When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation by Paula Fredriksen

Abstract

Reviewed by: When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation by Paula Fredriksen Anthony Giambrone O.P. When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation by Paula Fredriksen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 272 pp. By natural disposition, I am inclined to follow the (now not so) New Criticism, but Paula Fredriksen has written a book that begs for a good old-fashioned Freudian reading: When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation. The title hides an autobiographical interest, for Fredriksen is herself a Jew who was a Christian. Still more: she is a former-Catholic Jewish historian of early Jewish Christians, who on her last page rejects her own catchy title as a distorting anachronism. "Christians" did not yet exist in that far-away first generation, she confesses, only misguided Jews who thought that they would be history's last. In the meantime, of course, when the world did not end, these misguided Jews somehow turned into misguided Christians, and the book ends as an ethical thrust aimed at "one of the West's most sustained fonts of anti-Judaism" (183), namely Christianity, a faith built on layer upon layer of illusion. Lamentable as Christian anti-Judaism surely is, one wonders if a moralizing font of vulgarized ex-Christian "Jewish" anti-Christianism, dispensing seductively packaged speculative historical reconstructions, is what better Christian–Jewish relations really needed. At the base of the study stands a sharp variant on a perfectly benign first principle of historical reason: Jesus was a Jew. From here, with characteristic verve, the book—which is a kind of smashed-together summary of positions developed in her previous works (e.g., Jesus of Nazareth, King of Jews [1999] and Paul, the Pagan's Apostle [2017])—launches out upon Fredriksen's long-standing enterprise of rethinking and rewriting the entirety of Christian origins as a fully Jewish story. Such a project is obviously unobjectionable as far as it goes, though it takes many turns and pronounces many judgments that can and really should be disputed and resisted. A few [End Page 303] select issues will be evoked below. In essence, for Fredriksen, Jesus was a doubly duped victim, bilked by the failure of history to end and swindled by a mismanaged political game, a religious enthusiast who, by a bungled act of Roman plotting, unwittingly founded a new Jewish lunatic fringe: a crowd of mentally "marginal Jews" made in his image, a first-century sect of blundering and impervious prophetic dullness. Such a formulation freely sounds unfair and overstated. It is actually rather accurate, however, and at least serves to signal the problem of genre at the outset. Professionally responsible as it strives to be and personal as it inevitably is, the text is in every way a typical trade-book: meant for mass consumption (and mass sales) and thereby sold to (well-selling) sensationalistic views. In this connection it is merely the latest, well-paced and well-written iteration of the "Jesus the Failed Millenarian Prophet" series—which, like Star Wars books, at some point all start to look the same, with some minimal rearrangement of wookiees and death stars. The genus is well-known. Atop the turn to apocalyptic Judaism and a misled Jesus—now classic with its Schweitzerean pedigree—comes the accustomed citation of Leon Festinger and company's When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World. This combination of historical and sociological modeling then spins out the whole paradigm. Jesus was gravely mistaken in his expectation of the imminent end of the world and, on this point, his followers proved to be good disciples—even better than the master. For, again and again, they re-tried the same prophecy, repeatedly getting it wrong in their turn, reinterpreting and reviving the discredited view with a dense ingenuity born of complete and excitable delusion. In Fredriksen's reconstruction, we thus trace the arc through four specific eschatological let-downs: Jesus at his final Passover; then again when the resurrection appearances stopped; once more during the tense showdown with Caligula; and finally, during the Great Revolt against Rome. This chronicle of an unrelieved string of the...