Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) (21 page)

P
AUL’S LETTERS
, written over a decade and a half (from about the year 50 to the mid-60s), are the earliest writings of the New Testament. But the four gospels contain extensive passages, especially some of Jesus’s teachings and the basic accounts of his trial and execution, that take us back to a time that clearly predates Paul’s letters. For these are transcriptions of oral traditions that were current in the years following the crucifixion and may be fairly undiluted recountings of what people heard and saw during the lifetime of Jesus. Other passages, however, have been finessed to suit the view—or even the personality—of a particular evangelist or his need to frame his redaction in a certain way so as to communicate effectively with his intended audience. If Mark is the most primitive, often giving us what seem to be the very textures and odors of Palestine in the early 30s, and Matthew is the most Jewish, sometimes allowing his insistence on Rabbi Jesus’s Torah-faithfulness to blot out all other considerations,
Luke is obviously addressing himself to an audience more cosmopolitan than Mark’s but with limited interest in the specifically Jewish questions that so concerned Matthew.

In Paul’s letters, we see played out the conflict between Paul’s disciples and the Judaizing
Messianists, who insisted that new non-Jewish converts take on all the obligations of a Pharisaic interpretation of the Mosaic Law. Though the Judaizing party remained an element in Christianity into the second century, it was ultimately unsuccessful for several reasons,
among these the inherent complexity of its own program, the strength of Paul’s influence, and habits of mind and heart that made Greeks and Romans relatively unreceptive to the arguments of the Judaizers. In Luke’s Gospel, we see how, as the Judaizers dwindled and the gentiles took their place, the Jesus Movement adapted the
kerygma
—and did not adapt it—to the needs of its new audience, the Greco-Roman gentiles who, largely thanks to Paul’s exertions, began to fill its ranks.

In the cities of the Jewish
diaspora (especially
Alexandria,
Antioch,
Tarsus,
Ephesus, and
Rome), Jews were widely admired by their gentile neighbors. For one thing, they had a
real
religion, not a clutter of gods and goddesses and pro forma rituals that almost nobody took seriously anymore. They actually
believed
in their one God; and, imagine, they even set aside one day a week to pray to him and reflect on their lives. They possessed a dignified library of sacred books that they studied reverently as part of this weekly reflection and which, if more than a little odd in their Greek translation, seemed to point toward a consistent worldview. Besides their religious seriousness, Jews were unusual in a number of ways that caught the attention of gentiles. They were faithful spouses—no, really—who maintained strong families in which even grown children remained affectively attached and respectful to their parents. Despite Caesar Nero’s shining example, matricide was virtually unknown among them. Despite their growing economic success, they tended to be more scrupulous in business than non-Jews. And they were downright finicky when it came to taking human life, seeming to value even a slave’s or a plebeian’s life as much as anyone else’s. Perhaps in nothing did the gentiles find the Jews so admirable as in their acts of
charity. Communities of urban Jews, in addition to opening synagogues,
built welfare centers for aiding the poor, the miserable, the sick, the homebound, the imprisoned, and those, such as widows and orphans, who had no family to care for them.

For all these reasons, the
diaspora cities of the first century saw a marked increase in gentile initiates to Judaism. Many of these were wellborn women who presided over substantial households and who had likely tried out some of the Eastern mystery cults before settling on Judaism. (
Nero’s wife Poppea was almost certainly one of these, and probably the person responsible for instructing Nero in the subtle difference between Christians and more traditional Jews, which he would otherwise scarcely have been aware of.) These gentiles did not, generally speaking, go all the way. Because they tended to draw the line at
circumcision, they were not considered complete Jews. They were, rather,
noachides
, or God-fearers, gentiles who remained gentiles while keeping the
Sabbath and many of the Jewish dietary restrictions and coming to put their trust in the one God of the Jews.

