CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 7
The Beginning of “The Way”
1. He is risen!
When, after his execution, the body of jesus was safely entombed, the chief priests and temple authorities no doubt felt that they could breathe freely. There was now no risk of a popular rising in support of a discredited leader, and as for his closest followers, their inglorious flight when he was arrested made it clear that no more would be heard from them. They would disappear into the welcome obscurity of the occupations which they had so rashly left in order to follow the ill-starred Nazarene. Some members of the establishment who were not devoid of decent feelings would have agreed that it was sad that the Nazarene had ventured into Judaea and become a focus for such dangerous enthusiasm in and around Jerusalem. But such enthusiasm had to be nipped in the bud. If ever the end justified the means, it was then. Perhaps even the coincidence that the Roman penalty of crucifixion, to which Jesus had been sentenced, came within the meaning of the declaration of Deuteronomy 21:23, that “a hanged man is accursed by God”, could be overruled for good: it would discredit the Nazarene and his claims in the eyes of truly religious Jews more effectively than anything else.
Many of the religious Jews, Pharisees and others, who disagreed with the policies of the chief priests and the Roman administration and deplored the manner of Jesus’ execution, may nevertheless have experienced their own sense of relief at the removal of such a disturbing presence.
All these calculations were shattered by Jesus’ return to life. No one saw him leave the tomb, but on the third day from his death and burial, and for several days after that, he appeared to many of his followers in a manner which left them in no doubt that he was “alive again after his passion” (Acts 1:3). Twenty-five years after the event Paul could summarize the facts as he had been told them, reminding his converts at Corinth that Christ, having died,
was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas [Peter], then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.
This summary (1 Corinthians 15:4–7) raises one or two interesting critical problems to which Paul himself elsewhere helps to provide a solution.1 But it is sufficient at the moment to observe the variety of the resurrection appearances—occasionally to individuals, at other times to groups, and once to quite a large number. The followers of Jesus were taken completely by surprise when he appeared to them thus, and the experience made all the difference in life to them. In addition to those who were most closely associated with him during his ministry, members of his family, who had not hitherto been conspicuous in their support of him or approval of his activity, also saw him in resurrection, and were henceforth prominent among his followers.
The resurrection faith, to which the “Easter event” gave birth, was followed by an inflow of new life and new power, in which they quickly recognized the gift of the Holy Spirit with which, as John the Baptist had announced, the Coming One of whom he spoke would baptize his people.2 Jesus was the Coming One: now, raised and exalted by God, he had poured out the promised gift on his disciples. The immediate effect of this outpouring was an urge to bear public and personal witness that Jesus, the crucified one, had been vindicated by God, and to proclaim forgiveness and the blessings of the new age thus inaugurated for all who yielded their allegiance to him. They soon won an impressively large body of adherents, who formed with them a new religious fellowship in Jerusalem—the fellowship of disciples of Jesus, knit together in unity by the newly imparted Spirit. They followed what they called the Way—the way of faith and life initiated by Jesus. This expression was not unprecedented in Israel: it is found, for example, in the writings of the Qumran community as a designation for that community’s faith and life. One scholar, indeed, has argued that it was from the Qumran community that the disciples of Jesus took it over—in the first instance, in Damascus (because it is in a Damascene context that it first appears in a Christian sense).3 But there is no need to posit such borrowing: it is characteristic of minority groups that abbreviated expressions of this kind become current within them as part of their esoteric vocabulary, and “the way” is a shortened version of “the true way” or “the right way”.
It is convenient to refer to the fellowship as the church of Jerusalem, even if the term “church” is strictly an anachronism when used of the earliest period of its existence. In addition to being called disciples, its members were variously described as the believers, the saints or the poor. Those of them who had landed property sold it and put the proceeds into a common pool, from which a daily distribution was made to the needier members. By the time this common fund was exhausted, other sources of supply began to become available, as the gospel spread farther afield and converts in other provinces were taught to regard it as a privilege to send material aid to the mother church.4
Many Pharisees soon recognized that the revived “Jesus movement” was not such a menace to pure religion as they had feared. Jesus’ disciples appeared to be much less radical in their attitude to the law and sacred tradition than he himself had been. Their leaders attended the temple services and conducted themselves in general as observant Jews, enjoying popular good will. If they proclaimed Jesus as Messiah, it was at least counted to them for righteousness that the basis of their proclamation was the claim that he had been raised from the dead. Their firm grasp of the doctrine of resurrection was commendable, even if their witness to the resurrection of Jesus was held to be misguided.
