Jesus people: scholars search for the early church

Christian Century, July 26, 2003 by Bruce J. Malina

In Search of the Early Christians: Selected Essays.

By Wayne A. Meeks. Edited by Allen R. Hilton and H. Gregory Snyder. Yale University Press, 314 pp., $35.00.

OVER THE PAST three decades Wayne A. Meeks has investigated the social world of the early followers of Jesus. "The emphasis on the social context of writing and meaning ... has been perhaps the principal theme of my scholarship," notes Meeks, professor emeritus at Yale. He has always defined himself as a social historian whose goal has been "to discover how the world was subjectively experienced" by various early Jesus followers, and to describe what emerges "if we try to imagine ourselves into the position of some ordinary person in a Roman provincial city who is converting to Christianity in the first or second century" (The Origins of Christian Morality: The First Two Centuries).

The outcome of his efforts has been extraordinarily interesting. In The First Urban Christians (1983) Meeks tells the story of Jesus groups founded by Paul, focusing on their "urban" environment, their social life and the formation of their ekklesia, governance, ritual, patterns of belief and patterns of life. This work was followed by The Moral World of the First Christians (1986), a book that underscores Meeks's abiding interest in the moral values and attitudes of these early generations. He begins the story with a description of the social setting and of the great traditions of Greece, Rome and Israel expressed in it, then looks at early Jesus group morals within that setting. He takes up this theme again in The Origins of Christian Morality (1993) in which he considered morality and its implications for community, conversion, city and household, the world, mutual obligation, the experience of evil, the body and worthiness.

In his latest volume, which brings together essays from previous works, he muses on how the opening essay, "The Man from Heaven in Johannine Sectarianism," met a surprisingly large and favorable response, and "encouraged me both to try to discern other dimensions of the Johannine group's history ('Equal to God') and to explore different uses of similar imagery in other Christian groups ('The Man from Heaven in Paul's Letter to the Philippians'). The essay 'Breaking Away' attempted to make some more general comparisons, while 'On Trusting an Unpredictable God' explored some of the theological implications of the apostle Paul's wrestling with the identity of the communities he had founded. Directly or indirectly, however, the question of the various Christian groups' continuity and discontinuity with the variety of ways Jews [sic] inhabited the Greco-Roman world is a constant motif in all the essays below."

Meeks's concern with Jesus group morality derives from his valuable insight that "ethics and community formation seemed more the immediate point than doctrine, for example, [in] Paul's letters.... Despite the many books that continue to be published on the topic, 'New Testament ethics' is a misleading category, confusing historical constructions with normative judgments, eliding difficult questions about the nature of a scriptural canon, and above all failing to take with sufficient seriousness the dialectic between the formation of a community and the development of the community's norms of belief and behavior."

To understand and assess Meeks's contribution to New Testament studies we need to place his work in a broader context. When people think of "sociology and the New Testament," it is Meeks's name that first comes to mind. Many people still call the social-historical approach to New Testament documents "sociology," largely due to inattentive translations from German (German "soziologisch" means both "social" and "sociological"). Social history came to be called "sociological history" or simply "sociology." Yet the sociology in social history is worlds apart from what is taught as sociology in U.S. colleges. This is only one of the linguistic casualties that clutter biblical studies.

Since meanings come from social systems, it seems extremely anachronistic to refer to pre-Constantinian Jesus groups as "Christians" and to their ideology as "Christianity." After all, Christendom, the matrix of all existing forms of Christianity, is rooted in Nicea and its creedal canons. The word "Jew" is also used anachronistically, given that all Jews today derive from the fifth- to sixth-century Talmudic expression of one strand of Israelite ideology and behavior. There were no Jews in this sense in the world of Jesus and Paul. But social historians rarely attend to such anachronistic usages.

Further, on the basis of the data they employ and the stories they tell, the works of 19th-century novelists and social historians are hard to differentiate. Once we start to think of the problems and questions behind apparently self-evident notions like "history," we can see that our seemingly straightforward distinction between "fact" and "fiction" is relatively modern. Distinguishing works as fact or fiction is a social judgment, a judgment derived from criteria rooted in one's social system. These criteria are usually called "historical criticism," the marshaling and interpretation of data in terms of the historian's intuitive faculties and individual genius, hence without explicit generalization or concern for theory. Both social novelists and historians use their own version of "historical criticism," the one to tell a nonanachronistic fictional story, the other to tell a nonanachronistic factual story. But how can one tell the difference between the two? Footnotes alone do not solve the problem.