Who Wrote the New Testament? Read online

  WHO WROTE THE NEW TESTAMENT?

  The Making of the Christian Myth

  BURTON L. MACK

  DEDICATION

  For Curt

  Whose ancient texts are the Mission Mountains,

  and whose other culture is the Nez Perce

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Prologue: The Mystique of Sacred Scripture

  PART 1: Jesus and the Christ

  1. Clashing Cultures

  2. Teachings from the Jesus Movements

  3. Fragments from the Christ Cult

  PART 2: Christ and the Hinge of History

  4. Paul and His Gospel

  5. Paul’s Letters to Greeks and Romans

  6. Gospels of Jesus the Christ

  7. Visions of the Cosmic Lord

  8. Letters from the Apostles

  PART 3: History and the Christian Myth

  9. Inventing Apostolic Traditions

  10. Claiming Israel’s Epic

  11. Creating the Christian Bible

  Epilogue: The Fascination of the Bible

  APPENDICES

  Appendix A: Early Christian Literature

  Appendix B: The Contents of Q

  Appendix C: The Pronouncement Stories in Mark

  Works Cited

  Searchable Terms

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE:

  THE MYSTIQUE OF

  SACRED SCRIPTURE

  Fascination with sacred scriptures seldom surfaces for observation or remark. Their mystique is subtle, something that most persons in a culture would hardly recognize even if mentioned. I have been pondering that mystique, asking why the Bible has such a curious hold on our minds and imaginations. I have not been thinking about the obviously embarrassing public displays of foolish obsessions with the Bible in our time, listening for the hoofbeats of John’s four horsemen of the apocalypse, for instance, or citing Paul to prove that gays are sinners in the eyes of God. Madness of that sort can pop up in times of social and cultural crisis no matter what the issue or the mythic authorities might be. I am thinking instead about all of the seemingly innocent ways in which the Bible is taken for granted as a special book, and about all of the ways in which it works its magic in our culture without ever being acknowledged, consulted, or read.

  The range of procedures for consulting the Bible is astounding. Students tell me that their grandmothers used to seek “a word for the day” by letting their Bibles flop open to a “verse for the day.” Ministers, priests, rabbis, preachers, and teachers by the thousands pore over these texts in quest of some lesson or message fit for their classes or congregations. Groups are now forming outside the formal boundaries of institutional religion to study the Bible in the hope of discovering some fundamental truth felt to have been lost in our recent past. Think of the intellectual labor invested in the academic study of the Bible, the production of scholarly studies and guides for interpreting the Bible, and the huge flow of literature that constantly pours forth from church houses and commercial publishers of books on the Bible. One might well wonder at all this activity swirling around a single book.

  This constant consultation of the Bible is partially explained by the important role assigned to the Bible in our religious institutions. Readings from the Bible are essential to liturgies, lessons from the Bible are basic for teachings and doctrines, and references to the Bible are felt to be necessary in the construction of theologies by those charged with the intellectual life of religious traditions. The remarkable thing about this kind of appeal to the Bible, however, is that it does not seem to matter whether all of the theologies and teachings so derived agree. And it does not matter that, for a particular teaching or view, the “biblical” basis may consist of only a small set of sentences taken out of context and pressed into a dogma. This is true even at the highest levels of serious theological discourse. A study by David Kelsey (1975) has shown that, as one moves from one theological system to another among the Christian traditions in America, the selection of biblical texts said to be basic for the system also changes. It is as if everyone knows that the voices recorded in the Bible are many and diverse but that everyone continues to treat the Bible as if it spoke with a single voice. And even though the Bible is treated as a book with a single message, everyone understands that it must be studied as if the message were hidden or unclear. It is treated as if it were a collection of divine oracles that have to be decoded in order to arrive at the truth they contain. Is it not odd that one needs to consult the Bible, study the Bible, comb through the Bible, or pierce the surface of its enigmatic language in order to discern the hidden truth that gives it the authority it has for our religions? Is it not odd that we have not taken note of this curious preoccupation with the relentless “study” of the Bible in our society and that we do not ask what it is about the Bible and our religions that lies behind such fascination?

  The Bible also works its magic in our culture outside the bounds of religious institutions, although the ways in which it influences our collective sense of values and patterns of thinking as Americans are not readily recognized or discussed openly among us. Most of us do know, however, that biblical imagery and themes pervade the history of Western literature, theater, art, and architecture. We also know that the Bible was always involved in the conquest of other lands. During the “age of discovery,” for instance, Columbus studied the Bible in order to plan his voyages, and he read the parable of the feast in Luke 14:16–24 as a commission to circle the globe and “compel” the heathen to convert as Luke 14:23 enjoins (J. Z. Smith 1986). Should not such examples of the Bible’s influence in the history of our expansive civilizations bring a little frown of embarrassment to our faces?

