Walter Schmithals, The Theology of the First
Christians. Translated by O.C. Dean, Jr. Westminster/John Knox
Press, 1997.
Reviewed by Robert M. Price.
Was
the evangelist Mark predicting this book when he wrote, "Not one stone
shall be left upon another"? At any rate, Doctor Schmithals certainly
seems to leave no stone unturned in this searching reexamination of
early Christian thought and practice. He is not one to let sleeping
dogmas lie when he thinks that by awakening them we can gain new
clarity, and he sheds much light here, entering the lists to provide
convincing new solutions to long-stalemated scholarly debates. Many of
Schmithals's insights are not as new as they may appear to some readers
for the simple and regrettable fact that several of his valuable books
have never been rendered into English. (And, speaking of translation, I
suspect that we have translator O.C. Dean to thank/blame for the
inclusive language glossolalia in which Schmithals is sometimes to be
heard speaking here. Someone might have pointed out the difference
between translation and redaction.) Several of Schmithals's exegetical
and theoretical suggestions ought already to be familiar to us from
these earlier books and articles, but then that makes the present
collection of studies all the more a cause of rejoicing: better late
than never!
Walter Schmithals has always managed to challenge critical theories such
as those of Baur and Bultmann with genuinely critical, often more
consistent, alternatives, unlike most who challenge them merely in the
name of stale apologetics. Others seek to turn the critical clock back;
Schmithals tries to set it forward. For instance, his view of the
Jerusalem Council and the nature of the dispute between Paul on the one
hand and James and Peter on the other: Where Baur understood Paul to
represent a law-free gospel attractive to Gentiles, with Peter and James
representing a nationalistic Torah-keeping gospel, Schmithals sees all
the principles agreeing in the manner of liberal Hellenistic synagogue
Judaism that Gentile God-fearers needn't be circumcised as long as they
kept basic moral commandments. James, Peter, and the non-Christian
Jewish leadership objected only when Paul drew off God-fearers from the
synagogue, establishing independent law-free churches (which then
attracted liberal Jews to abandon the synagogue for the church as well).
So the nature of the Jerusalem accord was simply that Paul should
missionize elsewhere, off to the West, in a different sphere of
influence, targeting Gentiles not already part of the synagogue
structure.
Similarly, Schmithals refurbishes the Messianic Secret theory of Wrede
(which some today unwisely reject) by means of a take on the Q Source
that curiously parallels that of Burton Mack and company, and is yet
unique! As is well known, Mack and others take Q (or rather Q1) to be
the gospel of an early Jesus movement that revered Jesus as something
like a Cynic sage, a non-dogmatic, non-apocalyptic, non-soteriological
Jesus, not a Christ. Mark, though also taking up similar material here
and there, has taken his framework of a Messianic Jesus from an entirely
different movement, the Christ cult. The fusion is complete when Matthew
and Luke conflate Mark with Q. Schmithals applies a rather different,
but at least equally suggestive paradigm to the same data. In his view,
Mark belonged to kerygmatic, Messianic Christianity (the Christ cult, if
you will) and became aware of the remnants of the Galilean Jesus
movement who understood Jesus non-messianically (or pre-messianically)
as a prophet. This movement would later become the Ebionites of the
second century. Mark sought to bring them into the fold, arguing that
Jesus was the Messiah, but that understandably the Galileans did not
know it because of Jesus' scheme to keep it secret till later. This
Schmithals sees as the reason for the Messianic Secret schema. Mark,
then, took over an extant Gospel (a kind of Ur-Markus), added the
Messianic Secret motif, as well as some of the sayings of Jesus
cherished by the Galileans, and produced an ecumenical gospel. The
sayings material itself, which survived as Q till Matthew and Luke made
it superfluous, was a compilation of the Jesus traditions of the
Galileans. Who compiled it? Probably Mark himself! He may have
circulated it alongside his gospel, as a supplement. This would explain
how it is that both Luke and Matthew "happen" to have both Mark and Q on
hand as major sources.
