Seeking, but not finding
I think I have been searching in the wrong places for the origin of the Jesus figure in our New Testament writings. Of course it would be easiest to assume that there is some truth to the gospel narratives and that there was a historical preacher by that name who was crucified and whose followers believed he rose from the dead and went to heaven. But then I would be unable to explain why the earliest uncontested and independent evidence we have for that person does not appear until a full hundred years after his time and without a hint about how that life, so rich in allusions to mythical acts and persons, came to be known. Or I could conjure up an explanation that involved ordinary (generally illiterate) persons passing on ever more imaginative “oral reports” about the person but that would be letting my imagination fly in the face of studies that tell us that’s not how fabulous tales about historical persons originate. (They are composed from the creative imaginations of the literati.)
I used to fuss fruitlessly over trying to understand what might have led to the first gospel, widely believed to have been the Gospel of Mark. I liked the idea that that gospel portrayed a Jesus who could readily be interpreted as a personification of an ideal Israel, one who died with his nation in the catastrophe of 70 CE (the destruction of the Jewish Temple by Titus along with myriads of crucifixions of Jewish victims) and rose again to establish a new “spiritual” Israel in the “church”. But that idea did not explain the kinds of Christianities (there were many types) that swelled and plopped like bubbles in a vast Mediterranean hot mud spring. Not even if we moved the gospel to a later time so that it had the Bar Kochba war (132-135 CE) in mind.
An old door reopened
Nina Livesey (re)opened a door to a room for me that maybe I should have investigated more thoroughly before. In the book I recently discussed, Livesey speaks of a multiplicity of “Christian” schools comparable with the many philosophical schools in Rome. They usually centred around a prominent teacher, attracted an inner circle of disciples while also holding open public sessions, and would not be averse to publishing both trial and final versions of tracts illustrating some point of their teachings. Livesey revives the idea that the letters attributed to an apostle named Paul were published by one such school, one led by Marcion. Marcion was also reputed to have produced “a gospel”, one that many in later antiquity and since have considered to be an early form of our Gospel of Luke.
Let’s pause there and collect our thoughts for a moment.
Marcion was not the only “Christian” teacher in Rome around the middle of the second century. Other teachers or school heads (not all in Rome) around the same period include Apelles, Basilides, Cerdo, Heracleon, Justin, Marcion, Saturninus/Satornilos, Tatian, Valentinus . . . You get the idea. There were many competing teachings. Some of them came to be dismissed as a consequence of being labelled as “gnostic”. But they were there from the beginning — at least if by “the beginning” we insist on appealing only to independently verifiable sources.
Now when Marcion published “Paul’s letters” some other schools picked them up and used them as foils through which to teach their own doctrines. Multiple interpretations and textual variants were the result. That’s how the schools worked: they would be open to engaging with each others’ teachings, either with modifications, elaborations, or outright rejections. So it is difficult from our perspective to always know what the original teachings of some of these schools were: they were capable of changing over time.
Back to the gospels. When Marcion wrote up a life of Jesus, he was using that figure of Jesus as a means of promoting his (Marcion’s) view that “Christianity” was an antithesis of the Jewish religion. Marcion’s Jesus was not even real flesh and blood but a spirit being in the appearance of flesh and blood: the antithesis even in this respect to the physical ordinances of Moses.
Schools opposing the biblical narrative
But other schools had other ideas about Jesus. More than that, they had ideas about the origins of the Jewish religion and even of humanity itself that we today would find quite bizarre. There were multiple ideas about god and creation. Many of these ideas were borrowed from Greek philosophy, some from Greek literature and myths, as well as from the Jewish Scriptures. Some said that the god who created this world was a god lower than, and ignorant of, the ultimate “Good God”; some said the serpent in the Garden of Eden was actually a benefactor of humankind and the god who punished him (according to the Book of Genesis) was the wicked god; some said that the line of Cain (depicted in Genesis as the first murderer) was the righteous genealogy; some said Jesus first appeared in the form of Adam’s third son, Seth. Indeed, Jesus held different positions among these various schools. He might be seen as one of a number of spirit beings who were “born” in the earliest moments of time. Or he was a human, fathered by Joseph, who was possessed by a spirit being called Christ. Some saw him as hating the laws of the god of Moses and promising deliverance to all whom the Jewish god had condemned.
I suspect it is impossible to ever find a way to reconcile all of these teachings. They span events from time before creation right through to the present and beyond. One thing they all seem to have in common, though: they are all opposed to the orthodox understanding we have of the Jewish Scriptures, or the Old Testament. Not all of them, as far as we are aware, include a place for Jesus. But of those that do, Jesus has a role that is opposed to the Mosaic Law and traditional Jewish Temple. (Not unreasonably, given that Jesus is derived from the name Joshua who was originally understood as the successor to Moses.)
