Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§ 1 Christianity in the Making
sus, is an appropriate time to gather together the fruits of the last two centuries in
a fresh statement and assessment of the status quaestionis after two thousand
years. More important, however, are the recent developments in the field which
call for a more or less complete reevaluation of previous assumptions and approaches.
I mention here only the three most significant factors, (a) In terms of
methodology, the crisis for the hitherto self-assured historical-critical method of
analysing sources and traditions, a crisis occasioned by post-modernism in its
various forms, needs to be addressed at some depth, (b) The interaction with
social-scientific disciplines, particularly sociology, has shed a good deal of fresh
light on the NT texts and Christianity's beginnings, which needs to be incorporated,
but critically, into any such overview, (c) The discovery of new texts, particularly
the Dead Sea Scrolls and the codices from Nag Hammadi, has undermined
the older wisdom which had previously determined scholarly views on the
emergence of Christianity in its distinctiveness from its Jewish matrix and within
the religious melting pot of the first- and second-century Mediterranean world.
Although these texts were discovered more than fifty years ago, their impact continues
to ripple through scholarship on earliest Christianity, and the current debates
which they occasioned remain confused at many key points. Needless to
say, I hope to contribute in some measure to these debates.
There are three great questions for students of Christianity's beginnings:
(1) What was it about Jesus which explains both the impact he made on his disciples
and why he was crucified? (2) How and why did it come about that the
movement which took off from Jesus did not after his death remain within firstcentury
Judaism and became unacceptable to emerging rabbinic Judaism?
(3) Was the Christianity which emerged in the second century as a predominantly
Gentile religion essentially the same as its first-century version or significantly
different in character and kind?
These are not new questions. Already in his Paul book, Baur posed the second
question in setting out his programme for a history of earliest Christianity,
when he claimed that
the idea (of Christianity) found in the bounds of the national Judaism the
chief obstacle to its universal historical realization. How these bounds were
broken through, how Christianity, instead of remaining a mere form of Judaism,
although a progressive one, asserted itself as a separate, independent
principle, broke loose from it, and took its stand as a new enfranchised form
of religious thought and life, essentially differing from all the national peculiarities
of Judaism is the ultimate, most important point of the primitive history
of Christianity. 1 ^
13. Baur, Paul 3 (my emphasis).
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