Pilgrimage to
Jerusalem, however, could turn out to be a difficult test of the commitment of the
noachides.
For here in the heart of the Jewish world, they encountered Judaism
enragé
, a provincial religion concerned only with itself, and ages apart from the rational, tolerant Judaism of the diaspora. In the words of
Paul Johnson:

This description of
“Herod’s” Temple (actually the
Second Temple, built in the sixth century
B.C.
and rebuilt by Herod) is more than a bit overwrought. The God of the Jews did not roar in his Temple: the insoluble problem was that, since the
destruction of the First Temple and, with it, the
Ark of the Covenant, God had ceased to be present in his Temple. Nor would animal sacrifice have disgusted the gentiles, since Greeks, Romans, and all ancient peoples offered such sacrifices (though one cannot help wondering whether, had the Second Temple not been destroyed, it would today be ringed from morn to night by indignant animal-rights activists). But Johnson is right to emphasize that Judaism, in its mother city, could display a sweaty tribalism that gentiles would only find unattractive. The partisan, argumentative ambience of first-century Jerusalem, not unlike the atmosphere of the ultra-
Orthodox pockets of the contemporary city, could repel any outsider, whether gentile or
diaspora Jew.

Perhaps most important is Johnson’s shrewd observation that Judaism “contained the matrix of a universal religion.” By this time, the more percipient inhabitants of the Greco-Roman world had come to the conclusion that
polytheism, whatever manifestation it might assume, was seriously flawed. The Jews alone, by offering
monotheism, offered a unitive vision, not the contradictory and flickering epiphanies of a fanciful pantheon of gods and goddesses. But could Judaism adapt to gentile needs, could it lose its foreign accent and outlandish manners? No one saw the opportunity more clearly than Luke; his gospel and its sequel, the
Acts of the Apostles, present
a Jesus and a
Jesus Movement specifically tailored to gentile sensibility.

Careful contemporary scholars stop just short of accepting unequivocally the identity ascribed to Luke in antiquity and attached to his gospel—“a Syrian of Antioch, by profession a physician, the disciple of the apostles, and later a follower of Paul until his martyrdom”—but there is little reason not to assume that Luke was a Greek-speaking gentile, writing for gentiles, and that he is the “Luke” mentioned in the
Letter to
Philemon as Paul’s “fellow worker” and as the “beloved physician” of the
Letter to the Colossians. Luke may very well have come to Judaism as a
noachide
, spending many years in that position, since his knowledge of the
Septuagint, the
Hebrew Bible in its Greek version, is broad and deep—even if his knowledge of Palestinian geography is sometimes faulty, as well as his understanding of Jewish
custom and ritual. He wrote after Mark (who wrote in the late 60s), probably in the 80s a little after Matthew. We do not know where he wrote or for whom, except that we are sure he did not write for Palestinians or for born Jews of any kind.

We are also sure that he did not know Jesus. As he tells us at the outset of his gospel, he is the recipient of extant traditions both oral (“just as the original eyewitnesses passed them on to us”) and written (“since many have undertaken to compile an orderly account of the things that have come to fulfillment among us”). But these written accounts seem to be lacking something in Luke’s eyes, moving him to create his own: “I too have decided, after investigating everything carefully from the beginning, to put [these events] systematically in writing.” The earlier written accounts, though “orderly,” lacked a refined system and were not careful enough in their research.
This would have been the typical reaction of a cultivated Greek writer to the stylistic infelicities and lacunae of a writer like
Mark—and the tactful indirectness of Luke’s criticism is further proof of his excellent Greek education. Luke opens his account with an elegant periodic sentence, which concludes with a characteristic Greek flourish of dedication: “for you,
Theophilus, so that Your Excellency may realize what assurance you have for the instruction you have received.” We know nothing of Theophilus—it is even possible that he is meant to be symbolic of all Luke’s readers, for his name means “God-lover”—but the framing of a long narrative as if it were a letter is a common Greco-Roman literary device.

Mark, in giving Jesus his first utterance (“The Time has come … open your hearts”), sets forth the dominant theme of his gospel.
Matthew does the same by giving us the Beatitudes at the beginning of Jesus’s first sermon. No less does Luke lay before us his understanding of the core of Jesus’s message by presenting us with a scene that he sets at the outset of Jesus’s public ministry. After Jesus’s
baptism and his being tempted by
Satan in the desert, he returns to
Galilee “filled with the
power of the Spirit”: