Jesus’ Gentile Movement Became Jewish?
Jesus’ Gentile Movement Became Jewish?
Mack’s view of how Jesus’ movement developed must presuppose that Jesus (though a Galilean Jew) spawned a movement that was essentially Gentile in character, some part of which later became conservatively Jewish. Since an ancient Gentile movement would not likely respect a conservative Jewish trajectory, it is not surprising that we have no parallels to any such phenomenon in antiquity.183
More specifically, Mack claims that the Christ cult quickly evolved “on the model of the mystery religions, complete with entrance baptisms, rites of recognition (the holy kiss), ritualized meals (the lord’s supper),” as well as a new emphasis on conversion.184 I will return at the end of this section to Mack’s logic of preferring Gentile to Jewish parallels, but for the moment want to survey these specific examples. Mystery cults were non-Jewish and polytheistic, hence do not provide ready background to Jesus’ early movement. Had Mack looked elsewhere, he would have seen that the parallels he suggests were in no wise limited to mystery religions. Thus, for example, kisses were standard greetings for family or close associates throughout the ancient Mediterranean world,185 in no way limited to cult associations.
Likewise, Jewish parallels to conversion (also “with entrance baptisms”) are much closer than joining various mystery cults.186 Mystery “baptisms” were simply an initial lustration — like the regular cultic lustrations many temples required on normal occasions — that were part but not the center of cultic initiation. 187 By contrast, Jewish proselyte baptism was a rite of initiation-conversion, known even in Greek writers like Epictetus.188 Even if one rejects the priority or influence of Jewish proselyte baptism, as some do, the Jewish initial lustrations at Qumran189 are at least closer to the milieu in which Jesus’ movement originated and initially grew than are pagan mystery lustrations.
Mack’s suggested origin of the “lord’s supper” also ignores closer parallels for more distant ones. It is easy to understand how a cult meal modeled after the Jewish Passover Seder could be adapted in a Greek context to resemble a Greek banquet or cultic meal,190 but difficult to see why Jewish Christians (who were influenced by Greek culture but mistrusted Gentile religious practices) would have transformed a Greek cultic celebration into a Passover meal. (We discuss the last supper later, in ch. 20.)
Certainly Diaspora Jewish missionaries to Greeks adapted Greek language and Mediterranean Christianity became increasingly hellenized over the next few centuries. But as we have noted, Judaism was heavily influenced by Greek culture, and the reverse was not true (apart from magical texts). Texts that share both Jewish and Greek elements — as all New Testament documents in varying degrees do — are thus primarily Jewish rather than non-Jewish texts.
One cannot be certain of a writer’s motives, but Mack at least seems to suggest that part of his motivation for writing is to disabuse Christians of faulty thinking (an agenda one can certainly appreciate). He seeks to force them to see that they alone (he opines) of all religions demand that their adherents believe their myth to be history, and he summons them to recognize that their myth is not history. By such a procedure, Mack hopes to make Christians “multicultural,” able to dialogue evenhandedly with other faiths.191 Regardless of what one thinks of this agenda (most of us favor true multiculturalism), Mack’s agenda, like that of the Jesus Seminar, seems to drive his reading of historical data.