Books in Brief

004

The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul

Wayne A. Meeks

(Yale University Press: New Haven, Connecticut, 1983) 299 pp., $19.95

What was it like to be or become an ordinary Christian in the first century? This is the question Wayne Meeks asks within his stimulating and provocative study. His goal is to identify “The Social World of the Apostle Paul,” as the subtitle indicates. What emerges is an impressive social history of Pauline Christianity with a fresh approach.

The term “social world” derives, of course, from the social sciences. Meeks presents himself as an eclectic, however; in this book, he combines sociological theory and methods with more traditional historical methods. An historian by training, he has become quite sophisticated in his understanding of sociology. Indeed, he has emerged as the leading proponent in New Testament studies for the use of social science methods. His leadership in this area of research began with his seminal essay on theology and social identity in the Gospel of John (“The Man from Heaven in Johannine Sectarianism,” Journal of Biblical Literature 91 [1972], pp. 44–72) and continued with his serving as co-chairman of the Society of Biblical Literature seminar on “The Social World of Early Christianity.” The present work therefore represents the culmination of several years of research in this area. The result is a balanced, exacting analysis that is true both to the data and to the various methodological perspectives that the author brings to his work.

The study of the social setting of Pauline Christianity begins with an analysis of its “urban environment,” the subject of Meeks’s first chapter. Paul and his mission, Meeks points out, were concerned primarily with the city rather than with the countryside. Thus, the Pauline Christians were “The First Urban Christians.” To understand what this meant for the identity of these first “ordinary Christians,” Meeks studies the cities of Paul from a variety of perspectives: What kinds of people lived in the cities in the eastern Empire? What were their occupations? What were the social classes and social structures in these cities? What was the position of women in the Greco-Roman city? How did the Jews fit in socially? What were the cities of Paul actually like? Meeks brings to bear a wealth of recent scholarship on the ancient city and ancient society, including a brief review of recent archaeological data on the cities of Paul.

In chapter two, Meeks analyzes “The Social Level of the Pauline Christians.” Meeks utilizes some recent studies that point out that Paul’s letters refer to a rather large number of individuals who must have been from a relatively well-to-do social class, for example, those who owned the homes in which Christians met. Thus, early Christianity was not primarily a lower-class phenomenon, as previous scholarship has often suggested. The Church was in fact made up of a mixture of various social classes. Moreover, many of the leaders Paul mentions seem to have come from the upper social levels of society. Finally, Meeks presents valuable data as to the meanings of “class” and “status” in the ancient world and how these categories might explain some of the conflicts among members of early Christian communities.

How were the early churches organized? This question is addressed in chapter three, “The Formation of the Ekklesia.” Meeks utilizes a methodological insight that derives from a long-standing principle of New Testament scholarship: Much of what we recognize today as “Christian” was actually derived, at least in part, from the society in which Christianity took root. Thus, in order to analyze how individual churches held together as a group, he first compares them with known “groups” in the Roman world. These “Models from the Environment” include: (a) the household, (b) the voluntary association or club, (c) the synagogue, and (d) the philosophical or rhetorical school. Each of these social units could be said to have served as a model for certain aspects of the social organization of the Christian Church, although none is sufficient to explain the phenomenon as a whole.

Meeks notes the Church’s emphasis on the exclusivity and purity of the group as a separate entity, apart from society as a whole. This, in addition to its emphasis on the unity of the local group bonded in a “worldwide brotherhood,” set the Church apart from all other social units except for the synagogue, from which these ideas directly derived. Nevertheless, the Church did not see itself as merely an extension of the synagogue. Rather it developed a unique version of traditional Jewish ideals. This is delineated in an extended discussion of the terminology in the Pauline letters that defines group identity vis-a-vis the outside world.

