Lecture 4: The Jesus movement and the Birth of Christianity
• The problem was not only for outsiders; those who came to believe
in Jesus were also “Greeks and Jews,” bringing their cultural
perceptions with them.
o The earliest Christians experienced what sociologists call
“cognitive dissonance”: the apparent contradiction between
their symbolic world and their experience. Such dissonance
must be resolved through denial of the convictions, denial of
the experience, or reinterpretation of the convictions in light
of experience.o Within the symbolic world of the early Christians, Jesus ought
not to have been the source of life because of the manner of his
death. But their experience of the Holy Spirit’s power in their
lives—a power that manifested itself in new capacities and that
they saw as deriving from Jesus—made them call him both
“Lord” and “Christ.”o To maintain both their experience and their symbolic world,
the early Christians had to reinterpret their symbols in light
of experience.o In order to get on with their own story, then, they had to come to
grips with Jesus’s story, especially his death; thus, the process
of reinterpretation that began at once led to the construction
of the Passion accounts—the story of Jesus’s suffering—as the
first part of the Jesus story to reach set form.A Complex and Tense Religion
• From the time of its birth and earliest growth, Christianity was a
complex and tension-filled religion.• Sociologically, it was underdetermined and parasitic: Beginning
as a sect of Judaism, it was expelled from the synagogue and
became a Gentile association (an intentional community) without
obvious boundaries.