Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§1 Christianity in the Making
Christian and Gnostic heretical forms of Christianity. The breakthrough was
made by Walter Bauer's Rechtgldubigkeit und Ketzerei im dltesten Christentum
(1934, 2 1964), 19 which argued that the earliest forms of Christianity in several
major Mediterranean centres may have been what subsequent 'orthodoxy' came
to regard as 'heresy'. In other words, the earliest forms of Christianity were
much more of a 'mixed bag' than had previously been thought. Was there ever a
'pure' form of Christianity?! Bauer's own thesis is again subject matter for a subsequent
volume. But the issues he raised could not be confined to the second century.
In one of the most important twentieth-century contributions to the reconstruction
of Christianity's beginnings, James M. Robinson and Helmut Koester
followed up Bauer's insight in the light of the Nag Hammadi texts and concluded
that the same verdict had to be delivered on first-century Christianity as well. 20
Was there ever a single form of Christianity? Is the Christianity of the New Testament
simply the deposit of that form of Christianity which endured and/or
overcame its (Christian!) rivals? 21
Both these large-scale issues — the emergence of Christianity from within
Judaism, and into the wider Hellenistic world — have inevitably impacted back
on the first, on the attempt to understand the mission and message of Jesus himself
and its determinative influence. On the one hand, the (re)assertion that Jesus
was a Jew has become one of the commonplaces of contemporary NT scholarship.
But the more firmly Jesus is located within the Judaism of his day, the more
pressing become the questions Why then was he crucified? and How then did the
movement which sprang from his mission cease to be part of Judaism (to be Jewish!)
so quickly? On the other hand, the likelihood is frequently canvassed today
that the pluralism detected by Bauer was a feature of Christianity from the first,
that is of the very first hearings of Jesus' own preaching. Or even that the influence
of Hellenism which Harnack described as a feature of the second century is
already to be traced in Jesus' own message. These last are among the most important
issues to be discussed in the following pages (vol. 1). But the point here
is that the questions which motivate historical inquiry into Christianity's beginnings
can no longer be neatly apportioned to separate volumes. A history of earliest
Christianity can no longer treat the mission and message of Jesus simply as
prolegomenon, nor confine itself to the period and documents of the NT. Unless
19. ET Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971).
20. J. M. Robinson and H. Koester, Trajectories through Early Christianity (Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1971).
21. In my Unity and Diversity in the New Testament: An Inquiry into the Character of
Earliest Christianity (London: SCM, 1977, 2 1990) I followed up Robinson and Koester to the
extent of drawing attention to the diversity of earliest Christianity, that is, the diversity within
the New Testament. But I did not really address the issue of a diversity of which the NT itself
was only part.
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