1
Neusner, Jacob. ―The Perspective of Comparison: If the Literature of Christianity were
Comparable in Character to Rabbinic Literature.‖ In
An Introduction to RabbinicLiterature: The Anchor Bible Reference Library. New York: Doubleday, 1994.Perspective on the writings of earliest Christianity is provided by comparison with Jewishwritings produced at the same time and in many of the same places. For this purpose a simplecontrast will serve, so let us set forth a mental experiment. Try to imagine the task of anintroduction to Christian literature, if Christianity were written down the way Judaism is. Whatshould we expect as the Christian counterpart to rabbinic literature? What would we know? Howwould we know it if the records of early Christianity were like the rabbinic literature of lateantiquity?What would be known if all the literature of early Christianity had reached us in a fullyhomogenized and intellectually seamless form? This hypothetical concerns not only the NewTestament, but all the works of the church fathers, from Justin to Augustine, now represented asexpressions of one communal mind, dismembered and built into a single harmonious logicalstructure on various themes. True, they would be shown to continuously disagree, but the rangeof permissible disagreement would define a vast area of consensus on all basic matters, so that asuperficial contentiousness would convey something quite different: one mind on most things,beginning to end. The names of the fathers might be attached to some of their utterances, but allwould have gone through a second medium of redactors
—
the editors of the compendium
—
andthese editors picked and chose what they wanted of Justin, of Origen, of Tertullian, of Augustine,all in line with the determination of the editors. In the end the determination of the first sixcenturies of Christianity would be the creation of the people of the sixth century, derived frompeople who worked in the first five. We would then be reduced to trying to know what we canfrom a document of a timeless world.Not only would the document be framed to implicitly deny the historical development of its ideas, but the framers would gloss over diverse and contradictory sources of thought. I do notmean to only imply that Justin, Iranaeus and Tertullian would be presented as individual authorsin a timeless continuum. I mean that all Gnostic and Catholic sources would be broken up intosense units and these fragments then rearranged into a structure presented as representative of thesingle Christianity, with a single and unitary theology. This synthesized ecumenical body of Christian thought would be constructed to set out judgments on the principle theological topics,and these judgments would be accepted as normative from that day to this. The thing we must tryto imagine then is a Christianity which is whole and fully harmonized, with no Arians,
Nestorians, Gnostics, nor Patristics, and surely no lost libraries, but all are one ―in Christ Jesus,‖
so to speak.This would not be merely a matter of early Christian literature reaching us without thenames of authors attached to individual documents, for there would be no individual documentsat all. Everything would have been put through a formative process involving a stage of redaction to obliterate the marks of individuality. The theology would be one, and so would theform and style of the documents that preserved it. Indeed, what would be striking about such aChristianity is not that Mark would lack the name Mark, but that all the Gospels would bewritten in exactly the same style and resort to exactly the same rhetoric. The text would exhibit astylistic unity so pervasive that it would eliminate all traces of individual authorship. Thesarcasm of Irenaeus, the majesty of Augustine, the exegetical ingenuity of Origen, the lucid
Leave a Comment