Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (174 page)

2
New York Times
, 18 August 1991: 'Itchy feet: a symposium'.

3
Micah 5.2; John 7.40-43.

4
Luke 2.1, 5.

5
G. Vermes,
The Nativity: History and Legend
(London, 2006), 93-4. Much of what follows is indebted to the clear-sightedness of Vermes.

6
Matthew 1.1-17; Luke 3.23-38.

7
R. Bauckham,
Jude and the Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church
(Edinburgh, 1990), 355 - 9.

8
Much to be recommended as an analysis of Matthew's genealogy is a mischievous poem by the biblical scholar Michael Goulder, beginning 'Exceedingly odd is the means by which God/Has provided our path to the heavenly shore . . .' 'Tamar', first published in 1965, can be savoured in
The Reader
, 98/4 (Winter 2004), 20. For hostile comment on the Matthew genealogy from a twelfth-century rabbi, Jacob ben Reuben, see M. Rubin,
Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary
(London, 2009), 166-7.

9
Matthew 5.17, 21-48.

10
Matthew 1.16; Luke 3.23.

11
Isaiah 7.14; Matthew 1.23.

12
J. Jeremias,
New Testament Theology
(London, 1971), 36-7, 61-8; for 'The Lord's Prayer', Matthew 6.9-13; Luke 11.2-4.
Pater
goes into Latin identically as
pater
, and hence the name for 'The Lord's Prayer' still widely used in the formerly Latin West, derived from its two opening words, 'Our Father' - the 'Paternoster'.

13
The reasons for Dionysius's mistaken calculations are exhaustively explored in G. Declercq,
Anno Domini: The Origins of the Christian Era
(Turnhout, 2000), but the credit for the original discoveries is austerely returned to Julius in A. A. Mosshammer,
Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian Era
(Oxford, 2008).

14
See the references to Herod in Matthew 2 and Luke 1.5. The evidence for Herod dying in 4 BCE is exhaustively reviewed in T. D. Barnes, 'The Date of Herod's Death',
JTS
, n.s. 19 (1968), 204-9.

15
See the date in Luke 3.1-2. The only flaw in the cluster of dating evidence which Luke gives is his assertion that Annas shared the high priesthood with Caiaphas in 28-9: Vermes,
The Nativity
, 90.

16
For Jesus's baptism by John, see Matthew 4.13-17; Mark 1.9-11; Luke 3.21-2. For a variety of statements about Jesus's superiority to John, mostly put in the mouth of John himself, see Matthew 3.11-14; Mark 1.7-8; Luke 3.16-17; John 1.6-8, 35-7; 3.25-30; 4.1 - 2.

17
On Jesus's age at the beginning of his public ministry, see Luke 3.23.

18
Matthew 7.12; cf. Luke 6.31.

19
This cheerful summary of a textual problem which has occupied some of the sharpest minds of Western scholarship without conclusive result should be enriched by consulting, e.g., G. N. Stanton,
The Gospels and Jesus
(Oxford, 1989).

20
Mark 10.27; Luke 18.27.

21
Jeremias,
New Testament Theology
, 14-18: the phenomenon is technically known as 'antithetic parallelism'.

22
Jeremias,
New Testament Theology
, 35-6. It would be tedious to list all the many New Testament instances of 'Amen', but for the single use, see, e.g., Matthew 5.18; Mark 3.28; Luke 4.24; and for John's double form, John 1.51; 5.19, 24, 25.

23
Mark 2.27-8, with weakened versions in Matthew 12.8 and Luke 6.5.

24
The one exception to this rule, John 12.34, when 'the people' use the phrase, is echoing an earlier prediction of Jesus himself that the Son of Man will be lifted up (John 3.14).

25
Daniel 7.13.

26
B. Lindars,
Jesus, Son of Man
(London, 1983), esp. 17-28 for discussion of the Aramaic
bar enasha
, 97-100, 156-7: G. Vermes,
Jesus the Jew
(London, 1973), 160-91. For an incisive discussion which argues for a rather more positive assertion by Jesus of his Messianic status, see M. Hengel,
Studies in Early Christology
(Edinburgh, 1995), Ch. 1.

27
J. Jeremias,
Rediscovering the Parables
(London, 1966), 10. The parables are almost exclusively to be found in the Synoptic Gospels: there is only one in John's Gospel, John 10.1 - 6.

