In What Ways can Jesus Be Considered the Founder of Christianity - Literature review Example

In what ways can Jesus be considered the founder of Christianity? That Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah or Christ, is the founder of Christianity is held as an unquestionable assumption by many Christians is obvious, but careful scholarship requires that the assumption be qualified, if not refuted. A founder may be defined as a person who establishes, initiates, originates or lays the foundations of an idea, movement, group or institution1. Identifying a founder of Christianity then will require one to determine with which person did the religion originate, who established it, who introduced it as an idea or movement, and who gave it its structure and organisation. As we shall see, this task is not a clear-cut one. The origins of Christianity were fraught with much controversy, and its development into the organized religion and group of religious systems that we now call Christianity cannot be said to have been a smooth and linear one. This paper then explores the above question along three axes: Jesus as the founder of Christianity; Jesus as the originator of a Jewish Messianic sect that “posthumously”2 became Christianity; and the apostles as the founder of a Jewish sect that became Christianity through the interpretations and Christology of Paul. According to The Columbia Encyclopaedia, the main teachings of Christianity are that “Jesus is the Son of God; … that his life on earth, his crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension into heaven are proof of God’s love for humanity and God’s forgiveness of human sins; and that by faith in Jesus one may attain salvation and eternal life”3. It is indisputable that Christianity centres on the life, death, resurrection, and teachings of Jesus, without whom the religion wouldn’t exist. He is the pre-eminent source, and the great ‘rabbi’, whose words and the Midrash4 thereof form the New Testament scriptures. It is Jesus who gives the basis for the religion’s creation in the forty days between His resurrection and ascension: “After his suffering … he appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God. … He said to them … ‘you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.’”5 Although Christianity begins in earnest after Jesus’ ascension, he lays the foundations for it to be carried out in the above quote and in the Great Commission: “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptised will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. And [miraculous] signs will accompany those who believe”.6 There are two things of note about this commission; the first is that it reiterates the disciples’ missionary work during the lifetime of Jesus7, and the second is that it gives the disciples the power and authority to continue doing the miraculous work that Jesus had done in his lifetime. The first time the gospel is preached after the resurrection is on the day of Pentecost, when, on receiving the promised Holy Spirit, Peter addresses the crowd gathered8. His sermon takes the following form: he recalls the Messianic prophecy in Joel and relates the story of Jesus’ life, work, persecution and resurrection, using this to demonstrate that “God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.”9 He closes with a rejoinder that indicates the basic tenet of ‘The Way’: “Repent and be baptised, everyone of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”10 ‘The Way’ eventually becomes known as ‘Christianity’, after the appellation given to the disciples in Antioch11. On the one hand, the above shows that to some extent, Jesus can be considered the founder of Christianity, since it originates and is grounded in him. On the other hand, it shows, as most definitions of Christianity claim, that the religion that bears his name is actually founded by his followers after his death12. In one sense, Christianity, centred as it is on the death and resurrection of the Messiah, could only be founded after the fact. As Zeisler rightly points out, “It obviously could not have been done by Jesus himself, because the materials for it were not available until after his mission was accomplished.”13 While one could reasonably say that Jesus’ forty-day sojourn among his disciples sees him “laying the foundation” of Christianity, the Bible itself does not give details as to what Jesus taught his disciples in the pre-ascension period, except that he seems to have showed them the connection between his death and resurrection and the Messianic prophecies14. In another sense, it is conceivable that this is an apologetic non-Christian view, viz. after the death of Jesus, who is merely a great prophet15, the disciples fabricate a story to justify the death of the man who they believe to be the Messiah, thus the birth of Christianity16. Quite apart from this perspective, is the distinction often made between ‘first-century Christianity’ and modern Christianity, which, Roderick C. Meredith, quoting Kirkegaard (1956) and Jones (1924), claims bear so little resemblance to the former that Jesus would no longer recognise it17. He contrasts the popular conception, drawn from Paul’s statement that the old covenant law has been “done away”, with Jesus’ in Matthew 5:17: “I have [not come to] abolish the Law or the Prophets18 … but to fulfil them.” Immediately after these words Jesus goes on to show that the old covenant is still in effect, indeed, made more binding, when he gives a “fuller” meaning to the Ten Commandments.19 Among the biggest debates in biblical scholarship, then, is the question of whether Jesus really intended to found a new religion. Bible scholars and sources agree that Jesus, as well as the early Christians and apostles were Jews and their religion distinctly Jewish. Thus it can be said that what Jesus and/or the earliest apostles “found” or institute is actually a (reformist) sect within Judaism, preaching that Messiah had come. Branscomb explains that the gospel of Matthew was written with the view to refuting early claims that Jesus abrogated the law, and asserts that “Jesus never thought of his teachings as a new body of laws.”20 Rall points out that “Strictly speaking, there was no separate church at first … Its members are loyal Jews. They have a hope and a life which other Jews have not; but still they think of themselves as Jews, and they keep the rules of the religion of their people.”21 The Acts of the Apostles show very clearly the Jewish nature of the traditions kept by the apostles: going to the temple, keeping the feasts22, preaching on the Sabbath23 and refraining from eating non-kosher foods24, in the example of Jesus, who kept the Passover and the Feasts of Tabernacles and Unleavened Bread25. Viewed in this way, Jesus wasn’t the founder of “Christianity”; he was a Jewish prophet who sought to reform Judaism in order to prepare the hearts of the nation for the kingdom, which he, as the Messiah was to usher in at his second coming, and the admission into which he paid in full at his first coming. Mchugh