  We also have a vague notion of the importance attached to the Bible in early American history. It was the one book everyone had in hand, and it shaped the way we viewed the land, treated Native Americans, and constructed our institutions, including schools, universities, and the curricula of higher education. Many Americans have been quite intentional about treating the Bible as a charter for our nation. Thomas Jefferson, for example, thought it important to match the level of enlightenment we had reached in American democratic institutions with a Bible purged of its myths and miracles. Thus the “Jefferson Bible” contained only the pristine teachings of Jesus. As for the unpurged Bible, segregation in the South was long justified by quoting the curse on Ham’s posterity in Genesis 9:20–27 on the one hand, and arguing for the right to demand obedience from a slave by citing Paul on the other. When the lure of “developing” the “vacant” lands to the West in the late nineteenth century reached its peak, volumes of utopian poetry were written by leading American authors, such as Walt Whitman, rife with biblical themes about our manifest destiny as the people of God, called to create a paradise in the midst of an erstwhile wilderness. And the clichés we have used to announce our presence to the world have all been taken from biblical imagery: “righteous nation,” “city set on a hill,” and “light to the nations.” What do you suppose we would have said about ourselves if we had not had the Bible?

  In our own time, it is the frequent mention of the “Judeo-Christian tradition” that reveals how naively and automatically the Bible plays its role in public discourse. The term Judeo-Christian means that we stand in the “biblical tradition,” and the biblical tradition is regarded as the source for the values that make our society respectable and legitimate. No one finds it strange to hear senators quoting from the Bible or objects when presidents-elect place their hands upon it while taking the oath of office. It is as if we take our place in history by
unreflected reference to the Bible. A vague recollection of the biblical story seems to be in everyone’s mind, a story that begins at the creation of the world with Adam and Eve in the garden, that courses through the Bible and then through the history of Western civilization to flow into the fulfillment of its promise in America with a culmination in the future of consequence for all the peoples of the world. Those who have studied American popular culture tell us that the Bible has profoundly influenced the way we tell our stories, look for meanings, quest for transformations, imagine our futures, and hope for apocalyptic solutions to our problems. If the Bible is that important to our culture, is it not strange that we have not questioned the reasons why?

  I have also been impressed with the authority we grant the Bible when discussing issues of social consequence. The list of issues currently under discussion includes the place of creationism in public schools, the role of women in our society, social attitudes toward various sexual orientations, Jewish-Christian relations, theories of white supremacy, patriarchal institutions, the use of natural resources, the definition of family values, understanding violence, how best to relate to other cultures, and what responsibility we have for maintaining human rights around the world. Most of these issues could be discussed without referring to the biblical heritage, but the Bible is always lurking in the background, and positions have been taken on all of them that ultimately appeal to the Bible as the final word. When that happens, thinking and reasonable discussion stop. We do not know how to proceed after the Bible has been invoked. We are all complicit in letting an appeal to the Bible count as an argument.

  One of the reasons for our silence when confronted with a proof text from the Bible is that we simply do not know what to make of the Bible and its contents. Thus we do not know what to say in response to those who use the Bible as an authority for their views. Despite the enormous investment in biblical studies in our society, there is actually very little public knowledge about the Bible. One cannot assume that anyone knows why the individual books of the Bible were first written, how they were understood by those who first read them, when and why they were brought together in a single volume, what the historical significance of that moment was, how the Christian church has reinterpreted all of them many times in the course of Western cultural history, and what the lasting effect of that layered text has been. It is the strange authority granted to the Bible in our society, an acquiescence that pertains whether one is a Christian or not, together with the poverty of our knowledge and public discussions of the Bible, that is the stimulus for this book. Here we are with the Bible on our hands and we do not know how we got it, how it works, or what to make of it in public forum.

  So I decided to write this book. I am a biblical scholar and historian of religion who has been engaged in the academic study of religion and culture for thirty years. A wealth of information is available in these fields of study that can help us understand how the Bible came to be, and how and why the Bible continues to affect our culture. This knowledge is vast, detailed, and scholarly, but it is not arcane. We know much about the history, literature, religion, and cultures of the ancient Near East and about the Greco-Roman world where the clash of cultures took place that gave birth to both Judaism and Christianity. We have detailed knowledge of the original languages and contents of each book of the Bible, and for most of them it is possible to describe the circumstances that occasioned the writing. We are also able to say why a new piece of literature was written, how each writing drew upon other texts, ideas, and myths, and how the creative edge in a new literary composition was achieved by its author. As for understanding the ways in which the ancients thought about God, practiced religion, constructed their societies, and valued human relationships, we are not at a loss. There are exceptionally rich resources in the fields of classical studies that shed much light upon the history of Israel, early Judaism, and Christianity. And as for theory, the history of religions draws upon an even wider cluster of academic disciplines, including ethnography, cultural anthropology, comparative religions, and the sociology of religion. It seems a shame that no-nonsense knowledge of this kind is seldom called upon when discussing the Bible in either parochial or public forums. Perhaps a no-nonsense book about the making of the Christian Bible will help.