28
Ibid., 145.

29
Mark 12.1-12; Matthew 21.33-46; Luke 20.9-19.

30
See variations in Matthew 22.1-14 and Luke 14.16-24, usefully discussed (together with the version in the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas) in Jeremias,
Rediscovering the Parables
, 50-53, 138-42.

31
Matthew 25.1-13.

32
Luke 12.39-40; in its present form this hardly seems to be a parable, but that is what Peter calls it in response, and it may be a fragment of a larger story. For its echo in a fourth-century hymn of Ephrem the Syrian, see p. 183.

33
Matthew 20.1-16.

34
Matthew 5-7; Luke 6.17-49, with other fragments elsewhere. Much of the material is scattered through Mark's Gospel without being anthologized.

35
Matthew 5.21-6.

36
Matthew 6.7-15; Luke 11.1-4; see also Mark 11.25-6. Both the latter are abbreviated compared with the full version in Matthew.

37
Usefully discussed in T. G. Shearman, ' "Our Daily Bread" ',
Journal of Biblical Literature
, 53 (1934), 110-17 (although Shearman's conclusion may be considered too simple), and E. Lohmeyer,
'Our Father': An Introduction to the Lord's Prayer
(New York, 1965), 141-51.

38
1 Thessalonians 4.15-16; Matthew 24.30-31 (a 'Son of Man' saying). Paul in his own words has little to say about the 'kingdom' theme, and it is virtually absent from John's Gospel (exceptions are John 3.3, 5).

39
Acts 1.21-26.

40
Matthew 23.24; Matthew 8.22 (Luke 9.60).

41
For a good summary of extensive scholarly debate about the 'messianic secret', see C. Tuckett (ed.),
The Messianic Secret
(Philadelphia and London, 1983).

42
E. P. Sanders,
Jesus and Judaism
(London, 1985), 230, 256-60. Compare the absolute prohibition in Luke 16.18 with the exception for divorce for adultery in Matthew 5.31-2.

43
Good discussion of the issues in P. Bradshaw,
Eucharistic Origins
(Alcuin Club Collections 80, 2004).

44
John 18.31.

45
Matthew 27.25.

46
Mark 7.24-30; Matthew 15.21-8.

47
John 8.6, 8. It is ironic that this one instance of Jesus writing is to be found in one of the most textually insecure portions of John's Gospel (it is missing, for instance, in the text of John from Bodmer Papyrus 66, illustrated in Plate 1).

48
Hengel,
Studies in Early Christology
, 384-5.

49
Luke 24.13-35.

50
I Maccabees 4.11; Luke 24.13-49.

51
For a twentieth-century example of this, see the ceiling of the Chapel of the Ascension in the Anglican Shrine of Our Lady in Little Walsingham, England. Accounts in Mark 16.19 (in a fragment of text which seems to post-date the main text of the Gospel); Luke 24.51; Acts 1.2 (in a book generally taken as a continuation of Luke's Gospel by the same author, though the discrepancy in this detail of the Ascension does raise one's doubts about this little-challenged assumption).

52
For an interesting interchange concisely introducing many of the issues, see the correspondence of 1971 between Don Cupitt and C. F. D. Moule,
Explorations in Theology 6: Don Cupitt
(London, 1979), 27-41. Hengel,
Studies in Early Christology
,
passim
and esp. 383-9, provides a robust case for a very early and very consistent pre-Pauline exaltation of Jesus as the Son of God.

53
The question of authorship and authenticity among Paul's epistles, which is vital to sorting out which messages are his and which have been foisted on him by his admirers, is crisply dealt with in J. Barton and J. Muddiman (eds.),
The Oxford Bible Commentary
(Oxford, 2001), 1078-83, and in comment on subsequent individual epistles. Those generally agreed to be written by Paul himself are Romans, I and II Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, I Thessalonians and Philemon. That leaves a more dubious status for Ephesians, Colossians, II Thessalonians, I and II Timothy and Titus. Hebrews has widely been recognized as by a different hand throughout the history of Christian biblical interpretation, including by Martin Luther.

54
J. M. Robinson spoke aptly of the 'domesticated Paul' to be found in the Book of Acts: Robinson, 'Nag Hammadi: The First Fifty Years', in J. D. Turner and A. McGuire (eds.),
The Nag Hammadi Library after Fifty Years: Proceedings of the 1995 Society of Biblical Literature Commemoration
(Leiden, 1997), 3-33, at 28.

