Understanding the First Hundred Years of Christian Identity

Bengt Holmberg

The Christian church began as a small intra-Jewish renewal movement, marked by a strong conviction that Jesus from Nazareth was the promised messianic liberator of the Jewish people. But the Christos or Mashiach/ Meshichah they believed in was certainly a Messiah with a difference: cru-cified and risen from the dead, and as time would soon show, uncongenial as Messiah, not only to the Jewish leaders but to a large majority of all Jews. Therefore, beside this movement’s natural and unquestioned belong-ing to the Jewish people and religion, there existed in it, right from the start, a consciousness of marginality and being outsiders in relation to oth-er Jews. During its first 100 years, this originally Jewish movement moved definitely from the pole of belonging to the pole of being outsiders. By the time of the Bar Kochbah uprising (132-135) the “Christ-movement” as a whole had a non-Jewish majority, somewhat estranged from the move-ment’s Jewish origins; for some second-century Christians to be a Chris-tian even meant that one could not be Jewish. The Christian groups were by then so distinct in beliefs, cult and rites, organization and role behavior that they can be characterized as a new religion.

How this identity change from intra-Jewish renewal movement to a new religion should be understood was the primary question of the Lund re-search project, “Christian identity—the first 100 years,” from which this book is a report. The formulation of the project reflected in its name raises a number of questions that need to be briefly discussed at the outset. Was this really one coherent movement with a common “identity” of its own? Should the term “Christian” (and “Jew/ish”) be used about anything or anyone in the first 100 years of this movement? Moreover—by far the largest question—how should the term “identity” be understood and used?

Was there an early Christ-movement, distinct enough to have an “identity” of its own?

For a number of reasons it seems that the answer to this question should be yes. Historians do think that they can discern and investigate the pheno-

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menon of a Christ-believing intra-Jewish renewal movement, locating its beginning in the first third of the first century, in areas of the Roman pro-vince of Syria populated mainly by Jews, especially Judea and Gali lee. A number of its leading persons can be known, as well as the central beliefs, significant and distinct rites, and behavior patterns that characterized the movement. It is therefore commonly understood and treated by modern historians as one of many ascertainable and distinct enti ties in first-century history, a movement with its own “identity”, as indicated for example in the preface of the recent Cambridge History of Christianity:

We have endeavoured to capture the complexity of early Christianity and its social-cultu-ral setting, whilst also indicating some of the elements that make it possible to trace a cer-tain coherence, a recognisable identity, maintained over time and defended resolutely de-spite cultural pressure that could have produced something other.1

One could go on from this commonly agreed historical presence of the said movement to list briefly some of its defining characteristics:

- The movement had its origin in the historically accessible group formed around the charismatic Jesus from Nazareth, and there existed a personal, sociologically important continuity between that circle of adher-ents and later leaders in the movement of Christ-believers.2

- The movement had a common, central experience or “mnemonic event” that dominated their thinking and action: the death and resurrection of Jesus followed by the experience of receiving his holy Spirit.3

1 As the editors Margaret M. MITCHELL and Frances M. YOUNG write in the preface of the Cambridge History of Christianity. Volume I: Origins to Constantine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), xiii.

2 For this way of describing Jesus, se Martin HENGEL, Nachfolge und Charisma: eine exegetisch-religionsgeschichtliche Studie zu Mt 8:21 f. und Jesu Ruf in die Nachfolge (Berlin, 1968), and especially Gerd THEISSEN and Annette MERZ, Der historische Jesus: Ein Lehrbuch, 2d ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997), part III, which opens with § 8: ”Jesus als Charismatiker: Jesus und seine soziale Beziehungen”, 175–220. The continuity between Jesus and his followers was pointed out as an important historical fact by Gerd THEISSEN in his early work, Die Soziologie der Jesusbewegung [The Sociology of the Jesus Movement] (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1977).

3 Here and later I give terms like ”resurrection” and ”receiving the holy Spirit” with-out quotation marks or other disclaimers, not to treat these phenomena as ordinary facts of undisputed historicity, but simply because they are facts of (historically ascertainable) social cognition, or in other words experienced by the first-century people under investi -gation here.

On the role of religious experience in the earliest Christ-movement, see for example: James D.G. DUNN, Jesus and the Spirit : a study of the religious and charismatic experi-ence of Jesus and the first Christians as reflected in the New Testa ment (London: Ex-press reprints, 1995), and Luke T JOHNSON, Religious experience in earliest Christ-ianity : a missing dimension in New Testament studies (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998). Ben F. MEYER names this ”the Easter experience” in his The Early Christians: Their World Mission and Self-Discovery (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1986). On social

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- The movement also had a cognitive, cultic, and ritual centre: the person of Jesus. Their understanding of past, present and future history and of their own lives was dominated by christological ideas, and their prayer life and common worship with its initiatory and participatory rites was to a considerable degree focused on the person of Jesus Christ.4

- The movement was from the beginning a strong provocation to its sur-rounding Jewish society (and later in the diaspora and in non-Jewish con-texts). It was not an ordinary, everyday variant of Jewish faith and living that could tolerantly be accepted by other Jews. Rather it was more of a thorn in the flesh, disquieting and unacceptable already in its milieu of ori-gin, and therefore harassed and persecuted by Jewish authorities like the Sanhedrin and Herod Agrippa. Clear evidence of the early intolerable char-acter of the Christ-movement is the energetic attempts of the Pharisee Saul from Tarsus to stamp out (Gk. porthein) the new movement in its very first years (Gal. 1:13).5 In other words, the identity-forming boundaries be-tween Christ-believers and other Jews were there from the start, in spite of the fact that this movement was an undoubtedly Jewish phenomenon.

- To the defining characteristics of this renewal movement belonged also a very high opinion of themselves and their importance in Israel. Their almost cocky self-assertion could be phrased somewhat like: “we are ‘the holy ones’, we are those who have heard and understood God in Jesus the Anointed, received his Spirit and said yes to His kingdom, the salvation of Israel resides with us – welcome you too!” This self-understanding is central to the forming of their life and action, and the movement defines itself from its centre. Only in its second and third generation does the movement devote more attention to defining itself by what separates them from others, emphasizing its borders.

Are the labels “Christian” and “Jew/ish” anachronistic?

To state that the labels “Christian” and “Jew/ish” should not be used for first-century phenomena is becoming something of a scholarly common-place in works on, sit venia verbo, Jewish and Christian ancient history.

memory, mnemonic events, narrative identity formation, see Samuel BYRSKOG, Story as History – History as Story: the Gospel Tradition in the Context of Ancient Oral History (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), as well as his later articles.

4 See for example Larry W. HURTADO’s works on early devotion to Jesus and binitarian worship of God, One God, one Lord: early Christian devotion and ancient Jewish monotheism, 2d ed. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998 [1 st ed. 1988]), and Lord Jesus Christ: devotion to Jesus in earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003).

5 See Martin HENGEL, in collaboration with Roland DEINES, The Pre-Christian Paul. (London: SCM, 1991).

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Many examples could be given, but let one suffice. In a recent book, Philip F. Esler writes:

[T]he current habit of translating Ioudaioi as “Jews” and ethnē as “gentiles” is indefensi-ble in its anachronism and … more appropriate renderings are “Judean” and “non-Jude-an”… The need to be accurate in designating identities, even if they are not ethnic, also demands that we eschew the word “Christian” in relation to first-century CE phenomena. --- It does not appear to have been used as a self-designation by the group until after the New Testament period. Even in the three places just mentioned where it does appear, it re-flects outsider use. In addition, the words “Christian” and “Christianity” convey more re-cent associations alien to the first century. In place of these inappropriate and anachronis-tic expressions, I prefer “Christ-follower” or “Christ-believer,” “in-Christ,” and “the Christ-movement” when speaking of first century data.6

In a later section of the same book, Esler energetically argues for the term Ioudaioi as similar to other labels used by Greek and Roman writers about ethnic entities, which almost always link people to territory. Ioudaioi can in all its instances be understood as signifying people with a strong attachment to the land of their origin, Judea, and especially to its temple in Jerusalem. This is lost if we translate the term with “Jews”. In addition, this term, as well as the term “Judaism,” not only carries “meanings indeli -bly fashioned by events after the first century, including the development of a different identity for the people around the Mishnah” and all of the later Jewish history, acerbating its anachronism. It also opens for, or rather smuggles in, the idea that to be Jewish is a “religious” identity, so intro-ducing the strongly anachronistic Enlightenment idea of religion as some-thing clearly separate from all other social realities.

