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Questioning Our Assumptions About the Bible

Introduction

Thoughtful readers of the Bible usually have lots of questions. Some things just don’t make sense in our modern world. Some explanations are missing. Few of the biblical writers intended to write history, so we don’t know what is historically accurate and what is created for another purpose. Furthermore, we often don’t even realize our own hidden assumptions and biases that influence our reading. In this Bible and Beyond Discussion, Dr. James McGrath will lead us through some typical questions and help us notice some of our false assumptions. Reconsidering these issues will help us understand the stories, the wisdom teachings, and the biblical context better.

For example, understanding the meaning of “the Jews” and what it means to be a “pagan” or a “Samaritan” enriches our understanding of New Testament stories. This topic will probably lead to a discussion of Christian identity and the meaning of the Messiah. We will think about Jesus and his specific relationship to the Hebrew scriptures. Then we ask the same question about Paul and his relationship to his own Jewish heritage.  While we may find some inspiring insights, we may also be surprised to discover how our thoughts about early Christianity continue to evolve.

Texts from the Bible

About Pagans

Isaiah 57:8
Amos 7:17
Matthew 5:47; 6:7,32; Matthew 18:17

1 Corinthians 5:1

About Bishops and Deacons

1 Timothy 3:1-13

About Prophecy concerning Jesus

Matthew 1:22-2:23

Transcript

Click here for a printable transcript (pdf file, opens in a new tab).

Shirley Paulson

Welcome everyone to the January 2025 Bible and Beyond Discussion. I’m your host, Shirley Paulson, and our guest scholar this evening is Dr. James McGrath. He’s been with us before on our Bible and Beyond podcast, as well as here on our Bible and Beyond Discussions. And frankly, he’s back by popular request. So we want to thank you so much, James, for being with us again. You have such a great way of bringing us into and outside the Bible with surprising turns. So you’re going to want to unmute yourself, but I’ve got a little bit more introduction anyway, James. So just a second here and you can be ready to go. But I’ll just say that our topic for tonight is questioning our assumptions about the Bible.

And I really appreciate the way James brings up challenging topics in a way that we don’t feel threatened and yet we probably go away thinking I better chew on that a bit more. So in case you haven’t met James before, let me tell you that he’s the Clarence l Goodwin chair in New Testament language and Literature at Butler University in Indianapolis. Tonight we’ll be talking about his book, the A to Z of the New Testament, and we’ve featured three other books that James has published in some of our other Bible and Beyond events. One was What Jesus Learned from Women. Another was Christ– Maker, a Life of John the Baptist. And then the other one long ago was about the Mandaeans.

And I thought you’d like to know that several of the questions we’re addressing this evening have come directly from you.

All right, so James, we are obviously glad to have you back and I love that you have invited us to think about our assumptions and traditions that we thought came from the Bible but maybe didn’t. Welcome.

James McGrath

Thank you so much, Shirley.

Shirley Paulson

First we’re going to start with a lot of questions we’ve heard and one of the ones I’ve heard frequently is what about the Jews in the Bible? How do we understand what they mean in the New Testament and when they refer to the Jews? Can we start there?

James McGrath

Sure. And that’s a great question and I will try not to spend a half an hour on any one question that you asked me, even though, obviously there’s some depth to them. So one of the challenges is that we have in English a number of terms that overlap with certain terms that are used in the New Testament, but not entirely. And we’re also dealing with a very changed situation religiously for the people that we know of as the Jews, the Jewish people compared to in the first century. So the term Jew and Judaism. In Judaism and terms like that, it’s more visible that there’s a connection with Judah or Judea, this region, which was not just one of the tribes of Israel, but during a period in their history there was this division of kingdoms between northern tribes and southern tribes.

Each became separate kingdoms and only that southern tribe known as Judah was ruled over by David and his descendants, according to the story. And so in the New Testament, we don’t have a separate term for Judeans versus what we might call Jews. And so if you were somebody who was of Roman extraction, what we might call an Italian, and you converted to Judaism, you were converting to being a Judean essentially. Which wasn’t an idea that other people really had, but it was a bit like sort of immigrating, in a sense, except you’re immigrating religiously. You might not go and live in this place. And so Judaism, in a lot of ways, was the first tradition that really became unmoored from its geography, at least to a large extent. But in Jesus’ time there is still this sense that this people and this religion are the people in the religion of this location.

It’s just that there was this diaspora and they had developed ways of worshiping in these other places, institutions like the synagogue. And so we’re starting to see that process that leads to us talking about Jews as a religious group today, but also still seeming to be an ethnicity. And so there’s still some sense that there’s both these things and you can be Jewish and yet have no belief in God. For instance, you can be an Italian and convert to Judaism and yet your ancestry is still Italian. And so some of that does guide us well, but it still does get confusing. It’s mostly the Gospel of John that really seems to get into some… we might say, some dicey territory. But also into some directions that are really open to misunderstanding, because it talks about the Jews, as we might put it—which could also be rendered “the Judeans.”

