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Chapter 3 THE CHRIST CULTS

Chapter 3 THE CHRIST CULTS y choosing the terminology "Christ cults," Burton Mack means to differentiate those early movements that revered Jesus as the Christ from those that did not. For the Synagogue Reformers, the Q people, and the Community of Israel, Jesus need not have been the Messiah in any Jewish sense at all. If the Pillars and Heirs communities saw Jesus as the Messiah or the Messiah-elect, they saw the role in strictly nationalistic Jewish terms. But starting with his sixth category, Mack considers the communities for whom Jesus as a teacher (and even as a miracle worker) was of no importance at all, and who may not even have been aware of such a Jesus tradition. For them his role as a savior of one kind or another was pivotal. And the title "Christ" came to denote this. Outside of Palestine, this Greek equivalent of "messiah," i.e., Anointed One, rapidly became the proper name of a divine savior. After all, outside the Holy Land, and...

Conclusion THE MANY

Conclusion THE MANY BEHIND THE ONE ur survey of the early Christianities has indicated that the cherished image of a single early Church untainted by heresy, with everyone of one heart and soul worshipping one Christ, and eventually producing a harmonious canon of scripture speaking a single gospel with a single voice-is a myth. In every case, an earlier diversity has been unsuccessfully hidden away behind a screen of history as the finally dominant faction wished it had been. Even mainstream scholarship, while recognizing a significant degree of diversity and disunity both in the New Testament and among the range of early Christian sects, has been slow to depart from what Burton Mack calls "the Big Bang" model of Christian origins. That is, most scholars have gone on blithely assuming that there was a single Jesus of Nazareth, some sort of prophet and reformer, who was crucified, after which his followers experienced some sort of visions of Jesus as if risen from t...

Chapter 4 MESSIAH AS MISHNAH

Chapter 4 MESSIAH AS MISHNAH ANACHRONISMS AS EVIDENCE he gospels portray Jesus as in conflict with "the Jews," "the scribes," and "the Pharisees," implying Jesus was opposed to a monolithic "normative" Judaism-which did not yet exist! The Mishnah, a codification of scribal commentary on the Torah compiled by the end of the second century C.E., shows that the process of consolidating various earlier schools of thought and local, even idiosyncratic traditions of observance (e.g., in a certain village, of a certain scribe and his disciples) was a later endeavor beginning at Yavneh, the northern Palestinian town where, with Roman permission, Rabbi Johannon ben-Zakkai organized a new, postwar Sanhedrin empowered to adjudicate purely religious issues. When, as recently, some Christian scholars' have been willing to notice these anachronisms, it is difficult enough for them to draw the unwelcome inference that the gospel traditions in quest...