Schmithals is a master of source and redaction criticism, but with
form-criticism he holds no truck. It is not that he denies one may sniff
out the original Tendenz of this or that pericope, even it's
ecclesiastical Sitz-im-Leben, but his point is that our gospels
(even Mark) just do not read like compilations. Rather, they are
manifestly literary compositions by distinctive hands. There is no
reason to posit a tunnel period of oral tradition between the
contemporaries of Jesus and the later gospels. Schmithals seems to imply
that the attempt of form-critics to fill in the gap this way was merely
another species of apologetic like that which the second-century bishops
employed when they attributed the gospels to apostles and students of
apostles. But doesn't Schmithals himself posit a kind of oral tradition
twilight when he envisions the sayings passed on by the Galilean
Ebionites? No, because he notes that all the sapiential, this-worldly
teachings in Q are secondary, since they cannot be squared with the
interim-ethic of the apocalyptic Jesus. And the halakhic
controversy stories of Mark are anachronisms, too, stemming from the
period of more-or-less peaceful coexistence with the Hellenistic
synagogues. The point is much the same as when Burton Mack makes this
Markan material the product of the "Synagogue Reform Movement" in
Galilee.
Schmithals discusses the late appearance and almost apocryphal status of
the gospels. He has no patience with those who scour early
ecclesiastical writings looking for evidence of their authors'
acquaintance with the gospels, or who find lame reasons for the silence.
And yet only in the case of John does Schmithals entertain a Tübingen-like
date well on into the second century (he calls attention to recent
research exploding the apologetical early dating of the John Rylands
papyrus which has so long been used as a talisman to exorcise Baur). He
insists on seeing the Synoptics as tied closely to the expulsion of
Christians from the synagogue, though a glance at Rodney Stark's The
Rise of Christianity might give him cause to rethink his picture of
the Jewish-Christian split happening so early. As in Schmithals's
ground-breaking Gnosticism in Corinth, he seems to be coming very close
to a Tübingen or even Dutch Radical view of the dating of the texts, but
never quite to get there. As in his Pauline studies he must read
something like second-century Gnosticism back into the first century, so
here he sees Luke-Acts as targeting a kind of "pre-Marcionite" Paulinism.
I wonder why he does not go all the way with the cogent case made by
John Knox (Marcion and the New Testament) that Luke-Acts in its
present form is a second-century counterblast to real, explicit
Marcionism. He admits that John's gospel is unattested before Montanists
begin citing it, but why not ask whether that gospel may not stem from
Montanist circles, and whether it's promises of the Paraclete may be
originally intended as credentials for Montanus and his congeners?
Schmithals sees what others do not, that in the case of complex ideas,
as in complex texts, we are no doubt dealing with later conflations of
earlier, simpler components. It is from the deconstruction of these
later theological complexes that he derives his source material for
mapping "the theology of the first Christians." For instance, Schmithals
disentangles the threads woven together in this and that Pauline text to
show how the earliest confession was of God as the one who raised Jesus
from the dead. In this frame of reference, the resurrected Jesus was
important as the guarantee of the imminent resurrection of all the
righteous. As time went by, the focus shifted to Jesus whom God raised
and exalted to his right hand as ruling Messiah. In this role Jesus
assumed real, though rudimentary, Christological significance as a kind
of Mahdi who would save the righteous from the final tribulation. The
new covenant would be that established at his Parousia. His saving work,
in other words, was yet in the future. His death, first understood as a
sacrifice inaugurating the soon-coming new covenant, subsequently became
a vicarious sacrifice that brought salvation in the present. The
eucharist, too, began as an eschatological celebratory meal and only
later took on salvific coloring. At first it was a simple "breaking of
bread" without wine. This can be seen from the fact that the meal was
variously celebrated in the early church with salt, water, or fish
instead of wine as the other "kind." In addition, Schmithals notes, if
the bread and wine had gone together from the first, surely we would
read of the "flesh and blood" of Christ, not the "body and blood." Flesh
is the obvious complement to blood, while "spirit" should accompany
"body." (Dare one wonder if somewhere along the chain of signifiers and
history-of-religions influences the Zoroastrian soma/haoma
somehow became the soma and haima of the gospels? But
that's getting too close to John Allegro, I suppose.)
Baptism, too, assumes a new aspect under Schmithals's scrutiny. He
argues that Joachim Jeremias and Kurt Aland, in their famous debate
about infant versus adult baptism, were each both right and wrong.
Schmithals cuts the Gordian Knot: there is no early evidence of the
baptism of children born to Christian parents simply because only
converts were baptized in the first three centuries. The families were
automatically "converted" with the paterfamilias. Sometimes the children
were routinely baptized at this time; sometimes, the baptism of the head
of the family counted for everyone.