55
Acts 9.3-4.

56
Galatians 1.12-19.

57
M. M. Mitchell, 'Gentile Christianity', in Mitchell and Young (eds.), 103-24, at 109.

58
Romans 11.13. The account of Paul's arrest and trial by Felix the Roman governor in Caesarea is in Acts 24.

59
J. D. Crossan and J. L. Reed,
In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom
(London, 2005), esp. 23-6, 36-7, 215-34.

60
As Christ, e.g. Romans 5.6; 10.4; as Lord, e.g. the hymn, which appears to be a quotation by Paul of a text by someone else, Philippians 2.11.

61
C. F. D. Moule,
The Origin of Christology
(Cambridge, 1977), 58-60.

62
Romans 4.15; 7.8, 12.

63
E. P. Sanders,
Paul, the Law and the Jewish People
(Philadelphia, 1983), 6, 10, 13-14.

64
Romans, 1.17, with embedded quotation from Habbakuk 2.4. An excellent guide to modern discussion of Paul and the Law is D. G. Horrell,
An Introduction to the Study of Paul
(London and New York, 2000), Ch. 6.

65
Romans 2.14-15.

66
I Corinthians 15.22.

67
Paul's description of the Eucharist, I Corinthians 11.23-6, is the earliest text to assert that Jesus commanded his disciples to repeat in remembrance what he had done in the Last Supper. Among the Synoptic Gospels, the latest, Luke 22.19, picks up this reference to a command to remember and repeat the actions, which is not present in the earlier parallel descriptions in Mark 14.22 or Matthew 26.26.

68
I Corinthians 12.13, and on the variousness of the Christian community, see I Corinthians 7.7, 17; 12.27-30.

69
Genesis 1.2.

70
Romans 8.15-16, 26.

71
There is a persistent strand of argument among some modern scholars that John's Gospel was regarded in many sections of mainstream Christianity as suspect as late as the end of the second century CE. The evidential basis for this is narrow, as is demonstrated with care in C. E. Hill,
The Johannine Corpus in the Early Church
(Oxford, 2004), esp. 463-70. Equally, conservative scholarship still argues for an early dating for John: one surprising convert to this theory was J. A. T. Robinson,
The Priority of John
(London, 1985), and a recent study, generally putting the Gospels early, has been R. Bauckham,
Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony
(Grand Rapids, 2006).

72
Respectively John 6.35, 48, 51; 8.12; 9.5; 10.7; 10.11, 14; 11.25; 14.6; 15.1.

73
Mark 13.32: 'of that day or that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father'. This passage's concern to modify the apocalyptic urgency of the previous material suggests an addition at a very late stage in producing the final version of Mark.

74
John 1.32.

75
For the dense allusions here, see Revelation 21 and 22.

76
I Corinthians 15.5-8.

77
Galatians 2.11-14.

78
I Corinthians 10.23-32.

79
Martin Goodman has recently restated the case first made by the Jewish historian Josephus for accidental destruction: Goodman, esp. 440-44. One does not have to accept that argument to admire his masterly treatment of the era.

80
M. Goodman, 'Trajan and the Origins of Roman Hostility to the Jews',
PP
, 182 (February 2004), 28. On the genuine likelihood that the Capitoline Temple was built over the site of the crucifixion and tomb of Jesus, see J. Murphy O'Connor,
The Holy Land: An Oxford Archaeological Guide
(Oxford, 1980), 49-61.

81
Eusebius,
Church History
(
NPNF
, n.s. I, 1890), 158-9 (III.27.1-4).

82
Goodman, 103.

83
It was in this tradition that Nazi-sympathizing Christians in the twentieth century claimed that Nazareth lay in an enclave of 'Aryanism' and that the population of Galilee was not Jewish: see p. 942 and C. Kidd,
The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000
(Cambridge, 2006), Ch. 6.

84
Revelation 21.22 (see p. 104). The view which I am presenting has been challenged in recent years by scholars who argue for a much later and piecemeal separation between Judaism and Christianity, more or less complete only in the early fourth century. The case is eloquently stated in D. Boyarin,
Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity
(Philadelphia, 2004): see esp. xiv-xv, 192-201.

85
A useful treatment of this theme is L. W. Hurtado,
Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity
(Grand Rapids, 2003), esp. 1-78, 575-6.

86
C. Harline,
Sunday: A History of the First Day from Babylonia to the Super Bowl
(New York, 2007), 6-17.