When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation

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I was amazed at the scholarly depth and insight of author Paula Fredriksen's “Augustine and the Jews.” I gave her more recent “Paul: The Pagan's Apostle” top marks in my Amazon review. However, this book left me unimpressed in terms of its insights and scholarship.

As an initial observation, I purchased the book thinking that it would describe the shadowy period when Jews who adhered to the Christian movement - the “Assembly” in Fredriksen's terminology - were still part of Jewish synagogues, specifically, the period from approximately the crucifixion to around the early years of the second century. I thought we might get some insights from Fredriksen about how Jews and Christians cohabited and eventually went in their different directions.

What this book turned out to be was mostly a reimagining of Christian history during the time encompassed by the Gospels and Acts with some references to what Fredriksen believes must have happened after the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, which turns out mostly to involve a retrojection of that historical event back into the life of Jesus. We really don't get much in the way of the cohabitation of the Assembly and Jews or of the events that drove the two kinds of Jews apart. So, insofar as this book did not actually address that period of time - when Christians were Jews - this book was a kind of lost opportunity.

I also had problems with Fredriksen's approach to history. Her primary texts are the Gospels, Acts, some letters of Paul and the writings of Josephus. However, she gives herself permission to simply excise passages from New Testament texts where they are inconvenient to her thesis. For example, Fredriksen argues that trials before Pilate and the Sanhedrin make no sense to her narrative and, so, she simply rules them out of existence. Fredriksen could be correct in this, of course, but shouldn't a historian be more protective of historical material?

Likewise, Fredriksen offers the reader the notion that Jesus's post-resurrection appearances lasted for “years” until finally coming to an end for no particular reason. The standard model is that Jesus's post resurrection appearances lasted from the Resurrection until the Ascension with a final one sometime later to Paul. If Paul's experience was “years” later, then it might be technically correct to say that the appearances occurred over a period of “years,” but Fredriksen is implying something different; she is implying that the appearances went on for years, rather than in an intense initial period of around a month. she writes:

“The period of the resurrection appearances, in other words, was exactly that: an extended period of time, years in fact, though we cannot from our disparate sources say exactly how long.”

This is not an incidental matter; Fredriksen's theory is that the failure of Christ to appear put Christ's disciples into a state of cognitive dissonance which resulted in them inventing their mission to bring the gospel to the world. Fredriksen writes:

“This combination of the decreasing frequency and, finally, the cessation of Jesus' posthumous appearances, together with the persistent nonarrival of the Kingdom, might have ended the movement then and there.”

Again, maybe it could have happened this way, but where is the evidence for “decreasing frequency”? The gospels describe a short period of intense appearances, a definite end, and one appearance to Paul as a sui generis event. Certainly, one can speculate about a years-long process with fewer and fewer appearances as the fad wears off, but this approach remains speculative. Once we toss out the documentary evidence, there is about as much evidence for Fredriksen's narrative as there is for a narrative that argues that the whole story was made up after the fact.

Fredriksen's basic thesis is that Jesus was a fairly conventional apocalyptic prophet. Jesus preached the coming of God's kingdom for an unspecified number of years. He was well-known to the authorities in Jerusalem. Jesus's preaching of the coming of the Kingdom put the urban mobs in a state of high expectation during Jesus's last visit to Jerusalem. In order to “calm down' the mobs, Pilate had his guard arrest Jesus. Pilate then had Jesus crucified to send a message to the crowds that Jesus was most definitely not their expected king. Thereafter, in their state of high expectation, and suffering cognitive dissonance that Jesus would not be re-establishing the Kingdom, Jesus's follower's experienced appearances of Jesus which gradually declined. During this time, they reinterpreted Jesus's message to include the destruction of the Temple and gave Jesus a Davidic ancestry. Paul “divinizes” Jesus as a lesser divine being, but does not radically divinize Jesus as one with the Father. The disciples wait around Jerusalem and while they were waiting, the disciples decided that it was better to do something while waiting, so they began their outreach to the gentiles. There was no Jewish persecution of Christians - which is to say Jews of the Assembly. There was at most voluntarily accepted Jewish correction of divergent members of the community who attracted attention.