For this very emphasis on resurrection, however, they incurred the further disapproval of the Sadducean chief-priesthood, who in any case were gravely shaken by this renewal of public agitation (as they reckoned it) in the name of one who they had hoped would soon be forgotten.5 The Jesus movement was reaching alarming proportions, and many of them felt that if drastic measures were not taken to suppress it, it would get hopelessly out of hand. On one occasion when the apostles were arrested and brought before the Sanhedrin, charged with disobeying an earlier order of the court to stop preaching and teaching in the name of Jesus, it was the Pharisaic leader Gamaliel, as we have seen, who persuaded his colleagues to regard their offence as a technical one and treat them leniently.6
Some Pharisees, indeed, joined the disciples; if they were persuaded by the apostles’ witness that Jesus had indeed risen from the dead and was therefore the Messiah, they could add this belief to what they already held, without giving up their essential Pharisaism with its devotion to the law.7 If the chief priests maintained their implacable opposition to the movement, many of the ordinary priests, humble in character as in social status, were disposed to join it.8
2. Primitive christology
At quite an early period in their new corporate existence as companions of the Way, the disciples found themselves assessing the place of Jesus in the unfolding of the divine purpose. With increasing clarity they saw his identity and rôle adumbrated in the ancient scriptures, especially as he himself had taught them how to understand those scriptures. In the apostolic speeches of the early chapters of Acts there are quite a number of interlacing christologies—explanations of the person and work of the crucified and exalted Jesus in terms of biblical prophecy. He was the anointed prince of the house of David;9 he was the humiliated and vindicated servant of the Lord;10 he was the promised prophet like Moses.11 Nor was he identified only with personal figures of prophecy; impersonal images also were pressed into service. He was “the stone which the builders rejected” which, according to Psalm 118:22, had become the capstone of the pediment.12
These christological interpretations of Hebrew prophecy are not to be set down as constructions of the author of Acts; their primitive character is shown by the fact that they are presupposed in several strands of New Testament thought, and seem therefore to lie behind them all. The theme of the rejected stone, for example, was early combined with other “stone” oracles in the Old Testament to produce a composite testimonium which is appropriated and variously exploited in the Pauline corpus, in 1 Peter and in the Gospel of Luke.13
We must not think that these “christologies” were originally kept separate, as though a Davidic christology, a servant christology, a prophet christology and a “stone” christology stood side by side, each developed independently by one group or school within the new movement. They have been interwoven with each other throughout the history of Christian thought, and such evidence as we have indicates that it was so from the beginning.14
Even more important, however, than these “christologies” in themselves was the acknowledgment of Jesus as Lord in a sense which implied universal sovereignty. His exaltation pointed to him as the one designated “my lord”, to whom the divine oracle of Psalm 110:1 was addressed: “Yahweh says to my lord, ‘Sit at my right hand, till I make your enemies your footstool’.” The first impetus to this interpretation of the oracle was provided by Jesus’ own allusion to it in his reply to the high priest’s question about his identity: “you shall see the Son of man seated at the right hand of the Almighty” (Mark 14:62). His words had been vindicated in the event, for God had made the crucified Jesus “both Lord and Messiah” (Acts 2:36).
