A Short History of the New Testament

‘Fresh and lively… a stimulating read, at once accessible and provocative.’

Ja m e s Ca r l eton Paget, Se nior L ect u r e r in N ew T e sta m e nt St u di e s, Uni v e rsit y of Ca m bri dge, a n d F e l l ow a n d T u tor of Pet e rhouse

‘Moxnes does an impressive job in conveying the nature and character of this enigmatic collection of texts.’

Christoph e r Row l a n d, De a n I r e l a n d’s Prof e ssor of th e E x ege sis of Holy Script u r e, Uni v e rsit y of Ox for d

‘Up to date and masterful in its understanding of the issues… Provides for the student and general reader a wealth of rich insights, written in an accessible and arresting style.’

John M G Ba rcl ay, Lightfoot Prof e ssor of Di v init y, Du rh a m Uni v e rsit y

www.ibtauris.com

Halvor Moxnes

Halvor Moxnes is Professor Emeritus of New Testament Studies at the University of Oslo.

THE NEW TESTAMENT

Cover illustration: The Betrayal of Christ

by Judas (The Kiss of Judas): fresco by Giotto, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, 1303-1306 (photo by APIC/Getty Images)

Few documents in world history can match the inspirational impact of the New Testament. For all its variety – gospels, letters and visions – this firstcentury collection of texts keeps always at its centre the enigmatic figure of Joshua/Jesus: the Jewish prophet who gathered a group around him, proclaimed the imminent end of the world, but was made captive by the authorities of Rome only to suffer a shameful criminal’s death on a cross.

When his followers (including former persecutor Saul/Paul) became convinced that Jesus had defeated extinction, and had risen again to fresh life, the movement crossed over from Palestine to ignite the entire Greco-Roman Mediterranean world.

The author shows how the writings of this vibrant new faith came into being from oral transmission and then became the pillar of a great world religion.

He explores their many varied usages in music, liturgy, art, language and literature. In discussing its textual origins, as well as its later reception, Moxnes shows above all how the New Testament has been employed both as a tool for liberation and as a means of power and control.

A SHORT HISTORY OF

THE NEW TESTAMENT Halvor Moxnes

A Short History of . . . the American Civil War

Paul Anderson (Clemson University)

the American Revolutionary War

Stephen Conway (University College London)

Ancient China

Edward L Shaughnessy (University of Chicago)

Ancient Greece

P. J. Rhodes, FBA (Durham University)

Ancient Rome

Andrew Wallace-Hadrill (University of Cambridge)

the Anglo-Saxons

Henrietta Leyser (University of Oxford)

the Byzantine Empire

Dio nysios Stathakopoulos (King’s College

London) the Celts

Alex Woolf (University of St Andrews)

the Crimean War

Trudi Tate (University of Cambridge)

English Renaissance Drama

Helen Hackett (University College London)

the English Revolution and the Civil Wars

David J Appleby (University of Nottingham)

the Etruscans

Corinna Riva (University College London)

Irish Independence

J J Lee (New York University)

the Italian Renaissance

Virginia Cox (New York University)

the Korean War

Allan R Millett (University of New Orleans)

Medieval Christianity

G R Evans (University of Cambridge)

Medieval English Mysticism

Vincent Gillespie (University of Oxford)

the Minoans

John Bennet (University of Sheffield)

the Mongols

George Lane (SOAS, University of London)

the Mughal Empire

Michael Fisher (Oberlin College)

Muslim Spain

Alex J Novikoff (Rhodes College, Memphis)

New Kingdom Egypt

Robert Morkot (University of Exeter)

the New Testament

Halvor Moxnes (University of Oslo)

Nineteenth-Century Philosophy

Joel Rasmussen (University of Oxford)

the Normans Leonie Hicks (Canterbury Christ Church University) the Ottoman Empire

Baki Tezcan (University of California, Davis)