But either way, as a group that seems to stand over against Jesus. And yet when he’s talking with somebody outside of his own people, he says things—as he does to the smart woman—salvation is of the Jews. And so clearly, he identifies with the Jews and yet this gospel speaks of him over and against them in this way that is genuinely, linguistically puzzling. So there’s this one story that I love to point to, John 7, where they’re wondering: These people have gone up to Jerusalem for the feast. And so these are Jews who’ve gone up for this Jewish feast and they’re discussing, Is he the Messiah? Will he come up and show himself?” And then we’re told no one said anything openly about him for fear of the Jews. And so how can Jewish people who’ve gone to a predominantly Jewish city for a Jewish festival who are talking about a Jewish man, Jesus, be afraid of “the Jews”? What could that even mean?

I think the closest analog is if we say that people are worried…if I declare myself, vow allegiance to China, and pursue obtaining citizenship, I could say the Americans will revoke my citizenship and take away my passport. And I don’t mean that any Americans who are in this group tonight will come looking for me. And so it means the authorities that represent this group. And so the one thing we can say about the Jews in the Gospel of John is that it’s clearly not the entirety of a people group, but the authorities that are understood to represent them. And I think it’s used somewhat ironically. They didn’t have quotation marks in the New Testament, but if they did, I think they might have used scare quotes. Because I think part of the issue is that this is a group that believed Jesus is the Messiah, that has essentially been made unwelcome and kicked out of, in some way, shape, or form from a local synagogue.

We get this term “cast out of the synagogue” three times in the Gospel of John. And so I think the author is saying, yeah, those who’ve claimed the title of “the Jews,” and that lands very differently when it’s a Jewish group that has been ostracized using it that way versus when, say, medieval European Christians read it and found in it justification for pogroms and hatred and various other things towards this other people group. So I realize that was very long and I might’ve seemed to have been backtracking. I’m not going to talk too long about any question, but this is a really important one because there’s been such a history of antisemitism and other things that it’s important to get this right.

Shirley Paulson

I appreciate your focusing on that one, James, because you’re helping us to realize it’s okay that we’ve been confused about it. I mean that it is a very difficult topic and you summarize it very eloquently and quickly for us, even though it’s very complex. I don’t know if this next question is equally complex, but related: “What about the pagans? Do they have a complicated name too? What about the pagans?

James McGrath

Okay, so I have some tabs open on the browser here.

Shirley Paulson

Oh, great. Okay.

James McGrath

And let me actually pull up some of these and might not go through all of the texts that I asked you to possibly read, but I don’t know how many people who are here have gotten in the habit of looking up a verse online. And online can sometimes be hit or miss, but there’s stuff for which a Google search really does some great things. And one of them is: you search for a verse, and then you click on it, you scroll down until you get to the Bible Hub, which will give you a bunch of translations. And they’re not always the best translations, but sometimes that will immediately draw to your attention some differences, different ways that the same word is translated. So if we take a look, the New International Version has in Amos 7:17, “You, yourself, will die in a pagan country.” And we keep looking, and it has “You, yourself, shall die in an unclean land;” “you’ll die on pagan soil;” “you shall die in polluted land,” “you shall die in defiled land, unclean soil, a foreign country.” And so we have these different renderings here which will hopefully make clear that the term “pagan…,”

Shirley Paulson

Let me just stop you one second, James, and point out that what you’re showing us is the very last line of each of these translations,

James McGrath

Yeah, sorry for moving quickly. And here we’ve got one, the good news went with heathen, which is an interesting choice, right, related to Pagan. And if we look at another place where we get Pagans, a New International Version taking us in the New Testament, Matthew 5:47, if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Don’t even pagans do that?

And here I think it’s really telling that if you scroll down to some translations that are at least somewhat more literal, King James had “Publicans!” …like, whoa! what are they doing? Because there’s textual variance with tax collectors, but most of them have gentiles. And so what happened in a lot of translations is that this term was used in Judaism for everybody else that meant “the nations.” And so it’s a Hebrew word which came to mean all the other nations. And so that term that’s translated as “Gentiles,” the word that’s used literally means nations. And that’s the basis for how Paul tries to argue that Abraham will be the father of many Gentiles and that they’ll come in as gentiles because it says he’ll be the father of many nations and if everybody becomes part of one nation, then he’s not the father of many nations, is he?