  As everyone knows, the Christian Bible is not the same as the Hebrew Bible, and even among the main traditions of Christianity, the books included in the various Bibles do not agree. A major difference is found between the Protestant Bible, which excludes a number of books from the Old Testament, the so-called Apocrypha, and the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Bibles, which include these and, in response to the Protestants, call them deuterocanonical (a “second” canonical corpus). The story of the formation of the Christian Bible cannot be told without explaining the differences among Protestant, Catholic, and Hebrew Bibles, or without reference to the Jewish scriptures that Christians came to call the Old Testament, for the way each of these collections of scriptures took shape affected the other collections and left lasting marks upon the cultures that produced them. It is, however, the New Testament part of the Bible that makes it a Christian Bible, and it is the Christian Bible that has influenced our culture. We shall see that the New Testament was linked to the Jewish scriptures of the Old Testament in just a certain way, and that it is this link which gives the Christian Bible its peculiar logic and force. This linkage is what we eventually need to understand in order to have some public discussion about the Bible’s continuing attraction in our own time. But in order to understand that link and its logic, we need to see why the New Testament writings were written in the first place and how they eventually became the New Testament of the Christian church.

  As I toyed with the idea of writing such a book about the New Testament, I found myself confronted with a sort of catch–22. The catch is that for most people the New Testament is taken as proof for the conventional picture of Christian origins, and the conventional picture is taken as proof for the way in which the New Testament was written. The conventional picture comes to focus on a very small set of persons and events as storied in the gospels. It is the story of Jesus’ appearance in the world as the son of God. A divine aura surrounds this special time that sets it apart from all the rest of human history. Most people suspend their disbelief and let the story stand as the miraculous moment that started the Christian religion. All that followed, including the transformation of the disciples into apostles, the birthday of the first church in Jerusalem, the conversion of Paul, and the writing of the New Testament gospels and letters by the apostles, is thought to be a response to those first incomparable events. Thus the unfolding history is imagined on the model of dominoes falling in place when triggered by an original impulse. This creates a circular, interlocking pattern of authentication in which the New Testament is both the result of and the documentation for the conventional view of Christian beginnings.

  For this reason the New Testament is commonly viewed and treated as a charter document that came into being much like the Constitution of the United States. According to this view, the authors of the New Testament were all present at the historic beginnings of the new religion and collectively wrote their gospels and letters for the purpose of founding the Christian church that Jesus came to inaugurate. Unfortunately for this view, that is not the way it happened. Scholars locate the various writings of the New Testament at different times and places over a period of one hundred years, from the letters of Paul in the 50s of the first century, through the writing of the gospels of Mark and Matthew in the 70s and 80s, the gospels of John and Luke around the turn of the second century, and on to the acts, letters, and other writings during the first half of the second century, some as late as 140 to 150 C.E. (appendix A). This fact alone introduces another history of Christian beginnings that is not acknowledged by or reflected in the writings of the New Testament.

  To make matters worse for the conventional view, these writings stem from different groups w
ith their own histories, views, attitudes, and mix of peoples. In some cases it is possible to trace the connections between two different writings. An example would be the way in which the gospel attributed to Matthew was dependent upon the gospel attributed to Mark. But even in cases such as these a careful reading of two related writings always produces a long list of their differences. No two writings agree upon what we might have thought were fundamental convictions shared by all early Christians. Each writing has a different view of Jesus, for instance, a particular attitude toward Judaism, its own conception of the kingdom of God, a peculiar notion of salvation, and so on. This means that the impression created by the New Testament of a singular collection of apostolic documents, all of which bear “witness” to a single set of inaugural events, is misleading.

  We now know that there were many different responses to the teachings of Jesus. Groups formed around them, but then went different ways depending upon their mix of peoples, social histories, and discussions about the teachings of Jesus and how they were to be interpreted and applied. Some were of the type we call Jesus movements. Others became congregations of the Christ whose death was imagined as a martyrdom to justify a mixture of Jews and gentiles as equally acceptable in a new configuration of the people of God (or “Israel”). Still others developed into enclaves for the cultivation of spiritual enlightenment or the knowledge (gnosis) Jesus had taught. Each of these branches of the Jesus movements, including many permutations of each type, imagined Jesus differently. They did so in order to account for what they had become as patterns of practice, thinking, and congregating settled into place. And they all competed with one another in their claims to be the true followers of Jesus. Many of these groups had their own gospels (R. Cameron 1982), and some produced rather large libraries that are still available to us from the second, third, and fourth centuries. As for the New Testament, it turns out to be a very small selection of texts from a large body of literature produced by various communities during the first one hundred years. These New Testament texts were collected in the interest of a particular form of Christian congregation that emerged only by degrees through the second to fourth centuries. Toward the end of the book I will begin referring to this type of Christianity as “centrist,” meaning thereby that it positioned itself against gnostic forms of Christianity on the one hand, and radical forms of Pauline and spiritist communities on the other. It was centrist Christianity that became the religion of empire under Constantine, collected together the texts we now know as the New Testament, and joined them to the Jewish scriptures to form the Christian Bible. When these writings were first written there was no centrist tradition, and none of them fully agreed with the other with respect to their views of Jesus, God, the state of the world, or the reason for the Jesus movements.