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the Phoenicians

Mark Woolmer (Durham University)

the Reformation

Helen Parish (University of Reading)

the Renaissance in Northern Europe

Malcolm Vale (University of Oxford)

the Risorgimento

Nick Carter (Australian Catholic University)

the Russian Revolution

Geoffrey Swain (University of Glasgow)

the Spanish Civil War

Julián Casanova (University of Zaragoza)

the Spanish Empire

Felipe Fernández-Armesto (University of Notre Dame) and José Juan López-Portillo (Pembroke College, Oxford)

Transatlantic Slavery

Kenneth Morgan (Brunel University)

Venice and the Venetian Empire

Maria Fusaro (University of Exeter)

the Vikings

Clare Downham (University of Liverpool)

the Wars of the Roses

David Grummitt (University of Kent)

Weimar Germany

Colin Storer (University of Nottingham)

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THE NEW TESTAMENT HALVOR MOXNES

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To past and present students of the New Testament at the Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo

Published in 2014 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright Š 2014 Halvor Moxnes The right of Halvor Moxnes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions.

ISBN: 978 1 78076 607 2 (hb) ISBN: 978 1 78076 608 9 (pb) eISBN: 978 0 85773 552 2 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset in Sabon by Ellipsis Digital Limited, Glasgow Printed and bound in Great Britain by T. J. International, Padstow, Cornwall

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Contents

Preface Introduction: What is a history of the New Testament?

PART 1: BEGINNINGS From Jesus to the Gospels Chapter 1:

x xv 1

Becoming Christians – letter writing as community formation

8

Chapter 2: Memory and Identity: the Gospels as Jesus-biographies

37

Chapter 3:

Acts and Apocalypse – ambivalent living under the Roman Empire

64

Chapter 4:

Included or Excluded: When was the New Testament created?

74

PART 2: SHAPING HISTORY The reception of the New Testament

91

Chapter 5:

‘Christianity goes to Press’: The communication history of New Testament 97

Chapter 6:

‘. . . Their eyes were opened and they recognised him.’ Glimpses of Receptions of the Jesus Story

116

Chapter 7:

Race, Class and Gender ‘in Christ’?

The ambiguous reception history of Galatians 3:28

133

vii

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Halvor Moxnes PART 3: READING AND MEANING-MAKING The history of how to read the New Testament

157

Chapter 8:

Historical Readings: How modernity shaped New Testament scholarship 161

Chapter 9:

‘Reading from this place’: Paul in recent interpretations

185

Conclusion: Where is the Future of the New Testament?

205

207

Further Reading

Notes

218

Index

233

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Introduction WHAT IS A HISTORY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT?

The New Testament is a small book that has changed the world.

This may seem like a bold claim, but this volume on the history of the New Testament is an attempt to substantiate it. It is true that it is small; in a modern edition it covers only 250 pages, compared to the Old Testament’s 815. Its success is curious in so much as there was little or no advantage to being ‘new’ in the ancient world when authority, especially religious authority, was so closely associated with the ‘old’. In truth, the New Testament gained its authority because it was added to existing Jewish scriptures which were recognised as old. But the writings that became the New Testament did represent something new – the gradual growth of a Jewish sect into a new religion, Christianity, which was to spread over the known and unknown worlds, from Antiquity to the present modern age.

Since Jesus Christ, believed to be the Son of God and Saviour of humanity, was the centre of Christianity, the New Testament gained a unique position; it was not only the main source of knowledge about Jesus, but offered an interpretation of human existence, society and the future of the world in light of faith in Christ. Thus, the New Testament was at the beginning of what was to become Christendom – the gradual combination of Church, politics, culture and society, beginning in the Mediterranean world and the East before moving into Western and Northern Europe. After that followed the colonisation of North America, Latin America and Australia, and finally Africa (south of the Sahara) and new parts of Asia. The study of the New Testament eventually became a central plank in developments in the world of learning, from the first universities in the xv

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Halvor Moxnes Middle Ages to the establishment of modern academic disciplines in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and their development (and in some cases transformation) in the twentieth century.