Esler and other scholars are of course right in warning against anachro-nisms that may creep in through careless use of terms, although the intro-duction of more or less idiosyncratic neologisms is a doubtful way of avoiding anachronisms in research. This is especially so when these neolo -gisms are in need of constant explanation (“no, ‘Judean’ does not refer only to residents of Judea”), further refinements and, inevitably, multipli-cation, with a new term for every significant period in the movement’s history. However, words are not receptacles that automatically contain every meaning that anybody ever put into them. The term Christianoi need not signify a group outside Judaism any more than a term like Pharisaioi or Herodianoi does, and the use of the terms “Jew/ish” and “Christian” about first-century phenomena does not necessitate the importing of, say, fourth-century Judaism or Christianity into these terms. And the term “Jew/ish” is not per se morally tainted by its connection to the horrors of modern anti-Semitism (as Esler hints), but gladly used also by modern

6 Philip. F. ESLER, Conflict and Identity in Romans: The Social Setting of Paul’s Letter (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 12.

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Jewish scholars about their first-century forebears, not least because of a claimed continuity from them to present-day Jewish people.

As for the label “Christian,” it deserves to be pointed out that it under -goes a transformation already in the last third of the first century, as evi -denced by 1 Pet. 4:16: “If one suffers as a “Christian” (Christianos) let him not be ashamed, but glorify God just as a Christ ian [lit. en tō onomati toutō, in that very name].” What began as a pejorative nickname used by outsiders seems here on its way to become a label accepted by insiders as a term of honor because it expressed what they thought really defined them: their belonging to Lord Christ, their “Christ-ian” identity. If the label was felt to fit already by first-century Christ-followers, it is hard to understand why modern anxieties about how the term might be misunderstood should prevent its use in historical investigation of this very phenomenon. There-fore, I will not restrict the term “Christian” and “Christianity” to the fully (?) separate and developed movement of Christ-believers after, say, 130 CE, even if it should be used with some care.

Identity in recent scholarship on the Christ-movement

The tentative definition of identity in the previous paragraph needs clearer contours, and I will attempt to provide that through a discussion of some important ideas about early Christian identity put forward in the last few decades. The guiding question of this presentation concerns the degree of concreteness of early Christian identity. To what degree is identity en-visaged by the different authors as a flesh-and-blood reality in the actual life of the first Christians, how tangibly is it thought to have affected and governed the concrete life of this movement? The answers to these ques-tions will tell us what kind of phenomenon early Christian identity is con-sidered to be. I group the alternative answers in a schematic fash ion, from low concreteness to high, and are not mutually exclusive:

(1) Christian identity is a textual reality, a rhetorical construction with un-certain relation to actual social life.

(2) Christian identity is a late ideological construct made afterwards by the winners in the movement’s internal struggle for dominance.

(3) Christian identity is a rhetorical construction produced by entrepre-neurs of identity, accepted and acted upon by groups within the move-ment.

(4) Christian identity is the autonomous inner structure of the Christian semiotic system.

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(5) Christian identity is the evolving self-understanding of the movement, shaped by a feedback process between its originary experience and its evolving history.

(1) Identity as a textual phenomenon

Professor Judith Lieu has published important works on questions re-lated to early Christian identity.7 In Image and Reality, she focused on the relationship between Jews and Christians, through studying how the former are pictured in Christian writings of the second century. Her conclusion was that the image of Jews in these writings was created by the need of Christians to make them into their Other, the counter-image the Christians need to explain and confirm themselves. This action is typical for a group or movement that tries to make clear to itself, and also to others, who they really are and legitimate their own (separate) existence. As to be expected, that image is antagonistic and polemical, and to a large extent a rhetorical construct that reflects the needs of “othering” the Jews much more than it reflects historical experiences. To what extent it can be used as material for reconstruction of real historical relations between Christians and Jews is a question to which an optimistic answer can hardly be given.

In a following book, Neither Jew nor Greek?, Lieu collected a number of her essays on similar matters, such as investigating the “parting of the ways”, the reality of Jewish persecution of Christians, martyrdom and identity, the alleged attraction of Christianity for women and god-fearers. She ended up with a similar conclusion: Christian identity during the first hundred years (and more) was a fragile rhetorical construct, shaped and maintained by the polemical rhetoric of separation from “the Jews”.

In her latest monograph on Christian Identity, Lieu treated from a social-scientific perspective a good number of further questions concerning identity: the relation between texts and identity, the role of memory in the tradition process, group boundaries, behavior patterns as expressing and forming identity, questions concerning embodiment and gender, as well as localization, and the idea of Christians as a tertium genus in addition to Jews and Gentiles. In her learned and acute analysis of all these matters, Lieu is consistently opposed to any kind of essentialism in the understand-ing of the Christian movement, i.e. the idea that all members of a certain category have some permanent and defining essential characteristics in common. She prefers throughout to speak in terms of process and change. Identity is primarily something that the early Christians construct for them-

7 Judith M. LIEU, Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in the Second Century (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996); Neither Jew nor Greek? Constructing Early Christianity (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2002), and Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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selves through texts – not something that they have or share in because of belonging to the Christ-believing movement. Texts form or “express” identity rather than reflecting an existing, tangible every-day reality, and consequently do not tell us much about that reality. Of course, the textual construction of Christian identity does inform us about an original connec-tion to the Jewish people and how the boundaries between this matrix and the new movement developed. The texts are anchored to a social reality, but that reality remains largely hidden and inaccessible behind the text, no matter how real it must have been.

An illustration of how reluctant this methodological choice makes Lieu to reach a definite conclusion on historical questions can be taken from her introductory chapter. There she characterizes Ben Meyer’s question whe-ther there is no distinct and lasting identity of the Christian church through its history, as driven mainly by theological interest, perhaps also as an ex-pression of „essentialized Christianity.“ No historical investigation of the early Christianity can start from such a presupposition, she says, because it ignores the fact that after Walter Bauer we cannot take the original unity and distinct identity of the Christian movement for granted. On the other hand, there are a number of early indicators of at least some predisposition towards the translocal and transtemporal unity of Christ-believers.8 Lieu cautiously adds a question that qualifies about this degree of unity: ”How far can it be reconciled with the historian’s justifiable claim that there was no ‘single church’ in the first two centuries?”, quoting Keith Hopkins:

The frequent claims that scattered Christian communities constituted a single church was not a description of reality in the first two centuries C.E., but a blatant yet forceful denial of reality. What was amazing was the persistence and power of the ideal in the face of its unachievability, even in the fourth century.9

Whether Hopkins’ statement about church unity is really a “justifiable claim,” or rather a sharply worded hypothesis can be discussed. He sees Christian identity or self-understanding as a piece of theological or ideolo-gical wishful thinking, and not as an historical reality. It is hard to know whether Lieu finally gives her indirect support to the stand of Bauer and Hopkins that there is no such thing as an early, unified Christian identity, or whether she is only presenting the difficulties of knowing Christian identity in history.

One can point here to the notable similarity of Lieu’s perspective to Denise Kimber Buell’s treatment of early Christianity and the issue of

8 LIEU, Christian Identity, 22 f. Both Meyer and Bauer will be treated below.9 Keith HOPKINS, ”Christian Number and Its Implications”, JECS 6 (1998), 185-226,

207. Lieu did not, however, include Hopkins’ sentence about the unachievability of this “ideal” in her quotation.

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ethnicity. 10 Buell considers all the early Christian universalistic and some-what grandiose forms of self-characterization, claiming that Christians are an ethnos or a genos, on a par with other peoples like Jews, Greeks and others, as a rhetorical construction. It is a kind of negotiation with the sur-rounding world but mainly directed inwards to the Christ-believing group or movement itself, intended to draw boundaries and open them, to define oneself, to gain acceptance, to make oneself a great and important entity. She emphasizes that there did not exist only one vocabulary or approach in this respect–everything was local, partial, strategically adjusted. Therefore, the analyses of ethnicity language in early Christian texts cannot tell us anything about the historical development of the Christian movement as a whole or its self-understanding.11

In a similar mode of understanding the relation between texts and his-torical reality, Miriam S. Taylor claims that the anti-Judaism of the church fathers did not build on real contacts and conflicts with a surrounding and vital Judaism, as Marcel Simon had claimed in his epochal 1948 mono-graph Verus Israel.12 Rather, it was a collection of rhetorical-theological conventions or topoi, necessary for Christian self-understanding, but not reactions to real historical experiences.13

Rhetorical analysis between pessimistic and optimistic epistemology

The common perspective of all these works in understanding the deve-lopment of Christian identity is a certain epistemological pessimism about knowing the past. What we have as historians is only a number of ancient (mainly Christian) texts, and the relation between these texts and their re-ferent is seen as tenuous and highly uncertain. Therefore, an epistemologi-

10 Denise Kimber BUELL, “Rethinking the relevance of race for early Christian self-definition,” HTR 94 (2001): 449-476. See also by the same author: “Ethnicity and Religion in Mediterranean Antiquity and Beyond,” RelSRev 26 (2000): 243-249; “Race and universalism in early Christianity,” JECS 10 (2002): 429-468; and, with Caroline E. Johnson HODGE, “The politics of interpretation: the rhetoric of race and ethnicity in Paul,” JBL 123 (2004): 235-251.

