Jesus' Early Followers

Be sure to read the notes from the previous class, which summarize some of the observations we want to keep discussing.

Jesus' followers were left with the "theological" task of interpreting his life, teaching, and death. Among the early leaders who contributed to this interpretive task were Peter, Paul, and John (or whoever wrote the Gospel of John - Biblical critics do not generally attribute it to the disciple named John).

We will focus on the development of two key areas of early theological reflection: Christology and soteriology.

Christology

In the Bible, read the following passages, and answer the questions about them in the "quiz" on Christology in D2L:

Paul

Romans 5:12-6:11 (written by Paul ca. 58 C.E.?)

Philippians 2:5-11 (written by Paul mid to late 50s or early 60s?)

Colossians 1:15-20 (written by either Paul or a follower of Paul, probably after mid-60s, perhaps quoting an existing hymn about Christ?)

Peter / Mark

Mark 8:27-33 (written probably in the late 60's; the Mark to whom this Gospel is attributed is traditionally regarded as a disciple of Peter). Compare the similar passages in Luke 9:18-22 (probably written last 1/3 of 1st century AD, after Mark) and Matthew 16:13-23 (written 80-90?).

Also read Mark 14:53-65, then compare Luke 22:66-71 and Matthew 26:57-68. Assuming that these passages were written in this order (Mark, Luke, Matthew), jot down any developments you can detect in how the authors are presenting who Jesus is and how he relates to God.

John

John 1:1-18 (written probably in the 80s or 90s?).

Notes from class

We talked a bit about the kind of explanations of your observations that I want you to get better at constructing: not just little explanations that you can find in an encyclopedia, such as "holy water symbolizes blessing," but big explanations that you come up with by connecting one observation to another through abstraction, such as: "holy water on the way out and kneeling on the way seem to demarcate church as different from the rest of life--perhaps a place of direct contact with God, since Catholics believe that takes place in the Eucharist; Muslim worship, by contrast, seems to be just one more way of following a prophet's guidance, just as Muslims try to do in all areas of life."

Then we turned to the earliest Christians' interpretations of who Jesus is:

• Paul emphasized Jesus' humanity when he wanted to show how humans are saved by being identified with Jesus: his righteousness makes them righteous, his death and resurrection make them "dead to sin and alive to God," solving the problem created by Adam's sin and the resulting penalty of death.
• Paul presented Jesus as equally human and divine, or as going from the glory of divinity to the humiliation of being human and then back again, when he wanted to make Jesus an example of how humbling oneself leads to being exalted by God.
• Paul also presented Jesus as somehow at the head of all creation, and even a part of it.
• John clearly says Jesus was God, and existed before creation.
• Paul, John, and the synoptic gospels (Mark, Luke, and Matthew) use a range of terms for Jesus such as Son of Man, Son of God, Lord, and Christ/Messiah (literally "anointed one"), all of which are laden with religious connotations. We can't always tell exactly which connotations each author has in mind when he uses one of these terms, but sometimes we can: we can tell from Mark that in his mind the term Son of the Blessed One was a claim of divinity.

Some modern Christians in the liberal Protestant tradition have argued that the earliest Christian texts present Jesus as human, and that the idea of his divinity only appears in later texts as Christians reinterpret him and exalt him more and more. The texts we read did not quite fit this historical argument, but more importantly, the historical argument is itself a theological claim: it embodies the liberal Protestant (and Islamic) view that Jesus never claimed to be more than a human preacher with a moral message, and that the idea of his divinity was an interpretation his followers came up with.

{DAY 2}

Soteriology

Paul

Read Romans 3:19-6:11, and answer the questions about "Soteriology" in D2L.

John

Reread the account of Jesus' death in John 19. How does John think Jesus saves people? (In other words, how would you describe John's soteriology?)

Notes from class

We did a good job, I think, of trying to look very closely at how Paul uses his key words in Romans. We started out trying to find a single explanation of how grace, faith, and sacrifice all work together to produce salvation, which we took to be both redemption and justification. But this did not work very well, and in the end we came up with a much neater solution that appears to make good sense of Romans. Our solution is that Paul is intertwining two very different ways of talking about salvation:

• Justification:
  • The background to this is the idea of law: God requires obedience, he expresses his requirements in law, and that is what makes human actions count as sins rather than as morally neutral actions.
  • The result of law plus sin is the curse of death, as we saw in the story of Adam.
  • Paul believes that Adam's sin rendered humans corrupt so that they are no longer capable of being justified by actually obeying the law.
  • So instead people are saved by or through "faith," which is counted as if it were righteousness, and is the grounds for people being justified, i.e. counted as righteous.
  • Paul also says that this happens "by grace," which seems to mean that people are justified "in spite of their actions" and "in spite of what they legally deserve."
• Redemption:
  • The background to this is the idea that because of sin, every human life is owed to God, and should be taken by God, unless some other life is paid in its place.
  • This idea is expressed perhaps in the story of Abraham and Isaac (where a ram was sacrificed in Isaac's place) and certainly in the Passover (the firstborn sons would have died were it not for the blood of the lamb on their doorposts) and in the requirement that an animal be sacrificed to "redeem" every firstborn son.
  • Jesus' death serves as a final "atoning sacrifice," like a Passover sacrifice, that pays the price of their own life that humans owe to God. This leaves them "redeemed" - bought back from death, and free to live.

Paul, drawing on his own background understanding of the law and the stories of the Bible, thinks and writes of salvation in both these ways at once.

I'm sure this understanding of Paul must be way too simplistic; surely a theologian or a scholar like N.T. Wright could blow our interpretation out of the water if he wanted. But I think we did pretty well, in the short time we had, at really paying careful attention to Paul's words. This was not some interpretation I already had up my sleeve; as often happens in class, this was a new interpretation to me, that came out of our own interaction with the text in class.

Notice how strange these theories of salvation would sound if we had not already learned the background ideas of law, redemption, and sacrifice from the stories we studied. These soteriologies make sense only within the framework of a certain set of stories and concepts.