Judy & Bills Excellent Adventure: Exploring Early Christianity

          Between the time of Jesus and the time when creed and canon (Bible) were established, Jesus followers flowered in wild diversity. This fertile time of early or proto-Christianity was the focus of the Spring Program of the Westar Institute (a religious literacy advocacy group). We had the opportunity to attend the first two days of the conference, each of which focused on one of the Jesus movements blossoming during the first century.

          How do we train Gentile newcomers in the way of life revealed to us through Jesus? That’s the focus of the Didache, the document we considered on the first day. In asserting that this document pre-dates the writing of both the Gospels and Paul’s letters and is therefore independent of them, the presenter challenged the traditional view that one can use the Gospels and letters to interpret the Didache. Instead, the presenter claimed, the Didache is an independent window into a Jesus-following community that focused much more on how Jesus taught us to live than on what Jesus taught us to believe. For example, a sample eucharist liturgy thanks God for the cup, the vine of David, and the broken [loaf], the life and knowledge revealed through God’s servant Jesus, without a single mention of blood, flesh, sacrifice, or atonement. Thought provoking.

          Making sense of Paul was the challenge of the second day. Many people find Paul to be the most difficult of the New Testament authors—at times radically egalitarian, proclaiming that husbands and wives belong equally to each other, at other times disturbingly conservative, telling wives to submit to their husbands and women to be silent in church. The presenters helped us make some sense of Paul by arguing that the letters believed to be authentically his are consistently egalitarian, and the letters attributed to him but believed to be written in later generations seem more influenced by the norms of Roman order. They also gave us a new window through which to see Paul by explaining how the enormous difficulty of translating his ancient Greek into our modern English influences our hearing of him. What Paul really thought about faith and Jesus, for example, can turn on the translators’ interpretation of Greek grammar, which had no punctuation, not even spaces between words. Did he promote faith in Jesus, or the faith of Jesus? Since Paul wrote more of the New Testament than anyone, understanding what he was saying seems worthy of serious consideration.

          We were unable to stay for the last two days of the conference, but hope to obtain videos of the talks, and when we do, we’ll share more. Meanwhile, if you’d like a little more info on the Didache or the latest scholarly research into Paul, copies of articles by the conference presenters are available in the church library. Or, if you’d like a lot more info, the following books are available in the church library: The Didache by Aaron Milavec, and In Search of Paul by John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed. If you’d like more information on the Westar Institute, visit westarinstitute.org.

– Judy & Bill Silver