11 “Analyzing texts for ethnic reasoning draws our attention to rhetorical contexts con-cerned with establishing or preserving boundaries, either between non-Christians and Christians or among Christians. This analysis frustrates any attempts to chart a develop-mental progression in how and why Christian authors employ ethnic reason ing. Rather, this approach honors the diverse ways of producing and contesting Christianness in the Roman imperial period. This approach attempts to resist monolithic reconstructions of early Christian history by emphasizing the partial and strategic character of early Chris-tian claims to universality and unity.” BUELL, in the conclusion of her HTR article from 2001 (see previous note).

12 Marcel SIMON, Verus Israel: étude sur les relations entre chrétiens et juifs dans l’Empire romaine (135-425) (Paris: Boccard, 1948).

13 Miriam S. TAYLOR, Anti-Judaism and early Christian Identity (Leiden: Brill,1995).

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cal pessimist accepts only that as historically secure which cannot be de-nied, the text and its textual world, and leaves aside questions about the relation between textual world and the rest of the world. In order to be on secure historical ground one has to restrict oneself to investigating the textual world of these documents, while the flesh-and-blood human and so-cial reality that produced, received, and used these documents lies largely outside our historical reach.

An optimistic historian, on the other hand, aims lower in historical certi-tude, but wants to reach judgments about what probably happened. If unde-niability or even high certitude is the criterion to be met by statements on history, historical research would inevitably be stymied, and not much could be stated about the past. Ordinary historical work typically allows more incertitude in trying to make sense of all data from the past, and the sense-making is done through a process of verification and falsification of competing hypotheses, in order to arrive at a qualified judgment on which one of these reconstructions of the past is the historically most probable. “Most probable” rarely means “undeniably true”, but rather a defendable, yet improvable, approximation of historical truth. So, the choice of epistemological perspective can be seen as a choice of scope or level for one’s historical investigation. To choose to analyze only the textual world of extant sources is of course a perfectly valid enterprise, but one that will not allow a researcher to say very much, positively or negatively, about historical reality.

It can be noted in passing that the trend of restricting historical work to the textual world of ancient documents is somewhat reminiscent of early 19th-century historiography. Then, the very real methodological advances of source criticism resulted in a growing distrust against the ancient sources as giving historical information about anything except themselves, while nowadays the very real advances of rhetorical criticism seem to be driving scholarship in the same pessimistic direction.

Rhetorical analysis is somehow situated between these two kinds of re-search that focus (a) on the textual world, or (b) on the concrete, historical world of human beings. It is not a purely textual and ahistorical type of analysis, because even if it does take a very close look at how the text is built, it also focuses on the actual communication process between humans that the text is a part of. The “rhetorical situation” belongs to rhetorical analysis, and the interest in the composition and structure as reflecting the author’s intent to convince, persuade, and change things in the real world often leads the researcher into making statements about that world, historical or quasi-historical statements.

Such statements are not seldom based on a kind of (social-)psychologi-cal reading of literary elements in the text, offering, as it were, a shortcut

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to historical knowledge (“this text demonstrates this perspective or that in-tention, which must reasonably be caused by this or that historical situa-tion”). Unless substantiated by ordinary, laborious historical analysis and reconstruction, such hunches remain at the level of hypotheses. There is a certain risk that such “rhetorical” readings assume a too imaginative picture of text production in ancient times and how it related to historical reality (such as: texts were produced with no checks concerning veracity, for a gullible readership, and persuasion overrode all other aspects).

Rhetorical awareness can also make the scholar adopt the opposite as-sumption, that every piece of writing from ancient times must be classified as “nothing-but-rhetorical-construction” and therefore of no historical val-ue. Such a position annihilates the possibility of writing scholarly respon-sible history, and in spite of its apparent humility, it is another type of en -croaching on that discipline. Both these perspectives—the overconfidence of using rhetorical insights for statements on historicity, and the under-confidence of using them to deny the possibility of any historicity—lead to an increased use of inverted mirror reading. This means to start an histori-cal investigation with the idea that events simply must have been different from what the sources say. Such a hermeneutic of growing suspicion will make ancient sources less and less usable, while making hypotheses and reconstructions of the modern scholar increasingly important in historical work.

(2) Identity as a post-factum ideological construct

There are a number of scholars who operate with a picture or model of early Christianity that one could call the scenario of “centerless multiplic -ity” or in other words a movement characterized by great variety and no obvious center that defines and governs the whole. One classic formulation of this idea is the one launched by Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860), who saw the new Christian movement or “church” as existing in two strongly opposed variants almost from the start: the Petrine, Jewish-Chris-tian variant which was still Torah-observant, and the Pauline, “law-free” type that was pointedly non-observant in regard to the Law of Moses. The Petrine type of Christianity was the original one, the “thesis” in Baur’s He-gel-inspired philosophy of history, while the Pauline type was its “anti -thesis”. The New Testament does then not evidence one original Christian identity, but rather several competing ones.

Actually, it took a good century for the Christian church to work out an intermediate, harmonizing compromise between these strongly opposed al-ternatives, a “synthesis” that was the early catholic Church (Frühkatholi-zismus). Only then can one really talk about a common Christian identity, which is obviously a late product, only emerging after at least a century of

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stormy church history. This idea has had a great influence especially on Protestant scholarship, in various forms. Some deplored the synthesis that developed as the outcome of this struggle for unity, viewing it as a falling off from the high and authentically Christian level of Pauline Christi anity, mixing it up with elements derived from Judaism, as well as from the baser institutional factors operative in a worldly context.

The well-known lexicographer of the Greek New Testament, Walter Bauer (1877-1960), in 1934 published an historical work about orthodoxy and heterodoxy in the early church as Christian identities competing from the beginning. Bauer’s original work became influential among scholars of early Christianity only after it had been translated into English in 1971.14

This may have something to do with the fact that his great debunking of previous historical models fitted precisely into the emerging post-modern climate.

In spite of the words “earliest Christianity” in the title, Bauer set out to investigate Christianity in the second century, where the sources give us a picture of enormous multiplicity, strong conflicts, and prolonged struggle for dominance among different types of Christianity.15 Several of these Christianities would have been considered “heretical” by later generations in the third or fourth century, while others were more “orthodox”. Bauer’s specific question was which type of Christianity was the earliest in a number of important localities. His contention was that the picture of the church given by Eusebius of Caesarea in the beginning of the fourth century as completely “apostolic” and unified in the beginning, then more and more assaulted by marginal heretical groups, was actually the opposite of historical reality. In places like Edessa, Syria or Egypt, the “he retical” types of Christianity (esp. influenced by Gnosticism) were actually earlier than and larger than the purported “orthodox” groups. This was changed only by energetic struggle supported and led by the well-organized Roman church that managed to implant its own type of Christianity in other places. The Roman way of being Christian was characterized by traditiona-lism and a strong influence from Greek-speaking Judaism and its holy scriptures, the Septuagint, not very open to Pauline or Johannine Christian-ity, and even less to Gnostic types of Christianity. The different “heretical” movements, such as the Ebionites, Marcionites, Valentinians, or Monta-

14 Walter BAUER, Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1934, 2d ed. 1964). The second edition was translated by American scholars and published as Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy in Earliest Christianity, edited by Robert A. Kraft and Gerhard Krodel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971).

15 In Bauer’s opinion the New Testament had too little material and was too much in dispute to serve as the starting point for his investigation: ”…scheint das Neue Testament zu unergiebig und auch zu umstritten zu sein, um als Ausgangspunkt dienen zu können.” Rechtgläubigkeit (2nd ed., 1964), 5.

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nists, did not form one united front, and, unlike “orthodoxy,” did not have a form of faith and life suitable for mass practice, and were therefore eventually marginalized and pushed back.16 When the (Roman) “orthodox” type of Christianity had been more generally established the description of it as the original and apostolic type of Christianity was of course generally accepted, although it was, from a historical perspective, a rhetorical con-struction made by the winners of the intra-Christian dominance struggle.

As noted above, Bauer investigated second-century and later Christian-ity, not the New Testament. His perspective of course had to be applied to the first century of the Christian movement as well, evidenced by the New Testament writings. The basic idea of multiple origins of the Christian movement, or at least a very early diversification of it,17 which eventually is reined in and becomes more of an institutionalized unity has numerous proponents among scholars. One important such work, which also expressly refers to and praises Bauer’s work as “essentially right,” is James M. Robinson and Helmut Koester, Trajectories through Early Christianity (1971).18 A trajectory is the path a moving object follows in space, and in a transferred sense, it means a path, progression, or line of development resembling a physical trajectory. The New Testament writ-ings are seen as evidence of several such distinct lines of development – the Johannine, the Jewish-Christian/Ebionite, the Matthean, the Pauline and Post-Pauline, which would only converge and be seen as expressing one Christian faith in the canonization process that more or less began in the second half of the second century. Thus, again, unity grew out of a preceding, perhaps even original diversity. A question seldom broached or answered is how and when a movement with a one-person origin and indu-

16 ”ein für den Massenbrauch am besten geeignete Glaubens- und Lebensform”, as W. Bauer puts it in his own summary of his research, in Forschungen und Fortschritte 10 (1934), col. 99-101, here 100; reprinted in BAUER, Aufsätze und kleine Schriften, hrsg. v Georg Strecker (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 1967), 229-233.

