Where to begin? A word about method.

All along, I’ve been hoping to provide a true picture of the earliest church – it’s leadership, it’s worship patterns, how it understood itself in the context of the world. The truest picture we have, with as much detail as we can provide.

In that respect, I’m continuing to work through Larry Hurtado’s work Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, ©2003). What was striking about this earliest church was that “devotion to Jesus as God” was not only characteristic “always, everywhere, and by all” of the earliest Christians. Such devotion  was not only ubiquitous among earliest Christians, but it was “noteworthy phenomenally early”, it appeared with “unparalleled intensity”, and it appeared even in the midst of an “exclusive monotheistic environment”.

Here is a word about his method of pursuing that study.

In any study of earliest Christ-devotion the letters of Paul certainly must loom large, for these invaluable writings reflect an intense religious devotion to Jesus at a remarkably early point in the emergence of the Christian movement. But some readers will perhaps wonder why I commence here with a chapter on Paul, and then turn to an analysis of early Jewish Christianity in Roman Judea (Palestine). In strict chronological order there were, of course, Christians before the apostle Paul, as we learn from Paul himself. In his letter to Rome, for example, Paul sends greetings to Andronicus and Junia, two members of the Roman church who were fellow Jews and who “were in Christ before me” (Rom 16:7 [see my posts on Andronikos and Junia, Part 1 and Part 2 – JB]), and in his letters to Galatians Paul refers to “those who were apostles before me” in the Jerusalem church (Gal 1:17). By all accounts the first groups in the emergent Christian movement were made up of Jewish adherents in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Roman Judea (Palestine). Once again, among the relevant evidence (indeed the earliest evidence we have) are references by Paul to Christian groups in “Judea” as far back as his own conversion on the early 30’s (79-80).

Hurtado here notes that “it might seem more logical” to begin with a direct analysis of those “pre-Pauline” Christian groups. And in fact, he interacts with John Dominic Crossan, who does so (“The Birth of Christianity, New York: Harper Collins, 1998) while avoiding Paul in this discussion. “But in developing his views of Christian groups of the 30’s and 40’s [Crossan] depends upon, and hypothesizes from and about, material from sources that are in fact much later than Paul” such as the four canonical Gospels; other “Gospels” that are much later (“Gospel of Peter”, “Gospel of Thomas”), and the Didache.

But Paul’s letters are dated in the 50’s and 60’s, and his conversion “is most likely to be dated within a couple years (at most) of Jesus’ execution, that is, within what in terms of social history must be regarded as the “birth” of the Christian movement” (83). In fact, Paul frequently speaks of his interactions with other individuals from earlier dates. In that respect, he provides a reliable eyewitness account of the church in the 30’s and 40’s A.D.

Paul’s acquaintance with Palestinian Jewish Christians and their faith goes back even earlier than his participation in the Christian movement. Prior to his conversion, as a zealous Pharisee, he had become sufficiently acquainted with the beliefs and practices of Jewish Christians to determine that they were so dangerous as to justify his firm efforts to “destroy” the Christian groups and the ideas they promoted (as he testifies in Gal. 1:13-14; 1 Cor. 15:9; and Phil 3:6).

Furthermore, according to autobiographical statements in his letters, following his conversion Paul was active in Christian circles in Arabia, Damascus, and then “the regions of Syria and Cilicia”; and in the first few years he became personally acquainted with Cephas (Peter) and James the Just, leaders of the Jerusalem church (e.g., Gal. 1:13-24; 2 Cor. 11:32-33). The Paul who wrote the letters that we date in the 50s had been for some time prior a very widely and well-connected participant of the Christian movement, acquainted with Jewish Christians of Judean/Palestinian provenance all through the 30s and 40s as well as with Gentile congregations of the 50s (the main period of his Gentile mission). We can put locations of Pauline activity on the map of the Roman world with confidence (e.g., Jersualem, Damascus, Antioch, Thessalonica, Philippi, Corinth), and we have names of people involved with him (e.g., Barnabas, Timothy, Silvanus, Titus, and a rather impressive list of others that we could put together from Paul’s letters).

In other words, in any thorough discussion of Jewish Christians of these early decades, it is not only appropriate to take full account of Paul and the rich evidence in his letters, it is a failure of method not to do so.

Summarizing his own method for looking at Palestinian Jewish Christianity of the 30s and 40s, Hurtado gives these reasons:

1. Pauline Christianity is the earliest form of the Christian movement to which we have direct access from undisputed firsthand sources.

2. Paul’s letters, which are addressed to Christian circles already established and operative in the 50s, also incorporate and reflect emergent Christian traditions of belief and religious practice from still earlier years.

3. Paul’s own associations with Christian circles, which include important Jewish Christian figures such as Peter, James the brother of Jesus, Barnabas, and others, go back to his conversion, which is to be dated approximately 32-34, and so his acquaintance with beliefs and practices of Christian circles is both wide and extremely early.

4. Several of Paul’s letters reflect disagreements between him and other Christians, in particular some Jewish Christians with different views of the terms for full acceptance of Gentile converts, making Paul’s writings our earliest and most unambiguous evidence that there was a certain diversity of beliefs and groups in the earliest decades of Christianity, and also our best indications of the nature of this diversity and whatever commonality linked the groups.

5. The Christ-devotion attested in Paul’s letters amounts to a notable development in the history of religions, especially when set in the context of the Jewish religious tradition and the larger Roman-era religious environment, and his letters exhibit this development as having already taken place at a remarkably early point in the young Christian movement.

6. Finally, the place of Christ in the Pauline letters also anticipates, represents, and likely helped to promote the Christological beliefs and devotional practices that came to be widely characteristic in Christian groups after Paul.

Contrary to those who say that there is a dearth of historical material available about the earliest church, and rather that we ought to rely on what Christians of the 4^th and 5^th centuries said about Christ, Christianity, and “the Church”, beginning with Paul (and the other writings of the New Testament), we have an incredibly rich source of historical the churches life, practices, “τὸ εὐαγγέλιον”, earliest worship, “sacraments”, and more.