Meeks Wayne A.Hilton Allen R.Snyder H. Gregory - In Search of the Early Christians

IN SEARCH OF THE EARLY CHRISTIANS

WAYNE A. MEEKS

Edited by
ALLEN R. HILTON AND
H. GREGORY SNYDER

Copyright 2002 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Designed by Mary Valencia.
Set in Meridien Roman and Tiepolo types by The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc.,
Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Meeks, Wayne A.

In search of the early Christians : selected essays / Wayne A. Meeks;
edited by Allen R. Hilton and H. Gregory Snyder.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-300-09142-7 (alk. paper)
1. ChristianityOrigin. 2. Bible. N.T. JohnCriticism, interpretation, etc.
3. Bible. N.T. Epistles of PaulCriticism, interpretation, etc.
I. Hilton, Allen R. II. Snyder, H. Gregory, 1959III. Title.

BR129 .M44 2001
225.6dc21 2001055908

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The title of this book, In Search of the Early Christians, appropriately characterizes the work of Wayne A. Meeks. While the essays collected here diverge widely in content and focus, all of them spring from the fundamental conviction that people are more than disembodied intellects. The men and women who were drawn to the first Christian groups were subject to all the vicissitudes of life in ancient cities: they lived in neighborhoods, they were embedded in complex webs of status relations, they were subject to diverse social and economic pressures. While giving intellectual and religious history its due, Meeks and others began to lay increased emphasis on the concrete social existence of the first Christians, rather than attending solely to their ideas and beliefs. It now seems obvious that any story of the growth of Christianity must take account of such factors. In fact, forty years ago, it was not at all obvious, and the degree to which it seems so now is in large part because of Wayne Meekss careful and insightful scholarship.

The challenge that his work has posed to the discipline of New Testament studies and the role these articles played in issuing that challenge is chronicled in the authors introductory essay, Reflections on an Era. It is our task here simply to make way for the essays themselves. To that end, it may help to mention a few editorial decisions that we hope will make them accessible to more readers. We have left the articles essentially untouched. Because the volume is meant, in part at least, to record a period in the history of scholarship, we have not supplied subsequent bibliographical references to supplement the original citations. In fact, the only substantive change in these is the manner in which Hebrew, Greek, and Coptic quotations are represented. Keeping one eye on specialists and the other on the general reader, we have rendered all ancient languages in their own script and then supplied parenthetical English translations. We hope that this decision has the utility we have imagined.

Finally, it is ours to thank those who have made this book possible. We are especially grateful to the original publishers of these articles, who are credited individually on a separate page, for their ready permission to reproduce them, to our colleagues at Yale Divinity School and Davidson College for their support and understanding during our work on this project; to the Wabash Institute for grant assistance; to Glenn Snyder, Allens research assistant at Yale Divinity School; to Jeremy Hultin, who assembled the indices; and to Lara Heimert, Heidi Downey, and Margaret Otzel, the Yale University Press editors on this project, who have helped us considerably at each stage. Most of all, of course, we thank Wayne Meeks. As we have reread and prepared these essays for publication, we have been continually reminded of the influence their author has exerted over us and over a generation of scholars. We offer these essays back to him in new form, with our considerable gratitute and deepest respect for him as mentor, exemplar, and friend.

Allen Hilton and Greg Snyder not only persuaded both me and the Press that publishing a collection of my essays was a good idea, they are also responsible for making the collection into a book. It was they who conceived the order and shape of the whole and who browbeat me into providing an introduction and afterword to give voice to that conception. They helped me to place the individual chapters within a narrative about the transformations that study of the New Testament had undergone in the past several decades. For all that, as well as the countless hours of hard labor they have invested in every detail of the project (which they might more prudently have devoted to their own work), I am more grateful than I can find words to express.

Thanks also to Lou Martyn, Dale Martin, and Cyril ORegan for reading and commenting on the introduction and afterword, though I fear my revisions were not fully adequate to their sage criticisms. Finally, I thank Yale University Press for adding this volume to a series of happy collaborative ventures, and in particular Charles Grench, who first encouraged this project before departing for a warmer climate, and Larisa Heimert, Joyce Ippolito, and Margaret Otzel, who saw it through to completion.

Wayne A. Meeks

The essays gathered in this volume represent three decades of trying to understand the New Testamentand the people who wrote and first listened to and used the writings out of which the New Testament came into being. Looking back over that career, all this labor to understand such a small book seems odd even to me. Yet I have hardly been alone. These essays constitute but a drop in the sea of ink that has spread around those few pages of Greek text in nineteen centuries. There must be something odd about these old documents themselvesor, rather, about the peculiar and infinitely varied parts they have played in the lives of particular individuals and communities and even whole cultures.

A rather miscellaneous collection of things, this New Testament: a bit of history about a new cult with grand pretensions, some rough biographical sketches about a Jewish prophet, a handful of letters to people we do not know about issues we do not completely understand, a few tracts and pamphlets. Very little of it is of high literary quality, by ancient or modern standards. Yet there it lies, deep within the layers of our cultural memory, glowing at times with an uncanny light, at other times exuding a dark, destructive aura. Its words have inspired the occasional saint to a life of heroic service, purity, self-sacrifice, or martyrdom; they have elevated whole communities of ordinary people to extraordinary expectations of moral exertion and mutual caring. But its dark sayings have also enchanted otherwise sober and pious souls to terrible beliefs and acts: the defense of slavery, murder, genocide, madness, suicide.

The story of the uses and effects of the New Testament, for good and ill, must wait for another time. The essays that follow tell a much more limited story. They reflect a career-long attemptby no means completedto find an adequate way to describe the very beginnings of the Christian movement. This conceit of the