Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

Preface
It has long been a hope and intention of mine to provide a comprehensive overview
of the beginnings of Christianity. As a student of the New Testament
(NT), in both professional and personal capacity, I suppose the ambition has a
twofold origin: partly a desire to understand the NT writings in historical context,
and not only as theological resource or as literature; and partly an instinctive
hermeneutical awareness that the part can be understood only in the light
of the whole, just as the whole can be comprehended only through a close understanding
of the parts. The desire first took flesh in 1971, when A. R. C.
(Bob) Leaney, a wonderfully generous and gentle Head of Department for a recently
appointed lecturer, encouraged me to rethink the main NT course in the
Theology Department of Nottingham University. With limited teaching resources,
and Bob Leaney content to teach what he described as 'a mini-
Kümmel' (Introduction to the writings of the NT), the obvious answer seemed
to me to be a course entitled The Beginnings of Christianity'. The aim was to
give students a fairly detailed insight into the life and teaching of Jesus and the
initial developments which constituted early Christianity, in both historical and
theological perspective.
I already conceived the task in three phases. A whole term (ten teaching
weeks) had to be given to Jesus; how could it be otherwise, given the central importance
of Jesus for and in Christianity? That left only one other term for the sequel(s).
And in practice the discussion of primitive Christianity and of Paul's
contribution in particular left very little time for anything beyond the first generation.
The lecture course always came to an end when analysis of the second generation
of Christianity had barely been entered upon. The situation was unsatisfactory,
and only a partial remedy was provided by incorporating much of the
missing material into an MA course on 'Unity and Diversity in the New Testament',
which was duly written up for publication (1977). Otherwise the regular
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