From early days the concept of Jesus being enthroned at the right hand of God became a commonplace of Christian thought and language: there are few strands of New Testament teaching in which it does not appear. (Then, as now, the expression was understood as a figure of speech for supreme God-given authority.) And when it was asked how he was engaged at the right hand of God, the answer was soon forthcoming: he was engaged in a ministry of intercession. The fourth servant song ends with the statement that the servant “bore the sin of many, and made intercession for transgressors” (Isaiah 53:12); moreover, Jesus had spoken of the Son of man as exercising such a ministry in the presence of God. “Every one who acknowledges me before men”, he had said, “the Son of man also will acknowledge before the angels of God” (Luke 12:8). So, in what appears to be a quotation of a primitive and widespread Christian confession, Paul speaks of Jesus as the one “who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us” (Romans 8:34). The picture, says H. B. Swete, is not that of “an orante, standing ever before the Father with outstretched arms, … pleading our cause in the presence of a reluctant God”, but that of “a throned Priest-King, asking what He will from a Father who always hears and grants His request.”15
The primitiveness of the ascription to Jesus of the title “Lord” is shown by its currency in the Aramaic form maran or maranā as well as in the Greek kyrios: indeed the Aramaic invocation maranā–thā (“Our Lord, come”), used probably in the eucharistic commemoration, antedated the beginnings of Gentile Christianity and made its way (like the liturgical Amen and Hallelujah) untranslated into the vocabulary of Greek-speaking churches.16
The early currency of the invocation maranā–thā bears witness to the disciples’ lively expectation of Jesus’ parousia, his advent in glory, to consummate the kingdom inaugurated by his death and resurrection. One of the most primitive eschatological passages in the New Testament comes in Peter’s exhortation to the people of Jerusalem to repent and turn again, so that their sins may be blotted out and “that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord”, with the sending of Jesus, their foreordained Messiah, “whom heaven must receive until the time for establishing all that God spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old” (Acts 3:19–21). Here it is implied that early repentance on the part of the people of Jerusalem (perhaps as representing all Israel) would speed the parousia. This form of the expectation was soon superseded by others, but the expectation itself lived on as a potent hope throughout the apostolic age, not least in the thought of Paul.
3. Activity and death of Stephen
It would be strange if Jesus’ radical attitude to the law and religious tradition in general had not survived at all among his followers.17 Survive it did, and remarkably enough (so far as our records provide information), among the Hellenists rather than among the Hebrews.
The Hellenists in the primitive church of Jerusalem soon came to be recognized, by themselves and by the Hebrews, as a distinct group within it, on both economic and theological grounds. We are imperfectly informed about them, but we have some knowledge of two of their early leaders, both exceptionally gifted men—Stephen, outstanding in theological debate, and Philip, active as an evangelist. Stephen attracted attention by his critical attitude to the temple. At a time when the leaders of the church were attending its services daily, he took seriously Jesus’ prediction of its downfall, and maintained that such a permanent structure was no part of the divine plan for a pilgrim people. The ideal was rather a movable tent-shrine such as the ancestors of Israel had in the wilderness, not fixed to one specially sacred locality. He further maintained that the coming of Jesus had profoundly changed the status of the Mosaic law.
He appears to have defended these theses vigorously in the Hellenistic “synagogue of the freedmen”, as it was called, which was attended by Jews who had come to Jerusalem from Cyrene, Alexandria, Cilicia and Asia.18 We may wonder whether Paul the Cilician, Hebrew though he was rather than Hellenist, visited this synagogue and heard what Stephen had to say.
The upshot of Stephen’s outspoken expression of these radical views was that he was charged before the Sanhedrin with blasphemy—more particularly, blasphemy against the temple. An earlier attempt to procure a conviction against Jesus on this very charge had failed because of conflicting testimony;19 on this occasion there was no possibility of failure, because Stephen’s reply to the charge was a repetition and elaboration of his argument, delivered with something like prophetic fervour. The death-sentence was inevitable, as Stephen knew well. But as he faced the adverse verdict of the court, he invoked the superior advocacy of “the Son of man, standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:56).20
When Judaea became a Roman province in A.D. 6, the Jewish administration was deprived of capital jurisdiction, which the prefect reserved to himself.21 In one area, however, capital jurisdiction was left with the Sanhedrin: that was in cases affecting the sanctity of the temple. Where that sanctity was violated, by word or action, the Jewish authorities were empowered to execute their own law.22 The penalty for blasphemy was death by stoning,23 and this penalty was carried out against Stephen.24
His trial and execution gave the chief-priestly establishment an opportunity to launch a thorough-going campaign of repression against the church. The general populace of Jerusalem were as much shocked by an attack on the temple as their ancestors had been when Jeremiah delivered one over six centuries before.25 The apostles still enjoyed popular favour to such a degree that no action against them was possible, but many members of the church, and in particular those who were most nearly associated with Stephen, were compelled to leave Jerusalem and, indeed, the whole area in which the writ of the Sanhedrin ran. Two results of this dispersion were: first, that the gospel was carried by those Hellenists to territories outside Palestine; secondly, that the church of Jerusalem became much more uniformly Hebrew in its composition and outlook. But it is this campaign of repression that first brings Paul into close involvement with primitive Christianity.