Early Christianity

Christianity had a Jewish background, we have a clear under-

standing of the relationship that emerging Christianity had to

contemporary Judaism. In what follows, I want to look at a few

aspects of this question, showing that the nature of the relation-

ship is often quite murky. I will begin by looking at how some

aspects of Jesus’ career, at least in terms of how it is represented

in the canonical gospels, might be seen to share characteristics

with the Judaism of his time. Then I will consider how there is

a danger of reading Christian assumptions into evidence for

Judaism at the time of Jesus, and how this can give rise to prob-

lems in efforts to understand the relationship between Christianity

and Judaism. In particular, we will see that there is a problem

with seeing Judaism as some sort of fixed religious system from

which Christianity departed.

Bandits and messiahs: seeking a context for the
historical figure of Jesus

For early Christian writers like Eusebius, for whom Jesus’ status

as Messiah was self-evident, the fact that Jews rejected him

seemed like an act of criminal madness. This begs an important

question, however: to what extent might Jesus’ activities have

matched contemporary Jewish expectations of what the Messiah

should be? In certain of the gospel narratives, there is a clear

implication that Jesus was indeed rejected by some Jews at least.

Such accounts of rejection reach a crescendo with the circum-

stances surrounding Jesus’ trial and death. When the Roman

governor Pontius Pilate offered the Jews in Jerusalem the oppor-

tunity to secure the release of a prisoner, they chose Barabbas,

apparently in preference to Jesus (a least, that is how the story is

often represented). In the exchanges between Pilate and the

crowds in Jerusalem that follow, repeated demands were made

that Jesus should be crucified.

The circumstances of Jesus’ condemnation and death are

instructive, particularly in terms of establishing a historical con-

text for his career. From the gospel accounts it seems clear that

CONTEXTS FOR THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY

100