Right? And so it’s really this kind of argument playing with the sort of dual meaning of that term as describing outsiders as Gentiles, as non-Jews became less meaningful and seemed less appropriate to those who identify themselves as Christians. But less and less thought of themselves as in some sense, Jews, other terms were substituted. And the term pagan is a fascinating one because there’s some debate about it, but it seems to have come from a term that denoted rural populations which arguably hung on longer to traditional religion than people in the urban centers. And so it’s another word that’s undergone transformation from time to time, but really what it means is “outsiders,” right? “Others.” And I think it’s important to realize that by rendering it as “pagans,” I think my only concern other than that, is that it might denote Pagan with a capital P and a whole other religious tradition. I don’t think that was ever in view when people made these translations, although modern ones certainly ought to have known that they were veering into that territory. But by covering up that it was referring to gentiles, we missed that the earliest Christians understood themselves to be Jews, to be part of the people of Israel and continuing that tradition.

Shirley Paulson

Wow, okay. I’m really glad we went there with the Jews and Pagans. It’s really helping us have new definitions of them. I think this might also lead us to the concept of Messiah. Did Jews want to have a Messiah? Did they recognize a Messiah? Was that true or not? Tell us about where the Messiah came in. What were they looking for?

James McGrath

Yeah, so Messiah means Anointed One, and there were two key roles in which somebody was anointed with oil as part of the ceremony of installation. And so I’m wondering if anyone here watches The Crown?

James McGrath

The Crown, no, nobody’s going for the British. Oh, well anyway, if you did, there’s this scene with the first televised British coronation, and it’s Queen Elizabeth, of course becoming queen. And they have this ceremony which we get to see because it’s reenacted, but it would’ve happened behind screens, this sacred moment when she is anointed and the Archbishop of Canterbury anoints her with oil and does this whole thing. And the music that plays is coronation music composed by Handel for one of Elizabeth’s ancestors, I think was George, I can’t remember which one. And it’s a work that’s called Zadok the Priest, because the text is Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet anointed Solomon as king. And so I mention that just because if you watch The Crown, then you might’ve seen some of this happening not necessarily in exactly the way that ancient Israelites did.

So in the time between basically starting from the Babylonian exile, there’s a disruption to the line of kings, right? So the Babylonians deposed the exiled descendant, the last descendant of David, and depose him, and there’s no longer a king ruling on the throne there. And eventually the same happens with the high priesthood, another anointed with oil, a role that the line of Zadok that the scripture said was supposed to hold that role. That’s disrupted too, and others come to occupy it. And so there were expectations of one or two Messiahs in Jesus’ time and the time leading up to it. And it was the expectation that God would restore these roles to their rightful holders. And so you could have a hope for an ironic Messiah. And in the Dead Sea Scrolls, we have two Messiahs mentioned, like the Messiah of Aaron, the Messiah of Israel from the line of David. And in the case of Jesus, they’re focused really on the expectation that he’ll be the one to restore the line of David to the throne. And that’s what it means. And that’s why his crucifixion was a stumbling block, as Paul puts it, for those who believed he was the Messiah, because being executed by the Romans seemed like automatic disqualification if you were claiming to be the fulfillment of the expectation of the restoration of the Davidic dynasty to the throne.

Shirley Paulson

This is really helpful because I think we look at the Messiah as being: Jesus was the Messiah, but then how do we deal with the fact that he was considered a failed messiah? Or was he still the Messiah by some, not by others? Tell us what people thought then when he was crucified.

James McGrath

Yeah, definitely some viewed him as a failed Messiah, and that was part of the problem. And yet on the one hand, the early church clearly put a lot of effort into making sense of how he could nonetheless be the Messiah.

On the other hand, I think it does tell us something about Jesus and his character and his teaching, that if he had not been emphasizing things like—whoever exalts himself will be humbled, that you put yourself in lowest place if you want to have the highest position—that teaching like that allowed his followers to say, “Look, the route that he went, God is going to install him in office.” And he went about it in the most humble way possible because that’s what he taught and that’s the right way. That’s what God wants. And so all of this, I think probably helped them make sense, not just of Jesus’ death and his teaching and how they relate, but also the execution of John the Baptist, right? Because a lot of this emerged from John’s movement. (Yeah, you know I was going to work in a mention of John the Baptist somewhere!)

Shirley Paulson

Of course, of course! We’re glad you did.

James McGrath

But yes. So on the one hand, to many of his contemporaries, he seemed like a failed Messiah. I mean, the reason you have these objections that this is blasphemy is that you’re claiming that this man, who ends up being crucified, is the Messiah. It’s not that some of the exalted things that were said about Jesus couldn’t rightly be said about God’s emissary. It’s who they were being said about in the case of Jesus, that was a real issue.

Shirley Paulson

All right, so I’m going to switch directions a little bit here, and we’re going from Messiah to actual religious leadership. I’m going to read specifically the question that came in on this subject here.

“Where did the idea of priests and bishops and deacons, etc. come from since it appears that most early followers were in small groups and many were spread far and wide. How did they view leadership with many groups still considering themselves Jewish? Was the leadership based on the Jewish model or some extension of it, and were churches formed using this basis of the synagogue? I don’t know enough about the Jewish tradition to compare them. I know we’ve discussed apostolic authority, but I haven’t heard much about the individual ones—yet. I’m really curious about this evolution.

