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4 - Jewish Christianity

from Part II - The Jesus Movements

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Joel Marcus
Edited by
Margaret M. Mitchell  and
Frances M. Young
Margaret M. Mitchell
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
Frances M. Young
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
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Summary

Jesus and the earliest church

To some readers, the title of this chapter may seem like a contradiction in terms, since ‘Judaism’ and ‘Christianity’ are generally perceived to be opposites. But ‘from the beginning it was not so’ (Matt 19:8); Jesus and his first disciples were Jews, and for several centuries after his death Christians of Jewish origin were a significant presence both inside and outside of the land of his birth.

His own legacy, to be sure, was ambiguous; he was remembered, for example, as having claimed that it was not what entered people’s mouths that defiled them but what came out of their mouths (Mark 7:15; Matt 15:11; Gos. Thom. 14). If taken literally, this principle would suggest that foods have no power to defile, a conclusion flatly contradicting the Old Testament kosher regulations (Lev 11). It has been argued, however, that Jesus’ saying employs a Semitic idiom in which ‘not this but that’ actually means ‘not so much this as that’. Although Mark 7:19 interprets the saying as an assertion that all foods may be consumed, that is Mark’s exegesis not Jesus’, and it is omitted in the Matthean parallel (Matt 15:17). If Jesus had made an unambiguous statement abrogating the Old Testament kosher laws, these scholars say, those within the later church who claimed that Christians were free to eat anything probably would have invoked it to end discussion – but they did not.

Keywords

fourth-century Pseudo-Clementine literatureJamesJerusalemGentile ChristianityPeterJewish ChristianityTorahJesusmother church
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Christianity , pp. 85 - 102
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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