Week 2 - The Environment of Early Christianity

Week 2 – Chapter 2 of de Silva – “The Environment of Early Christianity” –

My initial criticism of de Silva’s decision to open his book with a discussion of the development of the canon of the New Testament is answered here. In Chapter 2, he delves into the historical background of the New Testament, commencing with Judaism of the “Intertestamental period.”

The pressures commenced with the conquest of Jerusalem and the taking of the Jews into captivity in Babylon around 587 B.C. until Cyrus of Persia allowed the Jews to return in 539 B.C. Disillusionment with the reality experienced when compared with the promise of Isaiah meant that the Temple became not only the focus of the Jewish cult observances but also the focus of disunity as well. And continued pressure from power centers outside of Judea – most significantly the pressure of Hellenism that arose with the conquests of Alexander the Great from 336-326 B.C. - resulted in numerous factions springing up within Judaism. De Silva notes that apocalyptic eschatology became widespread at this time and is reflected in many of the early Christian writings.

I would explain “apocalyptic eschatology” (off the top of my head) as the effect of the distress caused with the reality with which Jews of the time were faced, the loss of self-determination, the belief that the problems were caused by insufficient adherence to the Lord’s commandments, the belief that if the Torah was observed with sufficient correctness, that ultimately the Lord would help His followers overturn the evildoers and would reward the just. Some believed this would occur on this earth – a soldier-messiah who would free the Land of Israel and re-establish the reign of God on earth. Some believed the rewards would occur in the hereafter, in the spiritual realm.

It does appear that, regardless of the form the reaction took, the majority of Jewish thinkers concluded that the oppression of the Jews, the dominance of the Hellenistic culture and the Roman polity, was caused by insufficiency of adherence to Torah. God had made a covenant with the Jews, bringing them out of slavery in Egypt in the time of Moses, giving the Jews his commandments, and bringing them to the Promised Land. According to de Silva, there was another promise made by God, that he would establish King David and that his line would rule for all time. The apparent failure of these promises led to successive crises of belief and the creation of what we would call coping strategies.

De Silva notes that each of the Jewish factions had “firm convictions, rooted in centuries of experience. . .” (pg. 38) He defends many Jewish practices, noting that they were not mere petty legalism but the result of beliefs that correctly following the Law was necessary to regain God’s favour. He notes that, in the face of the dominance of alien cultures, there were three options – 1) assimilation to the dominant Gentile world (especially the dominant Hellenistic culture) in varying ways, 2) to fight for political independence and autonomy (which included the dream of the Messiah, although he says belief in the Messiah was not essential to this option), and 3) spiritual renewal and purification, which included renewed covenant loyalty through Torah, the belief in priestly messiahs, and so on.
In the opening paragraph of the chapter, de Silva notes at page 37:

The word that Jesus brought was a “word on target” for Jews in early-first-century
Israel. The challenges that Christ-followers faced as they sought to respond to the
gospel were challenges posed by the conflict between the call of God and the demands
(and opportunities) of the society and culture around them (and inside them!). The
apostles’ visions for their congregations took shape with reference to and in response to
the local settings in which Christians were called to witness to the one God and his Christ.

Now this paragraph is poses an interesting and challenging premise. One could say Jesus’s gospel, bringing the “good news” is spot on for all time, not just the 1st. century A.D. But there was a confluence of factors, including Jewish monotheism with its belief in the one God, operating on their behalf through history, Hellenistic culture, and Roman hegemony, as well as acute disillusionment with the world, expressed partly through Platonism and Neo-Platonism, that Jesus’s message would not have been accepted earlier and would not have been possible in the same way after destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. The conditions were just right at that moment in time, for a message such as Jesus’s to find fertile ground in Palestine and then to be spread around the Roman Empire and beyond in subsequent centuries.

On the other hand, one could say that Jesus’s message was not on target, in the sense that he was rejected by those with the political power and was executed by them in one of the most awful ways open to them. Probably those people thought at the time that the execution of Jesus would also be the end of his movement – just another rural would-be messiah, of whom there had been and would be a number in 1st. century Judea. It was the events after his crucifixion – his resurrection and appearances to the apostles after his death – that fueled a new courage and enthusiasm in them, to spread the Word of God throughout the nations.