Introduction
to the New Testament
But there is another logic for an arrangement that tells the same story but with a different emphasis. It has only been possible to tell the story in recent times as we have gained insight into the circumstances of the apostolic Church and how its writings came to be. It is this story that emerges from arrangement of The Spoken Word and the texts here
I and II Thessalonians -- the first writings
The Spoken Word order commences with I and II Thessalonians, the writing of I Thessalonians able to be dated precisely to AD 50. To grasp the significance of this letter, however, we need to be able to conceive the sequence of events and dynamics that led to its writing. Throughout these introductory notes, I will bracket dates with a 20/21st century equivalent in order for us to capture in our own minds the time-frames we are dealing with. thus, Jesus commences his ministry in about 26 A.D. (1926) and is executed in 29 A.D. (1929).Jesus’ execution as a criminal is the pivotal event of the apostolic era, and the whole of the Apostolic Testamentary writings, to one degree or another, is about how the community of faith deals with this shattering, faith-destroying event. The 'testimony' that lies at the heart of the whole story is how this community emerges from that event to become the transformed agape community of the Christian Church.
The first Christian generation
Judaism in the time of Jesus, as it is still today, is not a coherent religion but a collection of sects radically at variance with one another. The first generation of Christians following the crucifixion were all Jews and saw themselves as being a new sect within Judaism, keeping the Jewish Law, though in a way that had been modified by the teaching of Jesus.However, something radical was taking place beneath the radar. One of the Jewish leaders, Saul of Tarsus, had been converted to Christianity in a dramatic experience that broke all his prior conceptions of religion. He left Jerusalem and went to Arabia where he stayed for the next 14 years, wrestling with the implications of this experience of Jesus. When he returned to Jerusalem around AD 45 (1945), he came with a sensationally new interpretation of the meaning of Jesus and the message of the Gospel. Jesus, in Paul's reconstruction, abolished the Law and open the way through his death for every human – Jew or Gentile -- to approach God solely on the basis of believing what God has done in the crucifixion. With what dynamic of circumstances we do not know, Paul was able to persuade the Jerusalem leadership to confirm his message and commission him to take this message to be non-Jewish world. So began, in around 45 A.D. (1945), Paul's extraordinary mission that took him to Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and the European mainland in and around Greece. These journeys lasted until the late 50s (around 1958). They resulted in the establishment of the string of churches in these pagan lands. This is the background for the first of the writings that have survived for us, the two letters to the church he founded in Thessalonica, written, as noted in A.D. 50 (1950).
Paul's mission and message, however, quickly aroused a storm of reaction from the religious conservative establishment, in Judaism, but also from the Christian leadership who realised now that Paul’s radical liberalism completely undermined their traditional understanding of the message of Jesus and life lived under ‘God’s Law’. So they sent out counter-missions, led by Peter, to re- assert the place of the Law. At the same time, a new and even more radical wave of religious thinking was beginning to sweep the Roman world and many were turning away from Paul’s interpretation of the Christian message to embrace this new thinking. This is the framework for understanding the balance of the letters that make up the group I entitle, 'The Early Letters of Paul'. The Christian community is now a battlefield of conflict and factionalism, at the same time facing increasing hostility from the Jewish community. The letters to the Corinthians and to be Galatians come from this period, written around 56 A.D. (1956).
For Paul, the latter part of the 50s and early 60s were marked by a transition from being embroiled in church building and politics to a time of deep reflection. During an extended stay in Ephesus, he writes the longest statement of his theology, known to us as the Letter to the Romans. Then he was arrested and transported to Rome where he is imprisoned, possibly to face execution and there, in the expanse of time enabling him to think deeply, he writes the two extraordinary letters, to the Colossians and to the Ephesians. Here his vision soars to heights where no religious reflection had gone previously.
Mark's bombshell
We do not know what happens to Paul. He simply disappears off the radar screen in A.D. 62 (1962). What is extraordinary from our point of view about Paul is that, for all his intense focus on Jesus as the Christ, he showed almost no knowledge of or interest in Jesus as the man. Nor is there any evidence from his writings that the first generation Christians showed any interest or knowledge either. It seems as if the concrete life of Jesus did not occur to that first generation as having any significance in itself. This may have been part of their grief reaction and to the intense disillusionment regarding their messianic hopes that followed on Jesus’ death.However, among that first generation was one who was probably just a teenager at the time of the crucifixion, a young man close enough to Jesus to be in the Garden of Gethsemane at the moment of Jesus’ arrest and who ran away naked from the scene. The young man therefore knew Jesus but perhaps was too young to have been caught up in the messianic disillusionment but who cherished the memory of Jesus.