James McGrath

So we have a couple of terms that, depending on what translation you read, it may be a bishop or it may not. It may say deacon or it may not.

And I particularly recommend looking at—and if you do this while I’m speaking, that would be fine—but looking at Roman 16:1 on a site like Bible Hub, where you see in particular how certain translations… I will point a finger at the English Standard Version here, because it has a tendency to do this. But where other translations will describe Phoebe as a deacon of the church of Cenchrea, it goes with servant. Now, the term does have that meaning: it was used for a public servant, the best translation to capture the breadth of meaning, which makes it really interesting when you know that it was applied to Phoebe, I would say is ‘minister’. Because really, I mean you have this term diakonia, which really means ‘ministry’—’service,’ but carrying out service to benefit someone else. And so what we think of it as ministry. It’s not used in modern Greek for the Prime Minister or anything like that.

So it doesn’t end up developing that route, but that may just be because diakonos came to have that sense of deacon, this sort of church role. And it emerges as a term of leadership precisely because there’s this emphasis on leaders being servants in a Christian context. And so it is more widely used and it does have that context of ministry, but it’s not a position, it’s not something you would call yourself if you’re trying to lord it over others necessarily, right? It is a role that is like ‘public servant,’ where it may have some authority with it, but it really is the service and the work that you do to benefit others is, at least in theory, supposed to be the point of it. Please don’t ask me to get into public service as a broader topic, not where I’m hoping to go with this. And so we have Phoebe as in whatever sense, and it was not very specific, so we can’t get into, well, what exactly did they do in that time? We’re not told. The role evolves over time, but there are some who carry out ministry, which presumably means maybe ‘hosting’ and presumably ‘leading’—doing some teaching. And then it sounds like there were also bishops which evolved from a term that meant ‘overseer,’ or a ‘watchman,’ somebody who keeps an eye on things. And the way that rule evolves may give some indication of why that term was chosen, that there were some who essentially watched over larger areas, congregations. And in places where clergy are in short supply—not in church, that’s taken for granted—you will have maybe one minister who’s the minister over a region. And as the tradition developed, then sometimes those churches would take on local ministers, and this one person would remain in a sort of oversight role as a person who had maybe helped found those churches and had previously done things there. So these terms evolve, and they evolve out of some terms that don’t tell us a lot very specifically about what they were doing because they were generic secular terms. ‘Apostle’ didn’t tell us anything specific initially, because it meant emissary. It wasn’t a different term that anyone else would use if they sent someone to represent them. And so it’s only as Christianity develops that these terms take on a certain, more specific, connotations.

Shirley Paulson

Thank you for bringing this up for us to show us where we are there. I appreciate that.

James McGrath

Yeah. So let me just show a couple of things and let me see… I’m curious whether, if I switch between some tabs here, it’ll let me do this, and do it in a nice sort of way. So now this may look like gobbledygook to many of you, but there’s an online lexicon, it’s known as Liddel and Scott; it’s on a website called Perseus, which has Greek as well as English texts. So some texts that you’d be interested in are on there. But you can find your way to it and look up words, and you can see this is not like a New Testament dictionary. So, this is: how was this term used in ancient Greek broadly? And so here we have ‘episkopos’ from which we get ‘episcopal,’ it’s the term that becomes bishop and sometimes translated that way. And you can see some of the ways it was used.

So he watches over, overseer, guardian, scout, watch, and then eventually, here in this last one, becomes what it renders as ‘ecclesiastical superintendent.’ And if we look at ‘diakonos,’ it says messenger, sometimes attendant or official in a temple and then in Christian churches. And so we get some of the different ways that the term was used. So we don’t get a lot of this term, we don’t get this term used in Judaism in a synagogue context that I’m aware of. But some of that may just be that most of our texts from this time period are not in Greek.

But I do want to direct your attention to some important work that has been done about leadership in the Jewish temple and in Jewish synagogues. And so Bernadette Brooten did some study of the term ‘leader in the synagogue,’ and the fact that we sometimes get this term used for women in ancient sources, and what male scholars would do time and time again is say, “Well, this can’t possibly mean leader of the synagogue in this context because obviously women were not leaders of the synagogue!” And what she did is, she came in and did a systematic study of these, and instead of saying, “We supposedly know that women could not hold this role, therefore this could not mean what it seems to,”—what if we take this ancient evidence that this term was applied to women and take seriously that what it means is that our assumption about what women could and couldn’t do in this period is wrong, right?

Shirley Paulson

Wow.