17 In the Society of Biblical Literature seminar on “Ancient Myths and Modern Theo-ries of Christian Origins,” a group of scholars cooperated for three years in creating a history of early Christianity as having multiple origins. The work was summarized in Redescribing Christian Origins, ed. by R. CAMERON and M. P. MILLER, (SBL Sympo-sium Series 28, Atlanta: SBL, 2004). The standard picture of the Christ-movement originating in Jerusalem (as in Acts) is too simple, it must have had multiple origins, some even in the diaspora. The authors reconstruct one of the movement’s roots as the alleged “Q community”, a Galilean, small-town intelligentsia of scribes, and question the accuracy of Acts by claiming that the sayings of Jesus could have caused neither his crucifixion, nor the emergence in Jerusalem of a messianic movement focusing on him. James DUNN, in his scathing review in JBL 124 (2005), 760-764 considers the result of this project as far less credible than the ordinary, Acts-based story. In historical work, extant sources are always preferable to imaginary ones.

18 James M. ROBINSON and Helmut KOESTER, Trajectories through Early Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971).

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bitable continuity from this origin to a known group of Galileans exploded into a plethora of wildly divergent Christ-believing groups that it took some two centuries to connect to each other in a semblance of unity.

James D. G. Dunn was prompted by the work of Bauer to investigate the question of unity and diversity in the New Testament, as well as the ques-tion whether and where one meets the phenomenon of heretical diversity. His conclusion was that all writings inside the New Testament canon, in spite of diverse formulations of Christian faith, are one in holding the view that the earthly Jesus and the risen, heavenly Christ are identical, one and the same person. Those who in various ways separate the earthly from the heavenly Jesus leave the unity of faith with the New Testament and the rest of the church and become heretical. This is a development, however, that starts only outside and after the New Testament.19 Dunn’s thesis is a Yes and a No to the Bauer thesis: Yes, the earliest Christianity was multiform and very varied already in the New Testament and the first century, but No, it was not lacking unity in the fundamental parts of its faith. Its identity and unity, when measured in the cognitive, doctrinal dimension, are intact.

Bart D. Ehrman stated his Bauer-influenced thesis already in the title of his book: Lost Christianities.20 The early Christ movement in the second and third centuries was characterized by an incredible variation, with any number of ideas about God and Christ, about the Jews and the Holy scriptures, and about the way to live a Christian life. No group or trajectory had a central position or a monopoly on definition of what Christian faith or praxis should look like. Some time into the third century, the “proto-orthodox” Christianity gained ascendancy and managed eventually to marginalize the rest. There was once a number of fine Christianities which now regrettably have vanished because of the intolerance and hunger for domination in more powerful Christian groups. Ehrman depicts the marginalization process as more or less a war of extinction, with frequent use of terms such as “annihilate” and “stamp out”. In his reconstruction, the process of “unification” was not only a late phenomenon, but also a violent one, and the identity finally achieved is the result of a struggle with many losses along the road. The conclusion seems inevitable that Christian identity was never simply and naturally there in the movement from the beginning, but that it was to a high degree a fighting idea, an ideological construction meant to legitimate power politics:

19 James D. G. DUNN, Unity and Diversity in the New Testament: An Inquiry into the Character of Earliest Christianity (London: SCM, 1977, 2d ed. 1990).

20 Bart D. EHRMAN, Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). On page 173, Ehrman charac-terizes Bauer’s work as ”arguably the most important book on the history of early Chris -tianity to appear in the twentieth century”.

14 Bengt Holmberg

And then, as a coup de grâce, this victorious party rewrote the history of the controversy, making it appear that there had not been much of a conflict at all, claiming that its own views had always been those of the majority of Christians at all times, back to the time of Jesus and his apostles, that its perspective, in effect, had always been “orthodox” (i.e., the “right belief”) and that its opponents in the conflict, with their other scriptural texts, had always represented small splinter groups invested in deceiving people into “heresy.”21

The common element in these different pictures of how early Christian-ity developed is that Christian identity is not only a rhetorical construc tion—many scholars would agree on that, although adding: “not merely”—but that it was always a bone of contention, existing only in the plural during the early centuries of the Christian movement. To talk about Christian identity in singular is not historically possible until the ascendancy sometime in the third century of a generally “orthodox” or catholic Christi-anity with a biblical canon, a consolidation of doctrine and liturgy, and an established, tripartite office structure. So, for scholars with this perspec-tive, the inversion of the Eusebian model of an original, unified, orthodox identity of Christianity has to be the starting point for any discussion about Christian identity. It should be seen as a late, strongly ideological con-struction that masks and legitimates the power structure that is the outcome of a hard struggle for dominance in the Christian movement.

This is not the place for a full discussion of this perspective. One can note, however, that operative in this reading of history is the conviction that most of human reality is at bottom a struggle for power. This view has a long and mixed heritage all the way from Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, and Foucault, it is prominent in feminist and postcolonial theory, and in post -modern thinking generally. As one who wrote his dissertation on “Paul and Power”, I am hardly the person to deny that important insights can be won by applying an analysis of power relations to New Testament texts.22 But it can be overdone, as is the case even with helpful approaches. They can seem so helpful and self-evidently true that one need not bother with alter -native and complementary explanations of phenomena. One is dispensed from producing the historical evidence for, in this case, an actual power struggle of the suggested depth and violence in the second century, let alone in the first.

Walter Bauer has been rightly criticized for equating “orthodoxy” of the second century with the type of Christianity prevalent in Rome at the beginning of the third, and then importing the atmosphere and techniques of ecclesiastical power politics from the fourth century as well.23 After this barrage of serious criticism it is hard to understand that scholars can go on

21 EHRMAN, Lost Christianities, 4.22 Bengt HOLMBERG, Paul and Power: The Structure of Authority in the Primitive

Church as Reflected in the Pauline Epistles. ConBNT 11 (Lund: Gleerup, 1978; Ameri-can editions: Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980, and Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2004).

Understanding Christian Identity 15

saying things like ”his intuitions were essentially right” (Ehrman) or that the importance of his work lies in the questions he put and not in his an -swers. To a large extent, Bauer’s questions and his hypotheses cannot be supported by positive evidence, and some important parts of them have even been disproved from the sources. If we apply normal critical proce-dure, “the Bauer thesis” can therefore no longer provide the basic assump-tions of further study in the field. Ehrman is aware of this and willing to criticize Bauer at some points. Nonetheless, he seems to commit the very same kind of reductionistic anachronism, when he consistently applies war and enforcement terminology to the many varying and conflicting views of second-century Christians.

A more convincing argument could be made (and to some degree has been made, for example, by Eric Osborn in his The Emergence of Christian Theology) that—at least in terms of Gnosticism—it was precisely the incoherence of their account, the deficiency of their theology rather than heavy-handed tactics and polemics by the proto-orthodox which led ultimately to their demise. Unity was eventually achieved though not through compul-sion. Rather, it was by offering a narrative that was more coherent and which better ad-dressed the shared needs of early believers of various stripes that the “proto-orthodox” achieved their status.24

That scholars otherwise capable of historical criticism and work of high quality, as Bauer and Ehrman are, open themselves to easy anachronisms indicates that other factors than historical data and historical methods are operating under the surface; in this case a strong urge to counter, not to say debunk, Christianity’s traditional harmonizing and idyllic image of its early history. That image, including its view of an original, unified Chris-

23 For historical criticisms of Bauer’s work, in separate regions see on (a) Syria and Asia Minor: Frederick W. NORRIS, “Ignatius, Polycarp, and 1 Clement: Walter Bauer Re-considered”, VC 30 (1976): 23-44. Reprinted in Orthodoxy, Heresy and Schism in Early Christianity. Studies in early Christianity. A Collection of Scholarly Essays, ed. by E. Ferguson et al., vol. 4 (New York: Garland, 1993), 237-258. (b) on Valentinus and Rome: James F. MCCUE, “Orthodoxy and Heresy: Walter Bauer and the Valentinians”, VC 33 (1979): 118-130. (c) on Bauer’s treatment of Celsus: Gary T. BURKE, ”Walter Bauer and Celsus: The Shape of Late Second-Century Christiani ty”, Second Century 4 (1984): 1-7. (d) on Edessa and Egypt: Arland J. HULTGREN, The Rise of Normative Christianity (Minneapolis: Augsburg-Fortress, 1994), esp. on pp. 9-13. (e) on Egypt: Birger A. PEARSON, The Emergence of the Christian Religion: Essays on Early Christianity (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1997). The fullest critical treatment of the Bauer thesis is (f) the dissertation of Thomas A. ROBINSON, The Bauer Thesis Examined: The Geography of Heresy in the Early Christian Church (Lewiston: Edw. Mellen Press, 1988).

