Survey of the Gospels and Acts - Lesson 3

This is the second file in the online series of lectures for understanding the Gospels and Acts, in complement with the textbook by Craig Blomberg’s ‘Jesus and The Gospels: an Introduction and Survey’. In our first lecture, we focus on political and historical background for the New Testament and for the narrative portion of the New Testament: the Gospels and Acts in particular. This lecture focuses on the religious background of the Gospels and Acts, recognizing nevertheless that the departmentalization is somewhat artificial in a world that had not yet conceived of the notion of separation of church and state. Political and social events always had religious significance and vice versa. Nevertheless the division is puristic and can be helpful as all historical studies require systemization and departmentalization of one kind or another. 

An interesting way to come at the question of their religious background would be to ask, what might a person be, who would had been a listener to this set of lectures, religiously speaking, at the beginning of the first century before Jesus of Nazareth became a public figure and before the movement that would become to be known as Christianity was even birthed? Again, we can separate the option into those aligned with the Jewish and those as aligned with the more Greco-Roman background. The Jewish option will prove far more significant for a study of the life of Christ and the birth of Christianity, certainly within Israel but also to a significant extent elsewhere, simply because Christianity was the outgrowth and by- product of the Jewish religion. We will therefore spend more time on the Jewish background but begin by briefly considering the Greco-Roman side of religious life in the first century. It would be interesting to think about how you or I would relate if we had lived in the opening years of the first century before the Jesus Movement. 

The PowerPoint, labeled ‘Non-Christian Religious Option in the First Century,’ begins with a pie chart of the Greco-Roman World and the first reasonably sized piece of the pie refers to devotees of traditional mythology of Greece and/or Rome. We, of course, have no census of the numbers or percentages of supporters of the various first century religious options and particularly in the Greco-Roman understanding of things. There would have been many combined potentially separable options, including combinations that were not always true to the genus that would correspond to one or more of the options which scholars referred to as syncretism, thus creating as least a portion of religious belief or practice that would have been deemed heretical by the earlier religions or world-views. In the fourth and fifth century BC, almost everyone would have believed in the myths surrounding the gods and goddesses of the Olympian pantheon, still well known in the modern era; Zeus, the head of the pantheon, and his wife Hera; who when the Romans took over these myths, Jupiter and Juno; Apollo, the god of the Sun who broke his fiery chariot from the sky and was so named by both Greek and Romans; Poseidon, the god of the sea, who became Neptune in Roman nomenclature and many more. There is little doubt that in the largely rural and out of the way places, traditional mythology with the various sacrifices offered to different gods or goddesses over the different areas of nature in folklore, good fortune in those realms of life still held sway in the first century. But among the more urban or more educated peoples of the empire the traditional mythologies were in serious eclipse because science even as rudimentary as it was in those days recognized natural forces rather than gods or goddesses or many parts of what we still call nature and the imperial conquest of the various ancient Mediterranean empires had long since out stripped exploits prescribed even to the gods and goddesses. So we draw a sizable piece of the pie, of less than 50% indicates a downward trend or decline of a full-fledged belief in mythology as an overarching world view. Still we will see the coming prominence in such context as Paul and Barnabas's treatment in Lystra in Acts 14 when they were mistaken for Zeus and Hermes, the messenger god or again in Acts 19 at Ephesus when Artemis or Dianna, the goddess of the Ephesians is seen to be under threat because the silversmiths are losing their trade as Christians are now not buying the idols they once did as pagans. 

