Die Urgemeinde und das Judenchristentum

The second volume of a new history of early Christianity, written by Martin Hengel and Anna Maria Schwemer (cf. Jesus und das Judentum, Mohr Siebeck, 2007; ET Jesus and Judaism, Baylor University Press and Mohr Siebeck, 2019), was published 10 years after Hengel’s death in 2009. The manuscript that Hengel passed on to Schwemer in early 2009 comprised 117 pages, which means that the volume under review is essentially the work of Schwemer, who retained the structure of the project and the titles of the main sections (p. v). It is probably fair to say that it is Schwemer’s respect for Hengel’s scholarship and influence on research into the faith and life of the earliest followers of Jesus that prompted her to retain Martin Hengel’s name as co-author of the volume, although the increasing transition from the first-person plural to the first-person singular (“vielleicht etwas spät einsetzend[e]”; p. xi) signals Schwemer’s sole responsibility for various sections and arguments.The four main sections treat (1) the early church (pp. 3–136), with subsections on the origins of the earliest church (“Urgemeinde”) in Jerusalem and on the content of early Christian teaching; (2) the expansion of the church and the beginning of the Gentile mission (pp. 139–247), with subsections on the Hellenists and the persecution connected with Stephen, early Christian chronology from Jesus to Paul, the mission of the evangelist Philip, and the early Paul; (3) the “struggle” concerning the Gentile mission (pp. 251–415), with subsections on the earliest church and the beginnings of the mission to Gentiles (Peter and Cornelius); the Hellenists, Paul, and Barnabas in Syria; the persecution in Jerusalem by Agrippa I and the flight of Peter; the first missionary journey (of Paul and Barnabas) to Cyprus and the province of Galatia; the Apostles’ Council and the Apostolic Decree; and (4) Palestinian Jewish Christianity (pp. 419–611), with subsections on the situation of the church in Palestine, James (three sections), the exodus of the Jerusalem church to Pella, Simeon son of Clopas as the successor of James, and the expulsion of the Palestinian Jewish Christians from Judaism. The content of the main subsections 3 and 4 suggests that Paul’s missionary work in Macedonia, Achaia, and Asia, which will be treated in volume three of the project (p. xi), is deemed to belong to Gentile Christianity rather than to the developments in Jewish Christianity. In my opinion, a strict chronological sequence would have been more plausible, since Paul’s work in Galatia and the subsequent Apostles’ Council cannot be deemed to belong to developments in “Jewish Christianity” only, as Paul’s work in Macedonia, Achaia, and Asia, including his letter to the believers in the city of Rome, surely cannot be described in terms of “Gentile Christianity” pure and simple.The author(s) acknowledge the fact that without Luke’s Acts of the Apostles it would be impossible to even try to reconstruct the events of the early period of the church (p. x). They continue to hold the theory that Luke has harmonizing tendencies but acknowledge that he does not write a fictitious Apostelroman (pp. 7, 11). Luke writes as a former companion of Paul (p. 6), as a Hellenistic historian and a witness to faith in Jesus (“Glaubenszeuge”) whose basic evidence can be trusted, with caution (p. 11), as he seeks to write the continuation of OT salvation history in the ministry of Jesus, Israel’s Messiah and Lord of all people and in the new people of God, established by Jesus, consisting of Jews and Gentiles (pp. 6–7).In contrast to narrative and various (post)modern readings of Acts, Hengel and Schwemer, as is to be expected, focus on the texts of the NT, rather than on theory, as well as on the full range of extrabiblical texts that are relevant for the historical and theological context of the history of the earliest churches. While emphasizing the theological convictions of Peter, Stephen, Philip, Jacob/James, Paul, and others, they write the history of the early church as the history of the missionary work of these witnesses. There is much that readers will learn from the detailed presentation and evaluation of primary sources and the analysis of historical and theological developments, both being “vintage Hengel” (including the preference of “Tübingen” scholars, although Dunn and Keener and others are important “Seitenreferenten”).The three subsection on James break new ground, in terms of Hengel’s position who