Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§1 Christianity in the Making
figure through the latter half of this period is bound to be Paul. But Paul's life and
work need to be built into an integrated picture, and Paul needs to be fitted into
the much larger picture of a Nazarene sect 'beginning from Jerusalem'. The
emergence of the distinctives which were to mark out Christianity and result in
its becoming a separate religion was a much more complex process, involving
many others than Paul, but their contributions are much more difficult to bring to
light and to tease out. Nevertheless, the (probably) quite close conjunction of
Paul's death and the beginning of the first Jewish revolt (66 CE) point to 70 CE,
when, properly speaking, Second Temple Judaism came to an end with the destruction
of the Temple, as the natural terminus ad quern for the second volume.
At the time of writing this Introduction, the form of volume 3 is not yet settled.
The intention, however, is to cover what can roughly be classified as the second
and third generations of Christianity (70-150). This is the period in which
most of the NT texts were written, but the task of correlating them with other
data from the same period, particularly Jewish and Graeco-Roman texts and
epigraphical data, and of producing a coherent overall picture is extremely
daunting. Moreover, 150 takes us into the period when the challenge of Bauer's
thesis is at its sharpest and the confrontations between nascent Christianity/ies
and its/their chief competitors are already clear. 150 was also Weiss's cut-off
date, and though fairly arbitrary it should be sufficient to ensure that the gap between
the NT and 'post-apostolic' Christianity has been fully bridged and that
the trends and tendencies which formed Christianity's enduring character are
sufficiently clear.
And so to Jesus.