Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

JESUS REMEMBERED §1
Baur's formulation of the issue reflects the supreme self-confidence of
nineteenth-century German scholarship and the triumphalism of a view of Christianity
as the 'absolute' expression of 'the universal, the unconditioned, the
essential' 14 which grates intensely for a post-Holocaust sensibility. But, as we
shall see further in volume 2, Baur set the agenda for attempts to clarify the history
of primitive Christianity for the rest of the nineteenth century. And the issue
of Christianity's emergence from within Judaism has reappeared in the second
half of the twentieth century, posed all the more sharply by the Holocaust, as one
of the absolutely crucial subjects for any analysis of the formative period of both
Christianity and Judaism. 15
The turn of the twentieth century brought the third great issue to the fore,
summed up in the phrase, 'the Hellenization of (the earliest form of) Christianity'.
16 This was the principal concern of the history-of-religions school — to locate
Christianity as it emerged into the Graeco-Roman world within the context
of other religions of the day and to trace the influences from the wider context on
that emerging Christianity. The issue is nicely focused on the disparity between
the message of Jesus in the Gospels and the gospel of Paul in his letters, where
the assumption or conclusion (?) was that several key features of the latter had to
be attributed to the influence of mystery cults and early Gnostic ideas. 17 The consequences
for our appreciation of Christianity's beginnings are clearly signalled
in William Wrede's famous description of Paul as 'the second founder of Christianity',
who has 'exercised beyond all doubt the stronger — not the better — influence'
than the first founder, Jesus. 18
Here again are questions best left till volume 2. But one of the key insights
of the twentieth century has been the recognition that the historical developments
could not be neatly compartmentalized, as though one could simply distinguish
Jesus and Jewish Christianity from Paul and Hellenistic/Gentile Christianity,
from the Apostolic Fathers and the emerging Great Church, and from Jewish-
14. Baur, History 4-6, 33, 43, 47.
15. See my The Partings of the Ways between Christianity and Judaism and Their Significance
for the Character of Christianity (London: SCM, 1991) 1-17. The importance of the
plural (Partings) has usually been recognized in reactions to this volume; but it is equally important
to recognize the importance of the final phrase (for the Character of Christianity), intended
to draw Christianity's attention to this central feature of its beginnings. The significance
for historic (rabbinic) Judaism needs also to be part of the agenda for the ongoing dialogue between
Jews and Christians.
16. In his famous lectures, A. Harnack, What Is Christianity? (1899-1900; ET Williams
and Norgate, 3 1904) defined 'the greatest fact in the history of the Church in the second century'
as 'the influx of Hellenism, of the Greek spirit, and the union of the Gospel with it' (203,
his italics).
17. For details see below, vol. 2 (§20).
18. W. Wrede, Paul (1904; ET Boston: Beacon, 1908) 180.
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