The next chapter takes up the issue of “Governance”; that is, how were authority and power delegated in the Pauline churches? Here Meeks deals with one of the more elusive questions concerning the early Church. New Testament scholars have long been familiar with the problem that, although authority and power are at issue in the early period, there are no recognizable formal offices. This is, in fact, contrary to the forms of other social groups in the ancient world, those with which the church was compared in the previous chapter. Both synagogues and voluntary associations, for example, had formally designated leaders. The churches of Paul obviously could have followed one of these models; yet they did not do so, unlike the later Church, which did designate Church offices.

Nevertheless, as any sociologist knows, authority and power are present in any social group; the question is how do we recognize authority and power and how do they function? Meeks studies the underlying social structures of these churches in order to identify the actual lines of authority and power. He identifies these lines, for example, in Paul’s use of the letter and in his visits to churches, by himself or by his associates. Meeks also analyzes Paul’s references to “tradition” and “custom.” Above all, Meeks notes how Paul refers to his authority as an “apostle.” Paul, of course, must argue for that authority, and, in the process, he reveals much about the ambiguity of his situation and of the concept of “office” in the early Church as a whole.

The fifth chapter, “Ritual,” takes up one of the major concerns of the social scientific study of religion. But Meeks’s analysis here is more historical than sociological, although he provides a useful review of sociological theories. He analyzes the minor rituals (what took place when they “came together”) and major rituals (baptism and Lord’s Supper) in terms of what we can know about what actually took place and about how these rituals functioned to define the social identity of the Church. The chapter is especially strong in its analysis of the function of baptism and the Lord’s 005Supper as rituals that communicated a sense of social solidarity.

The final chapter, “Patterns of Belief and Patterns of Life,” is Meeks’s approach to the classic questions of Pauline theology. Here he sets Paul’s theology in the context of its social origins and implications. In Meeks’s own words: “We are interested in the social force of what the typical member of the Pauline churches believed” (p. 164). He lists four beliefs that caused early Christians to see themselves as distinct and separate from Greco-Roman society. First was the belief in one God, as basic to Pauline Christianity as it was to Judaism; to this was connected the idea that there was only one “body” or Church. Second were the apocalyptic beliefs, or the complex of ideas connected with an imminent end of time when God would save his elect community. Sociologists have documented such ideas among other separationist groups, often referred to as “millennarian movements.” Third, the metaphor of “the crucified Messiah” was used by Paul to define a unique behavior and value system for Christians that distinguished them from the rest of the world. Finally, the beliefs about evil as a power to be overcome, and the location of that evil in the “world,” created a sense of estrangement from society. Thus Paul’s characteristic soteriological (pertaining to salvation) terms—redemption, justification, reconciliation—also have implications for social identity.

Meeks’s book is one of the best examples of an attempt by today’s generation of scholars to bring new data, perspectives, and methods to bear on the interpretation of the New Testament. He writes in the tradition of the giants of the past, scholars such as Adolf Deissmann and Adolf von Harnack, who also sought to understand early Christianity in its Greco-Roman, as well as Jewish, environment. These scholars, however, did not have the benefit of the recently discovered archaeological and inscriptional data and the latest developments in social science theory.

Meeks’s work is important—not only because of the new perspectives it offers, but also because of the responsible and thorough way in which he covers the vast field of Christian origins and brings us up to date on recent trends and developments in scholarship. Although it is a technical work, it is eminently readable. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Christian origins.

Introduction to the New Testament

Raymond F. Collins

(Doubleday: Garden City, New York, 1983) 480 pp. $24.95

As I suggested in a recent review in this journal (Introduction to the New Testament, Volume I, by Helmut Koester, in Books in Brief, BAR 09:05), the New Testament can be introduced in a bewildering variety of ways. Fr. Collins, professor of New Testament at the University of Louvain, approaches the task in a fashion very different from that of Helmut Koester. What Collins offers is neither a discussion of the various books of the New Testament nor a comprehensive survey of early Christian literature and history, as Koester’s introduction presents, but an extended essay focusing on the methods with which scholars analyze the New Testament.