This young man, probably Mark, later became a disciple of Paul although there is evidence of tension between the two. Mark knew Jesus, Paul never did. It is my surmise that Mark, while embracing Paul's theology of the gospel, felt acutely Paul’s neglect of Jesus the person. After Paul’s (death?), Mark publishes an account of Jesus’ life. This story may well have dropped on the Christian community like a bombshell and created the second revolutionary movement in the Christian community.
Mark's Gospel, published in 64 A.D. (1964), is thoroughly Pauline in that it proclaims Jesus as bringing salvation through faith in him ("Your faith has saved you") and Jesus is portrayed as abolishing the Law.
Matthew’s gospel -- the conservative reaction
Matthew's gospel appears around a decade after Mark, around 75 A.D. (1975) and presents a diametrically opposite view of Jesus to the one Mark presents. This is Jesus according to the conservative’s vision -- Jesus the man of the Law who modifies but does not abolish the Law.Between Mark and Matthew's publishing had occurred a cataclysmic event for Judaism -- and Christians still regarded themselves as a branch of Judaism. In A.D. 70 (1970), the rebellion of the Jews against the Roman Empire led to the capture and total destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple and the dispersal of Jews throughout the empire. To grasp the enormity of this, imagine for Roman Catholics a nuclear device obliterating the Vatican, pope and curia. The Christian community had its head cut off. Matthew's gospel, with its emphasis on the rules to govern Christian society, was immediately and widely embraced as giving the Christian community a new cohesion.
The realm of empire
From the early 80s (1980s), the focus of Christian concern shifts to the relationship with the empire. Rome was now virulently anti-Jewish and identified Christianity as part of Judaism. This is the framework for the next great act of Christian writing, the two-volume gospel of Luke (the second volume of which we call the Acts of the Apostles). Luke is no longer focused on the issues that concern Matthew and Mark. He is focused on the relationship between the Christian community and the Empire, and the evident agenda behind his two-volume work was to present the Christian community, Jesus, the early church and the apostle Paul, as good citizens of the Empire, worthy not of persecution but of commendation and support. I suspect that this is the reason why Luke does not record Paul's execution (if that is what happened) because to do so would have undermined case.If we pair Luke's gospel with the Revelation to John, written a further decade on, we see how Luke's message failed to convince the Romans and Christianity came under increased pressure. The Revelation to John is written to prepare the community for the coming fire-storm of Imperial repression.
Disillusionment, conflict and a new threat
By now, our account of the story of these early years of the Christian community and the writing of the New Testament takes us up to the last few years of the century and to its turn (1895 -- 100 (1995 -- 2000)). These were years when the church was in deep trouble from within and without. The persecution by the Romans has already been noted but this may have been the least of the problems. The church was fading fast, bleeding membership, riven by warring factions. The wave of new religious thinking, evidenced back in the 50s, was now in full tide, creating further fissures and fractures in the church. At the same time, positively, the core of the faithful have developed a profound liturgy and their thinking was liturgically focused while the ministry of episcope and priesthood had emerged and clarified. This is the context for the titanic writings of the Letter to the Hebrews and the Gospel and letters of John, together with the Revelation to John.At the heart of the problem facing the church was the legacy of the way Paul presented the gospel as being focused on a return of Jesus. Life for the Christian community through the second half of the first century was incredibly difficult, but for these generations the hardship was all going to be made worthwhile because of the glory they would enter into on Jesus’ return. By the 90s (1990s), that apocalyptic vision had turned to disillusionment and this was causing widespread abandonment of the faith.
Hebrews (a sermon not a letter) was written to present a new model altogether of the work of Jesus, a model connecting deeply with the consciousness of the Christian community of priesthood that had emerged out of their liturgical focus. In the Revelation to John, written about the same time, Jesus is also presented as the liturgical priest, and the vision of John's Gospel is liturgically-centred through and through.
John's gospel, and his first letter, constitutes the climax and pinnacle of the apostolic era. The gospel was written in 100 A.D. (2000), the letter probably in A.D. 112 (2012). They are a profound reflection into the inner meaning of Jesus. The gospel should not be read as an ‘historical account'. John is drawing all the threads of the last 70 years together in this exploration of the meaning of Jesus and faith in him. He addresses the disillusionment by a new model that locates 'eternal life' not in an apocalyptic future but in the immediate experience of grace in life. He calls on the community to transcend factionalism and infighting by reaffirming the gospel message of love and unity. He confronts the new wave of religious thinking by affirming "the Word made flesh".
Although some writings such as the Letters to Timothy and 2 Peter remained to be written and come from late in the second century, with the first letter of John, the era of apostolic writings effectively comes to a close. Fittingly, the great climactic statement is Thomas’ cry, "My Lord and my God". It is as if the entire body of writing over 50 years leads to this one statement.
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