions Paul took were all rooted in his Jewish convictions about the importance of purity for the people of God.
With the world whirling around without and the passions stirring up desires within, all agreed that the mark of the truly superior person was self-control. It was the mark of excellence for judging one’s character, education, virtue, composure, integrity, and self-esteem.
Mark’s story was what the Greeks would have called a “life” (bios). It was a biography. Just as the Greeks would have done, Mark took the many little sayings and stories of Jesus that were available to him from earlier traditions and used them to create a new image of Jesus.
But the teaching was not to be understood in opposition to, or as a substitute for, the law of Moses. Instead, the teaching of Jesus was the very standard by which true adherence to the law of Moses would be judged.
This severance of all ties with “the Jews” was radical. It was not accompanied by any sense of mission, either to Jews or to the world. Instead, the Johannine community retreated to form an enclave of the enlightened ones.
That Christians have apparently had no trouble regarding these letters as authentic demonstrates just how important the apostolic fiction is to the Christian imagination.
Thus the author created a marvelous fiction in order to place a church manual of discipline from the mid-second century at the very beginning of the apostolic tradition.
These codes were based on a widespread cultural definition of honor and shame and were spelled out in a hierarchical ranking of authority. Thus there were certain behavioral requirements for fathers, mothers, children, women, slaves, and friends as they related to one another. In the pastoral letters of Paul, these household codes were set forth as if they were a new instruction.
The sayings reminiscent of the teachings of Jesus are not given special privilege and are not even attributed to him as their author or authority. The voice throughout is rather that of the author, and the authority to which he appeals is the wisdom common to ancient Near Eastern ethical instruction.
This literature shows that the centrist position turned to Hellenistic-Jewish ethical codes in order to spell out appropriate behavior for Christians.
There was early lore about the martyrdoms of Paul, Peter, and James, but eventually all of the storied apostles were granted a glorious death, including Paul, Peter, Andrew, Thomas, Matthew, Bartholomew, and Philip. This can be understood if we keep in mind the Greek educational model of following or imitating an example. The apostles were cast as the exemplary students of Jesus.
The history common to Christianity and Judaism was a recursive pattern of ethical instruction and conviction. There was always resistance to God’s call for righteousness, but even if a prophet was rejected and killed, it was not the end of the story.
Self-control was the bottom line for Luke, the most prized virtue and most discussed issue among philosophers of the Greco-Roman age.
What happened in this shift away from Jesus and toward the apostles is that the gospel story was reduced to a creed and the sign of apostolic authority became the rehearsal of that creed.
All these shorthand clichés referred to the Christ myth and treated it as a symbol for a large cluster of parochial instructions. In this shift, the earlier, first-century myths about Jesus were emptied of their complexity and mythic power to become formulaic statements of faith that signaled one’s acceptance of the Christian way.
it has been very difficult to imagine early Christians taking meals together for any reason other than to celebrate the death of Jesus according to the Christ myth. But here in the Didache a very formalistic set of prayers is assigned to the cup and the breaking of bread without the slightest association with the death and resurrection of Jesus. The prayers of thanksgiving are for the food and drink God
This vindication of the Christian character of Israel’s God was achieved at the expense of the Jews
It is the story of God’s purposes for humankind. The Bible is where the Christian notions of God and history are intertwined, the paradigms of salvation are set, the thrust toward the future is generated, and the charter for Christianity to expand throughout the world is given. No wonder the Bible is viewed as a sacred text by Christians. The Bible is the Christian myth.
The new history started with Moses, but skirted the history of the kings and the etiologies for the temple, and ended up with the academy of rabbis. It described a parallel history, in effect, and was a very clever revision of the temple epic because it was so simple. As we know, that myth would undergird rabbinic Judaism from that time until the present.
Other books, such as Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, the Maccabean literature, Aristeas, Additions to Esther and Daniel, Joseph and Asenath, the apocalypse called 2 Baruch, and 1 Esdras, were composed in Greek and still considered Jewish scriptures. These are only some examples from the large body of Jewish literature thought to be unhelpful or dangerous by the early rabbis. This literature survived because Christians continued to read
Without the Bible, the church would look ridiculous. How would it verify what it says it knows? How would it point to what it represents? How would it have any authority to speak? Why would any working society put up with its scoldings?
To accept the Christian religion, people have always had to adjust their thinking to the very unusual notion of belonging to a people and a history that were not really their own.
That is the history that one will need to accept and internalize if one converts and cares about eternity. It is the only history that will count when the final accountings are tallied. But how can a people have two histories? How can that history and one’s own history both be true? And even if one knows that both can’t be equally true, the biblical history must always prevail if one wants to remain, or must remain, a part of the march of Western Christian culture. Saying yes to that history has been the price one had to pay for access to Western civilization.
And the labor! Such labor, poring over those ancient oracles in the quest for some divine direction to guide us in our times! Think of the investment our society makes in terms of lives and labor in the hope of discerning the present import of that ancient word of God. Is it not an odd preoccupation for such a postmodern time as ours? Why is it that no one ever questions this investment of our energies in the study of these texts from antiquity? Why is it that such enchantment with these ancient writings never draws a smile or two?
But the radical ranking of Christians above their significant others has never been limited to Jewish-Christian relations. As a lens through which to view the world, the old-new formula in the composition of the Bible has resulted in a distinctively Christian mentality that views all non-Christians as pre-Christian.
And they constitute a list of very serious questions for all thoughtful persons concerned about the future of our lives together on planet earth. Should we turn to the Bible for answers? Those saying yes, from Waco to Washington, including all the recent pronouncements to that effect by Protestant churches, cannot be right. The surreptitious function of the Bible as America’s epic mythology is causing as many problems as it is solving. We cannot go on “destroying them in order to save them,”
It will not be easy. Americans in general are not accustomed to cultural introspection. And Christians in particular have never thought to be critical of Christianity. Christians know about being critical, of course. They render critique on society all the time, but always from the vantage point of the Christian vision, a protected sphere of ideals held to be inviolate, never to be questioned.
Shooting from the political hip will no longer do. Harking back to the Judeo-Christian tradition without spelling out what one means does not help. Facile references to the Bible are sounding shrill. We are very close to entertaining a public discourse about our nation’s Christian heritage that does not rise above the level of demagoguery.
