Part of the problem I'm facing with this whole issue, and it's the reason why I went out of my way to label this entry a rough draft of an incomplete thought, is uncertainty regarding the ways people in the early church may or may not have read scripture differently from us today. Many of the nuances have been lost forever and we are only now starting to understand what it is that has been lost.
So, we know that things are missing which generally relate to the way early Christians as Jews would have read scripture and would have written it themselves. What those are can only be speculated on. But it also creates a danger of mis-reading the historical record of the dispute.
As you say, we know there was a dispute between two flanks of the church, represented by Paul and James; and that a third flank of the church, represented by Peter, perhaps the main "moderate" body of the church itself, was used as a ping-pong ball. The way it was reflected in scripture, it was over adherence to Mosaic Law and the "vehicle" of salvation.
But it was clearly more than just a debate over ritual; at the very least it involved the identity of the Christian movement as being Jewish or cosmopolitan. Jewish-Christianity would have been a part of, and perhaps even an instigator of, a whirlwind of peasant unrest in that area and in that time. Gentile-Christianity would have sought to remove itself from political dissention with more focus on activity as a religious or philosophical movement.
Some of this debate is reflected in the modern literature as "Jesus movements" versus "Christ cults." It is an aspect of the matter that was not reflected in scripture because at the time it did not have to be.
The historical record goes as follows. Shortly after *that* matter was resolved by the Romans (brutally), a dispute arose over the elements of gnosticism and apocalypticism within Christianity. Some were kept, some were discarded. And at the point *that* matter was largely settled, Constantine I came along and transformed the church drastically by plugging it into the Roman imperial power structure. If Christianity started out as a philosophical and political radicalism, as I believe, it must have been drastically transformed by the Fourth Century. It was a sea change; even the underlying attitudes towards life and human nature that were the basis of Christian teaching must have changed. How and why? is what I want to know. And so this entry is an attempt to start to flesh out the ways underlying and unspoken attitudes were shaped.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2004-03-07 06:43 am (UTC)So, we know that things are missing which generally relate to the way early Christians as Jews would have read scripture and would have written it themselves. What those are can only be speculated on. But it also creates a danger of mis-reading the historical record of the dispute.
As you say, we know there was a dispute between two flanks of the church, represented by Paul and James; and that a third flank of the church, represented by Peter, perhaps the main "moderate" body of the church itself, was used as a ping-pong ball. The way it was reflected in scripture, it was over adherence to Mosaic Law and the "vehicle" of salvation.
But it was clearly more than just a debate over ritual; at the very least it involved the identity of the Christian movement as being Jewish or cosmopolitan. Jewish-Christianity would have been a part of, and perhaps even an instigator of, a whirlwind of peasant unrest in that area and in that time. Gentile-Christianity would have sought to remove itself from political dissention with more focus on activity as a religious or philosophical movement.
Some of this debate is reflected in the modern literature as "Jesus movements" versus "Christ cults." It is an aspect of the matter that was not reflected in scripture because at the time it did not have to be.
The historical record goes as follows. Shortly after *that* matter was resolved by the Romans (brutally), a dispute arose over the elements of gnosticism and apocalypticism within Christianity. Some were kept, some were discarded. And at the point *that* matter was largely settled, Constantine I came along and transformed the church drastically by plugging it into the Roman imperial power structure. If Christianity started out as a philosophical and political radicalism, as I believe, it must have been drastically transformed by the Fourth Century. It was a sea change; even the underlying attitudes towards life and human nature that were the basis of Christian teaching must have changed. How and why? is what I want to know. And so this entry is an attempt to start to flesh out the ways underlying and unspoken attitudes were shaped.