Historical Reminder Judeo-ChristianandSaint Paul

The majority of Christians believe that the Gospelswere written by direct witnesses of the life of Jesusand therefore constitute unquestionable evidenceconcerning the events high-lighting His life andpreachings. One wonders, in the presence of suchguarantees of authenticity, how it is possible to discussthe teachings derived from them and how one can castdoubt upon the validity of the Church as an institutionapplying the general instructions Jesus Himself gave.Today’s popular editions of the Gospels containcommentaries aimed at propagating these ideas among thegeneral public.

The value the authors of the Gospels have aseye-witnesses is always presented to the faithful asaxiomatic. In the middle of the Second century, SaintJustin did, after all, call the Gospels the ‘Memoirs ofthe Apostles’. There are moreover so many detailsproclaimed concerning the authors that it is a wonderthat one could ever doubt their accuracy. ‘Matthew was awell-known character ‘a customs officer employed at thetollgate or customs house at Capharnaum’; it is even saidthat he spoke Aramaic and Greek. Mark is also easilyidentifiable as Peter’s colleague; there is no doubt thathe too was an eye-witness. Luke is the ‘dear physician’of whom Paul talks: information on him is very precise.John is the Apostle who was always near to Jesus, son ofZebedee, fisherman on the Sea of Galilee.

Modern studies on the beginnings of Christianity showthat this way of presenting things hardly corresponds toreality. We shall see who the authors of the Gospelsreally were. As far as the decades following Jesus’smission are concerned, it must be understood that eventsdid not at all happen in the way they have been said tohave taken place and that Peter’s arrival in Rome in noway laid the foundations for the Church. On the contrary,from the time Jesus left earth to the second half of theSecond century, there was a struggle between twofactions. One was what one might call PaulineChristianity and the other Judeo-Christianity. It wasonly very slowly that the first supplanted the second,and Pauline Christianity triumphed overJudeo-Christianity.

A large number of very recent works are based oncontemporary discoveries about Christianity. Among themwe find Cardinal Daniélou’s name. In December 1967 hepublished an article in the review Studies (Etudes)entitled. ‘A New Representation of the Origins ofChristianity: Judeo-Christianity’. (Une visionnouvelle des origines chrétiennes, lejudéo-christianisme). Here he reviews past works,retraces its history and enables us to place theappearance of the Gospels in quite a different contextfrom the one that emerges on reading accounts intendedfor mass publication. What follows is a condensed versionof the essential points made in his article, includingmany quotations from it.

After Jesus’s departure, the “little group ofApostles” formed a “Jewish sect that remainedfaithful to the form of worship practised in theTemple”. However, when the observances of convertsfrom paganism were added to them, a ‘special system’ wasoffered to them, as it were: the Council of Jerusalem in49 A.D. exempted them from circumcision and Jewishobservances; “many Judeo-Christians rejected thisconcession”. This group was quite separate fromPaul’s. What is more, Paul and the Judeo-Christians werein conflict over the question of pagans who had turned toChristianity, (the incident of Antioch, 49 A.D.).”For Paul, the circumcision, Sabbath, and form ofworship practised in the Temple were henceforth oldfashioned, even for the Jews. Christianity was to freeitself from its political-cum-religious adherence toJudaism and open itself to the Gentiles.”

For those Judeo-Christians who remained ‘loyal Jews,’Paul was a traitor. Judeo-Christian documents call him an’enemy’, accuse him of ‘tactical double-dealing’, . . .'”Until 70 A.D., Judeo-Christianity represents themajority of the Church” and “Paul remains anisolated case”. The head of the community at thattime was James, a relation of Jesus. With him were Peter(at the beginning) and John. “James may beconsidered to represent the Judeo-Christian camp, whichdeliberately clung to Judaism as opposed to PaulineChristianity.” Jesus’s family has a very importantplace in the Judeo-Christian Church of Jerusalem.”James’s successor was Simeon, son of Cleopas, acousin of the Lord”.