24 Michael HEINTZ, “Review of Bart Ehrman, Lost Christianities” (2003), JECS 13 (2005): 247–249, 248. Heintz and others also point out that no Christian group before Constantine had the means of “stamping out” other Christian movements or even their li -terature. What Tertullian could do against thriving Marcionism was to write a book, period.

16 Bengt Holmberg

tian identity, is seen as an ideological construct that needs to be exposed. Against an old ideology is set a new understanding with notable ideologi-cal overtones: there was no Christian identity in the singular before the fourth century.

(3) Identity constructed by entrepreneurs and accepted by recipients

Philip F. Esler put forward a model of how the construction of identity could actually have been done in the first generation of Christians, by tak -ing a close look at what Paul is doing in his letter to the Christ-believers in Rome.25 He writes to Gentile believers and to “Judean” ones (Esler pro-poses this as substitute for “Jewish”), in order to counter the disunity that has begun to appear between them and especially the disdain towards those who still observe the Torah. The apostle wants to strengthen the unity and common identity of all Christ-believers and therefore he constructs an im-proved and enlarged edition of it. Esler writes:

I am concerned with the way in which Paul sought to exercise leadership in relation to the Roman congregations by reinforcing the fundamental common identity his addressees shared in relation to God and Christ, especially to the extent that his success in such a strategy would mean creating a particular form of unity between Judean and Greek ethnic subgroups previously accustomed to mutual hostility and conflict. I am proposing that Paul was acting as an entrepreneur of identity.26

What Paul attempts is not to build the identity of Roman Christ-follow-ers anew from the ground, because in his opinion that was already done, in baptism. He wants to clarify that they are all deeply one in Christ, and that this can very well go together with a continuing cultural, ethnic, and beha-vioral difference between them. In his view, the letter recipients share a deeper, more fundamental unity (or identity) in Christ than their different relations to the Torah of Moses would lead them to believe.

The unusual element in Esler’s reading of Romans is not the use of modern social psychology and its perspectives of social cognition and self-categorization (from Tajfel, Turner, and others), but rather the making of one individual into an “entrepreneur of identity” whose theologizing changes matters in the flesh-and-blood reality of other believers. The con-struction of identity appears to be a one-man job, done by a person who can effect important changes in the receiving group’s identity even as a letter-writer from a distance. Esler refers to the fact that Romans is a part of a communication process (he will meet them, they will see and hear him again), in which Paul wants to exercise leadership. They and he share a social identity, so that the apostle can use cognitional material (thoughts)

25 Philip F. ESLER, Conflict and Identity in Romans: The Social Setting of Paul’s Letter (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003).

26 ESLER, Conflict and Identity, 109.

Understanding Christian Identity 17

already acceptable to his receivers. As their leader, he can expect them to be willing to accept his conception of the identity of the Christ-movement and its relation to Israel, the covenant and the holy scriptures. There is thus some probability that his understanding of Christian identity actually be-came a socially accepted and effective cognition of Christian identity in Rome.

On the other hand, we do well to remember that we do not know whe-ther or to what extent Paul’s letter to the Romans made them accept him as their leader. The apostle’s powerful thinking is just one input into the pro-cess of identity construction and self-categorization that goes on in Rome. Until accepted, absorbed in a common symbolic universe and put into ac -tion (e.g. commensality) by the receivers of Paul’s letter, his vision of what they are is not a defining element of Roman Christian identity. It is easy to let the sheer power of Paul’s person and presentation make one blind to the vital role of the recipients in making such a change in their social identity possible.

Perhaps the chances of convincing the Roman Christians and changing their cognition of their common identity were good. Or perhaps they were not so good—how ready would Jewish Christ-believers in the middle of the first century actually be to see themselves as separate from their own “people of God” because of their belonging to the Christ? And how ready would self-assured Gentile Christians be to accept the heavy dose of ad-justing to Jewish customs and sensitivities that an apostle they have never seen enjoins on them? We need some weighty arguments not supplied by Esler for believing that the apostle’s theologizing in this letter effected such a transformation. Is Paul really constructing Christian identity in Ro-mans, or is he merely construing it?

William S. Campbell, who in many respects stands close to the position of Esler, is doubtful about Christ-believers being willing, or even able, to rethink or relinquish a deep-seated, taken-for-granted social identity. 27 On the very first page (1) of his book, he defines the issue as “whether Christ-followers leave behind their cultural affiliation and enter a newly created universal society or whether, as Jews or Greeks, they continue to live within that same culture but under the transforming influence of Christ.” For Campbell identity is more or less defined as ethnic identity, as can be seen from the fact that he takes over the six criteria of identity from Hutchinson and Smith’s Ethnicity. Some of these (like having a common ancestor, and common original homeland) can only apply to an ethnic

27 William S. CAMPBELL, Paul and the Creation of Christian Identity (London: T&T Clark, 2006).

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group and not to a group constituted of, say, Jews and Greeks. 28 The un-surprising outcome of Campbell’s investigation is that the Christian move-ment did not stop being Jewish, and he can summarize: “Christianity is thus not best understood as a sectarian new religion, nor as a reaction to Judaism, defined in antithesis to it. It is rather a transformation of a (main-ly) Pharisaic Judaism from which it borrows and affirms some motifs while rejecting others.”29 Those who unite themselves with Christ remain what they are, Jews or Gentiles, and the basic ethnic-cultural identity that one is born into is not very much changed by later social constructions (read: theologizing). “Identity precedes theology and… in fact theological constructions emerge to solve the problem of identity rather than to create it.”30—a statement that if not directed against Esler’s standpoint is anyway at odds with it.

The different components in the identity of the first Christians are de-scribed by Campbell as ”subidentities in a nested hierarchy of identity of which being in Christ is the primary.”31 This statement raises at least two questions: Is really being in Christ the “primary” identity of Chris tians, when the alleged “transforming influence of Christ” is not shown by Campbell to have any notable effect in the actual life of early Christians, comparable to that of being a Jew or a Greek? Secondly, why is the possi-bility of real conflict between main identity and subidentity never seriously contemplated by Campbell?32 It is not hard to discover in the New Testa-ment actual tension and conflict between Christ-believers of different backgrounds, where one party criticized the other’s subidentity as not be-ing fully “in Christ”. Well-known examples are when Christ-believers of Jewish descent demanded of their non-Jewish co-believers that they must be circumcised and become fully Jews in order to belong to the saved in Christ (Acts 15, Gal 2), or when Christ-followers who observed Jewish eating restrictions were looked down upon as weak Christians by those “strong” and “knowledgeable” enough not to do so (Rom 14-15).

In distinction from Campbell, David Horrell has taken the step of dis-cussing whether and how Paul’s understanding of the church as the Body of Christ had any socially constructive effect, or in other words, if it had

28 J. HUTCHINSON and A.D. SMITH, eds., Ethnicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), in CAMPBELL, Christian Identity, 5-6.

29 CAMPBELL, Christian Identity, 102.30 CAMPBELL, Christian Identity, 52, referring to Judith LIEU’s works.31 CAMPBELL, Christian Identity, 157. All subidentities are in the same “nest” (indivi-

dual or group), but they are not equally important, as one or two are dominant.32 Esler is open to this possibility and can talk about Romans as Paul’s “attempt to re -

vitalize their common ingroup identity in the face of the threat [my italics] posed to it by their original identities of Judean and non-Judean,” ESLER, Conflict and Identity, 32.

Understanding Christian Identity 19

any practical and social consequences for the Christ-believers.33 Scholarly opinion is divided on this issue. Exegetes like John Barclay, Daniel Boya-rin and Philip Esler think that earlier divisive “identities” or social profiles of an ethnic-cultural kind were abrogated, at least in Pauline Christianity, and substituted by a common new identity “in Christ”, which meant among other things that no Christ-believer was actually obliged to observe the To-rah any longer. Other scholars, like Markus Bockmuehl, William Camp-bell, Peter Tomson, and Magnus Zetterholm, think the opposite: Christ-believing Jews kept on obeying and practicing the Law of Moses, while their Gentile co-believers did not. Belonging together in one Body of Christ is then more of a theological idea or belief in a future fact of salva-tion that does not change very much in people’s practiced social identity on earth.

Against this increasingly common view, Horrell argues that it is more likely that the “in Christ”-thinking of Paul did redefine and change not only the way that Christ-believers thought about their salvation, but also their social identity. Obviously people in the Pauline congregations (and probably others too) thought of themselves together with all believers as incorporated in the death and resurrection of Christ through baptism and reception of Spirit, and through the recurrent participation in the Lord’s Supper. The social effect of this conviction in Antioch was commensality between Christ-believing Jews and non-Jews, even if the former retreated from that social habit under pressure from Jerusalem.

