When Christians Were Jews

Abstract

Fredricksen’s prologue identifies a few specific premises that guide her thoughts: 1) The earliest followers of Jesus were expecting an immediate end to the world, 2) Josephus provides the primary historical access to the state of affairs in the Roman world (including Jerusalem), and 3) the dramatic end to Jesus’s life would not have had the impact it did without the involvement of Rome.Fredricksen’s first chapter walks through several individuals/groups in order to examine the attitudes toward the temple in the period before and contemporary to Jesus. She concludes that Jesus, John the Baptist, and Paul all frequented the Temple and continued to elevate its place in their religious lives (Essenes are the exception, p. 42).The second chapter examines Jesus and Paul’s attitudes toward the temple. Beginning with John and Mark’s versions of Jesus’ temple cleansing, Fredricksen argues that Jesus’ actions and words are not a condemnation of any function of the temple itself, but rather an apocalyptic announcement of the coming end, which will bring a new temple of God’s final kingdom (pp. 48–49). Fredricksen notes that it is nearly impossible to understand that Jesus’s teachings themselves posed a military or political threat to Roman rule. The real fear for Pilate was the unpredictable nature of the large crowds gathered for Passover (p. 72). By crucifying Jesus alone, Rome put to an end the foment of Jesus’s end time prophecies. This also explains why the disciples did not fear returning to Jerusalem so soon after Jesus’s crucifixion. Jesus incited instability, but not revolution. Therefore, the disciples were not an ongoing threat.Fredricksen’s third chapter examines the resurrection experiences of some of Jesus’s disciples. Fredricksen views the contradictory resurrection experiences as respectively pointing to the same reality that each account was trying to communicate: Jesus’s prophecy about the coming of the kingdom was vindicated by his resurrection (p. 87). Fredricksen’s final section of this chapter tackles the delay in Jesus’s return. Ultimately, Fredricksen argues that the community reread Israel’s Scriptures and came to the belief that Jesus would need to return a second time once “all Israel” was reached with the news that the Kingdom had come. This led to the missionary energy of the community outward from Jerusalem (pp. 100–101).The fourth chapter covers the early community’s explanation of Jesus’s absence. In order to explain why he did not return immediately, the community needed to explain where Jesus was. By looking to the messianic descriptions of David, the community, so Fredricksen argues, made connections that showed Jesus was a king and was therefore seated at God’s right hand in heaven (p. 121). Coordinately, since Jesus had not yet returned, his followers needed a way to explain why. This came from their new understanding that salvation for the Gentiles was not complete, therefore the messiah would not come back yet (p. 136).In her final chapter, Fredricksen argues that the Gospel authors (especially Mark) had experienced the destruction of the temple and then conjoined Daniel’s apocalyptic prophecy with the teachings of Jesus in order to construct Jesus’s predictions of the end of times and the destruction of the temple.Overall, Fredricksen’s underlying goal is to demonstrate that the history of anti-Jewish readings of the NT inappropriately remove Jesus and his followers from their decidedly Jewish context (p. 186); a context which better explains what happened to the earliest followers of Jesus than the later “Christianized” reading. In essence, Fredricksen is critiquing the dialectic initially made prominent in biblical scholarship by F. C. Baur by echoing and expanding on Reimarus. It is not clear how prevalent the use of this Jewish/Christian dialectic is within the current field of biblical studies. Apart from this remix, Fredricksen’s vignettes do provide helpful psychosocial descriptions of how Jewish followers of Jesus could have understood the events surrounding Jesus’ death.