Misquoting Jesus Read Online Free PDF Page A

himself a Jewish rabbi (teacher) who accepted the authority of the Torah, and possibly other sacred Jewish books, and taught his interpretation of those books to his disciples. 3 Like other rabbis of his day, Jesus maintained that God’s will could be found in the sacred texts, especially the Law of Moses. He read these scriptures, studied these scriptures, interpreted these scriptures, adhered to these scriptures, and taught these scriptures. His followers were, from the beginning, Jews who placed a high premium on the books of their tradition. And so, already, at the start of Christianity, adherents of this new religion, the followers of Jesus, were unusual in the Roman Empire: like the Jews before them, but unlike nearly everyone else, they located sacred authority in sacred books. Christianity at its beginning was a religion of the book.
    C HRISTIANITY AS A R ELIGION OF THE B OOK
    As we will see momentarily, the importance of books for early Christianity does not mean that all Christians could read books; quite the contrary, most early Christians, like most other people throughout theempire (including Jews!), were illiterate. But that did not mean that books played a secondary role in the religion. In fact, books were centrally important, in fundamental ways, to the lives of Christians in their communities.
    Early Christian Letters
    The first thing to notice is that many different kinds of writing were significant for the burgeoning Christian communities of the first century after Jesus’s death. The earliest evidence we have for Christian communities comes from letters that Christian leaders wrote. The apostle Paul is our earliest and best example. Paul established churches throughout the eastern Mediterranean, principally in urban centers, evidently by convincing pagans (i.e., adherents of any of the empire’s polytheistic religions) that the Jewish God was the only one to be worshiped, and that Jesus was his Son, who had died for the sins of the world and was returning soon for judgment on the earth (see 1 Thess. 1:9–10). It is not clear how much Paul used scripture (i.e., the writings of the Jewish Bible) in trying to persuade his potential converts of the truth of his message; but in one of his key summaries of his preaching he indicates that what he preached was that “Christ died, in accordance with the scriptures…and that he was raised, in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3–4). Evidently Paul correlated the events of Christ’s death and resurrection with his interpretation of key passages of the Jewish Bible, which he, as a highly educated Jew, obviously could read for himself, and which he interpreted for his hearers in an often successful attempt to convert them.
    After Paul had converted a number of people in a given locale, he would move to another and try, usually with some success, to convert people there as well. But he would sometimes (often?) hear news from one of the other communities of believers he had earlier established, and sometimes (often?) the news would not be good: members of the community had started to behave badly, problems of immorality had arisen, “false teachers” had arrived teaching notions contrary to his own, some of the community members had started to hold tofalse doctrines, and so on. Upon hearing the news, Paul would write a letter back to the community, dealing with the problems. These letters were very important to the lives of the community, and a number of them eventually came to be regarded as scripture. Some thirteen letters written in Paul’s name are included in the New Testament.
    We can get a sense of how important these letters were at the earliest stages of the Christian movement from the very first Christian writing we have, Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, usually dated to about 49 C . E ., 4 some twenty years after Jesus’s death and some twenty years before any of the Gospel accounts of