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  • 10 - Self-definition vis-à-vis the Jewish matrix

  • from Part III - Community Traditions and Self-Definition
  • Edited by Margaret M. Mitchell, University of Chicago, Frances M. Young, University of Birmingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Christianity
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    19 January 2006, pp 214-229

  • Summary

    To speak of early Christian self-definition is to recognise that the sense of self always implies differentiation from one or more 'others'. This chapter identifies those significant 'others' as the 'Jewish matrix' and the 'Graeco-Roman world', differentiation from 'Gnostic' groups is arguably different in kind. Paul's was not the only model developing during the first century. Although constrained by the quasi-biographical gospel genre, Matthew denies any rupture with a genuine faithfulness to the past, either in his presentation of the person of Jesus, whom he describes in ways recalling Moses. Now that rabbinic Judaism is no longer taken as the controlling norm for any reconstruction of Jewish thought throughout the period one can also recognise that Christian theology's attempts to address the Hellenistic world continued to owe much to the earlier and perhaps continuing efforts made by Jews to speak of their God in the same context.