October 31: Early Christian views / audience and context

David Vishanoff

Tuesday, July 21st, 2015

Assignment

Read Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus through the Centuries, chapters 1, 3, and 4. Here are some questions to focus on as you read each chapter:

• Ch. 1 – The Rabbi
  • Why did early Christians present Jesus as a rabbi in the Gospels? Or maybe the question should be: why did Pelikan choose to focus on the Gospels’ presentation of Jesus as a rabbi, rather than on their presentation of him as prophet, messiah, lord, or something else?
• Ch. 3 – The Light of the Gentiles
  
  • In mining classical culture for predictions and anticipations of Christ, did the church fathers manipulate classical texts and images to make them fit their understanding of Christ, or did they refashion Christ to make him fit classical ideas and images? Or both? Or neither?
• Ch. 4 – The King of Kings
  • What picture(s) of Christ does this chapter give you? Are any of them familiar? Are any still around in our culture? Do any of them appear in your own gospel?
  • Did the idea that Jesus Christ is King serve mainly to justify various claims to political authority, or does this chapter show that it served other functions as well?

For today’s class, please state in writing (in comments, or better yet in a a short introductory essay) the audience and context to which you are addressing your gospel. Then work through your gospel draft and see how well it is addressing your context and audience. Polish your text as you go, adjusting it as needed so that it is specifically geared to your target audience and context. In your comments, point out where you are alluding to aspects of your target context and appealing to your target audience.

Please be prepared to explain in class how you are crafting your gospel to address this specific audience and context.

Notes from class

Our discussion of Pelikan sparked an important chain of inquiry:

• Pelikan showed plainly that Jesus is continually reinterpreted to be relevant to particular contexts, and at the same time is used by Christians as a lens to interpret each new context in Christian terms. It goes both ways: Jesus is reinterpreted in terms of each culture, and those Christians for whom Jesus is a master symbol reinterpret each culture in terms of their understanding of Jesus.
• This is natural and even necessary: as Niebuhr said, there is nothing so incredible as the answer to an unasked question. So if Jesus is represented to a particular society, he must be made relevant to that society’s questions.
• That is why Pelikan (and many contemporary scholars like Dr. Hicks-Keeton) emphasize the Jewishness of Jesus (and Paul), even though the canonical Gospels present him as both a Jewish Rabbi and quite different from Jewish Rabbis. It makes sense for them to do so because they are in a context still very cognizant of how negative Christian attitudes toward Jews contributed to the holocaust. It is natural for them to emphasize this aspect of the Gospel portraits, and even if it distorts them somewhat it may be a useful pedagogical device for jolting their audience out of their tendency to overlook the Jewish character of Jesus (or Paul).
• But does this mean that Jesus is a free-floating symbol that does and must become whatever each context requires? Should we just keep rewriting history to suit our present sensitivities? For example, can “Jesus the King” be interpreted to support any and every political system, as seems to have been done in the past?
• Or is the meaning of Jesus fixed enough that he simply cannot be twisted to be made relevant to some societies and contexts?
• Or are there universal human questions that everyone asks, or universal stories that everyone tells in some way, such that Jesus can represented in a way that is relevant to everyone without his becoming something different for everyone?