James McGrath

And what we know from our own experience, because we live in a context that still has elements of patriarchy in it, is that the fact that there’s discrimination and bias doesn’t mean that women never do certain important stuff. It just means that there are restrictions in at least some context that some try to keep them out of it. They may face additional hurdles and hardships, but we know that there are ancient female teachers, philosophers, things like that. And so there were more men than women doing this role. That doesn’t mean that there were no women doing it, but some scholars have given that impression. And whether,if the environment had been Greek speaking, one of these people might’ve been referred to with a term like ‘episcopos’ is an interesting question. I think that for the most part, they used ???  and precisely because Christians used ‘ekklesia’ for their own meetings just to distinguish themselves from the synagogue. That’s probably why they borrowed terms from secular Greek rather than using the Jewish terms, but they probably meant similar things. And so if you want an easy inroad to this Brooten scholarship, but also how male scholars have failed to take it seriously, Sara Parks has this great open access article—that means that you can read it free online—called “The Brooten Phenomenon.” And so hopefully you can see that on the screen there. And so if you just Google that, you can see it.

Shirley Paulson

Very helpful. Yeah. Oh my goodness, I’m so glad we are dealing with assumptions here. We have time for maybe one more of these.

James McGrath

Oh no, sorry, too long. I went on too long.

Shirley Paulson

We needed to hear all this James, so that’s okay. We have a million questions to ask you. We might come back. Who knows?

James McGrath

I’d be willing.

Shirley Paulson

I think we should talk about Samaritans the same way Jesus was talking about “Good Samaritans,” and we get the feeling that we’ve heard that Samaritans are both terribly evil or else just friends or neighbors that they didn’t get along with well. Tell us about the Samaritans.

James McGrath

Yeah, so let me just share a screen very briefly because if I ask what happened to the Samaritans, oftentimes people are a bit puzzled. Like if I ask, “When did they disappear or die out?”, sometimes people will scratch their head and the answer is, “They did not!”  And so the first thing to say is that if you google “Samaritan Passover,” you can see that the Samaritans still celebrate the Passover to this day on Mount Gerizim, which is the place that comes up in the dialogue between Jesus and the Samaritan woman in John 4. It’s like, “You say that we should worship in Jerusalem, whereas we worship on Mount Gerizim.” And so I actually had the chance, as I was working on the John the Baptist book, (some of you will know this if you’ve read Christmaker) to tour Samaria for the first time and visit it.

And my tour guide was the grandson of the Samaritan high priest. And so the Samaritans are the descendants of the northern tribes. And in the Jewish scriptures, they cast aspersions suggesting that, “Well, they all got carried off and other people came in and intermingled.” But just as not everybody from Judea was carried off, not everybody from Judah, not everybody from the northern tribe was carried off. And this tour guide took me to meet his grandfather who pronounced the Aaronic blessing on us. That’s the priestly blessing: “The Lord bless you and keep you” in Samaritan Hebrew. And so that was wonderfully cool. I don’t care whether you, or I, for that matter, or anyone, else thinks this is an actual descendant of the Aaronic priesthood, even if it’s disputed, it was still a really cool experience to have someone who is essentially a contemporary high priest—which you don’t have in Judaism, because whereas the Samaritans coped with the destruction of their temple by just celebrating there without one, the Jews stopped practicing sacrifice in the temple because the temple was not there and didn’t use the location that way.

So the Samaritans are viewed in Jesus’ time and in later Jewish literature such as rabbinic literature, as subjects of debate, because on the one hand, there’s some clear evidence that they have the Torah in a slightly different version, but they have it, and they worship one God that they say is the God of Israel. And so they are kin, and yet there are also these things in the scriptures that cast aspersions on them. And so there’s some debate. And you still get that in a sense today, and they find themselves sort of caught in between, because they are Arabic speakers, because where Samaria was historically is now what’s known as the West Bank, a large part of it. And so they are the only Palestinians today that have Israeli citizenship, which is interesting. And this tour guide—his name, and if you know anything about Judaism and about the Arabic speaking world, you’ll get the irony of this or why when he’d go to a checkpoint, they would look at his documents funny—his name is Abudh Cohen, so Abudh from Abudhalah, and Cohen is like the priestly Jewish last name.

And you don’t get these two together in Judaism, whereas among these Arabic speaking, as well as Samaritan, Hebrew speaking Samaritans, you can get this combination. So I mentioned that not because their situation today is exactly what it was in Jesus time, but because there is actually some continuity in the sense that they are from a Jewish perspective, this entity that’s not Jewish and yet is clearly related. And what’s important, I think, for looking at Christian origins is that John the Baptist, and Jesus, had an interest in the 12 tribes. And we get the sense that they went to places like Samaria and transJordan. And so there was this outreach to not just Jews in the sense of Judeans and those who either were associated with or inhabited the historic southern kingdom, but the people of the northern kingdom as well.

Shirley Paulson

Oh my gosh, thank you. You’ve given us a great sense of history and geography just by giving us a sense of who these people are there. That’s wonderfully helpful.

