The New Testament and Christian Origins Since 1975

The last 50 years have witnessed numerous developments in the academic study of the New Testament and Christian origins. In a journal “devoted solely to reviewing and bibliography in the field of religion and related areas” (Remus 1975, 63), it is therefore fitting to survey the state of the discipline by highlighting the 10 most important works published since 1975. Although many shorter essays and articles have had a significant impact, this list is limited to book-length works discussed in chronological order. This is not to say that these are necessarily the most outstanding examples of scholarship that appeared in this period. Yet, they fairly represent key shifts, pronounced trends, and influential perspectives that are crucial for mapping the terrain as it now stands. This list is offered not as an evaluation or a prescription for where scholars should expend their energy, only as a description of the books that have pointed the discipline to its present location. Older accounts of rabbinic Judaism from a Christian perspective often viewed it as a desiccated, legalistic religion that had long ago deviated from the ethical monotheism of the prophets. Although Sanders was not the first to do so, no scholar has had more to do with exposing the presuppositions behind this caricature of Judaism as a specimen of “works righteousness,” as it was often termed in Reformation-era polemics. In accentuating the diversity of the Second Temple period, he urged scholars to abandon the notion of Spätjudentum, “late Judaism,” as an imposition of these Christian stereotypes and to recognize the vitality of “early Judaism” (or Judaisms, plural) instead. This development owed much to a post-Holocaust sensitivity to the ways in which previous discourses had been hostile to Jews and Judaism. The prominence of Jewish New Testament scholars such as Paula Fredriksen, Amy-Jill Levine, and Mark Nanos is one indication of the sea change that has taken place on this score. Sanders not only deconstructed certain mischaracterizations but also argued positively that different varieties of Judaism all subscribed to what he called “covenantal nomism,” wherein the children of Israel were understood to have entered into the covenant by grace and remained in it by faithful obedience rather than “earning” their salvation or status as the chosen people. While this volume focused less on Paul than on the “patterns of religion” found in ancient Palestine, it is also partly responsible for the promulgation of what is now called “the New Perspective on Paul,” which emphasizes the apostle's continuity with rather than opposition to core Jewish convictions in his teachings on faith, the atonement, forgiveness, conversion, and the role of Gentiles in salvation history. It is impossible to read any book reflecting on Paul's relationship to the Judaism of his time without finding Sanders in the footnotes. Scholars have long known about ancient Christian texts that are preserved only as references embedded in the works of patristic authors, many of which are quoted only to be criticized for their heterodox teachings. The discovery of a large cache of manuscripts at Nag Hammadi in 1945 made available these and many more texts that would radically alter our understanding of the diversity of Christianity in its first few centuries, much as the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 would do for early Judaism. Once texts like the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, and the Apocryphon of James were made available, it became clear that these works represented perspectives on God, Jesus, and the church that diverged from those found in the canon. Pagels was the first scholar to describe this literature and synthesize its content for an audience beyond the specialists who had labored to reconstruct and translate it. She brought to life a worldview encompassing elements both familiar and strange under the rubric of “Gnosticism,” a category that has been contested in terms of its scope and coherence with respect to a disparate collection of writings. Even scholars who did not necessarily share Pagels' enthusiasm for the alternative vision of Christian faith embraced in this literature, which did not make it into the Bible, nonetheless accepted the invitation to explore it in detail. Pagels took these writings seriously, as worthy of study on their own terms and not simply as distortions of or deviations from Scripture. It is hard to overestimate their impact in a field where the primary source material is in relatively short supply. What attracted individuals to the early Christian movement? Theological, spiritual, and even psychological factors have often been invoked. Along with Gerd Theissen (1982), Meeks was among the earliest scholars to consider socioeconomic explanations, focusing especially on the rich data found in Paul's letters. Marxist historians had previously considered such factors, but Meeks brings to the investigation a command of the literature as well as a wariness about the dangers of reductionistic explanations of phenomena for which we have incomplete information. His thesis that many of Paul's converts experienced the anxiety arising from “status inconsistency” with respect to wealth, class, ethnicity, family background, and other identity markers diverged from the earlier conventional wisdom that Christianity drew primarily from the lower classes and those, like women and slaves, on the margins of society. Did they organize themselves like other groups in the Greco-Roman world, such as households, synagogues, clubs, or professional guilds? In his attempt to describe the texture of the community found in the early ekklēsia, his particular conclusions matter less than his embrace of social-scientific theories and typologies, many of which are indebted to Max Weber and Clifford Geertz. Meeks sought to provide a thick description of the internal structures and rituals of these stratified communities and their relationship to the beliefs and behaviors preached by Paul. Ethnography, cultural anthropology, and other sub-fields from the social sciences now commonly supply New Testament scholars with the tools for analysis. Meeks refers to his orientation as that of a “moderate functionalist” (1983, 7) and