THE HISTORICAL SITUATION
AT THIS POINT
Now then, what is the main thing that all of these documents are telling us? That the early Christian Church was a set of internally placid communities, though persecuted from outside, carefully preserving the preaching of the evangelist who came among them to convert them? That there was a "Markan" community that preserved the original preaching of Mark, which was later written down, and a "Lucan" community and a "Johannine" and "Matthean" community which did the same for these preachers?
Far from it. Just about all of the letters indicate that from the very beginning, each Christian community was in turmoil, with different preachers swaying the people in very different directions, and evidently members of the communities themselves interpreting things in shocking ways. It looks as though the early Christian communities were no more "of one mind" than the Protestant churches are in the present day. In fact, you might say, given the number of times the writers deal with this subject, Christianity was in crisis at a time shortly after the beginning, and only some years later got consolidated into something more or less like a consistent view of what was actually going on.
Let me review this aspect of things a bit. In the first letter to Thessalonica, Paul is worried that the persecution will make the people alter their faith. In the second letter, he warns them that some subversive person has forged a letter supposedly by him indicating that the end was just around the corner, and he asks for prayers "to be able to escape from people who will not listen to reason and who are simply evil; the belief you have is not everyone's."
A few years later, he has to write to Galatia to warn them that Judaizers are interpreting Christianity as if it meant that you had to become a Jew to be a Christian, and members of the community are trying to combine their faith with following horoscopes. At practically the same time, he has to write to Corinth to keep them from breaking up into followers of their original preachers (exactly the opposite of the hypothesis above), and to insist that Christianity has only one message. He also warns them against the members of the community that were mythologizing the Resurrection. A year later, he is writing back to that community after being driven out in disgrace by some infiltrator who twisted their faith and made them think that Paul was a fraud.
He writes to Rome a few years after that and greets all sorts of people in a place he never visited. And in the course of the letter, he warns the Jewish converts not to interpret Christianity as an extension of Judaism, and corrects once again the misinterpretation of his own view of freedom from the Law--among people who had never had him preach to them.
In another few years, we find him writing to the Philippians not to pay attention to the Judaizers, because he is as good a Jew as any of them; and he mentions the people who "deliver the Prince's proclamation out of jealousy and competitiveness . . . [and who] aren't sincere in reporting about the Prince."
He writes to Colossae from prison, to people he has never met, to warn them against the attempt to interpret Christianity as something fitting into the science of the day, with the Prime Movers and the heavenly spheres; and he writes the same thing to the people of the other community in Laodicea.
The letters to Timothy warn him to keep away from "speculation" and useless discussions of theory, and just stick to the facts; and he points out specific people he has to watch out for. He does the same thing to Titus.
James clearly is trying to correct mistakes in interpreting what Paul preached, as well as give basic moral guidance. Peter, in his first letter, doesn't warn against subversives, but tries to give a reason why the Christians are suffering persecution from outside. But Jude has no other point to his letter than to caution against subversives who were twisting Christian teaching; and Peter in his second letter lends the authority of the first Pope to this warning, as well as to James's misgivings about what was being done with Paul's letters.
And even John's letters, which doubtless were considerably later, also stress the notion of infiltration by people who want to suppress the genuine message and replace it (evidently, from the first letter, by a theory either that Jesus is God but not man or that Jesus is man but not God), and who had no respect even for "the student the Master loved."
How likely is it, then, that there would be these little pockets of Christians who were preserving an oral tradition that belonged to one preacher--especially in the light of the fact that Luke and Matthew both had to have the text of Mark to work on, since they copied even some of the linguistic twists that are distinctive to that author, and that (according to my research) Matthew had also to have the text of Luke?
No, what emerges from these letters is that what was needed by the year 65, when the original witnesses of Jesus were dying off, was some document that people could hold on to, which would lay out the facts in such a way that Christians could know what should be believed and what was to be rejected. And John's Report, since it presupposes some knowledge of the Synoptics in order to make full sense, indicates that such a document already existed, but containing some ambiguities which John wanted to make sure were cleared up.
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