Could you tell us something about Jesus’ own relationship to the Hebrew scriptures? Did he sometimes misquote them or why do we have different things going on with his relationship to the scriptures?

James McGrath

So the way the scriptures are used in the New Testament is not consistently what we would consider good interpretation with paying attention to context, ancient context and things. But that I think is actually useful to highlight that you don’t get, even though some people treat modern fundamentalists as though they were the default version of religion and everybody else is being more liberal, is departing from that traditional thing. Ancient Judaism, historic Judaism, they looked for multiple meanings of words. They played with the text, they looked for loopholes and explored them. They’re like, well, what else could this mean? If you calculate the numeric value of this word and then explore what else has that same numeric value, where could that take anything that you could do with the text, they would do with it? And so the things that seem puzzling to us, there’s more that I could say about this, but oftentimes reflect that diversity and that playfulness that’s traditionally part of Judaism with the text with the scriptures.

Shirley Paulson

So maybe Jesus is still playing with us. Okay, we better go on here. Okay, Leigh Ann, let’s hear your thoughts or questions

Leigh Ann Lindsay

I recently saw something, and I think it may have been on the Westar website, but I’m not sure because I’ve looked at a lot of different things and it was just a small statement that talked about that we should be not looking at, or history shouldn’t be talking about, the Christianization of Rome, but rather the Romanization of Christianity, which to me totally kind of flips the perspective when you’re reading the New Testament and looking at the Bible from that standpoint. And I was just wondering what the thought might be on that and because to me that really does kind of upend a lot of assumptions then.

James McGrath

Oh, that’s a great question. And on the one hand, I’m not as inclined as some people are to try to blame Constantine for absolutely everything that’s gone wrong with the church. I think because he did not make Christianity the official religion of Rome or anything like that. He showed a great deal of favoritism as emperor, but it seems to be that he was showing favoritism and trying to settle disputes because he had himself become part of this and had declared some sort of allegiance to it. How much he understood? I mean, there’s only so much we can blame him for misunderstandings. Some of it has to do with people who don’t have the kind of courage that let’s say Bishop Budde had to say to somebody who’s in power. So this thing that you’re pursuing, let me explain how as Christians we view this thing.

And so historically people have not always been willing to say to someone like an emperor. So from the perspective of the teaching of Jesus, you got this wrong and this is not how you should go about things. The Romanization of the church is what we see, even our time as people try to put empire power, secular power and religious power together. And it’s the same thing ultimately in a different form, in a different context, but not entirely unlike its ancient counterparts. And when that happens, I think it’s as much to do with the church… I don’t think the church gets to the point where it can be Romanized without having already abandoned some of its commitments and some of the teaching of Jesus about power, about service, right, about what it means.

You don’t get to be emperor by trying to become the servant of all, right. And so even to get into that position, you have to have risen to power through some sort of force and a Christian empire, if there were ever to be such a thing. And if to the extent that the kingdom of God might be something like the Empire of God in, of course with Jesus’ vision, whoever’s going to be great in that is going to get there by being the servant of all, right? And that’s not how the Roman Empire in any of its permutations ever worked, including when Christianity became a major part of it. And so I think there’s both, because certainly there are things in the Christian Roman Empire that were not there before and you get some qualification of some of the things. You get some changes, you get implementation of things to benefit the poor and needy and things like that that we’re not there before. But you also get this alliance that means that use of power is not being challenged the way it used to be. Force is being used sometimes to spread this faith and the two are becoming identified. And so I don’t think that speaking just about the Romanization of Christianity or just about the Christianization of Rome gets the whole picture. I think we need both.

Shirley Paulson

Very interesting. Great question. Thank you for that

Shirley Paulson

Yeah, Toto, you’ve got a good one, right?

Toto Tay

Yeah, along that line, I love what you said about that, and it got me thinking that really it is the squeaky wheel that gets the grease all along. But it made me wonder how far back can we go? Could we not go back as far as to say, what do we know about the very first communities and the earliest communities actually being perhaps some of the wealthier communities? We know the texts, the codices were usually produced by wealthier groups. So it made me wonder how much of it was the urbanization and kind of the elites that were driving some of these factions and maybe being bad players to rise to power.

James McGrath

Yeah, great question. And the question of starting with Jesus’ relationship to urban context is a fascinating question, because not far from Nazareth walking distance in ancient terms, if not modern American terms, you have what was until during the lifetime of Jesus, the capital was Sepphoris of Galilee, and then it’s destroyed instead of rebuilding the capital there, Herod Antipas places his capital in Tiberius, right along the lake. And Jesus is not said to go to Sepphoris or Tiberius, and yet if Mary Magdalene’s name, even if it also was playing on her as a tower of strength and things like that also alluded to a place—Magdala—then that’s a place that we’re not told Jesus went to necessarily. Although there’s this strange reference that might be to something like the region of Magdala or something like that, but it might have been a corruption anyway, but he seems to have attracted people who were of that sort.