makes no secret of the “eclecticism” of his method. Other practitioners (e.g., Elliott 1990) are perhaps more intentional and rigorous in their application of particular methods to particular texts. In a field where fresh material to study is scarce, innovative methods and models for interpreting familiar texts become all the more crucial for generating new insights, notwithstanding the risk of posing anachronistic analogies to explicate them. Meeks' interdisciplinary work was a catalyst for the methodological pluralism that now characterizes New Testament studies. Women had certainly studied the Bible in a critical manner prior to the late twentieth century, but it was not until the 1970s that a mode of interpretation consciously informed by feminist theory emerged. With the entry of greater numbers of women into the guild, questions about the social location of the interpreter and the goals of interpretation received heightened attention. Whereas earlier scholars had called into doubt the ideology of objectivism inherent in the discipline of academic biblical studies, no one had applied this critique to the role of women as the subjects and objects of critical investigation in such a thoroughgoing manner until the publication Schüssler Fiorenza's volume, in which she reconstructed the history of earliest Christianity as “a discipleship of equals” that was stifled in the second century. She does not go so far as Walter Wink (1973, 1) in declaring “historical biblical criticism” to be “bankrupt.” Indeed, she conceives of feminist interpretation as a historical and a theological enterprise. Within the feminist paradigm, one interpretive approach is to expose structures of patriarchy embedded within the Bible itself. Another is to employ hermeneutical strategies to demonstrate that the biblical authors, rightly understood, were reflecting realities that were more liberatory than the “malestream” exegetical tradition has recognized. On this view, feminist criticism enables us to be better historians by opening our eyes to those dimensions of the text that have been hidden and retrieving untold stories of women's participation in and contribution to the Jesus movement, thereby enabling women and other oppressed individuals in a struggle against “kyriarchy.” To this end, she has protested “value-neutral” exegesis that perpetuates unjust structures and calls on scholars to take responsibility for the ethical implications of their scholarship. An early sign of this book's influence is that 4 years after its publication, Schüssler Fiorenza became the first woman to serve as president of the Society of Biblical Literature. “Q” is scholarly shorthand for a hypothesized document consisting of sayings attributed to Jesus, used by both Matthew and Luke in the writing of their respective gospels. (It is an abbreviation for Quelle, German for “source.”) The theory that such a document must have existed goes back to the 1860s and has been part of debates about the Synoptic Problem ever since. Although a majority of scholars have long acknowledged that something like Q probably existed, serious study of a document that has not survived is obviously complicated. A major impetus for its reconstruction came from Kloppenborg's seminal work in which he argues that Q was composed in three stages which in turn reflect successive stages in the life of the “Q community” that produced it. The earliest of these stages most resembles collections of ancient sapiential sayings, and the Jesus that emerges from Kloppenborg's reconstruction of the text is more a teacher of wisdom than an apocalyptic prophet, miracle worker, or Pharisee involved in Torah disputation. Proponents of this thesis subsequently formed the International Q Project, a colossal undertaking with the goal of presenting the definitive reconstruction of this sayings source, laid out in three distinct strata as described by Kloppenborg. With a critical edition in hand, a new generation of scholars embarked on studies of Q, often with an eye open to what it reveals about the historical Jesus. The precision of the IQP reconstruction and the confidence with which it presumed to discern social and historical realities from the details of non-extant texts strikes many critics as unwarranted extrapolations from inadequate evidence. One measure of Kloppenborg's significance is the renewed life his work gave to alternative theories of gospel composition, including those of a vocal minority that argues for dispensing with Q as an unnecessary hypothesis. To say that the New Testament authors were engaged in the act of interpreting—often quite creatively—the Hebrew Bible is unremarkable. It is more difficult to say, specifically, how they did this or whether there was any method to their madness. Hays outlines a procedure for detecting whether Paul is knowingly quoting a text from Scripture or merely echoing or alluding to it, whether consciously or unconsciously, when writing his letters to churches. Rather than seeing Paul as arbitrarily proof-texting or offering “helter-skelter intuitive readings” (161), according to Hays, it is possible to determine Paul's own understanding of a particular text, the extent to which he is trying to evoke its original literary setting, and how the cited text functions in his own argument. As such, his monograph, deeply informed by literary critics outside of biblical studies, has been immensely influential among scholars interested in the phenomenon of intertextuality in the New Testament, in part because it helps to reign in the inevitable subjectivity involved in discerning connections between otherwise unconnected texts. Hays also asserts that Paul's use of Scripture discloses a core assumption about the relationship between Israel and the church: “Paul finds the continuity between Torah and gospel through a hermeneutic that reads Scripture primarily as a narrative of divine election and promise” (157–58). The proclivity of many scholars to speak of the “narrative” underpinning the thought of this or that text that is not in narrative form—such as Paul's letters—is a result of Hays' work. He further proposes that Paul's own interpretive method should provide a normative model for the present-day church, informed by but not limited to historical-critical readings. This theological dimension of