2-UNIT STUDIES OF RELIGION



STUDIES OF RELIGION PRELIMINARY COURSE

DEPTH STUDY 1: CHRISTIANITY

FORMATION OF THE CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURES

|IMPORTANT DEFINITIONS |

|Apocryphal |A term for the sacred books that are non-canonical or not in the canon of that particular tradition. |

|Bible |The sacred book of Christianity consisting of the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. It is a written record of God’s|

| |revelation. |

|Canon |An official list of sacred books. |

|Gospel |This term has three levels of meaning – the good news preached by Jesus; the good news that through Jesus we have been |

| |saved; the written record of the good news by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. |

|Revelation |God’s self-communication to people. |

|Synoptic |The three gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke (the material in these is very similar). |

After the death and resurrection of Christ the apostles and disciples were engaged in three main activities –

• From the beginning, the disciples proclaimed their faith in the risen Jesus. They did so in brief phrases which summed up the essentials of the good news. The disciples said, “You crucified Jesus, but God has raised him, exalted him, made him Lord, and we are witnesses to that. He sends us his spirit. Believe in the good news and you will be saved.” An oral collection was made of the various beatitudes, which Jesus could use to proclaim this good news: from now on the poor are no longer poor, since God has come to establish his kingdom. People told of the miracles of Jesus, which show his victory over evil, suffering, sickness and death. They also took up parables, that form of teaching by stories, which express well and simply the happiness, which Jesus has brought, and the need to make a choice.

• The disciples re-enacted Jesus’ last supper, which gave significance to his death. To begin with, when only the first disciples were involved, there was no real need to recall the last supper in detail; they knew what they were doing. Each one could still say how he understood it, and add details. Soon, however, there were other disciples who had not known Jesus; they had to be told the significance of these actions of breaking bread and drinking wine from the cup.

• Those who had newly been baptised had to live as disciples of Jesus. To discover how to live in community, to answer the many questions raised in everyday life, they kept returning to the life of Jesus, his words and his actions. They took up the parables and adapted them to their new situation; they had to watch, keep vigilant, and become the good earth in which seed could grow. New teaching was looked for in the miracles: the tiny community had the feeling of being a frail boat tossed by storm and tempest; they could survive only because the risen Jesus stood up to the tempest in response to the prayer of his church, “Lord save us!” How were the authorities to act? They remembered that Jesus had said to them, “You are the servants of others”, and had left them only two rules, mercy and forgiveness. Thus wherever Christian communities came into being, images of Jesus were developed in the disciples’ memory.

The Gospel were formed in three stages as a result of these activities –

• The life and teaching of Jesus Christ – his actual words and deeds. According to the early Christians, those who could interpret the events correctly should have been able to see that Jesus was the Messiah, that the end-time had come, and that all the people of Israel had expected was now fulfilled.

• The oral tradition – after the Ascension, the apostles with fuller understanding handed it on by recalling what Jesus had said and done. In this way traditions were hand on from one group to another. The actual form of the traditions was determined by some of the pressing needs of the first Christian community.

• The written Gospels. By the time the eye-witnesses (those who had actually lived with Jesus) were beginning to die, the Christian community realised that soon there would be no recourse to such people when confirmation was needed of precisely what Jesus had done or said. There was a need to commit the sacred traditions to written form. In different Christian communities written Gospels took place. They were presented in the form of a life of Jesus, but they did not intend to be history or biography. They were accounts of good news, making use of the traditions with which Christians were well familiar.

So the religious beliefs, based on the words and actions of Jesus, were systematically organised in the Gospels in three stages. These religious beliefs and thoughts were supplemented by the letters written to various Christian communities, the Acts of the Apostles and the Book of Revelation. The letters explained and clarified Christian teachings and answered questions that were posed about Christian living and the performance of sacred ritual, while the Book of Revelation was intended to give hope to the persecuted Christians.

