Redescribing Christian Origins

Abstract

Redescribing Christian Origins, edited by Ron Cameron and Merrill P. Miller. SBLSymS 28. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature; Leiden: Brill, 2004. Pp. xvi + 539. $49.95/$235.00. ISBN 1589830881/9004130640. This is a rather unique and fascinating volume. It contains not only papers delivered over three years of meetings of Society of Biblical Literature's Seminar on Ancient Myths and Modern Theories of Christian Origins but also some very honest, heart-searching reflection on results of this, its first phase of operation. The project has been an attempt to offer a different (that is, a historically more reliable) account of Christian origins than that provided by canonical traditions, book of Acts in particular. Acts gives only one version of story, a version that strains credibility beyond endurance. The documents and Gospel of Thomas provide evidence of a different story, one not focused in Jerusalem and without reference to a kerygma of cross and resurrection. The task, then, is to rediscover Christian origins that lie behind these documents, implication being that there was no single origin of Christianity but multiple origins and that a more responsible historian must reckon with emergence of diverse Christianities. The theoretical basis is that texts are juncture of myth making and social formation, so that careful scrutiny of them from that perspective should provide details that go to make up alternative stories. Throughout published essays, discussions, and reflections, influence of Burton Mack and Jonathan Z. Smith is frequently acknowledged and is repeatedly evident. The first stage (when project was still a Consultation and not yet a Seminar) was to gain a clearer perception of community, or Galilean Jesus Association, Willi Braun prefers. The assumptions already at this point are rather worrying: is a literary document whose contents and full extent are clear; it emerged in a series of at least three chronologically successive compositional phases (with due acknowledgment to John Kloppenborg); from content and character of a Q community can be read as an increasingly self-conscious and fairly sophisticated research collective (p. 48). Moreover, compositional phases allow such a mirror-reading not only for a whole but also for pre-Q^sup 1^ phase well three compositional phases (p. 83) and even for Q's opponents (p. 71). This mirror-reading gives the virtually unavoidable conclusion that Q^sup 1^ and certainly a whole represent intellectual/scribal of people who had both competence and means for such labors and strongly suggests that document Q^sup 1^ was work of a social group from ranks of an urban retainer class of middling status, a Galilean small-town scribal intelligentsia (p. 57). William Arnal, to whom link between and village scribes is largely indebted, elaborates social situation behind compositional stages of Q: in particular, that Q^sup 1^ was intended to address relative loss of status among village scribes (what Braun describes the burden of alienation and deracination [p. 63]), an intention that failed because persons in question had lost too much authority and were unable to exert sufficient influence to halt further loss (p. 84). I know that hypothesis, or rather hypotheses, were being taken read by Consultation and Seminar, but I do wonder whether they provide a sufficiently secure and substantial basis for Seminar's undertaking. The content and extent of are not clear. The assumption that a Q^sup 1^ not only can be discerned but can be confidently regarded a single, coherent document is most contentious. And suggestion that any early Christian assembly had only one document (or nothing more than some collection of Jesus' sayings) and that character of community/congregation can be read off from that document/collection demands a lot more self-critical appraisal than it has so far been given. …