This history is no longer well known. In the secularised parts of the Western world, there is much less knowledge of the New Testament than even a generation ago, both of the actual content of the writings and of their larger historical and cultural context of transmission and influence. As a result, the relevance of the New Testament itself is sometimes called into question. A rewriting of the history of the New Testament is needed to address this changed environment. But where to begin? We have to go back to a period where the New Testament did not exist. The writings which became the New Testament were originally intended to be read by small groups, dedicated to following Christ, in their own time. Their authors could never have imagined that their work would one day constitute Scripture for the largest religion in the world, becoming a classic of world literature and a cultural cornerstone of Christian societies for millennia. They could have had no idea of the critical study, theory and literary method that these writings would have been subjected to in their ongoing interpretation over the last 200 years. All the considerations alluded to here need to be integrated into even a short history of the New Testament, thereby capturing something of the history which originally produced these texts, the history which witnessed their canonisation, and the history which was made, and continues to be made, through acts of interpretation and application in the lives of readers. This book therefore divides into three parts titled as follows: 1) Beginnings, 2) Shaping History and 3) Reading and Meaning-Making.

The first section, Beginnings, introduces the relevant writings from the first century after Christ, and therefore long before they became ‘The New Testament’. I use this traditional term, ‘after Christ’ (usually AD), instead of the now standard Common Era (CE) to emphasise just what caused the production of these writings: the historical person of Jesus from Nazareth, and the faith his followers had in him as the Messiah (Christ). My guiding interpretative perspective, developed in the following chapters, is the view that the purpose of these writings, especially the gospels, was to tell the story of Jesus xvi

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Introduction of Nazareth in such a way that they shaped the identity of their readers. Or, in the case of the letters, they presupposed knowledge about Jesus, while reminding their readers of the appropriate formative quality of that knowledge. These writings, I will stress, must be read within the context of the Greco–Roman world: they employed literary genres and conventions that reflect their Hellenistic and Jewish environment. The last chapter in this section discusses the process that led up to the formation of a fixed collection of texts called The New Testament.

The next section, Shaping History, discusses how the New Testament became such an important and influential document in so many parts of the world. We start with the material history of the New Testament: how it was produced, published and disseminated.

The technological development of media is reflected in this history: from the handwritten codex via printed books to the electronic webpage. The spread of the New Testament is part of a history of translations and of geographical distribution through mission and colonisation. Based on this material history, the cultural impact of the New Testament can now be studied in a new perspective represented by reception history.

Reception, broadly understood, includes not only the interpretation of New Testament writings in a theological or academic setting, but also the dissemination of themes, topics and images – through art, music, literature and films, for example. This was not only an activity for the elite: ‘ordinary’ Christians participated in activities which made the memories of Jesus come alive. The New Testament also had a great impact upon discussions of pivotal moral and social causes – for example the liberation of slaves and gender equality.

These discussions are illuminating examples of the importance of the New Testament since they had broader social and political implications in addition to being internal Church issues. However, the New Testament has been a double-edged sword in this respect: it has also been used to support slavery and discrimination on the basis of race, gender and sexuality.

Finally, the third section, Reading and Meaning-Making, includes the history of how the New Testament has been studied and the different methods and theories that have been applied in different xvii

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Halvor Moxnes ages. The Enlightenment and the subsequent establishment of modern universities in the nineteenth century had tremendous consequences for its study. This was the period of the so-called ‘historical-critical’ method in many disciplines, and the original, historical meaning was the goal of most biblical interpretation. This method became dominant in the study of the New Testament, until its hegemony was broken in the last part of the twentieth century. In the last generation, there has been greater diversity in methods and theories, and biblical interpreters have interacted with the social sciences and literary studies. But perhaps most significantly of all, there has been a turning away from the ideal of the ‘objective reader’ – personified in practice by a white, male scholar – to wider groups; for example women, Africans, Latin-Americans, Jews, Muslims and atheists.

These readers brought with them new methods and perspectives, for example feminist, post-colonial, religious and secular liberation readings. The history of the New Testament shows that it has been a classic text, and the vitality of many modern readings suggests that it will continue to engage new readers, both within and outside the structures of the Christian churches.

xviii

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