And in particular, Joanna, who is the wife of Herod’s property manager –  probably would’ve lived in Tiberius, might have moved around a lot with the job. But so there are elite supporters of the Jesus movement, which is fascinating. And I even came across some traditions that Mary’s parents might’ve actually been from Sepphoris. There’s a local tradition on those lines, which I think is fascinating. So depicting Jesus as a peasant is one of those terms. I’ve always felt like, well, that’s like an agriculturalist. His family are these trade people who at the very least probably would’ve gotten the work in cities, and yet he’s focused on the smaller towns and the countryside. And so he’s somebody who may have some elite support and yet who is trying to do a grassroots movement and realizes that the urban centers are not the place to make the change happen. And I think John the Baptist was already sort of moving in that direction.

The wildernesses in which he was active were not like being a hermit somewhere off in the desert. The places that are associated with him are major thoroughfares in between big urban centers. And so it’s sort of going out to the crossroads. So I think the urban versus rural divide, you have some people who have some elite support nonetheless standing on the rural side, but bringing some urban influence and bringing some things like literacy and familiarity with the scriptures into the picture as well in interesting ways. So there’s a lot of work done on that, which I think often reduces things to, we know that between cities and countryside, even today, there are significant divides, but there’s also permeability and there are people who are trying very hard to identify with and be voted for by rural folks, and yet they’ve gone to elite institutions of education and things. And so I imagine that the ancient reality had at least a similar complexity.

Shirley Paulson

That’s so interesting to think about getting a picture of where Jesus might have really been instead of just being all by himself in his own little world and nobody was around him. This is really helpful to see that. Okay, Maureen,

Maureen Blake

This talk has been very effective in identifying one of my biases or assumptions. I didn’t realize how black and white, I considered things like the church. Constantine came in, established the church, and it went off in those directions. It makes so much sense what you’re saying about the gradual Christianization of Rome and Romanization of Christianity. That makes so much sense. But in one of our other classes or something, I can’t keep track of it, we talked about how the small groups in the beginning, they have Jesus followers, then they grew bigger and they’d have house churches, then they grew bigger and bigger, so they couldn’t have the meals together like they did. Is that likely where bishops, overseers would come in to manage the group? And then it makes me think, of course we want growth, but growth getting bigger rather than growing a whole bunch of more small communities. It seems like growth of Jesus followers all in one group has kind of a negative effect if it needs to be more managed and organized, and then that would slide right into being church-ified.

James McGrath

Yeah, and it’s interesting church-ified. I could feel the negative connotations there, right? Yeah, which is interesting. Yeah, I mean, do you aim for the megachurch or do you aim for the equivalent number of small communities? And oftentimes when you go to the megachurch route, they will try sometimes in vain to start some smaller groups and things like that. And sometimes people participate. But the truth is that if you grow to a certain size, then things get unwieldy, and then you have to put in management structures and organize things. And we get a sense that even in the earliest church, it’s like, okay, so we have some widows and some orphans and they need to be fed, and we’ve got enough of them that we need a system for how to do this. And so there’s some discussion, and it’s very unclear because people like Steven, we get the sense that they may have had some more role of authority than just doing this kind of work. But on the other hand, maybe that’s just a sign that service as what Christian leaders do was taken very seriously then in a way that was not true there. Power tends to go to people’s heads as well.

Yet already in the second century, we have people saying, emphasizing, so honor and respect the bishop. And then eventually you get to the point where they’re dressed lavishly and are living differently than anybody else around them. And things that one distinctly gets the impression was not part of Jesus’ vision for his movement.

Shirley Paulson

Fascinating question. Okay. And Honor

Honor Hasse

On the subject of Christianity. Maybe that just means different things to any individual you talk to, but I think this group that we’re talking to here are seriously studying Jesus’ life and trying to understand what it was he was getting at that as the way we should live. So then when you talk about the Christianization of Rome or the border of the Mediterranean, the Christian movement or the Jesus movement just mushroomed so fast. I mean, starting with 12 guys and  their leader in this little country of Israel and all of a sudden it takes off and in 200 or 300 years they’re represented all around the Mediterranean.

My feeling is that for it to go that fast, a lot of those who would be calling themselves Christian, who would say, yes, I believe I’m part of the party of Christ, that it was likely pretty much of an emotional response to what they heard and experienced. And then you have these, apparently what we’re learning now with a lot of the stuff from Nag Hammadi, et cetera, that you had individuals or small groups who were really digging in. And I mean things like the secret gospel of John and the gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary, these people are really digging in. That’s not just an emotional response. So it looks to me like you have a very small percentage of people who are really after what he really taught. And a lot of people who said, yeah, we like it, it’s wonderful, we love it. But that’s as far as it went. Do you think that’s a reasonable take on what was going on?

