The First Cultural Context—Judaism................................................

Lecture 3

I

n the last lecture, we saw how important Greek and Roman culture was
for understanding earliest Christianity, not merely as a static setting
but as a set of living influences. In this lecture, we’ll examine the most
important and problematic cultural context for early Christianity, namely
Judaism, the “symbolic world of Torah.” As we’ll see, the importance of this
context is both straightforward and problematic—straightforward in that the
Christian movement began as a sect within 1st-century Judaism and attempted
to engage the Jewish Scriptures and problematic in that the Christian claim
that Jesus was the risen Lord appeared as heretical within Judaism.

The Jewish Cultural Context
• The importance of the Jewish context is both obvious and
straightforward: The Christian movement began as a sect within 1st-
century Judaism.
o Jesus was a Jew and his first followers, including Paul, were
Jews who called Jesus their Messiah (“anointed one”); their
allegiance, furthermore, was to Judaism.

o The first efforts to interpret the significance of Jesus and his

Resurrection engaged the Jewish Scriptures (Torah).

o So intense and sustained was this engagement that the writings

of the New Testament, although composed in Greek and using

many forms of Greco-Roman rhetoric, can legitimately be

called Jewish literature.

o Within 150 years, these writings would be joined to those of

the Jewish Scriptures to form the Christian Bible.

•    The problematic character of the Jewish cultural context is less

obvious but equally significant for the future of Christianity.