agrees that “part of [Jesus’] purpose must have been either to correct or to refine contemporary Jewish ideas of that kingdom,”26 and further questions whether the teachings and intentions of Jesus were (mis) represented or revised later by the apostles and the gospel writers27. Jesus’ reading of the scrolls from Isaiah 6128 indicates that he sees himself as a Jewish Messiah fulfilling Jewish Messianic prophecies and expectations. Note that Jesus preaches only to “the lost sheep of the House of Israel”29, although in the Great Commission he sends his disciples out to “all nations”. One might conclude from this statement that Jesus himself has a Jewish mandate, but the religion that spreads in his name has a larger gentile mandate (and implications). For decades after Jesus’ ascension ‘the Way’, retains its Jewish characteristics, but when Paul receives his mandate to preach to the gentiles in Acts 9:15, the gospel begins to take a radically new form. An as-yet subtle difference exist between the conception of the new faith by the (predominantly) Jewish Jerusalem Church, founded by Christ’s Jewish disciples and headed by James, and the (predominantly) Gentile Church founded and headed by Paul. Goguel summarizes it thus: Christianity in its infancy found it hard to become conscious of itself as a religion in its own right. … [The Jerusalem Church] considered that what was new was more than anything else the fulfilment and expansion of Judaism. Paul was the only one of the first generation who understood that in being the fulfilment of Judaism Christianity passed beyond Judaism and left it behind. But no one really followed his guidance. Because Christians of the first generation failed to grasp this their faith remained a prisoner in the cradle of the Judaism in which it had been born. Christianity was only on the way to becoming a stabilised religion, when the church became conscious of being an independent entity in its own right or rather when circumstances compelled it to become so.30 Then at Antioch a controversy arises, and though the apostles in Acts 15 seem to resolve the issue by compromising on some issues and relaxing the need for the Gentile Christians to strictly observe Jewish traditions, it reveals what Rall calls “a great crisis”31 and a serious theological schism that would redefine Christianity and its future. The results of this schism on the Christian religion cannot be overstated. Here it is that the faith takes on the skeleton of its present forms. “The gospel which moves through the Roman world,” Rall explains, “is a gospel that is free from Judaism and Jewish law. And Christianity ceases to be a Jewish faith and becomes a world religion.”32 Rall believes that Paul was “the great interpreter” of the meaning of the new faith, and had a greater understanding of “the meaning of Christianity as a universal religion and … a spiritual faith” than even the disciples whom Jesus Himself handpicked33. He is not the first to suggest that Paul’s bilingual background and dual citizenship allowed him to fashion and express the doctrine to the Gentiles and Hellenistic Jews in a way that none of the Twelve (Palestinian Jews) could, and that this was his great contribution to the religion, which to some extent, grants him the right to be called its (second) founder. While Rall refutes the accusation that Paul “corrupted the simple message of Jesus and complicated it, by turning it into a religion of redemption or by subverting its Jewishness,”34 both he and Goguel agree that Paul’s stance in the Antioch issue rescued the new faith from being “strangled” by its Judaic roots, and that without him the religion would perhaps have disappeared. “There is no doubt”, Goguel asserts, “that without Paul Christianity would never have become established in the form in which we find it.”35 Following the emigration of Peter and the apostles from Jerusalem, and the war of 70, the Jerusalem church wanes and the Gentile church waxes as the centre of the unified Christian doctrine and religion, and the effects of the decision of the Jerusalem council and Paul’s epistolary Christology are clearly seen: In a brief generation the change takes place. The community at Jerusalem gives place to the church of the empire. Christianity is being preached, not as a Jewish hope, but as good news for all men. Nothing is said about being a Jew or keeping Jewish rules, but only about faith in Christ, and about living a new life of love in the Spirit of God. It is Christianity as a universal and spiritual religion.36 The above arguments show that isolating a founder of Christianity in the sea of its evolutions is a problematic one. What we can state with certitude is that Christianity is derived from and based inextricably on the life, person, teachings and unique paschal and messianic signification of Jesus. However, while the movement now known as Christianity originated with Jesus and was spread by his disciples, Christianity as an organized religion distinct from Judaism was born of the “Antioch Creed”, established by Paul, and “refined” by the later Christian fathers and events into the religion that we know today. Bibliography Becker, Jürgen. Paul: Apostle to the Gentiles. Translated by Dean, O. C. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1l993. Branscomb, Harvie. The Teachings of Jesus: A Textbook for College and Individual Use. Nashville, TN: Cokesbury Press, 1931. Carrington, Philip. The Early Christian Church. Vol. 1,. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1957. ______________. The Early Christian Church. Vol. 2,. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1957. Chilton, Bruce, and Jacob Neusner. Judaism in the New Testament: Practices and Beliefs. New York: Routledge, 1995. Contemporary Thinking about Paul: An Anthology. New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1950. Dunn, James D. G., ed. Jews and Christians : The Parting of the Ways, A.D. 70 to 135 : the Second Durham-Teubingen Research Symposium on Earliest Christianity and Judaism (Durham, September 1989) /. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999. Geikie, Cunningham. The Life and Words of Christ. New York: Appleton, 1913. Goguel, Maurice. The Birth of Christianity. Translated by Snape, H. C. New York: Macmillan, 1954. Graystone, Geoffrey. The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Originality of Christ. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956. Meredith, Roderick. Restoring Apostolic Christianity. Charlotte: Living Church of God, 2001. Mchugh, John. "In Him Was Life." In Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways, A.D. 70 to 135: the Second Durham-Teubingen Research Symposium on Earliest Christianity and Judaism (Durham, September 1989) /, edited by Dunn, James D. G., null16-158. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999. Rall, Harris Franklin. New Testament History: A Study of the Beginnings of Christianity. New York: Abingdon Press, 1914. Ziesler, J. A. Pauline Christianity. Revised ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Read More