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When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation

When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/common-knowledge/article-pdf/27/2/310/929556/310abulafia.pdf by DEEPDYVE INC user on 30 March 2022 Paula Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 272 pp. When Christians were Jews, there were no Christians. Fredriksen reaches this startling conclusion at the end of a book in which she seeks to understand why the followers of Jesus remained in Jerusalem after his crucifixion. What did they find in Jerusalem that they could not find elsewhere? The answer is: the Temple. The premise of this study is that the only way to understand the initial Jesus movement is to strip away all of the later assessments colored by the knowledge that the end of time was not the imminent reality that Jesus’s earliest followers thought it was. The steadfast conviction that the Second Coming was around the corner concentrated minds on only one distinction, that between the people of Israel and the Gentiles. The immediate challenge was how to interpret the delay. When the Second Coming did not occur, conclusions were drawn about the need to preach the message of Jesus beyond Jews to Gentiles, the reality being that many so- called God- fearers were so drawn to this message that they agreed to renounce their ancestral gods in favor of the God of Israel. Their willingness begged the question of whether they should also observe Jewish laws and customs and whether males should undergo circumcision. Paul said no; others said yes. But even for Paul, Jerusalem stood at the center of the new movement. He and the Apostles partook in Temple rituals, as Jesus had done himself. The Temple was where the end of time was expected to manifest itself. When the end did not come, even after the Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, new generations of Jesus’s followers reinterpreted what had been passed down to them about him and collected and created narratives that would develop into the core texts of what would become Christianity. And it is the subsequent interpretations of these core texts that would set Christians against Jews. The great strength of this book is how it places the early followers of Jesus so firmly in the context of multiple expressions of Second Temple Judaism in the volatile political landscape of the Hasmonean/Herodian/Roman land of Israel. Reading Paul’s letters looking forward into his unknown, rather than backward through the lens of what we know happened, is enlightening. Doing the same for the Gospels is much more difc fi ult because the Evangelists were already on the road of anachronistic reinterpretation after the destruction of the Temple. Given that the early preaching of Jesus’s message was so successful among Gentiles, it remains questionable whether Fredriksen’s “non- Christian” Christians were ever all Jews. — Anna Sapir Abulafia doi 10.1215/0961754X-8906201 C OM MO N K N O W L E D G E 31 0 http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Common Knowledge Duke University Press

When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation

Abulafia, Anna Sapir
Common Knowledge , Volume 27 (2) – May 1, 2021
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Copyright
Copyright © 2021 by Duke University Press
ISSN
0961-754X
eISSN
1538-4578
DOI
10.1215/0961754x-8906201
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Abstract

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/common-knowledge/article-pdf/27/2/310/929556/310abulafia.pdf by DEEPDYVE INC user on 30 March 2022 Paula Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 272 pp. When Christians were Jews, there were no Christians. Fredriksen reaches this startling conclusion at the end of a book in which she seeks to understand why the followers of Jesus remained in Jerusalem after his crucifixion. What did they find in Jerusalem that they could not find elsewhere? The answer is: the Temple. The premise of this study is that the only way to understand the initial Jesus movement is to strip away all of the later assessments colored by the knowledge that the end of time was not the imminent reality that Jesus’s earliest followers thought it was. The steadfast conviction that the Second Coming was around the corner concentrated minds on only one distinction, that between the people of Israel and the Gentiles. The immediate challenge was how to interpret the delay. When the Second Coming did not occur, conclusions were drawn about the need to preach the message of Jesus beyond Jews to Gentiles, the reality being that many so- called God- fearers were so drawn to this message that they agreed to renounce their ancestral gods in favor of the God of Israel. Their willingness begged the question of whether they should also observe Jewish laws and customs and whether males should undergo circumcision. Paul said no; others said yes. But even for Paul, Jerusalem stood at the center of the new movement. He and the Apostles partook in Temple rituals, as Jesus had done himself. The Temple was where the end of time was expected to manifest itself. When the end did not come, even after the Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, new generations of Jesus’s followers reinterpreted what had been passed down to them about him and collected and created narratives that would develop into the core texts of what would become Christianity. And it is the subsequent interpretations of these core texts that would set Christians against Jews. The great strength of this book is how it places the early followers of Jesus so firmly in the context of multiple expressions of Second Temple Judaism in the volatile political landscape of the Hasmonean/Herodian/Roman land of Israel. Reading Paul’s letters looking forward into his unknown, rather than backward through the lens of what we know happened, is enlightening. Doing the same for the Gospels is much more difc fi ult because the Evangelists were already on the road of anachronistic reinterpretation after the destruction of the Temple. Given that the early preaching of Jesus’s message was so successful among Gentiles, it remains questionable whether Fredriksen’s “non- Christian” Christians were ever all Jews. — Anna Sapir Abulafia doi 10.1215/0961754X-8906201 C OM MO N K N O W L E D G E 31 0

Journal

Common Knowledge – Duke University Press

Published: May 1, 2021

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