Acts 2:42:
[After the events of Pentecost...] They committed themselves to the teaching of the apostles, the life together, the common meal, and the prayers.
Acts 5:42:
Day after day, in the temple courts and from house to house, they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Messiah.
Last summer we devoted most of the summer Sundays to a deeper-than-usual look into the four canonical gospel accounts, using Marcus Borg’s Evolution of the Word as our basic text and reading the gospels in the chronological order in which they were originally written down (Mark, Matthew, John, Luke).
This year we are going to be doing the same sort of chronological study but this time we will start at the actual earliest of the New Testament books to be written, which is Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians. Over the course of the summer we hope to reach the first seven books – all of which are letters from Paul – written before a single gospel was compiled. We will again be using Borg’s book as our primary reference.
Today I just want to remind you of what the state of things was before anything at all was written down – what was and what was not necessarily part of the commonly shared and accepted body of beliefs about Jesus in the years immediately following his crucifixion. It will probably be a little dry and academic – a little nerdy – but I think it is a necessary baseline to establish before we move on. We covered much of this last summer, but let’s refresh our memories. I’m going to be a little brief with this background info this summer but if you want more detail you can go to the Archives here and pull up my sermons from May 2016 – there’s much more detail there.
The important thing to remember here is that there hasn’t always been a written New Testament. That should be an “of course” statement and yet how often do we remember to consider it when we are approaching a reading from scripture?
The first of the gospels to be written down, Mark’s, was written about 70 AD, a full 40 years after Jesus’ death. The earliest writing of any, Paul’s letter to the emergent church at Thessalonica was written about 50 AD – 20 years after Jesus’s crucifixion. The last, Second Peter, was written possibly as late as 150 AD. Therefore, the various books of the New Testament were written over a 100+ year interval – none of them within the generation that touch on Jesus’ actual life here on earth.
When the early church Fathers were compiling the New Testament, it made sense to them that the writings specifically about Jesus should be first – since he was the reason for any of this – so the four gospels appear at the beginning of most NTs. And since the book of Revelation purports to be about the end times, it made equal sense to them that it should be placed at the close of this new compilation. And so it has remained ever since in most bibles.
Biblical Literalists, who believe every jot and tittle of the bible was divinely inspired in exactly the way the King James version presents them, would reject any attempt to re-order anything, but most modern seminaries and universities teach that the bible grew more organically over time. I for one respect Marc Borg’s thinking and his scholarship and tend to accept his ordering of things here.
My point for today, however, is that there were a number of years after Jesus’ death that all that people “knew” about Jesus came entirely from word of mouth – Jesus stories, shared and re-shared – some from people who had actually been there, many from people who “knew someone” who had been there, and probably a lot of “this is what I heard someone say that they had heard.”
Borg has compiled this list of things most Jesus-followers would be likely to have known and believed in the years before a written record:
• Jesus was born around 4 BCE and grew up in Nazareth.
• In his mid to late 20's he heard a wilderness prophet named John and began, in some form, to follow him and his ascetic teachings. Jesus began his own public ministry after John was arrested.
• Jesus’ message was all about the kingdom of God – what it’s like and how we should live because of it.
• The kingdom of God that Jesus preached is about transforming this earth, not some future heaven.
• He preached mostly to the peasant class out in the rural areas, avoiding cities, except for Jerusalem.
• He taught in stories - brief, easily remembered and repeated stories and sayings.
• He was a healer and exorcist. Most of the stories about him involved physical healing or casting out evil spirits.
• He broke social boundaries, mingling with outcasts and women and ignoring purity laws.
• His followers recognized him as anointed by the Spirit.
• He went to Jerusalem at Passover in the year 30 and basically challenged those in authority there until they killed him.
• Some of his followers experienced him after his death – not as a “ghost” but as a divine reality who shared qualities with God.
With no easy means of transportation most people tended to remain close to where they were born and raised so some specific Jesus-stories might have remained localized for quite a long while. With the adventures of the great traveling evangelists, such as Paul and Silas, that local-aspect changed and news about Jesus began to spread throughout the Mediterranean world. But even in the earliest years, some people did still travel about and stories would be told and spread around, so while incidences might have stayed local stories at first the list I just read would have most likely been the basic stuff that most people shared – the basis for an emerging Christian faith system.
There is one more important point I want to make here because it will be pertinent to our reading all throughout this study. That is the difference between memory and testimony. A memory is something that someone was present for – something they personally heard or saw or participated in. Testimony, on the other hand, is what someone feels or believes based on information or personal experience they have – whether on their own or through someone else’s recounting of a memory.
Much of what the New Testament gives us claims to be memory, and some of it may well be, but as I have often said, no one was following either Jesus or the evangelists around with a steno pad. Much of the NT is testimony – a statement of what someone has come to believe about what his has heard or seen. Given the timeline of the writings, these documents almost always record, not a strict historical rendering of events, but the writer’s beliefs that have grown up from the stories.
What we are going to be reading is, therefore, primarily the early church’s testimony about what they have come to believe about Jesus and life in the Kingdom of God. Keep this in mind as we read the first letters of Paul.
Next week we will look at who Paul was and how he became the evangelist and architect of the new Christian belief.
There is one more important point I want to make here because it will be pertinent to our reading all throughout this study. That is the difference between memory and testimony. A memory is something that someone was present for – something they personally heard or saw or participated in. Testimony, on the other hand, is what someone feels or believes based on information or personal experience they have – whether on their own or through someone else’s recounting of a memory.
Much of what the New Testament gives us claims to be memory, and some of it may well be, but as I have often said, no one was following either Jesus or the evangelists around with a steno pad. Much of the NT is testimony – a statement of what someone has come to believe about what his has heard or seen. Given the timeline of the writings, these documents almost always record, not a strict historical rendering of events, but the writer’s beliefs that have grown up from the stories.
What we are going to be reading is, therefore, primarily the early church’s testimony about what they have come to believe about Jesus and life in the Kingdom of God. Keep this in mind as we read the first letters of Paul.
Next week we will look at who Paul was and how he became the evangelist and architect of the new Christian belief.
**NOTE: All throughout this sermon series we will be pulling from and relying on "Evolution of the Word: The New Testament in the Order the Books Were Written." Marcus J. Borg, (c) 2012, Harper Collins Publishers
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