Hays' hermeneutical agenda has both ardent supporters as well as staunch critics. Critical approaches to the New Testament long predate the twentieth century, yet participants on both sides of older debates often shared the same starting point, that is, the life of Jesus as described in the Gospels and the story of the early church in the Acts of the Apostles. The project of “redescribing” Christian origins proceeds on the premise that debunking this or that element of the “official” account is wholly inadequate. Smith's work was critical in the development of new theoretical approaches to the New Testament that were not constrained by this template (The first issue of Religious Studies Review featured an essay by Smith [1975] on this very topic.). He contested the notion that Christianity was fundamentally different from other movements in the ancient Mediterranean and argued that much comparative study has been embedded in covert apologetic attempts to demonstrate Christianity's uniqueness that are, in turn, an outgrowth of Protestant polemicizing against “Pagano-papism.” Smith's encyclopedic knowledge of ancient traditions enabled him to focus on local manifestations of religious phenomena and thereby avoid facile comparisons. Negatively, then, he sought to diagnose the “parallelomania” he saw as endemic to the discipline. (Samuel Sandmel, in 1962, provides the classic definition of this “mania”: “that extravagance among scholars which first overdoes the supposed similarity in passages and then proceeds to describe source and derivation as if implying literary connection flowing in an inevitable or predetermined direction.”) Positively, he sought to generate new modes and categories of comparison. In his mapping of the early Christian theological terrain, for example, soteriology in Pauline Christianity is “utopian” due to the centrality of the resurrection while other traditions are “locative” in that they do not emphasize the need to conquer death. He rejects the idea that there was a single, monolithic Christianity (note the plural “Christianities” in the book's subtitle, which mirrors the habit of many scholars to speak of “Judaisms” of the Second Temple period). The most significant aspect of Smith's work is found in his substantive critique of the discipline itself and his attempt to provide a theoretical grounding for New Testament studies within the broader field of religious studies. It is cheating, perhaps, to select this five-volume opus, but taken as a whole, it constitutes one of the most impressive achievements in the history of the Quest for the Historical Jesus. At the time of his death in 2022, Meier was at work on a sixth volume. Pope Benedict XVI himself praised Meier's work as “a model of historical-critical exegesis, in which the significance and the limits of the method emerge” (2011, 296). Such a compliment, however, hints at the unintended effect of his prodigious output. After an exhaustive analysis of the Parable of the Talents, which concludes with the assessment that it “more likely than not” goes back to the historical Jesus (2016, 306), Meier remarks, “We might at first feel frustrated that so much work on a single parable leads to such meager results.” For many scholars, this is the matter out the exegetical so and yet so to for it, he many scholars that there had to be a better of the historical Jesus than even the most application of of (e.g., Other scholars (e.g., had models from and in their own attempts to reconstruct teachings. social and studies have as for on the gospels. at a familiar that it is to say who Jesus was not than to say who he was or what he To the extent that the of at the ways in which the study of Jesus and Christian origins reveals the of other scholars, one whether scholars are merely for the century. influence is by numbers of one this even it is not a work of scholarship. in its it as a of the discipline for a of and be the book ever by a New Testament An is a in criticism with an to in ways and have a but has when it to the of his Whereas earlier of the early church to and from his other makes a of works in from the margins and their to the “official” much as Pagels had For scholars, in and in the the impact of on New Testament studies. much this is a of professional on the as a to beyond the the of worthy of study in to work as that of a is to its from the of scholars had the as part of the of the New Testament and not part and of the and the to this collection of essays sought to exegesis with an approach that saw Paul as an criticism” not only on including in material that had than but also about any between religion and This approach after the of and the on in but often very it between and the of the in the late twentieth and (e.g., one of the of according to became the religion of as an The then, is to back the of and what to be the original of the Christian not a faith focused on the of the or salvation from a for from unjust social and of the out according to this is to Paul (e.g., than to Jesus if only because we have writings from the it is to read between the without the of in a text that first has to be While scholars that Paul and it is more commonly argued that he to or scholars the New Testament in to what they as and in the present on of the which have been or by work. other would works not and the Gospels the Biblical Christian to and Paul While these works represent and approaches that have become more in the it is less clear that any one of has had the influence by the in the would to works on the phenomenon of (e.g., or more to the theological or ethical dimensions of the New Testament (e.g., Hays or perhaps a that a methodological approach that in the (e.g., that this list few from the or from outside the On as to it is difficult to with the impact made by the earlier as to whether this has been for the better or the are no doubt many works published in the last that as influential as the 10 discussed It is to It to the of a issue of Religious Studies Review to their

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• The first urban Christians

  Wayne A Meeks•The first urban Christians•1983

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• Postscript

  Open Access•Harold Remus•Religious Studies Review•1975

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