Horrell sees “becoming Christian” as a drawn-out process that we do not see completed in the New Testament.34 It began in the Jesus movement (men and women around Jesus in his lifetime), who generally had a Jewish social identity. Within that general ethnic and cultural identity, they had a distinct group identity, manifested in beliefs, rituals, and cult reshaping their lives. Only the influx of non-Jewish Christ-believers resulted in a sudden solidification of a distinct Christian identity, in which it became clear that Christ and faith in him defined the group identity of every believer. For Paul, and increasingly for other believers, everyone in the movement is “in Christ” and a member of his Body, and this simply had to change earlier identity markers and boundaries, which, in spite of setbacks, it did. The watershed in this development is the meeting in Jerusalem,

33 David G. HORRELL, “ ‘No Longer Jew or Greek’: Paul’s Corporate Christology and the Construction of Christian Community,” in: Christology, Controversy and Community. New Testament Essays in Honour of David R. Catchpole (ed. by D. G. Horrell and C.M. Tuckett. Leiden: Brill, 2000), 321-344.

34 David G. HORRELL, “ ‘Becoming Christian’: Solidifying Christian Identity and Content”, Handbook of Early Christianity: Social Science Approaches . Ed. by A. J. Blasi, J. Duhaime, P.-A. Turcotte (Walnut Creek–New York: Altamira, 2002), 309-335.

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which decided that the Gentiles did belong to the Christ-movement without becoming Jews.

(4) Identity as the autonomous inner structure of the semiotic system

In his important 1999 book The Religion of the Earliest Churches , Gerd Theissen wanted to present “a theory of the primitive Christian religion.” 35

In a social-scientific, more specifically cultural anthropological perspec-tive (Clifford Geertz), he analyzes the object of his study as a semiotic sys -tem, a system of signs, like a language. This system of signs does not consist only of words that make up what Theissen calls “myths”, founda-tional beliefs and narratives, but also of rituals and behavior patterns, and the corresponding net of social relations.

All this can be approached by historical methods. While Judith Lieu states clearly that her intention is not to describe the origin and develop-ment of Christianity as a whole but to remain in the textual world and analyze what is found there about identity, Gerd Theissen wants to go on from the textual and symbolic world to the world of actual human history. The difference between them is not mainly a difference in how identity is understood, but in how they think concerning the accessibility of historical reality. Theissen approaches the complex, flesh-and-blood, social reality of early Christianity as an historian, which means as one convinced that the available data (mainly texts) are evidence of an accessible reality outside the data themselves, a reality with both typical and unique features. He in-tends to make statements about a tangible social reality: a living religion, understood as a “language” or a semiotic system. This complex and multi-dimensional system of ‘signs’ does not consist of words only, but also of other realities like myths, rites, and behavior patterns (ethos). The ap-proach can be characterized as epistemologically optimistic and critically realist – the thing under investigation was really there and is approachable by ordinary historical methods.

In the opening, methodological part of his book, Gerd Theissen gives a brief description of how the Christian social cognition, embodied in words, rites and actions—the religious sign world—can affect life in the Christ-movement. “How can it govern thought, feeling and action and enable peo-ple to be engaged in social co-operation and conflict?”36 The religious sign system consisting of myths (which contain roles that make identification possible), rites (that work with symbols), and ethics (working with norms)

35 Gerd THEISSEN, The Religion of the Earliest Churches: Creating a Symbolic World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999). The title of the British edition, A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion (London: SCM, 1999), is a direct translation of the German original: Eine Theorie der urchristlichen Religion (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1999).

36 THEISSEN, Religion, 11.

Understanding Christian Identity 21

is actually what makes possible religious experiences and functions in the life of people. The sign system precedes the individual and is internalized by ordinary socialization processes. When internalized the religion governs world-view, self-understanding and behavior, in short: what makes up a person’s or a movement’s identity. This means, in other words, that if somebody manages to influence the social cognition, or the social behavi-or, of the Christ-believers, this will have effects on the whole system. It would be possible for an historical actor (Paul or another) to change the identity of the movement a little, provided he manages to have his ideas acted upon, which is the beginning of institutionalizing them into part of the system. Here the perspective of Esler and Horrell receives support.

The identity residing in this semiotic system is a much larger and more stable social fact than the individual Christian person or congregation. The system is characterized by an “inner autonomy” that determines the deve-lopment of this body and drives the “competitive syncretism” which is ty-pical of the early Christian religion. “Competitive syncretism” signifies active engagement with the elements of other religions, which are both taken over and declared outdone by one’s own system, as when Jesus is de-clared to be exalted above all other gods and lords. In Theissen’s per-spective the early Christian religion was both influenced by its environ-ment and historical factors, and capable of integrating desired elements from outside, as well as resistant to them when need be.

Theissen does not use the term “identity” as a main concept in his ana-lysis. The exception is his chapter 11, ”The Crises of Primitive Christi-anity,” where he characterizes the history of Christianity as the emergence of an “autonomous religious sign system.”37 The three great crises that this religion passed through in its first two centuries, the Judaistic crisis in the first century, the Gnostic crisis in the second, and the prophetic cri ses in both these centuries, all have to do with the guarding of this autonomy. The first, Judaistic, crisis concerned the question whether Jewish identity markers must or can be retained within this religion, the Gnostic concerned the boundaries of Christianity towards the surrounding world and universal sign systems, and the third, prophetic, type of crisis was about the role that can be allowed to the ineradicable ethical radicalism of this religion. The threat to the inner autonomy was posed not only by religious factors but also by conditions in the political framework of the time, says Theissen, meaning that both the Judaistic and the Gnostic crises concerned the avoid-ance of pressure from and conflicts with the surrounding society, while the prophetic movements actually wanted the opposite. It would have been socially advantageous for the new movement in the existing situations to give in to accommodation demands of the Judaists in the first century, and

37 THEISSEN, Religion, 209-248, citation from p. 209.

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of the Gnostic Christians in the second century. The radical prophetic movements, on the other hand, reacted against what they saw as the Chris-tian majority’s too easy accommodation to the world outside. By saying no to these demands for less or more conflict, the main Christ-movement manifested its distinctive character and defined its identity a bit more. Theissen summarizes the outcome of all these crises in the following way:

The temptation to adapt to the surrounding world and to deny its own identity was chro-nic, and simply assumed different forms. In the first century it became acute in the form of the Judaistic crisis, and in the second century in the form of the Gnostic crisis. --- Primi-tive Christianity derived its power to resist these manifold forms of temptation to assimi-lation from its solemn stand against culture: the awareness of being different from the world and the claim also to depict this difference from the world in a visible life-style. For abstract radicalism alone bestows only a problematic social identity. But ethical radical-ism which leads to visible patterns of behaviour that are socially binding and also gives power to deviate from ‘behavioural norms’ could time and again keep safeguarding the identity of primitive Christianity. Here this power of resistance often established itself against the structural tendencies which were given by the social and political overall framework of the Roman empire.38

These words actually summarize the whole analysis of the different cri-ses concerning the inner autonomy of Christianity, or in other words, its identity. It is clear that for Theissen “Christianity is not simply the result of cultural, political, factors influencing or indeed determining its develop-ment, but that rather it is ‘autonomous’, an independent, largely closed, system, determining, in a substantial measure, the direction which main-stream Christianity should take.”39

Like any semiotic system, the Christian one has its own set of rules, its “grammar”.40 The fundamental beliefs or basic axioms of this religion are two, one of which is inherited from Jewish religion: there is one God only who has created everything and who is and will be the Lord of the uni-verse. Instead of the second basic axiom of Judaism: belief in the election of one covenanted people of God, Christianity put its own: faith in Jesus Christ as the redeemer for all human beings. Next in the grammar comes a group of so-called basic motifs, subordinate to the fundamental axioms. Among the motifs are creation, wisdom, repentance, love of neighbor, dis-

38 THEISSEN, Religion, 247.39 John RICHES, review of Gerd Theissen, A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion,

JTS 55 (2004): 208-216, 213.40 Theissen refers (p. 327) to George A. LINDBECK, The Nature of Doctrine (Philadel-

phia: Westminster, 1984) as the origin of the idea that faith has a ‘gram mar’. Another theologian, not mentioned by Theissen, who treats religious traditions as semiotic sys-tems, or languages with grammar, and who also—like Theissen—treats of various types of syncretism, is Robert J. SCHREITER, Constructing Local Theologies (New York: Orbis, 1985), esp. chapters 5 and 7.

Understanding Christian Identity 23

tance from God, reversal. These are not simply theological ideas, but each one is embodied in a social community over time, and expressed in the way it acts, worships, lives and relates both to the members and to those outside the group. The fundamental “myth” of Jesus is of course narrativiz-ed and expounded, but also played out, as it were, in the rituals and the roles belonging to this communal life. All this together functions like a sign system, or a language that manifests and shapes the identity of this religion.

