graymouser

I've been thinking lately about early Christian origins, and how to make sense of what I see as signs that there were multiple independent movements that formed and were coalesced hastily into proto-Christianity. This is just a sketch of my current ideas, I'll admit it's sort of drawn from the general pool of ideas circulating online, and I'd love pointers on where to get good sources to back up some of these ideas.

We only have good reason to date Paul back before 70 CE and the razing of the Temple. It makes sense, because this seems to be the appropriate time for a major shake-up of Jewish religion - you had these would-be messiahs and prophets of doom before the fall of the Temple, but now the stakes are really high. The Romans destroyed the center of Judaic life, and there are going to be immediate, vibrant expressions of that. Paul was probably not much more than an itinerant miracle-worker spreading a religion based on his own visions, competing with some similar miracle-workers (they were a dime a dozen in the day) in Jerusalem for allegiance. His gospel was about a "Jesus Christ" who was not solidly rooted in history at this point.

Then the Temple falls, right? And you've got a much bigger impetus for eschatological works. And somebody - I've no idea who or where - writes the gospel of Mark. This isn't based in any way on a real person, but is a deeply Midrashic work setting the stage for an imminent parousia. It has a different soteriology than Paul, being much more about immediate need for salvation through works. The time scale is short: we're not hedging our bets, it's apocalypse in this generation, now, and boy do the Roman oppressors get it in the end. Its Christology is not fully developed, it's rough around the edges, but it'll do and it's a hit.

A funny thing happens along the way - you've got multiple communities using the Q documents, which come from somewhere outside of the Markan tradition. Multiple folks who like the Mark document decide it'd be better if improved with Q - which fits your ancient mindset, if Jesus didn't say those things, well, he would've anyway. So that would put Matthew and Luke in the same period. The last of the big ancient documents that would later get canonized is Revelation - probably a popular Jewish apocalypse that was used in some proto-Christian communities.

So you get this riotous diversity of groups, you've got the authentic Paulines floating about, Mark, Matthew and Luke, Revelation, and a boatload of documents we don't even have, all in a kind of soup of Jewish diaspora apocalyptic expectation. Some are probably flavors of proto-orthodox (and proto-heterodox), some are gnostic, others are varieties that we don't even know about today. Is there a historical Jesus in there? If there is, there's probably nothing authentic about the guy in Christianity - maybe there was a "Q prophet" before the fall of the Temple, but Paul is talking based on visions and Mark wrote his gospel as a Midrashic creation. For these people, that's truer than some historical account of a person who lived fifty, sixty years ago anyway.

Then...it doesn't happen. Nope. The generation that would've seen Christ is all dead and the kingdom has not come. Yet these documents had to be pretty broadly in the right circles by 100 or 110 or so - the fact that the stuff about the generations was never edited out probably means that there was some reference to it when that generation was around. Now, a prophecy gone bust can hurt a religion's chances, but only when the religion doesn't get up and do something about it. (Cf. Millerites / Adventists, and Jehovah's Witnesses, both groups that had disappointed predictions of the parousia and didn't go extinct for it.) There is a sort of natural selection of trends and documents, new material (e.g. Acts) is written to reconcile Paul with the Synoptics more clearly, deutero-Pauline epistles (and the rest of the current NT material) "correct" some theology, and generally a proto-orthodox current is built on top of the best of the best documents culled from the riotous diversity of the past century.

What am I missing in the sketch above? Is there anything that's flat out wrong? What isn't accounted for? What would be some good sources to read to flesh out some of the points? I really think that some of the history is told in the theology, and that deep down it's a story of the syncretism of various groups having contradictory beliefs about Jesus and God.

show_no_mercy

There's still some question, in my mind, about what the "authentic" seven Pauline epistles read like. How many redactions were there? What did Marcion's "authentic" seven (out of his 10) read like? What did they read like prior to Marcion? If this could be reconstructed it might give better insight into this Paul movement prior to 70 CE.

graymouser

Well, yeah, ancient history is always a story about what you don't have more than about what you do. The reason I think the Paul movement was independent of the Markan community is that the soteriology is so plainly at odds - Paul is faith, faith, faith while the Gospels have Jesus saying "do this" and "do that" and you shall be saved. I would expect harmonizers to, well, harmonize the soteriology somewhat better than what we see. So - like in the case where I think the "generation" material fairly accurately dates at least Mark, I think the differences had to have been early and well established to the point where they couldn't be edited away. Not that this gives us a complete picture of what is redacted and what isn't, but it's at least a starting point.

Clivedurdle

I would go much wider and not focus on Jerusalem. There are clear gnostic xian groups for example in France.

I would see a judaic mystery gnostic cult bubbling up in various places all over the med, Noth Africa and possibly well over to Persia and India.

For various reasons this all gets centralised - the Romans may have helped explicitly as a weapon of war - Mark as an ironic play has important implications.

Possibly two hits - Vespasian/Hadrian and Constantine. They may not actually be related, except by the chance of Constantine's mum having a fetish about Jerusalem.

aa5874

The problem I see with your sketch is that it is just highly speculative. There is a big difference between the origin of Christianity and the origin of the Jesus story and when people started to beleive in Jesus.

There is no reason to think that people believed in Jesus or that there were Jesus stories in the 1st century. No external source wrote about Jesus who was diefied and was called the Messiah.

According to Justin Martyr even magicians were called Christians during the 1st century, the time of Claudius, this would imply that the word Christian preceeded the Jesus story.

There is no reason to think there was a writer called Paul who wrote epistles, when internally, Justin Martyr did NOTaccount for Paul, Acts of the Apostles, the churches and teachings of Paul.

Even the authors of the Gospels were not influenced by information found in the Pauline writings, these are indications that information about Jesus found in the Gospels were written before the Pauline letters.

And it is MOST strange that even the general epistles, considered to be later than the Pauline Epistles, hardly show any influence at all by Pauline doctrine.

Paul wrote in a VACUUM.

Even Jesus in the Gospels was not influenced by Paul. Jesus of the Gospels was CIRCUMCISED. Pauline writers claimed circumcision was useless.

The Pauline writers are all late and were written long after there were already Jesus believers, sometime after the writings of Justin Martyr.

It would appear that the Jesus stories were written sometime after the writings of Josephus.

graymouser

How can you not focus on Jerusalem? It's a background presence in what we have of Paul, and the destruction of the Temple looms so very large in Mark (and Revelation). Obviously there are references to places elsewhere in the Roman Empire, but what in the canonized sources would lead so far afield?

graymouser

I disagree. There is a reason to think so: the generational references to the parousia. If at least proto-Mark didn't come from a period when these prophecies could have been fulfilled, I don't think you can explain their presence, and that would put Mark within 60 years or so of Pilate being in Jerusalem. It makes perfect sense to me that a writer, in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple, would project back a messiah from the days of the Temple - who even tried to cleanse it! - who would return and give the Romans their comeuppance. It doesn't make sense to me to fabricate prophecies that have already failed.

I wasn't trying to imply that the Gospels were written under Pauline influence, in fact I said the opposite - that these were writings subsequently unified into a single religion.

Clivedurdle

Gestalt, context - like the much larger Jewish population around the med than in Judea, for example in Alexandria, pre fall of Temple.

And these tales may just be using Jerusalem as a backdrop.

And is Jerusalem really that important to Paul?

bacht

Good question. He seems to have started his career in Syria, and spent most of his time outside of Judea. It's not unthinkable that the two Jerusalem visits attributed to him were invented later as a bridge between Jewish and gentile Christians. His modus operandi seems to have been visiting and corresponding with gentiles in Jewish synagogues around the eastern empire.