There are four Gospels that are accepted by the Church as authoritative and reliable. They are called the canonical Gospels and comprise Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke are collectively known as the synoptic gospels.

There are many gospels that are considered not to be reliable and authoritative enough to be included in the New Testament. Four of these, however, are considered to have been used as sources for writing the canonical Gospels:

• The gospel of Thomas – considerable controversy exists regarding whether it was written in the mid-first or second century. If written in the mid-first century, then the gospel of Thomas would have been used as a source for writing the Gospel of Luke.

• Q – a mid-first century collection of the sayings of Jesus, probably written in Antioch. Q contains the sayings in Matthew and Luke not found in Mark, and was therefore used as a source for writing the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Q takes its name from the German word Quelle, meaning source.

• M – a written and oral tradition used as a source for writing the Gospel of Matthew.

• L – a written and oral tradition used as a source for writing the Gospel of Luke.

After the memories of Jesus’ teachings and ministry had been gathered, they circulated and grew in oral or spoken form between about 30 and 50 CE, when Paul’s first writings began to appear, probably commencing with 1 Thessalonians. Scholars have proposed that around the same time as Paul’s first writings appeared, an important source called Q also appeared, containing all the material held in common by Matthew and Luke but not found in Mark. John appears to be independent of the other three gospels. Q, and in turn Matthew and Luke, also might have been influenced by the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas.

Paul’s early letters and Q were quickly followed by the gospels of Mark, written in Rome around 65 CE, then Luke, written in Corinth around 80 CE, Matthew, written in Antioch around 85 CE, and finally John, written in Ephesus around 95 CE. The remainder of Paul’s actual letters were written up until his death in 64 CE. Those attributed to him were dated anywhere between 50 and 100 CE. Revelation dates from 95 CE, and the last of the Christian writings, 2 Peter, was written between 90 and 110 CE.

Whereas Hebrew is the original language of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Christian Scriptures were all written in Greek – not classical Greek but Hellenistic Greek, which was the everyday Greek language spoken in the Mediterranean basin between 300 BCE and 300 CE. Although Jesus and his earliest followers probably spoke Aramaic, it was not those who wrote the Christian Scriptures but later Greek-speaking Christians.

| |Mark |Matthew |Luke |John |

|Author |Possibly a disciple of Peter |Unknown, but very likely a |Possibly Luke the physician |Unknown, but definitely not |

| |named Mark. |Jewish Christian convert who |who accompanied Paul to |John. |

| | |knew the Jewish tradition. |Phillipa. He was a Syrian of| |

| | | |Antioch and a gentile. | |

|Date |After 70 CE. |80-90 CE. |80-90 CE. |90-100 CE. |

|Place |Probably Rome. |Probably Antioch in Syria. |Probably Greece or Asia |Possibly Ephesus. |

| | | |Minor. | |

|Intended community |Christian Gentiles |Jewish Christians |Christian Gentiles |Christian Jews and Jews in |

| |(non-Palestinian Christians) | | |Diaspora (dispersed in |

| | | | |countries other than |

| | | | |Palestine). |

|Background of the community |Constant threat of |Period of consolidation. |Period of expansion. |Period of conflict with |

| |persecution under Nero. |Conflict with official |End of time not thought to be|official Judaism. |

| |Shocked by the impending |Judaism. |imminent. |Period of reflection on the |

| |destruction of Jerusalem (70 |Had questions regarding | |meaning of Christian |

| |CE). |order, discipline and | |discipleship. |

| |End of time thought to be |authority. | | |

| |imminent. | | | |

|Image of Jesus |Jesus, suffering Messiah. |Jesus, teacher of Israel. |Jesus the Lord. |Jesus the divine Son. |

The official body of Christian writings is known as the canon of Scripture. By about 400 CE official rulings by councils of Christians had accepted that the following books comprised the canon of divinely inspired Scriptures –

• The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

• Acts of the Apostles.

• Paul’s Letters: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon.

• Letter to the Hebrews.

• Letter of James.

• 1 and 2 Peter.