One criticism directed at Gerd Theissen’s idea of the Christian religion as a kind of language is that the “grammar” analogy is not a good one:

For what the case of the Gnostic controversies shows is not that the ‘grammatical rules’ determine the direction in which the Christian community should go, but rather that the central beliefs in monotheism, in a universal redeemer, are themselves essentially con-tended and that the community has therefore to engage in extended debate and argument in order further to define and clarify beliefs in the one God’s role as creator and redeemer when faced by those who propose new definitions. There are no grammatical rules which simply determine what is a correct expression of the Christian faith, for it is the gramma-tical axioms themselves which are being questioned.41

Riches is of course right in stating that the conflict with Gnostic Chris -tians was to a large extent a theological debate about God and his relation to the created world, thus involving the axiomatic root beliefs. Theissen’s analogy to rules of grammar should, however, be understood in a different way. What prevented Gnostic ideas from being accepted by mainstream Christians was not only that they did not conform to some list of correct opinions. The consequences of such an acceptance would have severely affected other parts of “the system” as well. If Gnostics were right, one would have to stop reading the Jewish holy scriptures in worship (a deep cut in ritual continuity), and the fought-for legitimacy of being a religion with very ancient roots, having Abraham as ancestor and being the inheri -tors of a long and deep history of salvation, would have to be relinquished (cognitive-mythical aspect). It would further mean that one retroactively devalued the action of the highly respected martyrs, as it would not have been necessary for them to be so stubborn about not pre tending to worship the emperor (ethos). Finally, it would have opened the system for more extreme behavioral variants, either libertine or rigorist-ascetic, which would also jar with ingrained behavior patterns.

These factors can of course not be described as rules in a literal sense. However, together they form a consistent whole, whose parts support and keep each other in place. A change in a vital part of the “myth” would bring with it an avalanche of other changes, and is therefore rejected as in-compatible with the system as a whole. Or—to keep in mind that we are

41 RICHES, “Review of Theissen”, 214 f.

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actually talking about social cognition—it is identified as incompatible with the community’s embodied beliefs and myths, rituals and worship, behavior patterns and ethos. The active logic of a system is there, even if it is not a strictly logical system like a code of law with clearly defined rules.

(5) Identity as the Christ-movement’s feedback-shaped self-understanding

Ben F. Meyer describes the development of the Christ-movement as a learning process in which the movement gradually changed its self-under-standing and way of manifesting its identity. 42 This identity grew out of what Meyer calls “the Easter experience,” a life-transforming faith relation to the risen Christ Jesus. Even if every individual in the first Christian generation had not personally had the Easter experience, it was a shared reality for all of them. First, the leaders shared it: different as they were, Cephas, James, and Paul (in his special way) had all met the risen Jesus and been indelibly changed by that experience, forgiven, rehabilitated, taken into service (cf. 1 Cor 15:1–11). Furthermore, the closest circle of disciples and witnesses shared a history with Jesus, a common memory, anamnēsis, of his life and person up to and including his resurrection, which formed and shaped the basic content of their preaching and teach-ing, their prayer and Spirit-filled worship together. The faith experience was celebrated and nurtured in community, which means that it was insti-tutionalized in the rites (baptism and the Lord's supper), behavior patterns, ēthos and traditions of the first Christians. This embodiment of the found-ing experience in a living community made it accessible to others. People who had never even seen Jesus could be told his “history,” be convinced of its truth and reality, also by seeing and participating in its tangible results (an attractive community), eventually be initiated into it and share this “memory” or “internal history” of the church.43

42 Ben F. MEYER, The Early Christians: Their World Mission and Self-Discovery . (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1986). See further the two collections of Meyer’s essays: Critical Realism and the New Testament (Princeton Theological Monograph Series 17; Allison Park, Pennsylvania: Pickwick Press, 1989), esp. the essay "The World Mission and the Emergent Realization of Christian Identity", 173–194 (originally published in the W. R. Farmer-Festschrift edited by Ed. P. Sanders, Jesus, The Gospels, and the Church, 1987, 243–263), and Christus Faber: The Master Builder and the House of God (Princeton Theological Monograph Series 29; Allison Park, Pennsylvania: Pickwick Press, 1992), esp. the essay "The Church in Earliest Christianity: Identity and Self-Defi-nition", 149–169.

43 H. Richard NIEBUHR, The Meaning of Revelation (New York: Macmillan, 1941) formulated the idea that all communities find their identity in a shared "internal history". The event of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection is for Christians the center around which their internal history (grafted on to that of Israel) is ordered.

Understanding Christian Identity 25

But history did not stop right after the originary, transforming, and iden-tity-shaping experience of the first group of believers, however momen-tous. The people, situations, and events that the early Christians kept en-countering naturally caused a repeated reflection that affected the self-un-derstanding of the movement as a whole. This reflection clarifies the com-mon identity built on the originary experience and shapes the way it is ma-nifested. This feedback process of recurring reflection resulting in changed self-understanding is a pattern found in several textualized events, like the Cornelius episode (Acts 10-11) and even more clearly in the apostolic meeting in Jerusalem (Acts 15, Gal 2).

The Gentiles surprisingly enter the movement, by meeting the decisive criteria of belonging to Christ: undeniable possession of his Spirit. Once accepted as belonging inside the Christ-believing community, they quickly grow in number, causing a heated discussion about the need for them to enter the covenant fully by circumcision. Leaders of Jerusalem and Anti-och reflect upon this together, and they reach an agreement about some kind of division between the mission to the Jews and the mission to the other peoples. The conflict about commensality in Antioch (Gal 2:11-21) shows that the content of the agreement needs to be fur ther specified the-oretically and practically, or in other words, that another loop in the feed-back process is necessary. Paul’s attempted solution to the latter problem was to distinguish between identity and self-definition (in Ben Meyer’s terminology): belonging to Christ in one body is part of the deep identity common to all Christ-believers, while a specific self-definition, or way of living and manifesting this identity, is variable. Some believers (of Jewish descent) may and perhaps should define their way of being Christ-ians as including obedience to the Torah and its customary application, others (of Gentile descent) need not and should not. Paul allows no self-definition to conflict with the common identity, as was the case when Antiochene Christ-believers of Jewish descent, led by Peter, refused to eat with their Gentile fellow-Christians and by this very loud body language denied their belonging to the Body of Christ.44

Ben Meyer’s way of understanding identity as different from self-defi-nition would, in my opinion, have been of help in Esler’s and Campbell’s work on what Paul as an “entrepreneur of identity” was doing to “create” an identity for the Christ-believers that would maintain unity among them. The apostle is not out to create a new identity from scratch, nor is he actu-ally outlining new (Jewish or Greek) “sub-identities.” Already this makes the “entrepreneur” label a bit doubtful, and the talk of “creating” identity inappropriate. However, Paul is not simply stating what was obvious to

44 In Bengt HOLMBERG, ”Jewish versus Christian Identity?” (RB 1998, 397-425), I gave a fuller analysis of what happened under the surface of the Antioch Incident.

26 Bengt Holmberg

everyone in the movement after the Jerusalem agreement (Gal 2): that one could belong to the covenant of Israel without being or becoming a Jew, through being incorporated in Christ. His “enterprise” is rather to clarify the logic inherent in that decision. To mix up the fundamental “in-Christ” character which must be maintained by all believers (Meyer: their identity) with behavior which may vary according to one’s cultural situation (Meyer: their self-definition) is wrong in theology and will in practice de-stroy the unity of those who belong to Christ. Paul thought that all Christ-believers could and should live peacefully and closely together, manifest-ing their one-ness by sharing the same Lord’s Supper (Gal 2:11-21), with-out any obligation to have the same relation to the Torah. Torah obser-vance is, after Jerusalem, not part of Christian identity in the strict or deep sense, even if it can be part of one way of manifesting that identity, one self-definition.45

Identity for Meyer is on the one hand something given from the start of the Christ-movement (even beginning to some degree in the pre-Easter Je-sus-movement): a transforming experience of belonging to Christ Jesus, af-fecting self-understanding, prayer habits, occupation, social relations, theo-logy, behavior patterns and the way one thinks about them. On the other hand, this identity must be manifested, clarified, and reconfigured continu-ously in the “self-definition” of the group. In addition, there can be several self-definitions manifesting the same identity, although they cannot be allowed to develop in a direction that undermines or even negates the com-mon identity and endangers the unity of the movement. The formation of identity is a collective or corporative process, not something thought out individually, even if, as in all groups, some individuals with more author-ity and capacity of thinking will influence the group’s self-categorization and social cognition more than others.

The important lesson to learn from Meyer is that identity is not static, but dynamic and dialectic, a feedback-shaped learning process of several people and groups together. The links to the originary experience(s) were of vital importance and could not be given up, but nonetheless the move-ment could take decisions leading it in new directions that were not even dreamt of a few years previously (like the mission to Gentiles).

