Paula Fredriksen. When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation. Yale University Press, 2018.
Paula Fredriksen’s newest book attempts a difficult feat: to understand the first generation of Jesus followers, despite having to do so with an eclectic smattering of passionately biased evidence that also happens to have been cherished as sacred text by almost two thousand years of interpreters. I enjoyed the intellectual exercise of imagining with Fredriksen how a small group of Jews living in the early 1st century C.E. would have understood the message, execution, and shifting beliefs about the imminent resurrection (Endtime). To accomplish her goal, she synthesizes the work of her lifelong career of piecing together what is known and what can be gleaned about the first Jesus followers, situating them solidly within Judaism in the Second Temple period, especially in the context of the tumultuous in the first century.
The first chapter examines the importance of the Jerusalem temple cult throughout early Judaism in order to highlight the important place it occupied in Jesus’s preaching and in the lives of his followers after his death. Fredriksen correctly notes that even the Dead Sea sect, whom she identifies as the Essenes, rejected worship at the temple because of the "incorrect" way in which the priests ran the cult (pp. 31–32; 42). Their rejection, therefore, was in response to contemporaneous priestly authority rather than of the temple itself. Fredriksen notes that while most scholars follow the itineraries of the Synoptic Gospels, she supports an itinerary more like the one found in the Gospel of John; Jesus’s crucifixion does not make sense if, as per the Synoptics, he appears only once in Jerusalem to preach his message (pp. 14–20). After all, why would the Roman authorities, Jewish authorities, or even the larger crowd be aware of Jesus and his movement at all if this was his first trip?
In the second chapter, Fredriksen indicates that a logical scholarly critique of Jesus’s support of the temple cult—for which she argued in the previous chapter—would focus on the pericope of Jesus turning over of the moneychangers’s tables, which appears in some form in all the canonical gospels. While the event likely happened in some form, she argues that the protest would not have been about sacrifice per se, as sacrifice was the whole point of not only Jewish temples but of most temples in antiquity (p 47). Instead, Fredriksen identifies this scene as a visual prophesy for Jesus’s teaching about the imminent approach of the Endtime: “[Jesus] symbolically enacted the current temple’s coming apocalyptic destruction. At or as the End of the Age, God would demolish the standing temple, Herod’s temple, in order to replace it with the final, glorious, eschatological temple of the Kingdom [...]. Such a prediction of destruction would imply no censure of the current temple. Jesus made no such negative judgment” (pp.48–49, italics present in original). Further, she notes that Paul is silent on Jesus’s prediction of the destruction of the Second Temple, although he writes prolifically about (and shares) Jesus’s expectation of the immediacy of the Kingdom of God (pp. 50–51). Fredriksen explores this topic specifically to ask why Jesus was crucified and how his crucifixion relates to the temple. Fredriksen notes that Jesus’s popularity combined with his focus on the Endtime being soon (perhaps even during that Passover) would have caused the authorities to be concerned about the potential for civil unrest. Jesus is arrested in secret and quickly executed as “King of the Jews,” not because of his teachings, then, but because the expectation of the imminent Endtimes by the Passover crowds may have caused unruly behavior, or even outright rebellion, against the ruling Romans. This also explains why Jesus’s followers were not arrested and why they continued their ministry within Jerusalem—the authorities knew that the rest of Jesus’s mission and message, which were taken up by his followers, were not in themselves problematic (pp. 69–73).
Chapter three addresses the cognitive dissonance that Jesus’s followers were likely to have felt after his swift execution. The visions of the risen Jesus and ideas of the resurrection, Fredriksen notes, are what would have resolved the dissonance: “If Jesus were raised, then the Kingdom truly must be at hand” (p. 75). That only Jesus was raised and not everyone, which was the general expectation of Jewish resurrection for those who believed in it, fed into the idea that Jesus must therefore return, soon, in order to complete the general resurrection. However, as the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus declined and finally stopped altogether, Fredriksen points to four reasons as to why the movement did not die out: 1) that some followers continued to experience charismata (p. 99); 2) that his followers turned to Jewish scripture which provided more robust context and content for Jesus’ mission (p. 100); 3) this turning toward a new interpretation of scripture helped Jesus’s followers better articulate what would be expected with Jesus’s imminent return (p. 101); and 4) the followers saw the pause in the expected eschatological timetable as a God-given chance to carry Jesus’s message to the Diaspora and the nations (p. 101).
