THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM (Part 2)

THE FORMATION OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH.

We have often been taught that the Church calls on the Bible and Tradition for its doctrines; whereas we say the Protestants call upon the Bible alone, Sola Scripture. In fact, what we always have is the Church, the followers of Jesus. He preached a message; his followers preached that message; in turn the hearers of that message preached that message and so on till today. So any introduction to the Gospels must always start with the initial followers of Jesus. whoever they may be, in the Church that began after his Ascension. This Church began in the cultural setting of the people of Palestine.

Information about the early history of the Church is very meager and yet it is the first one hundred years of the Church’s history that the documents of the New Testament were written. What also makes it difficult is that all the documents that we have on the history of the Church have been written and edited over the years by the Church itself and, further,  these documents were written to meet other needs and not for the sake of history. Nevertheless, we must not be discouraged by this lack as scholars have studied the first century very intensely and have been able to reconstruct the cultures of this world. Furthermore a careful examination of early Christian literature discloses much information to help us recover aspects of the earliest Christian experience.

It seems certain that Jesus did not organise the Church as a religious institution during the period of his public ministry. Rather the relationship he fostered between himself and his followers was modelled in some ways on the relationship which existed in Judaism between the rabbi and his followers. Yet there is a most important difference: Jesus did not educate his followers to become rabbis themselves. Rather he offered them a way of life, to share in his role as Redemptor of the world. Jesus formed them into an intimate band of iterant preachers and healers.

As far as we can tell all of the first Christians were Jews, that is, because Jesus’s own ministry was limited to Galilee and Judea, both of which were Jewish areas. Thus the disciples that he gathered around him were also Jews. Thus after the resurrection the followers of Jesus saw themselves as a sect within Judaism. They continued to participate in and observe the Jewish cultic practices. They, therefore, shared many of the convictions, hopes, beliefs and prejudices of religious Jews. The major distinctive feature of their religious faith was their belief that Jesus was the Messiah and that this had been vindicated by God raising him from the dead.

The Jewish people believed that the spirit of God had been uniquely with God’s people, Israel, from the time of Abraham onwards through the times of the prophets. But, after the prophets , his presence was recalled. They, then, anticipated the coming of the Messiah which would signify that God’s presence had returned to Israel. The first Christian were convinced that the spirit of prophecy had been restored as a feature of their community life. Following on from this, the early Christians believed that they were living in the last times. The first Christians believed that God was creating the end-time and that they were participating in it.

THE CHURCH’S PREACHING

The early Church believed that God wanted them to tell others that the end of the world was at hand, that Jesus was the end-time Messiah, that God was exerting his right to rule. The early Church taught that Jesus was the chosen agent of God to remove the alienation that mankind had set up through the sin from God and that Jesus would continue to work until this alienation was totally removed.

Christians saw Jesus as the Messiah, the expected Deliverer sent by God. However the Jewish people had different views of what the Messiah would be.

1. Some Jews looked for a martial leader who would free the Jews from the yoke of the invader and set up a powerful kingdom again.

2. Others looked for a king who would restore the splendour and economic prosperity that they had under the reign of King David and, thereby, have international prestige.

3. Still others expected the Messiah to be similar to some of their famous religious leaders in the past, eg. Moses, or, Elijah.
So the Jewish listeners would ask the preachers “What type of Messiah was Jesus?’ Another David, Another Moses, Another prophet. What type of Messiah was he?

To help answer these questions the Church began to tell stories about Jesus. These stories were based on the recollection that the disciples had of the events that happened while they were associated with Jesus. These “stories from life” were dramatic, lively and vividly concrete ways of clarifying what was meant by “Messiah”. The Church then became selected about the stories that they told about Jesus, those finally selected being those narratives that seemed to call forth the clearest answers to the questions being asked.

At first the early Church was not concerned to talk about what Jesus had done but rather to describe what Jesus was doing right then and who he was. The stories that were of importance to them and was the most fascinating were those stories that were revealing the Messianic identity and which  pointed to his continuing activity. So they chose stories that were the most convincing and persuasive. Their intention was to stimulate faith. Hence, the appropriate response was not so much intellectual comprehension but commitment of life to Jesus’ way.

The early preachers were not concerned with objective biography for its own sake but were concerned that the stories about Jesus revealed the Messianic nature of his life. Being convinced that the end was soon, they were not interested in preserving all the details that they knew of Jesus’ life.

Those directions that we were talking about that were contained in their preaching,

1. the message of Jesus was not only preached but also developed: “the kingdom of God is at hand” Mark 1: 15; c/f. Matt 10:7;
2. the content about Jesus himself was increased.

and were soon combined. The preachers combined the message which Jesus had preached of the re-establishment of God’s kingly rule in his creation with its own preaching of Jesus as the Messiah. In the person of Jesus God again rules his creation. God has shown the reality of this rule by raising Jesus from the dead after a hostile creation had destroyed him. The Jewish community was shocked because they could see why the Messiah had to suffer and to die: how could a good God allow this to happen? To answer such questions the preachers appealed to the Jewish writings to see how the Law and the Prophets foretold this.

