Among the Gentiles: Greco-Roman Religion and Christianity, <\/em>(Yale\/Anchor, 2009), 480 pages.<\/p>\nThere are books which catch a rising tide of interest and scholarship in a subject and become seminal studies.\u00a0\u00a0 There are books which go against the tide of general scholarly opinion, and sometimes they survive because of their excellence.\u00a0 And then there are books which float along calmly downstream and people recognize them for what they are, not timely tomes\u00a0 or decent dissents but something here today and gone tomorrow. \u00a0 Luke Johnson is, as Wayne Meeks has dubbed him, a contrarian.\u00a0\u00a0 He likes to play the role of the loyal opposition to some of the sacred theories and ideas in the world of Biblical studies.\u00a0\u00a0 While he may be a contrarian, he is not a curmudgeon, in fact he is well respected right across the guild of Biblical scholars, and rightly so.\u00a0 He is a scholar\u2019s scholars and at the same time a really nice person.\u00a0 It\u2019s hard to disagree with someone like Luke when he is so congenial in his way of being disagreeable. \u00a0 I have loved reading many of his books, and have been helped by numerous of his Biblical commentaries. \u00a0 \u00a0 This review however must tackle his latest footnote-laden monograph, and give it a thorough once over.\u00a0 It deserves it, not least because it won the $100,000 Grawmyer Prize awarded in Louisville to a top book in the field.<\/p>\n
Let us start by mentioning some of the things that are missing in this study, that should be present.\u00a0 If one is going to tackle the subject of whether Christianity could be labeled a \u2018religio\u2019\u00a0 in the ancient and Greco-Roman sense, and at what juncture one could actually call it such,\u00a0 one would have thought that attention would have to have been paid to the many many articles on the social history of the Greco-Roman world and early Christianity written by Edwin Judge, now conveniently collected into three volumes (two are out, and one is forthcoming\u2014 see the volume my old mentor David Scholer edited Social Distinctives of the Christians in the First Century (<\/em>2007), and the gigantic collections of essays being published by J.C.B. Mohr).\u00a0 Johnson\u2019s study is vast,\u00a0 one third of the close to five hundred pages are footnotes,\u00a0 there is extensive documentation\u2014- and not a single reference to, or engagement with the work of Judge, or for that matter any of his disciples, such as Bruce Winter or Peter Marshall or Robert Banks, to mention but three. \u00a0\u00a0 This is not merely an oversight,\u00a0 this is a huge lacunae in such a study.<\/p>\nBut that is not all.\u00a0 Also M.I.A.\u00a0 is any engagement with the detailed work on early Jewish Christianity in the first four centuries of the Christian era by Richard Bauckham.\u00a0 Likewise, he is nowhere to be found in even the bibliography which go on for for well over a hundred pages.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Why is this important?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Because Bauckham has demonstrated at considerable length that Jewish Christianity continued to be an influential force in Christianity beyond the canonical era, and that we neglect that history at our peril.\u00a0 And the result of such neglect is not hard to find in this study. \u00a0 We could start with the fact that Johnson thinks only Hebrews and James are canonical books written largely for Jewish Christians.\u00a0 Really?\u00a0 What about Matthew or Jude or 1 John or even possibly 1 Peter.\u00a0 The canon has in fact more volumes written primarily for Jewish Christians than Johnson is prepared to allow.<\/p>\n
Though Johnson admits that the structure of the earliest Christian communities are indebted to the synagogue structures, and that the church continued to use the LXX as its sole Scriptures for a very long time, he wants to argue that in fact Christianity, almost from the first developed as a Greco-Roman religion, on par and in many ways like pagan religions in terms of its religiosity or religious sensibility as he calls it.\u00a0\u00a0 Now there is a strong case to be made for a good deal of what Johnson wants to assert, but not at the expense of recognizing the ongoing indebtedness of Christianity to not very Hellenized Judaism and its Holy Book.\u00a0\u00a0 Take for example\u00a0 Johnson\u2019s argument that the eventual structure of Christianity involving as it did priests, temples\/basilicas, and sacrifices owed most to the already extant Greco-Roman religious structures. \u00a0 Johnson is of course not the first to argue such a case.\u00a0 We see this kind of case in the works of one of Johnson\u2019s Yale mentors,\u00a0 Ramsay MacMullen (see his recent book The Second Church <\/em>and its review in my blog archives at Beliefnet).<\/p>\nThe problem with this argument is that it doesn\u2019t give sufficient credit to the degree to which the OT institutions, involving priests, temples, sacrifices, holy days and the like influenced the thinking of people ranging from Clement of Rome to Augustine.\u00a0 One could certainly argue that OT exegesis and hermeneutics by Christian thinkers of the first four centuries which turned Sunday into a sabbath, and the Lord\u2019s Supper into a sacrifice and the ministry into a priesthood, and church buildings into places where the sacrifice of the Mass was celebrated\u00a0 had as much to do with how Constantinian Christianity turned out as did the influence of Greco-Roman religion. \u00a0 In other words,\u00a0 the case Johnson makes in this book is lopsided, or even one-sided.\u00a0 What was needed was \u2018both sides now\u2019\u00a0 to present us with a fair and balanced picture. \u00a0 Be that as it may, there is a very great deal to be said on behalf of this ground-breaking work, and we will begin to interact with his positive case in our next post.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
L.T. Johnson, Among the Gentiles: Greco-Roman Religion and Christianity, (Yale\/Anchor, 2009), 480 pages. There are books which catch a rising tide of interest and scholarship in a subject and become seminal studies.\u00a0\u00a0 There are books which go against the tide of general scholarly opinion, and sometimes they survive because of their excellence.\u00a0 And then there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/55\/2011\/01\/luke.jpg\" "\\"luke\\"")
<\/a>L.T. Johnson, Among the Gentiles: Greco-Roman Religion and Christianity, <\/em>(Yale\/Anchor, 2009), 480 pages.<\/p>\n