At the beginning of chapter four Fredriksen turns to an examination of the variety of messianic expectations during the Second Temple period, including Davidic, priestly, and prophetic expectations, in order to highlight the interpretative flexibility of the concept. In fact, she argues “its eventual application to the figure of Jesus demonstrates precisely that flexibility” (p. 108). Jesus’s followers used their analysis of earlier writings together with Jewish messianic expectations and with the teachings of Jesus in order to confirm “traditions about Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and second coming,” which were already present when Paul wrote to the Romans (pp. 122-3). With these evolving understandings of eschatology, the ministry of Jesus’s followers began to spread beyond Jerusalem to the synagogues in the Diaspora (p. 40). In addition to Jews, these synagogues would have contained non-Jews who worshipped the Jewish god in addition to their gods, and some of whom became the first gentile believers in Jesus.
Chapter five addresses more directly these gentile members of the Jesus movement. Diverging from typical New Testament scholarship, Fredriksen carefully distinguishes between these people—whom she calls eschatological gentiles—and “god-fearers,” who could worship the Jewish god in addition to their gods. Those who joined the Jesus movement, significantly, would be required to stop the worship of their gods (p. 151), which, in turn, created social instability among their neighbors and in their cities, together with trouble for the local synagogues wrongly accused of fomenting this lack of civic piety (p. 159). Whether these eschatological gentiles needed to formally “convert” [sic] to Judaism became a question of contention in Jesus communities, both in and outside of Jerusalem (p. 159). The book of Acts, Fredriksen notes, works hard to smooth over these disagreements in its retelling of the time, but Paul’s letters highlight just how contentious this topic was (pp. 159–60). Although Fredriksen limits this analysis to the gospels, Acts, and Paul’s letters in her analysis, the inclusion of, for instance, chapters 2–3 in the Book of Revelation could corroborate these disagreements so evident in Paul, which Acts attempts to downplay.
Fredriksen ends the book by exploring the idea that the political dramas of the first century, including the emperor Caligula’s move to put his statue in the Jerusalem temple, all served to reinforce an expectation of the imminent general resurrection (pp. 165–8). The first Jewish revolt against Rome and Rome’s strong military response likely contributed to the idea that the apocalypse was surely imminent (p. 171). In a sense, it was. Fredriksen even wonders at the end of the book, if some of James’ people were at the temple when it was finally destroyed, as described by Josephus (p. 182).
The challenges of the available evidence means that some topics—such as the importance of the Jerusalem temple (chapter one) and the variety of messianic expectations (chapter four)— are explored at greater depth than others. After Paul’s letters, the canonical gospels, and Acts, the analysis relies most heavily on Josephus, less so on some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, Daniel, and very few other canonical and apocryphal texts. Of course, this is a challenge that every scholar of this period shares, but it is curious that more non-canonical texts were not used, given the rich and vibrant image they paint of early Jewish practices and beliefs. On a related note, scholarly readers may be surprised to find citations of secondary literature to be quite light; in fact, these focus primarily on Fredriksen’s previous work. The work presents the culmination of a senior scholar’s career, and the footnotes are signposts of her earlier more typically academic, defensive, and painstaking work.
Overall, the work is an evidence-based, yet imaginative exercise and a worthwhile read. It took me two read-throughs to really appreciate what Fredriksen is doing here. At first, I was frustrated by the minimal citations of mostly Fredriksen’s own earlier work, and what felt like her often maximalist interpretations of the evidence. In my second reading I more fully appreciated the difficulty of the task she had set for herself—to reconstruct what may have been happening “on the ground” within the first generation of Jesus followers for an audience not limited to specialists. Fredriksen is a consummate communicator who has the ability—rare amongst scholars—to write clearly and vividly for a public audience. This is both this book's strength and its weakness. Specialist scholars will want more citations, more cautious conclusions, and fewer endnotes that simply refer back to Fredriksen's earlier work. However, general readers may find themselves lost without a background in Second Temple literature and history. I would recommend this book, which represents the synthesis of an impressive career, for both educated laypeople and for specialists who, ideally, already have a firm grasp of Second Temple Jewish literature—a group which should include New Testament scholars, but too often does not.
Shayna Sheinfeld, Sheffield Institute of Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies. s.sheinfeld@sheffield.ac.uk