In other words, what I am imagining here is a situation that we can with reasonable assurance place as early as the opening decades and middle of the second century — a time when a find a multiplicity of schools with various notions proposing narratives that contradicted those we read in Genesis and those of the “orthodox” interpretation of the Jewish bible more generally.
Where did those ideas come from?
An Anti-Jewish/Judean time
I am tempted to begin with the beginning of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) as proposed by Niels Peter Lemche and in some depth by Russell Gmirkin. This takes us back to the beginning of the Hellenistic era (from the time of Alexander the Great’s conquests) when Samaritans and Judeans, with the aid of Greek writings, collaborated to construct a narrative of origins that we read today in the books from Genesis to Deuteronomy or Joshua. Genesis in particular has retained hints that its authors were trying to incorporate multiple gods whom later readers would equate with Yahweh. Most scholars have seen multiple hands and schools of thought going into the final product of the Pentateuch. It is not difficult to imagine some intellects associated with the production of the first bible continuing to raise alternative ideas that were infused with Greek philosophy and myth or to imagine that some of this kind of divergent thinking continued through to the Roman era. What are surely critical turning points, however, are the calamities that befell the Jews (or Judeans) first under Vespasian and Titus (the first Jewish war of 66-70 CE), the uprisings and widespread massacres of Jews a few decades later under Trajan and then the “final solution” by 135 CE under Hadrian when the Jews were forbidden even to set foot in Jerusalem.
The bloody times coincided with the emergence of “Christian schools” in Rome. Let’s take a step beyond Nina Livesey’s specific focus on the letters of Paul appearing at this time. Let’s suggest that it is these times that witness the emergence of schools teaching the “end” of the Jewish laws. These times further witness teachings declaring the falsehood of the narrative of creation by the Jewish god, or at least teaching that this creation was evil or less than “good”. Imagine that this is the time when we see the namesake of Moses’ successor, Joshua/Jesus, promising deliverance from the judgment of that lesser god of the Jews.
If we can imagine all of that, we are, I think, confining ourselves to what the evidence in our second century sources allows.
But how does any of that explain the Christianity we recognize today?
It doesn’t. If that’s all we had, no doubt those negative teachings of Marcion, of Valentinus and others would have fallen by the wayside in time.
From antipathy to antithesis to … fulfilment
But something happened after Marcion released his story of Jesus, a Jesus who was an “antithesis” of the best that the god of the Jews could offer.
Another school, perhaps one associated with the “church father” Justin, or with Basilides in Alexandria (I don’t know and can only surmise), responded with an opposing narrative about a Jesus who was less an “antithesis” of the Jewish god than a “fulfilment” of all that the Jewish god had hoped for but had failed to achieve hitherto.
If that happened, we have a revolutionary moment. We no longer have a negative response to “the Jewish religion and scriptures”; rather, we have a way of capturing and finding new and enriched meaning in that old religion and its hoary sacred writings.
What if Jesus could be transformed from an anti-Moses or anti-Yahweh figure into a ‘higher than Moses’ figure, a fulfilment of the higher ethics of god who was henceforth to appear as a newly discovered deity, or as the old deity whose true character was only being seen clearly now for the first time — or as the “one sent to reveal” that newly understood deity?
Such a Jesus had the power to enrich and so preserve with new meaning texts that had long been revered (even among non-Jews). Allegorical reading could infuse them with new meanings. The old was discarded, yes, but it was also retained and revivified as throwing the “new” into 3D relief by its shadows: Joseph and Moses and David and Elijah (and so on) of the Old Testament prefigured the Jesus of the New — at least if read with a little imagination. A gospel could depict Jesus as a personification of an ideal Israel, healing others but suffering unjustly only to be raised up and bring all humanity to salvation. Another gospel could present Jesus as a new Moses delivering a “higher law” in the Sermon on the Mount. And so on.
I suggest that once one or some of those schools (probably in Rome but not necessarily confined to there) discovered a way to both reject and embrace with new meaning the old Mosaic order of things, they were on a winner, as we might say today.
Such a Jesus, just like the other original Jewish writings and again like the writings of “proto-Christian” (including “gnostic”) schools, drew upon the inspiration of Greek myths and philosophy to flesh out their teachings. The Jesus with us today drew upon one additional source — the Jewish Scriptures — and found as a result a longer-lasting heritage. Various “schools” may have competed for the most outstanding way to oppose and supplant the religion of the Jews who from 70 to 135 CE were suffering the calamities of Vespasian, Titus, Trajan and Hadrian. The form of Christianity that became a religion that could boast of a “higher fulfilment” and stronger appeal to literati and hoi polloi alike was the one that learned how to infuse venerable texts and the experiences of their advocates with new meaning and build on their foundation. Rejection of the Old, in way, yes, like the teachings of other schools … but with one important twist.