Why Christianity Happened: A Sociohistorical Account of Christian Origins (26-50 CE). By JAMES G. CROSSLEY.

Abstract

James Crossley offers an account of Christian origins which deliberately downplays the importance of the history of ideas, gives greater weight to socio-economic factors, and sets out to explain how it is that a Jewish, law-observant, movement in the eastern Mediterranean became a cosmopolitan religion. Early Christianity's particular kind of inclusiveness served a particular social need at this historical juncture and paved the way for the expansion of the movement outside the confines of Judaism, both socially and ideologically. The book offers an approach to the early Christian textual evidence which does not, at least in the first instance, focus on the questions which have dominated a theologically dominated tradition of scholarship (the origin of Christology, the historicity of the gospel traditions, or wider questions of the application of an ancient religion to the modern world). There is much to welcome in this approach and the challenge he poses to scholarship on the New Testament is timely. New Testament study's preoccupation with a certain, narrowly defined, set of religious issues, with a distinct apologetic hue, continues to drive the study of early Christianity ever more into its scholarly ghetto. Opening the doors to wider traditions of study and debate is long overdue. With that particular intention, I have no qualms, and Crossley makes his case cogently and powerfully. He knows more than I do about law observance in Second Temple Judaism and the possible relationship of the Jesus traditions to it. His discussion of the particular slant of Jesus’ social interactions is of great interest.