Author: ppadmin

Myers, pastor of a Congregational church in Oklahoma City, has walked with his congregation on a path that looks more to relationships than to creeds as normative for Jesus’ friends.  It is the path that leads away from adoration of the ‘nation state and standing armies, away from closed religious scriptures’ (p 10).

Back to the days of the early church when the call of G-d was experiential, not creedal (‘right belief instead of right worship’, p 10).  He focuses on ‘What does the Bible really say?  What does it mean to say it is inspired by G-d? Why do we believe that G-d’s voice is exclusively in the past tense? (p 19).  He describes religion at its best: ‘biblically responsible, intellectually honest, emotionally satisfying and socially significant’ (p 22).  He looks at the way in which the bible has been shaped:  a process of review and selection that condensed an enormous amount of material down to four gospels, a pseudo-history we call the Acts of the Apostles, and the letters that complete the New Testament’ (p 24).

Myers does several chapters on emphasizing the relational dimensions of the drop-out carpenter:  ‘Original blessing, not Original Sin’, ‘Christianity as Compassion, not Condemnation’, ‘Discipleship as obedience, not Observance’, ‘Justice as Covenant, not Control’, ‘Prosperity as Dangerous, not Divine’; ‘Religion as Relationship, not Righteousness’.

I know it’s an old book, but after I reread it after many years I realized how insightful Malherbe had been in focusing differently on the biblical writings.

One of the major changes in the biblical landscape has been the interest in religious studies in universities and colleges not affiliated with ecclesial bodies; ‘the perspective from which early Christianity is studied is no longer that of the church’ (p 3).

Malherbe widens the interpretation of early Christian literate and the communities with which the writings are associated.  ‘It is at least possible that some documents were rescued from obscurity not because they represented the viewpoints of communities but precisely because they challenged them.  It is too facile to view literature as the simple product of communities; (p 13).  And the New Testament deals with concrete situations and should be understood in relation to these precise situations.  Any sustained attempt at homogenization will lead to imprecision’ (p 17).

A fascinating summary of the first four generations of storytellers who created the New Testament and Christian faith, the story of the origins and developments of the Christian movement as told by the people who lived it.  White deals with the story as reflecting four generations (a generation is about forty years).

The first generation runs from the death of Jesus to the end of the first Jewish revolt against Rome (70 CE); the second generation runs from 70-110 CE and deals with the changes that took place within the Jewish movement; tensions between the Jesus sect and other Jews begin to emerge; the third generation (110-150) shows the movement breaking away from its Jewish roots and becoming a separate institution; issues of church leadership, relation to the Roman state and regional diversity make up this period; the fourth generation (150-190) sees the Christian movement coming of age socially and intellectually.

This is the generation that sees the first efforts to shape the New Testament canon.  ‘The New Testament is the source for much of our understanding of the development of early Christianity, but it is also a product of the development.’

‘The Bible is necessarily misunderstood if one’s reading of it is not grounded in an appreciation of the social system from which its documents arose’ (p 5).  This is the basic orientation of Malina’s discussion of the New Testament documents, as he examines cultural anthropological dimensions and backgrounds.

Malina identifies the social institutions comprising the biblical story:  kinship, politics, religion and economics (of which only kinship and politics were of explicit focal concern’ (p 5). Biblical authors never spoke of economics simply…the vocabulary of the various ideologies expressed in the bible worked within kinship and politics.  ‘Religion is to be understood through belonging and power (not reasoned influence).  Economics is meaningless unless convertible into honour, and thus has no focus in and of itself’ (p 17).

The two major Mediterranean social institutions were kinship and politics; patronage marked the relationships within these.  Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of G-d challenges these institutions and their embodiment in Roman structures.  For the Kingdom of G-d to make sense to Israelites living in Galilee and Judea, it would have to speak to what was wrong:  ‘the Roman political economy and its appropriation by the local Israelite aristocracy.  This is  the role that the G-d of Israel would play on behalf of his people: not that of monarch but of ‘Father’ (p 84).  ‘The kingdom of G-d was to take the form of personal and representative theocracy’ (p 161).