regarded the Letter of James as a thoroughgoing anti-Pauline polemic, while Schwemer, largely following Deines (Jakobus, Evangelische Verlagsanstalt 2017), accepts an early date (AD 45–50) for the letter deemed most likely to be authentic, written to the believers who had been expelled from Jerusalem, focusing on the standard Jewish interpretation of Gen 22:12 in the context of Gen 15:6 when explaining the connection of faith, works, and justification, a letter that does not have a Christological deficit as is frequently alleged (pp. 459–74).The evaluation of the sources sometimes leaves an ambiguous impression. Hengel and Schwemer regard many of the references to miraculous healings in Acts as legendary romanticization of the earliest period of the church in the 80s when Luke writes (p. 71). But then they state that the gift of healing practiced by Jesus’s emissaries “probably impressed Luke the physician,” highlighting the healings as having “not a little significance,” that is, as being rather significant, together with social work, for the missionary work of the early church (pp. 72, 73). Hengel and Schwemer claim that Luke’s report concerning the Hellenists in the Jerusalem church needs to be reversed: the problem started not with the lack of support for the Greek speaking widows but with the separation of Greek speaking and Aramaic speaking believers in distinct congregations, claiming, without any specific evidence, that many of the diaspora Jews in Jerusalem did not understand Aramaic and that many of the “Hebraioi” in the church spoke little or no Greek (pp. 147–48). The claim that there is a contradiction between Paul’s reference to his missionary work in Nabatea leading to conversions among (circumcised) Arabs and Luke’s depiction of the first conversion of a Gentile Godfearer in Caesarea on account of Peter’s mission (p. 370) simply does not follow: Paul’s letters (plausibly) imply a mission to Arabia, but Paul does not mention conversions among Arabs (although it is plausible that they happened), while Luke does not label Cornelius’s conversion as the first conversion of a Gentile (which he well may have been, although the chronology of the event is impossible to assess, as Hengel and Schwemer acknowledge, pp. 9–10). Hengel and Schwemer decouple the Apostles’ Council from the Apostolic Decree (pp. 412–15), without seriously considering the arguments of scholars who regard the latter as the decision of the former (n. 73 prioritizes the majority opinion against M. Bockmuehl, as though majority opinions ever bothered Hengel to take a position!). The suggestion that Gentile believers played only a walk-on role (Statistenrolle) at this time (p. 415) is surely an error of judgment: it was the large number of Gentile believers and the impact that the demand for circumcision and the keeping of the purity (food) laws had on the unity of the congregation in Antioch consisting of Jewish and Gentile believers that triggered the necessity of the Apostles’ Council, whose logistics had to be enormous (and expensive), given the fact that Peter and probably most of the Twelve had left Jerusalem five or six years earlier.Hengel and Schwemer conclude from their evaluation of the New Testament texts that the “young messianic congregations” inside and outside Palestine did not exist as numerous, extremely different groups. Rather, they shared a strong bond, which was the relationship to Jesus, the messianic teacher and miracle worker, who had been crucified and who rose from the dead, and the new, common messianic ethos established by the memory of Jesus’s proclamation of the kingdom of God (p. 135). This is surely correct, and a necessary corrective to the assumption that every NT author represents a distinct church, or group of churches, with a distinct theology that seeks to challenge and correct the theology of other churches and their “apostolic” authors.The missionary work of Paul and the expansion of Christianity worldwide and specifically in Rome and Asia Minor is to be treated in the third volume of Geschichte des frühen Christentums, and the history of the early church will be treated in volume four (p. xi). Schwemer (b. 1942) does not provide projected publication dates; if each of these two volumes should also take 10 years to be written, the fourth volume will be close to an eschatological event!)

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  Open Access•Christoph Stenschke•Verbum et Ecclesia•2023

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