The work begins where many New Testament introductions end, with an account of the formation of the New Testament canon, that is, an account of the process, extending over the first several centuries of the life of 007the Church, through which certain of its early pieces of literature came to be considered as authoritative for faith and practice and others were rejected. This study, often slighted in introductions to the New Testament, is an interesting one, and it is useful to be reminded that the New Testament was not delivered to the Church at a single moment, as “Torah from Mt. Sinai.” Instead, as Collins shows, it grew, through the compilation of smaller collections, such as the corpus of Pauline epistles and the assembly of four separate Gospels. Furthermore, while there was agreement on the authoritative status of many of the New Testament books by the end of the second century, the limits of the collection remained fluid down into the fourth century. Throughout the third and fourth centuries, we find some ecclesiastical authorities debating the status of certain works, such as the book of Revelation or the Epistle to the Hebrews. Collins’s account of this process is clear and succinct. At the same time, his treatment of the issue indicates the self-imposed limitations of his introduction, which focuses solely on those works that were finally accepted in the Western Church as authoritative. Collins’s guiding principles are thus not so much historical as they are theological.

In the second chapter, Collins begins in earnest the treatment of the overall theme of his work, “the historical-critical method” of Biblical study. This label, like charity, can cover a multitude of sins. It is, in fact, part of the jargon of the scholarly trade, used to refer not so much to a specific method of analysis as to a whole set of questions that were first forcefully posed in the 18th century, during the Enlightenment. These questions share, more or less, the presuppositions that (a) the books of the New Testament ought to be investigated just as any other ancient document, and thus (b) they can best be understood as documents of their own time, within the context of the Mediterranean world of the first century. The analysis of the New Testament that has been built upon these presuppositions has agitated theologians for the last two centuries. What Collins begins to do here is to give an account, from a Catholic perspective, of the results of that agitation.

Collins next reviews the development of New Testament criticism in the 19th century, concentrating on research about the life of Jesus. This research often resulted in a portrait of Jesus as an exponent of 19th-century liberal Protestantism, and the weaknesses of this portrait, documented in Albert Schweitzer’s well-known The Quest of the Historical Jesus, have long been recognized. The quest reached something of an impasse when scholars realized that none of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ career is strictly biographical. Nonetheless, Collins believes that the research of the last century has left one enduring legacy in its analysis of the relationships among the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke). According to the consensus reached on this issue by the end of the last century, Mark wrote first and was independently expanded by Matthew and Luke. Collins does, however, note that there are critics of that consensus quite active today who hold to the “Griesbach hypothesis” that Matthew was written first, that Luke was dependent on Matthew and that Mark was dependent on both.

Collins’s next four chapters deal with four forms of analysis widely used in contemporary study of the New Testament. He first examines “text criticism,” the necessary first step in any serious study of a Biblical document. Like other ancient texts, the works of the New Testament were transmitted in a complex process during which ancient and medieval scribes often introduced errors into their copies of the sacred texts. The result of these scribal errors is that the numerous manuscripts through which we know the New Testament frequently differ from one another, sometimes quite markedly. Hence, critical study of the New Testament must begin by sorting out those differences or “variants” and attempting to establish as accurately as possible what was originally written. Collins next explores the phenomenon that early Christian authors often did not compose their works from whole cloth but relied on earlier materials that they adapted in various ways. Detection and study of sources, such as the collections of sayings or stories behind the Gospels, or the liturgical hymns and prayers behind some Pauline texts, can teach us a good deal about the communities to which the works of the New Testament were addressed. Next Collins examines “form criticism,” the analysis of the formal features of New Testament materials. Collins notes how certain types of material, such as parables, miracle stories, or proverbs regularly followed conventional patterns, especially when these units of tradition were transmitted orally. Understanding those conventions can often help to determine the original points intended by particular stories or sayings. Collins then examines “redaction criticism,” the study of how the authors of the Gospels and epistles modified and adapted their sources. Attention to this editorial activity can frequently help to isolate the particular perspectives of individual authors.