The second piece of the pie is much smaller and should actually be drawn smaller than it is in the pie chart, but then, it would be more difficult to see. Those who were full-fledged devotees of the philosophers to the extent that they actually learned from the philosophical schools as teenagers or young adults, sitting at the feet and or walking with the major philosophers of Greeks and Roman centers, were a very small elite group of people who had free time and money to engage in such pursuit. The numbers could have been slightly expanded by others who could study more informally, more through hearsay or listening to public orators than through formal education. But the influence of the philosophers and their followers spread well beyond those who might be said to be fully subscribed to the philosophies as a world view and then may be categorized under several headings as the next screen proceeds to illustrate. The most pervasive philosophies going all the way back to the teachings of Socrates as written down and interpreted through Plato, again in the fifth and fourth centuries BC and likely beyond, had begun to experience a resurgence and slight modification in the first century such that history today speaks of this philosophical view as Neo-Platonism. Most significant for our purposes was Plato's view of unrelenting dualism between the material and immaterial world such as that in Neoplatonism; the material world including that of human bodies was definitely viewed as inferior to the immaterial world which alone would survive death in this strand of philosophical thought. This commonly led to a form a asceticism or self-denial of standard bodily appetites, but on occasion could produce the opposite results of an over-indulgence of those appetites, a form of hedonism under the rationale that if matter ultimately didn't matter then its didn't matter how it was treated. Two groups of philosophers who we see together in Athens in Acts 17 as Paul debates and discusses with those who he encountered in the stoa or market place there and then addresses on Mars Hill or the Areopagus, are quite important for the more immediate century leading up to and including the time of the birth of Christianity. And in many ways they are polar opposite of each other with respect to a number of their major tenets. The Stoics founded by Zeno in 300 BC were for the most part pantheistic, that is to say believing in a world soul or life force that integrated the entire material world but not distinctly separate from what Jews and Christians would have considered to be the created order. The Epicureans on the other hand were pure materialists who did not find the world inhabited by any soul of any kind. Perhaps the closest thing to any widespread equivalent to atheism in the ancient world; nevertheless, Epicureans did not formally deny gods and goddesses but simply believed that they were too remote to be meaningful in dealing with the affairs of this world. Theists rather than atheists might be the better modern equivalent. They were founded approximately the same time in Greece as the Stoics were by Zeno, but by a man named Epicurus. The Cynics’ idea is slightly different from the modern use of the word, were a group who disparaged the traditional belief in god and goddesses and virtue in public morality in a variety of ways and often reveled in counter cultural behavior in public with respect to unkempt dress, in extreme cases even in defecating or copulating in public; but was perhaps best known for their beggars curse and for living off handouts that others were willing to give them. Dominic Constance has suggested that they were the hippies in the first century in an age of Augustine, in reference to the increasingly upwardly mobile young people who were the age of Caesar Augustus. Many more radical theories about Jesus' itinerant life style have likened him to a Cynic though interestingly the closest parallel: the use of the purse was precisely what Jesus told the disciples not to take with them but rather depend on hospitality of established home dwellers rather than handouts of those they might encounter in public.

As with all the topics in these lectures and in these opening surveys as different religious options, our textbook goes into further detail and refers to literature that elaborates in much greater length. Still, we return now to our pie chart: we come to a third piece of the pie which is that of Gnosticism or more specifically for the first century, we should speak of incipient Gnosticism. We see also two additional pieces of the pie rounding out the chart labeled Mysteries & Magic and then Imperial Cults. Let us take a look now at these additional three Greco-Roman religious options, and proceeding in reverse order. 

Another small piece of the pie: the Imperial Cults which at least in some era unified into what can be called the Imperial Cult; in other terms, may be referred to just emperor worship. Initially rejected by Augustus Caesar during his life time, he was deified and subsequent emperors throughout the first century increasingly were willing to countenance this possibility during their lifetimes so that by the time of Nero and beyond, we have evidence of the demand to acclaim the Emperor as lord and god. In terms of individuals for whom this was their dominant religious world view, the piece of the pie was undoubtedly small. One may think today for example of the very tiny handful of people who in totalitarian regimes around the world would take seriously the claim of various dictators to divine qualities. But, as in the former Soviet Union or the contemporary North Korea, the occasional African country throughout the twentieth century, etc. or in a strong totalitarian regime, required at least lip service to this belief.

 The outward expression of the appearance of such a philosophy can be seemingly pervasive. Christian refusal to participate in such acclamation probably was viewed by the average Greek or Roman as simply a lack of patriotism. Why not simply give lip service and keep the order and stability of the Empire for everyone's benefit, even if one did not believe in one's heart that the Emperor was divine, would have been the common logic. For Christians not to follow suit might well have been viewed much the way many people today looking at a group like the Jehovah Witnesses who refused to pledge allegiance to the flag.

