The Jesus Movement and the Birth of Christianity

Lecture 4

H

aving sketched the cultural matrix within which Christianity was
formed—the complex civilizations of Greece and Rome, built on
Mediterranean culture and further complicated by empire, and the
equally complex symbolic world of Judaism—we now turn to the Jesus
movement and the birth of Christianity. The metaphor of birth is particularly
appropriate in the case of Christianity because it entered history at a specific
time and place and with a definite parentage. Like an infant, Christianity
entered the world bearing the genes of Greco-Roman and Jewish cultures,
but it combined those elements in a new and distinctive fashion, so that it
was not simply a version of what had preceded it but something truly new in
the world.

The “Founding” of Christianity and the Life of Jesus
• Christianity was not “founded” by Jesus in the obvious or
straightforward sense that other great religions have founders.
This point can be made by comparing Jesus to Muhammad as the
founder of Islam or the Buddha as the founder of Buddhism.
o In the case of Muhammad, the prophet received revelations
throughout his life that were gathered into the Qur’ān and
provided a body of social teachings on which an Islamic society
could be (and was) based. In contrast, Jesus’s teachings tended
to be aphoristic and parabolic and were far from systematic.

o In the case of Prince Siddhartha, the experience of

enlightenment led to the Four Noble Truths, by which others

could also experience nirvana and attain the Buddha-state.

Jesus’s inner experience is not communicated by the Gospels,

and Christians do not claim to share his distinctive experience

of the divine.

o Jesus’s itinerant ministry in rural Palestine lasted from only one

to three years, reached a limited number of people, and ended