Each of these chapters includes a brief 008review of the major exponents of each method of analysis. Furthermore, each method is illustrated through analogies taken from modern texts. Thus the reader learns as much about the literary forms and editorial procedures of the European English language daily, The Herald American, as about the forms in which the story of Jesus was transmitted. Each chapter ends with a brief example of the method under discussion as it is used in the analysis of a specific passage of the New Testament.

There is a lengthy chapter on “structuralism,” a newer type of analysis that has aroused a good deal of interest in some circles in the past two decades. Structuralists are interested not in what texts say but in the patterns that underlie and are presupposed by texts—in the way that a system of grammar underlies and is presupposed by the users of a language. Thus some structuralists investigate the basic ways in which stories are told, reducing them to patterns of action among certain types of characters. Others, influenced by psychoanalysis, explore the psychological frameworks presupposed by various authors. The theoretical foundations of the various branches of structuralism are quite complex, and structuralist theories are often opaque to the uninitiated. Collins does an admirable job of reducing structuralist jargon and abstraction to a comprehensible level. He does not, however, show that there is much insight to be gained from this approach in understanding New Testament texts. It is certainly telling that this chapter does not have the sort of illustrative example that Collins provides for the other types of analysis.

The final chapters of the work deal with certain theological issues raised by the historical study of the New Testament, namely, the theory of inspiration and the relation of scientific analysis to the life of the Church. Collins rejects any simplistic mechanical theology of inspiration, which would hold that God directly controls the psyche of individual authors. Nonetheless, Collins feels that it is important to affirm that God is involved in the process of the production of New Testament scriptures. He also finds it important to affirm that Biblical study should be performed in the service of the Church, although he is never quite clear what operative limitations that commitment imposes on the Biblical scholar.

A lengthy epilogue recounts the struggles within the Roman Catholic Church during the last century over the issue of Biblical interpretation. Fr. Collins reviews such developments as the papal encyclicals and the decrees of the Pontifical Biblical Commission early in this century that cast a pall over Roman Catholic critical scholarship. He notes the resurgence of Catholic Biblical study after the encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu of Pius XII in 1943. Finally, he provides a detailed account of the ecclesiastical controversies and intrigues that preceded the very positive statement on scripture and scriptural study produced by the Second Vatican Council. These pages make interesting reading for anyone not familiar with the intrigues and controversies recounted. Informed about this history, the reader can easily understand Collins’s concern with theological issues and with the question of the relationship of Biblical study to the Church.

Collins’s work will certainly interest those who desire an introduction to the methods of New Testament study from a Catholic perspective, although on many technical matters there is little that distinguishes Collins’s work from the approach of Protestants such as Koester. Anyone, however, who actually wants to be introduced to the New Testament itself will probably be frustrated by this volume. With its concern for methods and their implications, it obscures the heart of the subject matter.

There are other significant limitations to the volume. Despite all of Collins’s concern with the methods used for the historical study of the New Testament, there are major gaps in his survey. It is surprising, for instance, that he does not devote any attention to the contributions that archaeology or the historical study of ancient religion and culture have made to New Testament interpretation. Similarly, the interest in sociological and anthropological analysis of the New Testament among scholars in the United States and in Germany during the last decade goes unnoticed.

Even in the area of his own major interest, the theological interpretation of the New Testament, Collins leaves some fundamental issues in the dark. It is obvious, for example, from his disparaging references to the “excesses of rationalistic criticism” that he dislikes the approach of many liberal Protestant and even some Catholic scholars who discount or reinterpret the miraculous and supernatural elements of scripture. Yet he never discusses directly and systematically the issues involved. The attempt of the work to show how and to what extent the “historical-critical” method has been accepted by Roman Catholic scholars remains unfulfilled as long as such basic issues remain hidden.

The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul

Wayne A. Meeks

(Yale University Press: New Haven, Connecticut, 1983) 299 pp., $19.95