Paul Barnett must love jigsaw puzzles, especially the type where 75 per cent of the pieces are missing and somebody threw out the box lid.
New Testament scholars agree that the earliest book of the New Testament was not written until around 20 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. If Jesus died and rose in 30 or 33 AD, 1 Thessalonians was not written by Paul (or more accurately, dictated to his secretary) until 50 AD and Galatians in 55 or perhaps 48 AD. Not surprisingly, many Christians and more than a few historians have wondered exactly what the first disciples believed and said about Jesus in the first twenty years.
One scholar described this period as "dark decades " clothed in silence." While such an assessment is clearly a negative exaggeration, it is true that Acts is highly selective and represents only partial evidence and we wish we knew more. Throughout the twentieth and on into the twenty-first century so-called quests for the historical Jesus have sought to fill this gap in our knowledge. Names like Bousset, Casey, Crossan and the Jesus Seminar have come up with answers that are less than satisfying to orthodox Christians. Such authors say that the original Jesus was no more than a Jewish prophet or Cynic-type philosopher and that it was the early church that turned him into a Gentile god who died to bring salvation to the lost. According to these reconstructions the apostle Paul was not a faithful follower of Jesus, but rather the inventor of Christianity. At the popular level, The Da Vinci Code has seriously undermined confidence in reading the New Testament as history.
The Birth of Christianity is Barnett's investigation of this critical period. Far from "his best guess," it is a thorough sifting and weighing of the available evidence. His main thesis is that "the future directions of Christianity were set within the first year of its life." The book is a meticulous combing of the New Testament for clues about the first twenty years with careful attention to questions of chronology, language and geography. Barnett builds on the work of other historians in the field, in particular, Hemer, Hengel and Riesner. It is a contribution demanding attention from the specialist but written in a style accessible to a much wider audience.
The book abounds with insights and startling conclusions. Saul was converted within a year of Jesus' crucifixion. The preaching that Jesus is "Christ," "Lord" and "Son" was formulated during that year. The book of Acts is not a "dodgy' secondary source, but a primary source reporting in part Luke's eyewitness account as a companion of Paul. Peter exerted a profound influence on Paul's understanding of the significance of Jesus. By the time of Paul's first letter, written collections of Jesus' teachings were in circulation. The authority of Peter undergirds Mark's Gospel. John's Gospel arose in Palestine in the period between the crucifixion and the Roman invasion in the late 60s and was written independently of the Synoptic Gospels. The 15-20 years between the main events and the first textual evidence is in antiquity "a brevity without parallel." (For example, Tacitus wrote about Nero fifty years after the events.) Most importantly, it was Christology that gave birth to Christianity and not the reverse.
Every generation of the church needs not only good Bible teachers but also historians. God not only speaks, but has acted in history, and our faith, though transcendent, is susceptible to historical investigation. Even if receiving less notoriety than some others, Paul Barnett is arguably Australia's premier historian of the early church. The Birth of Christianity follows his other books on Jesus and the early church, Jesus and the Logic of History (1997) and Jesus and the Rise of Early Christianity (1999). His first book, Is the New Testament History? (1986, 2003), made a profound impression on this reviewer as a young believer, confirming to me the historical truth of the main claims of our faith. Volumes two and three of his current project, Paul and his Mission Churches and Finding the Historical Christ, are eagerly anticipated.
Dr Brian Rosner lectures in ethics and New Testament at Moore Theological College.