Cardinal Danielou here quotes Judeo-Christian writingswhich express the views on Jesus of this community whichinitially formed around the apostles: the Gospel of theHebrews (coming from a Judeo-Christian community inEgypt), the writings of Clement: Homilies andRecognitions, ‘Hypotyposeis’, the Second Apocalypse ofJames, the Gospel of Thomas. [ One could note here that all these writings werelater to be classed as Apocrypha, i.e. they had to beconcealed by the victorious Church which was born ofPaul’s success. This Church made obvious excisions in theGospel literature and retained only the four CanonicGospels.] “It is to theJudeo-Christians that one must ascribe the oldestwritings of Christian literature.” CardinalDaniélou mentions them in detail.

“It was not just in Jerusalem and Palestine thatJudeo-Christianity predominated during the first hundredyears of the Church. The Judeo-Christian mission seemseverywhere to have developed before the Pauline mission.This is certainly the explanation of the fact that theletters of Paul allude to a conflict.” They were thesame adversaries he was to meet everywhere: in Galatia,Corinth, Colossae, Rome and Antioch.

The Syro-Palestinian coast from Gaza to Antioch wasJudeo-Christian ‘”as witnessed by the Acts of theApostles and Clementine writings”. In Asia Minor,the existence of Judeo-Christians is indicated in Paul’sletters to the Galatians and Colossians. Papias’swritings give us information about Judeo-Christianity inPhrygia. In Greece, Paul’s first letter to theCorinthians mentions Judeo-Christians, especially atApollos. According to Clement’s letter and the Shepherdof Hermas, Rome was an ‘important centre’. For Suetoniusand Tacitus, the Christians represented a Jewish sect.Cardinal Daniélou thinks that the first evangelizationin Africa was Judeo-Christian. The Gospel of the Hebrewsand the writings of Clement of Alexandria link up withthis.

It is essential to know these facts to understand thestruggle between communities that formed the backgroundagainst which the Gospels were written. The texts that wehave today, after many adaptations from the sources,began to appear around 70 A.D., the time when the tworival communities were engaged in a fierce struggle, withthe Judeo-Christians still retaining the upper hand. Withthe Jewish war and the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. thesituation was to be reversed. This is how CardinalDaniélou explains the decline:
“After the Jews had been discredited in theEmpire, the Christians tended to detach themselves fromthem. The Hellenistic peoples of Christian persuasionthen gained the upper hand. Paul won a posthumousvictory. Christianity separated itself politically andsociologically from Judaism; it became the third people.All the same, until the Jewish revolt in 140 A.D.,Judeo-Christianity continued to predominateculturally”
From 70 A.D. to a period sometime before 110 A.D. theGospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John were produced.They do not constitute the first written Christiandocuments: the letters of Paul date from well beforethem. According to O. Culmann, Paul probably wrote hisletter to the Thessalonians in 50 A.D. He had probablydisappeared several years prior to the completion ofMark’s Gospel.

Paul is the most controversial figure in Christianity.He was considered to be a traitor to Jesus’s thought bythe latter’s family and by the apostles who had stayed inJerusalem in the circle around James. Paul createdChristianity at the expense of those whom Jesus hadgathered around him to spread his teachings. He had notknown Jesus during his lifetime and he proved thelegitimacy of his mission by declaring that Jesus, raisedfrom the dead, had appeared to him on the road toDamascus. It is quite reasonable to ask what Christianitymight have been without Paul and one could no doubtconstruct all sorts of hypotheses on this subject. As faras the Gospels are concerned however, it is almostcertain that if this atmosphere of struggle betweencommunities had not existed, we would not have had thewritings we possess today. They appeared at a time offierce struggle between the two communities. These’combat writings’, as Father Kannengiesser calls them,emerged from the multitude of writings on Jesus. Theseoccurred at the time when Paul’s style of Christianitywon through definitively, and created its own collectionof official texts. These texts constituted the ‘Canon’which condemned and excluded as unorthodox any otherdocuments that were not suited to the line adopted by theChurch.

The Judeo-Christians have now disappeared as acommunity with any influence, but one still hears peopletalking about them under the general term of’Judaïstic’. This is how Cardinal Daniélou describestheir disappearance:
“When they were cut off -from the Great Church,that gradually freed itself from its Jewish attachments,they petered out very quickly in the West. In the Easthowever it is possible to find traces of them in theThird and Fourth Centuries A.D., especially in Palestine,Arabia, Transjordania, Syria and Mesopotamia. Othersjoined in the orthodoxy of the Great Church, at the sametime preserving traces of Semitic culture; some of thesestill persist in the Churches of Ethiopia andChaldea”.