New converts required instruction in the basic beliefs of the Christian faith. The story of the great commandment (mark 12: 28 - 34) was a tradition that would have been useful for catechetical purposes. Other Jesus stories assisted the Church as it  produced patterns of worship. Traditions such as the Lord’s Prayer (Matt. 6: 9 - 15) or the Last Supper (Mark 14: 17 - 25) aided in the development of liturgical forms for worship. When Christians became discouraged at the slow and erratic response their preaching produced from non-Christians, the account of Jesus’ telling of the Parable of the Soils (Mark 4: 1-20) gave comfort and encouragement. Solutions to critical ethical crises arising in the life of the Christian community were stimulated by such stories as Jesus’ instructions about divorce (Luke 16:18), or his teachings on humility (Luke 14: 7 - 14), or his advice on Church discipline (Matt. 18: 15 - 20. Other traditions inspired and supported Christians who held firm to their beliefs in times of suffering from persecution (Luke 6: 27 - 36; Mark 8: 34 - 9:1 ; 13: 9 - 13;).  Stories about Jesus helped the Church to address concrete issues and problems of the time.

Given the reasons why the early Church remembered and passed on its recollections of Jesus and given the purposes why they were uses it is clear that it is impossible to speak about the author of these traditions, or even of a particular traditions. Further, it would fit into the tradition of the Jewish writers to claim as the author of a work who may have lived hundreds of years before the compilation, eg. The Songs of Solomon. These stories or pericopes were told and re-told on too many occasions over a long period of time. The whole Christian community is the author of the Jesus tradition. “Its creator is the community; its custodian is the community; and its guarantor is the community.”

STAGES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE TRADITION

STAGE ONE:

The initial stage of Christianity might be called Palestinian, Aramaic-speaking Christianity. It was centred on Jerusalem and the community formed there. Those belonging to the Church were Jews who believed that Jesus was the Messiah sent by God. The disciples form the core of the community. Through their teaching and preaching other Jews came to believe and accept the teachings of Jesus. Then they became members of the community. The pericopes about Jesus were taught to them in Aramaic.

STAGE TWO:

However the teachings of Jesus did not remained confined to this Aramaic-speaking Palestine for long. It soon moved out of Jerusalem and spread to the areas of Judea and Samaria, to Damascus, Antioch and beyond, wherever there were Aramaic speaking Jews. The next step was the expulsion of the Christians by the non-Christian Jews out of Jerusalem. The preaching was still carried on but now the people preached to were Hellenistic Jew, Jews who lived in a Greek-speaking area and who were strongly influenced by the Greek culture. Nevertheless, the preachers could assume that their audience would know the Jewish customs, beliefs, and traditions. To be persuasive the message had to be adjusted to accommodate themselves strongly influenced by Hellenistic culture.

Also, the language of preaching changed from Aramaic to Greek, this entailing that the stories of Jesus being translated into Greek. Translation from one language into another is a very difficult task. It is rarely possible to find an exact one-to-one correlation between words in two different languages. Nuances shift. Imprecisions creep in. Linguistic approximations occur. Something always get lost in translation. When the translation occurs in an oral situation on the spur of the moment in response to a question, the difference between the original and its counterpart in the new language tends to be greater.
Also between the Semitic culture and the Hellenistic culture there were different modes of expression, different world-views, different ways of thinking, different philosophical presuppositions , all making communication from one culture to another extremely difficult.

STAGE THREE:

Preaching in the Greco-Roman world, through the Hellenistic Jews, began to attract large numbers of Gentiles. Christians became convinced that God was turning their attention away from the Jews to the non-Jews. This brought about a change in the message being taught: more emphasis placed on the belief in Jesus Christ and less on the traditional Jewish religious practices. This also had the result that fewer Jews were willing to become Christians since the temple worship in Jerusalem was neglected, as with the traditional Jewish holidays, and other practices of the law. However as Jewish disenchantment increased so did the Gentile interest. The result was that soon Christianity was directed primarily to Gentile listeners. Paul was one of the main instrument in bringing about this change as he felt that he was the apostle to the non-Jews. The Gentiles became the primary source for the subsequent growth of Christianity. During the revolt of the Jewish Zealots a remnant of the Jewish Christians fled to Pella, a small town in the hills east of the Jordan. From this time onwards, for all practical purposes this signalled the end of Christian preaching to Aramaic-speaking Jews. Furthermore, there developed a hostile antagonism from the Hellenistic Jews who became to look on Christianity as destructive to Jewish beliefs. Thus, the Church preached the gospel primarily to the non-Jewish peoples of the Greco-Roman world from 70 CE. onwards.

One of the results of this preaching to the non-Jews was that many of their listeners had no familiarity with Jewish religious customs. Further, the Roman authorities became to look on Christianity as a new political challenge to the might of Rome from a another minor Jewish sect.

The Gentile converts were tempted to mix some of their pagan beliefs and practices into their form of Christianity, thus distorting central features of the Christian faith, eg. previous experience with religious meals that were part of pagan worship confused some new Christians about the meaning of the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper. Again we find Paul talking about the eating of meat that had been offer to pagan gods.

This change from one culture to another, from one language to another took place very rapidly; in fact, the Hellenistic Gentile stage was from 40 to 55 CE and that was only ten years after the death and resurrection of Jesus and the formation of the new Church. Such extensive transference of religious meaning from one culture to another required extraordinary openness and understanding; it reveals the longing that the Greco-Roman world had for a meaning to their lives which their own culture was not giving.  Extraordinary skill was required to adapt religious practices and traditions forged in the Semitic tradition to conform to the ways people thought and the symbols which were meaningful in Hellenistic culture.
 

(to be continued)