Our portrait of Judaism in the first century B.C.E. [sic] has acquired many facets through the results of recent scholarship. Some Jews lived in Palestine under the direct rule of Rome, while others were scattered throughout the entire empire. In either case, Judaism received its unique form as the “authorized religion” by means of faith in the God of Israel. The contract of the Jews with all other people and religions preserved their identity. Nevertheless, Judaism still comprised many groups and sects, of which primitive Christianity was only one. — Henning Graf Reventlow, The History of Biblical Interpretation, Volume 1, p. 47.
In the quote above, I’ve got to think that Reventlow means to say C.E., rather than B.C.E., unless Reventlow has radical new information to disclose about primitive Christianity. But let’s get down to the actual business here.
The earliest Christian movement was composed of Jews, for whom, Reventlow says, “the canonical books of the Old Testament were quite obviously sacred Scripture to which they looked in their early proclamation, the gospel, and gave their new interpretation” (p. 47). I’m not quite sure about the role of canonical in that sentence, but I cannot help but agree with the general sentiment. The early Christian movement seems to have taken it as a given that Scriptures of Judaism continued to hold validity as containing messages from God, all though Reventlow does note a different point of view among Marcion and some others. However, with the exception of several movements that have long died out, Christianity has historically retained the Scriptures of Judaism.
Eventually, Christians would come to see a certain set of writings by early Christians as Scriptural. These writings came to be known collectively as the New Testament, and as a result the older Jewish writings came to be called the Old Testament. The New Testament writers justified their claims in a variety of ways, including the citation of Old Testament texts.
The writers of primitive Christianity who produced the texts that were collected to form the New Testament cited the Bible according to methodological rules common to their environment. It is not astonishing that we discover these in the New Testament. — Reventlow, p. 48.
Rather than beginning with any particular New Testament writer, Reventlow begins with Jesus himself. How did Jesus interpret the Old Testament? Reventlow acknowledges that there is a great difficulty to answering these questions, as we only have Jesus’ words to the extent that they are preserved in the gospels.
Still, Reventlow believes that we can to some extent reconstruct Jesus’ approach to the Scriptures. These Scriptures, given Jesus’ situation in the world, would be the Hebrew Bible, and Jesus’ interactions with Sadducees and Pharisees was that of “conversation partners who shared a common tradition” (Reventlow, p. 50).
Reventlow, like most (I think) scholars today, sees Jesus as an apocalyptic preacher, who taught that the reign of God was approaching, and that soon God’s kingdom would be established on earth. This general picture can be found in various places in the Hebrew Bible, and well as in noncanonical apocalyptic literature. According to Reventlow, “Jesus primarily and principally presupposed the authority of the Torah”, although he at times spoke of his own authority as exceeding that of the Torah, and extending its principles outward in new directions.
Reventlow spends some time attempting to reconstruct the historical Jesus behind the gospel accounts, and to give some interesting examples of how this reconstructed Jesus looked at Scripture.
In future installments, we will look at other examples of how New Testament texts contain interpretation of the Old Testament.
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