45 The logic of including non-proselyte and non-observant Gentiles in the Christ-believing community (Acts 15, Gal 2) can also be expressed thus: “As a result of the Ju -daistic crisis in the first century it was decided that Christianity is not a part of Juda ism.” THEISSEN, Religion, 231.

Understanding Christian Identity 27

How should identity be approached? A summary

After having presented and discussed a number of different ideas on identity from contemporary scholarship, I want to articulate some lessons learnt from that exercise and to draw some conclusions about how one should approach early Christian identity.

Identity is a term and a reality hard to define, belonging originally to talk about the character or personhood of a human individual. In the social sciences and in general historical discussion it is often used in a rather loose, transferred sense about groups and movements, signifying their re-cognizable social profile.46 A social profile comprises such things as a common, foundational memory, expressed in “myth”, rites, and behavior, effecting over time social relations and a common form of life with internal network and discernible boundaries to the outside. Experience tells us that a social group or movement is more than the sum of its parts (indi -viduals), and it is justified—at least as a practical shorthand for its social cognition and self-categorization—to talk about the group’s features, expe-riences, customs and typical behavior, life-process, history, and identity. After long and careful study, one may actually know a group in a way ana-logous to knowing a human: you know how it acts and reacts, how it talks and reflects, what it will do and say, “feel” and “think” in typical situations and in new ones. Of course, a group consists of individuals and they shape and maintain its social identity, but they are also shaped by it, sometimes quite forcefully. Especially from the perspective of the individual, the group “identity” often is a solid, inexorable social fact that “I” and other humans have to adjust to, just as to other institutionalized realities.47

Already the identity of an individual consists of multiple identities or roles, and not all of them are important in all situations; usually one or two are the dominant ones. Social scientists label this a “hierarchy of nested identities.” In the case of an individual, the different identities hang toge-ther by the fact of belonging to that specific human being. His or her con-tinuous person is an actual reality that holds together all the different par-tial identities. When talking about the identity of a movement it is not so easy to see a distinct and continuous core in it, an actual reality “naturally” holding it together. Moreover, drawing clear boundaries between a social movement and its outside world is also more difficult.

Further, when used about a movement the concept tends to oscillate even more between understanding identity as a deposit and understanding

46 ”Identity has become something of a buzzword in recent social science and in stud-ies of early Christianity.” HORRELL, “Becoming Christian”, 311.

47 Cf. my discussion of institutionalization, routinization, and cumulative institution -alization in Holmberg, Paul and Power, 167-181 (Fortress ed. 1980: 165-179).

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it as a task. Paul Ricoeur introduced a distinction between identity as being idem, the same, and identity as being ipse, oneself or one’s true self.48 In the former case, identity is a question of retained continuity with one’s origin and history, while in the latter it is a question of to what degree the person, group, or movement has attained its authenticity, its true inner self. The former is more of—although not exclusively—an historical question, while the latter with its emphasis on what someone or something really “is,” or should be, is an ontological question concerning philosophical and theological matters.

In historical work, identity cannot be grasped by definitional work in the ontological arena of what things, persons, movements “really are”, somewhere deep inside. The “identity” of a group or movement is better approached and provisionally described as a social reality, a recognizable social profile that is summarized in people’s thoughts (often in narrative form) about who “we” or “they” are and how we and they typically be-have. The development and fluctuations of any group are reflected in the identity formation process as well. Identity is thought and discussed about, both by insiders and outsiders, and therefore is something constantly “ne-gotiated”. It is not a static character, or essence, or “soul” of a group, but an ongoing, relational process of self-understanding and self-categoriza-tion, often with a strongly ideological perspective (“ideology” meaning a theoretical legitimating of existing power relations).

From the anthropological perspective introduced in this discussion by Theissen we are reminded about the concrete embeddedness of identity in other dimensions of human life, its embodiment in corporative action of a deeply formative nature, like common prayer, worship, and ritual praxis, as well as shared behavior patterns, custom and ethos. One might characterize this visible and audible dimension of identity as its “earthiness,” connected as it is to real human lives and tangible, everyday realities. This aspect of identity sets some checks against a too easy equating of ideas, especially new ideas, with social reality, as noted in the discussion above on the work of Esler and Campbell.

On the other hand, if one comes at the material from the direction of rhetorical analysis (as Lieu and others), identity appears to be, at least in extreme cases, something floating in the air at a distance from the earth. It is so hard to know whether it floats above the earth like a balloon that is tied to the earthly terrain, or like a cloud that is not, that one is tempted to leave it floating up there.

48 Paul RICOEUR, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 140, via Werner G. JEANROND, Gudstro. Teologiska reflexioner II (Lund: Arcus, 2001), 167.

Understanding Christian Identity 29

Weighing the balance between these two outlooks, I would suggest that any historical investigation of early Christian identity must start with and give greater weight to the earthy elements of identity, or in other words to its tangible dimensions. From there one can go on to analyze social con-structions of self-categorization and the symbolical universe of the group, naturally including in the balanced picture the institutionalizing power of social cognition.49

If we study the history of exegesis, we will see generations or epochs of exegetes, each dominated by some great, overarching ideas. These founda-tional ideas reflect important cultural, philosophical and religious thought systems—ideologies—of their own time, and they influence considerably which questions are asked and which replies can at all be imagined. In the Bauer-Ehrman trajectory briefly described above, some pervasive post-modern ideas from the last third of the 20 th century seem to influence the picture: Conflicts and struggle for economic assets and social power are the driving force of history. All large-scale ideas in philosophy, theology, and cultural life are ideological constructions of reality designed to protect the interests of powerful people.

We noted above that Ehrman, who clearly stands in the research trajec-tory starting from Walter Bauer’s work, seems to view the development of early Christianity through protoorthodoxy to a full-blown orthodox, Chris-tian identity as something of a mistake. Hard Christianity won, while viable alternative Christianities were lost—clearly an ideological position, which there is no attempt to hide. Ehrman and other scholars in this tradi -tion helpfully show, both through their criticism and through the picture they want to substitute for the old one, that historiography is not and cannot be a value-free enterprise. Inevitably, it reflects a more or less hid-den ideology or world-view, sometimes hidden to the unsuspecting author as well. An obvious conclusion from this insight is that exegetical hypo-theses should be subjected to an ideological critique concerning their pre-suppositions and taken-for-granted world-view. Historical investigation

49 One example of the interplay between earthiness and legitimating social con struc-tion is found in 2 Tim 3:14-16, illustrating what was said above on the difficulty of cutting out the Jewish Bible from early Christian identity: “Continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it [probably “your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice,” 1:5] and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings.” To this identity-forming “earthiness” of family tra -dition of devotion to the bible is then added a piece of parenetical teaching on why that custom is personally valuable: “[writings] which are able to instruct you for your salva-tion through faith in Christ Jesus,” to which is then added a general legitimating theory of these scriptures: “All scripture is inspired by God…”

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should engage in discerning and peeling off the influence from ideological perspectives and time-bound ideas.50

Outlining this book

The essays in this volume are a kind of report from a research project in which a number of New Testament scholars in Sweden cooperated since 2003. Some of them will publish monographs (Tellbe and Thorsteinsson) or doctoral dissertations (Ivarsson and Roitto) on their subjects, while others use their chapter in this volume to summarize aspects of their ongo-ing research on other subjects as well (Byrskog and Runesson). The kind of report is like opening six windows, each on a different research terrain. The focus of each separate author is different as regards space and time and character of the material investigated, as well as different in methodo-logy. In this way is illustrated the number of possible and actual approach-es to the complex question of early Christian identity.

Samuel Byrskog focuses on the relation between text and community through a sophisticated analysis of how the gospels narrativize the move-ment’s memory of Jesus. He begins by taking a closer look at the gospel genre and shows that its combination of biographical and historical ap-proaches is due to the intention of connecting the present time of author and readers to the decisive, identity-forming belonging to the Lord Jesus in history. In a second part, he argues that the gospel Sitz im Leben should be understood as specifically connected to the social memory of early Chris ti-anity and how it worked. He goes on to analyze the chreia of the gospels as a mnemonic narrative form designed to bridge the past and the present and create the group’s belonging to that important past, its Jesus Christ-centered identity.

Anders Runesson …Rikard Roitto…Mikael Tellbe…Runar Thorsteinsson…Fredrik Ivarsson..Finally, I will try to summarize the insights that our work in this

identity project has reached, through a free discussion of how all this has changed or might come to change the way in which early Christian identity is understood.

50 The research project received valuable input over the years from Dr Bo Brander, a systematic theologian of Lund University, who investigated for the project what ecclesio-logical ideas influenced 20th century exegetes of various confessional backgrounds. He constantly made the project exegetes realize how deeply intertwined historical interpreta-tion is with theological ideas, thus increasing our awareness of ideological dimensions in scholarship and of the need for self-criticism in our discipline.