James McGrath

Thank you for not asking a big difficult question. I think we see that even in how people who approach Jesus right in his own time, and again, some of this may or may not be historical, but maybe at least plausible or maybe even reflects the reality in the time of the gospel authors shows that this was something happening very early, but people who were coming to Jesus for what they could get, how they could benefit, but not very clearly interested in his teaching or becoming part of this movement and things like that. And we also get the sense, and I know there’s significant debates that people here will be aware of. Was this something that came in as a secondary stage? How much of it was there from the beginning? Does it go back to John the Baptist where John and Jesus, both of this sort, neither one was the other, wasn’t. But things like that sort of phenomenon known as apocalypticism, the sense that there’s an urgency, that the end of history is at hand and things like that, that at the very least was a major aspect of the early Christianity that becomes embedded in our texts, our early New Testament texts, because “there’s some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God come with power,” and Matthew makes it: “There are some standing here who will not taste death until you see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.” The sense that there is this almost end of the world judgment is sued type of attitude in at least some strands of the Jesus movement and where do they come from?

However much they are part, they do seem to predominate for a period that includes Paul, where he’s like, “The dead in Christ will rise first, and then we who are alive will meet him in the air, expecting that we—us!—some of us possibly including himself, will be part of this.” And so some of the mystical focus that we get in some of the Nag Hammadi and stuff like that, some of the institutionalization focus that we get, are all responses to, among other things, the fact that there were some hopes that some people—and maybe quite a few people who were part of this Jesus movement—had, that were not fulfilled in the way that they expected them to be.

And so maybe it’s a testimony to the strength and power of Jesus’s teaching that despite the fact that what some believed that he himself had predicted—that this was all going to happen within this generation—we’re still talking about them. Most people, if among the things that they teach is or the things that are attributed to them (if you don’t think it goes back to Jesus), is that the judgment is at hand. This generation will not pass away until all these things are fulfilled, those kinds of phrases,… that’s not going to…, it may still persist, but it’s not going to be something that takes over the world in the way that the teaching of Jesus has, sometimes in corrupted forms, sometimes in politicized forms. We don’t need to go back to that topic. So I think one of the interesting questions, and I wrestle with this a bit in my work on John the Baptist is, “how much diversity was there from the very beginning”?

I mean, if what we might call ‘gnosticism’ (whether you like that term or not), and other types of mysticism and the Ebionites and conservative Jewish Christian Jesus followers and welcoming in the Gentiles and proclaiming it to the ends of the earth and the apocalyptisists and the not-apocalypticists. And if all this emerges out of the movement of John the Baptist and Jesus-variation on that, but also some of John’s other followers, then this is something remarkable and vibrant and important we’re dealing with. And I’d say in John—one of the most vibrant, creative religious thinkers in all of history—I really wish we had more directly from him, because Jesus thought very highly of him, as one of his sayings indicates. I feel like I wandered away from your question. I’m not sure how much I answered it, but you did start with ‘Christianity!’ And so I knew I wasn’t going to do justice to the whole thing, but I want to make sure I got at least some of what you were hoping for.

Shirley Paulson

Well, it’s fascinating. I appreciate your giving us this broad picture of the diversity, the activity, the life that the people on the ground, what a rich, colorful picture you painted for us, James, I really appreciate it.

Obviously James, we would like to talk to you another three hours or so, but we really appreciate your being with us tonight. You’ve given us so much to think about. I really appreciate it. So I just want to thank everybody for your participation in this event tonight. This was the January 20, 25 Bible and Beyond discussion titled Questioning Our Assumptions about the Bible with our guest scholar, Dr. James McGrath. Once a month from eight to 9:00 PM Eastern Time on Monday nights, usually the fourth of the month, we provide a discussion of one or more early Christian texts each month. One of our knowledgeable scholars leads these sessions sharing a well-framed overview of these early Christian texts and allowing participants time to ask questions and share their insights.

And one last thing, if you enjoy our Bible and Beyond Discussions, we hope you’ll consider becoming a sponsor by joining our Patreon community. Your monthly contribution entitles you to exclusive content such as my weekly column, “What I Learned This Week,” plus discounts on our live online hybrid courses, and more. So to get there, you go to patreon.com/BibleAndBeyond. Thank you so much. So again, James, I want to thank you so much for guiding us deeper into the Bible and helping us navigate more securely who these people are. Thanks so much for being with us tonight, James.

James McGrath

It’s been a pleasure as always. You have such a wonderful group here. And so, yeah, happy to spend this time with you and happy to come back again and spend some more time in some future point.

Shirley Paulson

That’s wonderful, James. James is one of those rare scholars who’s actually accessible and I am so grateful that he is. Thank you so much. Really appreciate that.