Though Schmithals's disdain for Gnosticism is everywhere apparent, he
does not, like so many, allow this distaste to hide from him the
important role Gnosticism played in contributing some of the most
important categories to early Christian thought. Not only did Gnosticism
supply the central notion of apostleship; it also provided some basic
conceptuality still visible in the tangle of associations we call
baptism and the eucharist. Schmithals rejects the taken-for-granted
axiom that Christian baptism was borrowed from John the Baptist. John's
rite was a pietistic renewal sacrament within the faith community, while
Christian immersion was an initiation rite for outsiders. And, as the
Kimbanguist Church of the Congo noticed, the opposition between John's
(mere) water baptism and the anticipated Spirit-baptism of Christians
clearly implies the later has nothing to do with the former. Christian
baptism must have come from Gnosticism, a sacrament of entrance into the
collective identity of the Gnostic Light-Man, the Christ whose several
members the individual illuminati were. Schmithals points out elsewhere
that Gnostic rituals must represent a decadent magical form of an
original belief that self-gnosis would be enough to liberate, the same
difference we find between knowledge-only jnana yoga and rajah
yoga, which supplements pure knowledge with meditative methods. At any
rate, Christians must have borrowed baptism "into Christ" from Jewish
Gnosticism, where the rite itself was salvific. Similarly, the original
Palestinian eschatological eucharist must have been reinterpreted along
the lines of the Gnostic rite where, by means of the ritual of eating
from one loaf, the illuminati experience their pneumatic oneness,
"sharing in the body of Christ."
Schmithals traces two separate Christologies back to two major centers
of early Christianity. In Antioch, an adoptionist conception understood
the death of the virtuous Jesus as an atoning sacrifice, while in
Damascus, under Jewish Gnostic influence, espoused an pre-existence
Christology according to which it was the humiliation of the
incarnation, and not the death in particular, that wrought salvation.
The Damascenes had already drawn on pure Jewish Gnosticism, which had
only a heavenly Christ-Aion who became "incarnate" only by virtue of the
scattering of his divine sparks into the bodies of mortal illuminati.
This they combined with the Palestinian Jewish Christian faith in Jesus
of Nazareth as the Messiah in a more traditional, historical sense. Thus
the fall of the Primal Man of Light into the material realm became the
self-emptying of the pre-incarnate Christ as the incarnate Jesus. Paul
had been converted to the Damascene form of Christianity, but once he
began to associate himself with the mission of the Antiochene
Jewish-Christian synagogues, he combined elements of both Christologies.
Burton Mack talks about the gradual fusion of disparate Jesus movements
and Christ cults and, though Mack's name never once occurs in this book,
Schmithals seems to have filled in the blanks left by Mack's generality.
This is no criticism of Mack. Anyone would be well advised to read his
wonderful books and Schmithals's together.
I have already anticipated how Schmithals's suggestions sometimes seem
to imply more radical conclusions than he himself reaches. Let me just
note in conclusion how two of Schmithals's form-critical insights into
the Pauline Epistles would help elucidate a key aspect of the Dutch
Radical paradigm. W.C. van Manen and others rejected the Pauline
authorship of every single so-called Pauline Epistle, allowing that
there may well have been some early, no-longer extant letters actually
written by the historical Paul, and that these gave rise to the notion
of Paul the Epistolarian, upon which our canon of pseudepigraphical
Pauline Epistles is based. Since Van Manen judged the Pauline
pseudepigrapha to be patchworks, he did not exclude the possibility that
some genuine Pauline fragments might remain. Schmithals, too, partitions
the Pauline Epistles into several earlier fragments, though he ascribes
them all to Paul. That much was already clear from Schmithals's Paul
and Gnosticism. But in The Theology of the First Christians
he focuses on a whole series of versified teaching formulae which appear
to have been incorporated (and adapted) in the present Epistle texts.
They are not pre-Pauline texts, as scholars often say, but rather
Pauline formulae that Paul himself is citing. So far, Schmithals. But
suppose that these various "teaching nuggets" were all that remained of
the historical Paul? Suppose the Pauline School, who wrote all the
Pauline Epistles, preserved these "golden verses" of Paul the Apostle by
embedding them into their Epistolary contexts. Schmithals might be said
to have isolated a kind of Pauline Q Source. (Some feel more secure in
positing the Synoptic Q Source because the discovery of the Gospel of
Thomas provides an extant parallel to it; in the same way it may be
worth noting that there is actually a parallel to the Pauline Q
suggested here. As it happens, there is a set of ten ancient British
formulaic sayings called The Triads of Paul the Apostle.)
The Theology of the First Christians is a great book by a great
New Testament scholar. No one will fail to learn much from it.