Christianity

Did Jesus and the disciples form Christianity?

Now, one of the things that historians and scholars have unpacked for us is that there was no religion in antiquity, at least in the way that we modern folk tend to think about religion. When we think about religion, maybe what comes to our mind is a coherent system of belief in some ritualistic behavior and perhaps some institutionally governed hierarchical leadership structure. For example, in Catholicism, you have the pope, and then you have bishops, and then you have priests. In the modern world, your ethnicity has nothing to do with your religion. For example, there are Catholics from every part of the world. But in antiquity, that was not the case whatsoever. As historian Paula Fredrickson comments, she says, "In antiquity, all religions were ethnic, and all ethnicities were religious." In other words, in the ancient world, at the time of Jesus, your family group in your community, whether that be your city or your nation, was a major determining factor in your cultic practices and the God or gods you worshipped. Maybe a specific city had gods that they honored. For example, in Acts 19, in Ephesus, they glorified and housed the Temple of Artemis. Worshipping gods in the ancient world was like having an insurance policy. You'd want to ensure the gods remained happy because happy gods meant happy humans. And if the gods were honored and worshipped, things would go well for your family and community. And if things were going badly, if there was a famine, if there was a nation that was about to invade yours, or your wife couldn't get pregnant, you would offer sacrifice to the gods and garner their favor. 

We tend to read the New Testament through a very different lens. We look at the apostles as just random dudes who practiced a religion called Judaism. And then, after Jesus came on the scene, they became Christians, stopped going to synagogue on Saturday, and started going to church on Sunday. And maybe they used to think they would go to heaven if they could obey the law enough. But because the law was so hard to do, they were just thankful that Jesus came to free them from their shame and release them from the heavy burden of doing the law. Unfortunately, that's how Jesus and the Jewish apostles of Jesus are often characterized today. But that's really modern, and it's pretty flawed logic. 

Historian and scholar E. P. Saunders and many others have shown that this is not at all what the ethnic descendants of Abraham believed about the law or expected for the future. In the first century, your ethnicity and the gods you worshipped weren't separate subjects. When we understand this about Jesus' disciples, we ought to see them not as abandoning their ancestral customs, beliefs, and future expectations because of Jesus but rather as firming them up, being more sure of them, and being even more deeply committed to them. Because from day one of meeting Jesus, they'd believe that Jesus was the Messiah. 

One example of first-century Jews continuing ancestral customs and beliefs after recognizing Jesus as the Messiah is found in Acts 21. In this chapter, the apostle Paul returns to Jerusalem, and the Jewish Christians express concern about rumors that he is teaching Jews living among the Gentiles to forsake the Mosaic customs. James says to Paul in verse 20:

"You see, brother, how many thousands there are among the Jews of those who have believed. They are all zealous for the law (Acts 21:20, ESV Bible)

This statement highlights the continued observance of Jewish customs and practices among the Jewish community of Jesus' followers in Jerusalem. The term "zealous for the law" suggests a strong commitment to observing the Mosaic Law, indicating that the early Jewish Christians maintained their Jewish identity while accepting Jesus as the Messiah. 

Much like Jesus, the disciples and apostles anticipated what Moses and the prophets had spoken about over and over again. God had made a covenant with their people, and because of that covenant, he would restore the twelve tribes of Israel to the land. He would rebuild Jerusalem. He would raise up a son of David as the king over them and use the people of Israel as his servants to be a light to the rest of the nations. As Jesus' ministry progressed, the apostles became even more convinced. 

Instead of affirming their expectations, we typically understand them as ignorant, unlearned, unrefined, and unable to grasp the complexities of this new spiritualistic, de-ethnicized apocalyptic expectation that Jesus was teaching them. Somehow, they needed the spirit to see that their old nationalist hopes were just garbage now, that everything they had known from their childhood had actually been redefined and reimagined. But this is not the case at all. As we can see, after Jesus had risen from the dead, the disciples asked this all-important and all-revealing question. In Acts 1:6-8, Luke writes:

So when they had come together, they asked him, "Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?" He said to them, "It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth." (Acts 1:6-8, ESV Bible)

Their expectations were very Jewish. We know you to be that son of David we've been looking for. Are you going to crush Rome? Are you going to restore Jerusalem? Bring back the twelve tribes, just like we expect you to do? Their question was not uninformed. In fact, Jesus even alluded to this reality as documented in Matthew 19:28:

Jesus said to them, "Truly, I say to you, in the new world, when the Son of Man will sit on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. (Matthew 19:28, ESV Bible)

So the question asked by the disciples in Acts 1:6, "Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?" It is a perfectly valid question. The burning thing on their mind wasn't about heaven, spiritual gifts, or other subjects often discussed today in the Christian church. Their one question before Jesus leaves is about God doing what he said concerning Israel. Jesus never denies the validity of the question. He answers, "It's not for you to know when that's going to happen." Jesus validates and affirms the question. 

So the disciples were either exceedingly ignorant at this point, which is what the average modern believer often thinks, or they had actually believed Moses. They believed the prophets, and they actually believed what Jesus said and taught. The disciples were Jewish. Their ancestral practices, beliefs, and expectations for the future were all within a Jewish context. They were raised with this worldview in which they understood Jesus.

Paul was Jewish, and there is significant evidence in the Bible that Paul remained Jewish, even after he devoted his life to Jesus, the Messiah. We risk misinterpreting his writings and drawing untrue conclusions if we fail to recognize this reality. We will explore the Jewishness of Jesus and Paul more in future studies. 

Our view of Jesus and Paul and how we interpret the Bible has been heavily influenced by anti-semitism and anti-Jewish thought. As early as the second century, and climaxing around the third century with the emperor Constantine, Christianity had opposed the Jewish story through what biblical scholars and historians have called replacement theology or supersessionism. This is the belief that the Christian Church has replaced ethnic Israel, the physical descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in their role within the Gospel story. The belief is that they have been replaced because they rejected Jesus as their Messiah. This way of thinking has caused so many Gentile disciples of Jesus to see the Jewish scriptures, what we would call the Old Testament today, as either irrelevant or unimportant for us, or even, at best, just a bunch of prophecy that points to Jesus and what he did at the first coming.

There's been a lot of scholarship and historical work done on the Jewishness of the Bible over the last few decades. Scholars and historians like E. P. Saunders, Paula Fredrickson, Daniel Lancaster, and John Harrigan have done a great job exploring Jesus and Paul and life in first-century Israel. Of course, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has also contributed to a significant shift in our understanding of that period. While there's a vibrant discussion among academics, the implications of these critical historical discoveries don't often make it down decisively to the popular level in such a way that it actually changes the way the average Gentile disciple of Jesus reads the scriptures and lives out their lives.