Mysteries & Magic combine together a miscellaneous assortment of secret cults and practices, all of which had growing appeal in a slightly larger piece of pie because of the ability to manipulate the gods and goddesses to do one’s bidding, because of the opportunities or eternal life that were offered, because of the elitism of being in a sect or having access to rituals that set one apart from the large mass of humanity and in many instances because of the equality in a very classless society offered to the devotees of these groups so that slave and senator, prominent business person and mistress, and other unequal individuals, could come together as a secret group by night and be treating as equal worth by the gods and each other. 

Finally, we come to Gnosticism which throughout the New Testament period was more in its infancy stages such that scholars often speak of incipient Gnosticism or proto-Gnosticism. Nevertheless, by the second century it would become a major factor for a synchronistic combination with Christianity and significant alternative to what emerged as the dominant more orthodox second century Christianity. Gnosticism built on the dualism, the radical separation of material and immaterial world from Platonism and Neoplatonism and developed it entire cosmology stemming from this. Our next slide depicts a strange display revealing a kind of composite of a number of various Gnostic texts; their creation myth in which an original god now remote and largely unknowable and impersonal produced in Greek what were called aeons. Today we think of this term as referring to long periods of time, but originally one of the meanings of the word was something akin to our English concept of an emanation, an impersonal abstract force or power, vice or virtue from this original god. One of these original aeons rebelled from the original god-head, a combination of god plus its emanation which was often referred to as pheroma or fullness of deity; I recall similar language used in Col 2:9 but this reference applies to Christ alone. This rebellion from the god-head, had decided to create the universe, that it, the material world. Since in Gnostic thought, the material world was by nature inherently evil. Such creation could be seen as an act of rebellion not the perfectly good product of a perfectly good God as in the narratives of Genesis one and two. The plight, from which humanity had to be delivered in Gnosticism including regular combinations of Gnosticism of Christianity, was therefore not humanity’s sin but this initial fall as it were was from immaterial perfection into material imperfection. The hope for the Gnostic, Christian or otherwise, was not the resurrection of the body; being stuck with something evil for all eternity, but rather, be the disembodied immortality of the soul, and hence for the same reason as Neo-Platonism, most Gnostics or proto-Gnostics took an ascetic approach to living and ethics while a minority took the opposite extreme and pursued a hedonist lifestyle. Redemption in the Gnostic myth was salvation not from sin but freedom from the material world which could ultimately be achieved only upon a person's death, which could be anticipated in this life if one had access to secret, elitist and sometimes esoteric revelation or wisdom; (Wisdom is a Greek word for knowledge; akin to this wisdom was being kanoious to Gnosticism. Another Greek word for wisdom was sophia, which was also a Greek name and a feminine word) such that wisdom or knowledge easily became personified as that which came from the god-head to save humanity. In 'Christian forms of Gnosticism' sophia was often equated with or replaced by Jesus which found certain Jewish precedents and there were in fact Jewish forms of Gnosticism but not as common as the more pure Greek form and there were Jewish Christian syncretistic mixtures with Gnosticism as well but though again in the minority. For these later combinations, we should draw from the background of Proverbs eight and nine and various second temple Jewish sources that had already begun to personify God's wisdom as a person and often as a woman, doubtless because in part because the Hebrew word for wisdom: toqma was also feminine. One of the most significant, later, probably mid to late second century, 'Christian Gnostic documents' was the Gospel of Thomas; the famous Jesus seminar in the 1990's included this along with Mathew, Mark, Luke and John as one of the five Gospels whose authenticity or historicity they evaluated verse by verse, saying by saying, deed by deed throughout the lives and teachings of Jesus, therein, portrayed Thomas as by far the most important of the non-canonical Gospel text and is a collection of 114 sayings prescribed to Jesus supposedly secretly given to the Apostle Thomas after Jesus' resurrection about what turns out to be in many instances far more amenable to Gnostic thought than to the religion of the New Testament. But because somewhere between a third and a half of all the sayings of the Gospel of Thomas find at least partial parallels in the New Testament and which were demonstratively unorthodox in nature. It is an intriguing question for scholars to debate the number of the sayings of potential authentic as well as relative merits of the varying forms of the sayings that do find partial parallel within the New Testament. 

Turning to the Jewish area now will occupy the rest of this lecture; Judaism had many different facts, though scarcely contained the diversity one found within the Greco-Roman world. Here, we can speak of many common features that unify almost all strands of Judaism in ways that have no parallel within the Greco-Roman religious options.