A Social History of Christian Origins: The Rejected Jesus, Simon J. Joseph’s fifth monograph, offers a constructive contribution to the scholarly quest to uncover the traditions behind the New Testament. To that end, and building on his previous work, in this book he primarily focuses on the role played by the apostle Paul in the construction of Christian identity. Joseph proposes that the transformation of the early Jesus movement’s “Jewish/Gentile binary into a Jewish/Christian dichotomy was the result of a socio-ethnic conflict within the Jesus movement,” ultimately producing “the myth of the Jewish rejection of Jesus” (3). As one has come to expect, Joseph delivers his trademark blend of a close reading of the text and a thorough engagement with past and present scholarship, pairing it in this instance with a meta-critical assessment of the fields of Jesus research, Paul-within-Judaism studies, and the (mis)application of social memory theory. Collectively, these observations produce an important corrective to a number of current trends in New Testament studies.
The book is divided into two parts, each with five chapters. The first part sets in place the foundation. Grounding the ensuing discussion in Jesus' Jewishness (chapter 1), Joseph examines four key categories used in Jesus Research (chapter 2): "common Judaism" (42-47), asceticism (47-49), apocalypticism (49-55), and “(non)violence” (55-63). In the book’s first meta-critical turn, he highlights the historical Jesus’ apparent discontinuity with normative academic assumptions about “common Judaism,” offers a sustained critique of occasionally monolithic academic constructs of Judaism and apocalypticism, and revisits his previous arguments against the concept of a violent revolutionary Jesus. Along the way, Joseph engages with the most recent critique of his positions.
The following three chapters work together as a group. Joseph opens by “Theorizing Rejection” (chapter 3) before moving on to the “Criteria of Rejection” (chapter 4). While cautioning that “the criteria of dissimilarity and rejection both reflect and re-inscribe centuries of Christian anti-Judaism,” he proposes that these criteria should nevertheless be problematized rather than discarded in Jesus Research (97). Next (chapter 5), Joseph summarizes social memory theory and—in the book’s second meta-critical moment—highlights the challenges affecting the (mis)utilization of this tool in contemporary New Testament and Jesus research, from apologetic “appeal[s] to the alleged impossibility of getting ‘behind the Gospels’” (101) to the simplistic view of all memory as constructed from the perspective of the present (111-112). He confronts certain theological endgames by noting that “social memory . . . is not ‘convertible’ with historical continuity” (104). Observing that both social memory and New Testament reception history reach us via Christian channels, he argues that while social memory theory cannot fully reconstruct a Jewish historical Jesus, the latter can be re-contextualized “within a complex configuration of [post-Easter Jewish/Gentile] social conflict” (108). The study of first- and second-century CE social contexts in which the Jesus traditions were (re)deployed thereby once again emerges as a useful area of inquiry.
The book’s second part examines more closely the circumstances under which the memory of a Jewish historical Jesus yielded to new, apparently discontinuous developments. Joseph begins by further problematizing (chapter 6) the conceptualization of the New Testament as representing a coherent pattern (or memory) of sacrifice and discipleship. Following this, in the book’s third meta-critical segment (chapter 7), Joseph challenges the contemporary academic construct of Paul as a Torah-observant Jew, highlights clear points of tension within Paul’s conceptual framework (146), and examines the alternative of Paul “constructing a new trans-ethnic identity” that would subsequently come to be known as “Christian” (144). He contends (chapter 8) that Paul’s legacy “le[ft] a heavy footprint in ‘Christian’ history and theology, condemning Jews to an interminable fate of darkness . . . and hostile contempt” (158).
An early product of that legacy was (chapter 9) “The Rejection of the Collection”—Paul’s charitable contribution to Jerusalem Christians collected from the Gentile churches—an event Joseph interprets as “a turning point in the breakdown of Jewish/Gentile relations” (164) and as the rejection of Paul’s approach to the Gentile mission (165) by the Jerusalem church. Building on these findings and discussion (chapter 10), Joseph proposes that “to identify the New Testament as a whole as ‘Jewish’ . . . is to argue beyond the evidence” (170). Rather, the New Testament writings are best viewed as “chronicling the emergence of a new self-conscious non-Jewish social identity” (170). Informed by and adapting Pauline concepts, these writings “transformed (and transferred) an intra-Jewish conflict into a Jewish/Christian schism” (175).
As Joseph programmatically notes, “the Jewish Jesus, although conceded by all, is desired by few” (30). Written at a time when critical New Testament scholarship is arguably in some decline, this book offers a corrective to some of the field’s theological and ideological agendas, taking a bold stand against those contemporary academic trends that traffic in monolithic abstractions and apologetically motivated historical continuities. In its appreciation of the diversity of ancient Jewish and Judeo-Christian thought, this study reaffirms for a new generation of readers—and future scholars—the validity of the New Testament as a discontinuous (re)deployment of Jesus traditions in different 1st- and 2nd-century CE social contexts. In his focus on the rejected Jesus as central to the formation of early Christian identity, Joseph signals that a quest for authentic traditions behind the text of the New Testament remains far from finished and yet eminently possible.
Olegs Andrejevs is a lecturer at Loyola University Chicago.
Olegs Andrejevs
Date Of Review:
March 11, 2023