• 1, 2 and 3 John.

• Jude.

• Revelation.

The Christian canon (New Testament), then, contains twenty-seven books, yet agreement has not been reached concerning its content. Some branches of the Syriac Church do not include 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude and Revelation. Certain Protestants (after Martin Luther) do not accept Hebrew, James, Jude and Revelation. They argue for a true core of the Christian Scriptures, ‘a canon within a canon’. Such debate has led not only to different canons but also different versions of the Bible.

The facts that Jesus was Jewish and that God was revealed to the Chosen People are significant for, and valued by, Christians as part of their tradition. The Hebrew Scriptures (known as the Old Testament to Christians), therefore also became part of the Christian canon.

A close look at the Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant and Jewish cannons of the Hebrew Scriptures identify some of the key differences between them –

• Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians have forty-six books in the canon, Protestants have thirty-nine and Jews have twenty-four.

• Certain Jewish books are described as non-canonical or not in the canon of that particular tradition. The Christian term for this is apocryphal. The Roman Catholic version of the Old Testament is slightly larger than the Protestant, because it includes seven books that are considered apocryphal by the Protestant churches – Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch. Originally, this term (apocryphal) referred to works claiming to be of a sacred origin, but supposedly hidden for generation. Later the term came to refer to a body of literature with scriptural or quasi-scriptural pretensions though not genuine, composed during the two centuries before Christ and the early Christian centuries. Today, in Protestant editions, these books are often included in a section at the end of the Old Testament.

• The Orthodox canon was established at the Orthodox Church’s synod of Jerusalem in 1672 CE.

• The Hebrew or transliterated titles of Jewish books often follow the opening or key words of that book.

• Two books of the Catholic canon, Esther and Daniel, are larger than their Protestant and Jewish counterparts.

By means of a circular diagram, show how the New Testament was formed chronologically.

Chronological Formation of the New Testament

References

Bartlett, T. (2000). New studies of religion: preliminary course depth study 2: Christianity.

Board of Studies. (1999). Stage 6 syllabus: studies of religion. Sydney: Board of Studies New South Wales.

Brown, S., F. (1991). Christianity: World religions. New York: Facts on File, Inc.

Charpentier, E. (1981). How to read the New Testament (J. Bowden, Trans.). London: SCM Press.

Cole, W., Owen. (1993). The Christian Bible. Oxford: Heinemann Educational.

Courtie, B., & Johnson, M. (1990). Christianity explored. Oxford: Lion Publishing plc.

Crotty, R. (2000). Christianity. In D. Parnham (Ed.), Exploring religion (2nd ed., pp. 53-94). South Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

Crotty, R., & Lewin, R. (2000). Sacred writings. In D. Parnham (Ed.), Exploring religion (2nd ed., pp. 303-328). South Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

Fenn, K., Waldie, K., & Parker, J. (1994). Biblical studies II (Australian ed. Vol. 35). Auckland: National Centre for Religious Studies.

Lovat, T., & McGrath, J. (Eds.). (1999). New studies in religion. Katoomba: Social Science Press.

McClish, B. (1999). The Australian church story. Melbourne: HarperCollinsReligions.

Morrissey, J., Mudge, P., Taylor, A., Bailey, G., Gregor, H., McGillion, C., O'Reilly, P., Magee, P., & Mills, L. (2001). Living religion (2nd ed.). Sydney: Longman.

© Emmaus Publications (2003). Every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge all materials used. This material may be photocopied for educational use only.

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Students learn about the origins and history of Christianity –

• The early development of Christianity.

Apostolic preaching

the oral tradition

Death of Jesus

30 CE

L

M

Paul starts writing his letters

50 CE

Gospel of Thomas

50 CE

Q

Death of Peter and Paul

64 CE

Gospel of Mark

70 CE

Fall of Jerusalem

70 CE

Gospel of Luke

80-90 CE

Gospel of Matthew

80-90 CE

Gospel of John

90-100 CE

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