And the rest is history.

Concerning the issue of Jesus's divinity, Fredriksen writes:

“Paul, importantly, never claims that Jesus is a god. The closest he comes is to say that Jesus was “in the form of [a] god” before he appeared “in the likeness of men.” Capitalizing “God” throughout this passage in Paul's letter, the Revised Standard Version mistranslates it. Paul's world contained both God, the chief biblical deity, and gods, such as those represented by the nonhuman “knees” in this same passage in Philippians 2: they will bend to the victorious returning Christ and to God the Father. Jesus is not “God.” He is, however, a divine mediator; a human being (anthrōpos), though “from heaven.” (What James, Jesus' brother, would have made of such claims I have no idea.) Jesus becomes radically divinized— as much god as God the Father— only during the imperially sponsored episcopal councils of the fourth and fifth centuries, a period when the (now Christian) emperor was also (still) considered divine. Back in the mid-first century, when Christians were Jews, Jesus was high on the cosmic gradient, but he was nonetheless human. Our current categories of “humanity” and “divinity” do not stretch in these ways. Theirs did.”

Fredriksen crafts her narrative in some surprising ways. For example, she favors John's gospel on a variety of issues. Thus, Fredriksen accepts the Gospel of John's testimony to the number of years that Jesus was active and the number of trips he made to Jerusalem. She also accepts at least John's version of the timing of the statements that Jesus made concerning the moneychangers in the temple.

The reason she favors John is that it is important to her that Pilate and the temple priests knew that Jesus was not really a rebel and was not a threat to the established order. Thus, the temple priests had no real reason to seek Jesus's death, and they were too involved in Passover activities to be able to spend any time in all the back and forth of trials and crucifixion. This puts the blame on Pilate, who knew that Jesus was a peaceful teacher and not an agitator. Moreover, because Jesus's teachings were known from his prior trips to Jerusalem, Pilate and the High Priests did not have to try Jesus and there was no opportunity for the crowd scenes that are attested to in the gospels.

It could have happened this way, of course, but the problem is that I didn't find the excising of so much of the gospel text to be particularly convincing. Then, again, I have to reflect on Fredricksen's personal biases. She is a Catholic who has converted to Judaism and has made many comments critical of what she finds to be anti-Jewish attitudes in, or read into, the New Testament. The burden of her decisions about what to accept from the New Testament seems to favor a reading that distances Jews - high priests or the average man - from the Crucifixion.

Some of Fredriksen's speculation was interesting. Her idea that the disciples congregated in Jerusalem in the expectation of Christ's imminent return and they wanted to be where the action was going to happen makes a lot of sense. Other proposals that she makes are worth considering.

However, on the whole, I was disappointed by how unsophisticated and shallow Fredricksen's analysis was. Fredriksen starts from the proposition that Jesus was obviously merely an apocalyptic preacher whose crucifixion started a movement that changed history. From that assumption, her task is simply a matter of telling a “just so” story about disappointment, cognitive dissonance and retrojecting future events into the historical Jesus. Fredriksen's approach may be accurate but I didn't find it convincing or interesting.

Many times, Fredriksen missed the opportunity to provide something of interest to those who don't start from her assumptions. For example, Fredriksen writes “If these pagans were baptized into the Jesus movement, however, they could no longer worship their native gods, the gods of their families and of their cities.”

This is true so far as it goes, but not that pagans were not merely baptized into the Jesus movement; they were baptized into the Jesus movement in the “name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” This baptismal formula goes all the way back to the beginning of the movement. If Fredriksen is write about Paul not divinizing Jesus as God, then who was the Son and why is the Son given an equal status with that of the Father by first century Jews?

We don't hear a word about this, unfortunately, but it seems that it would shed light on the time “when Christians were Jews.”

I was torn between giving this two or three stars. I think there might be something of interest for other people here, but this book does not live up to Ms. Fredriksen's prior works.