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The majority of Christians believe that the Gospels
were written by direct witnesses of the life of Jesus
and therefore constitute unquestionable evidence
concerning the events high-lighting His life and preachings. One wonders, in the presence of such
guarantees of authenticity, how it is possible to discuss
the teachings derived from them and how one can cast
doubt upon the validity of the Church as an institution
applying the general instructions Jesus Himself gave.
Today's popular editions of the Gospels contain
commentaries aimed at propagating these ideas among the
general public.
The value the authors of the Gospels have as
eye-witnesses is always presented to the faithful as
axiomatic. In the middle of the Second century, Saint
Justin did, after all, call the Gospels the 'Memoirs of
the Apostles'. There are moreover so many details
proclaimed concerning the authors that it is a wonder
that one could ever doubt their accuracy. 'Matthew was a
well-known character 'a customs officer employed at the
tollgate or customs house at Capharnaum'; it is even said
that he spoke Aramaic and Greek. Mark is also easily
identifiable as Peter's colleague; there is no doubt that
he too was an eye-witness. Luke is the 'dear physician'
of whom Paul talks: information on him is very precise.
John is the Apostle who was always near to Jesus, son of Zebedee, fisherman on the Sea of Galilee.
Modern studies on the beginnings of Christianity show
that this way of presenting things hardly corresponds to
reality. We shall see who the authors of the Gospels
really were. As far as the decades following Jesus's
mission are concerned, it must be understood that events
did not at all happen in the way they have been said to
have taken place and that Peter's arrival in Rome in no
way laid the foundations for the Church. On the contrary,
from the time Jesus left earth to the second half of the
Second century, there was a struggle between two
factions. One was what one might call Pauline
Christianity and the other Judeo-Christianity. It was
only very slowly that the first supplanted the second,
and Pauline Christianity triumphed over
Judeo-Christianity.
A large number of very recent works are based on
contemporary discoveries about Christianity. Among them
we find Cardinal Daniélou's name. In December 1967 he
published an article in the review Studies (Etudes)
entitled. 'A New Representation of the Origins of
Christianity: Judeo-Christianity'. (Une vision
nouvelle des origines chrétiennes, le judéo-christianisme). Here he reviews past works,
retraces its history and enables us to place the
appearance of the Gospels in quite a different context
from the one that emerges on reading accounts intended
for mass publication. What follows is a condensed version
of the essential points made in his article, including
many quotations from it.
After Jesus's departure, the "little group of
Apostles" formed a "Jewish sect that remained
faithful to the form of worship practised in the
Temple". However, when the observances of converts
from paganism were added to them, a 'special system' was
offered to them, as it were: the Council of Jerusalem in
49 A.D. exempted them from circumcision and Jewish
observances; "many Judeo-Christians rejected this
concession". This group was quite separate from
Paul's. What is more, Paul and the Judeo-Christians were
in conflict over the question of pagans who had turned to
Christianity, (the incident of Antioch, 49 A.D.).
"For Paul, the circumcision, Sabbath, and form of
worship practised in the Temple were henceforth old
fashioned, even for the Jews. Christianity was to free
itself from its political-cum-religious adherence to
Judaism and open itself to the Gentiles."
For those Judeo-Christians who remained 'loyal Jews,'
Paul was a traitor. Judeo-Christian documents call him an
'enemy', accuse him of 'tactical double-dealing', . . .
'"Until 70 A.D., Judeo-Christianity represents the
majority of the Church" and "Paul remains an
isolated case". The head of the community at that
time was James, a relation of Jesus. With him were Peter
(at the beginning) and John. "James may be
considered to represent the Judeo-Christian camp, which
deliberately clung to Judaism as opposed to Pauline
Christianity." Jesus's family has a very important
place in the Judeo-Christian Church of Jerusalem.
"James's successor was Simeon, son of Cleopas, a
cousin of the Lord".
Cardinal Danielou here quotes Judeo-Christian writings
which express the views on Jesus of this community which
initially formed around the apostles: the Gospel of the
Hebrews (coming from a Judeo-Christian community in
Egypt), the writings of Clement: Homilies and
Recognitions, 'Hypotyposeis', the Second Apocalypse of
James, the Gospel of Thomas. [ One could note here that all these writings were
later to be classed as Apocrypha, i.e. they had to be
concealed by the victorious Church which was born of
Paul's success. This Church made obvious excisions in the
Gospel literature and retained only the four Canonic
Gospels.] "It is to the
Judeo-Christians that one must ascribe the oldest
writings of Christian literature." Cardinal
Daniélou mentions them in detail.
"It was not just in Jerusalem and Palestine that
Judeo-Christianity predominated during the first hundred
years of the Church. The Judeo-Christian mission seems
everywhere to have developed before the Pauline mission.
This is certainly the explanation of the fact that the
letters of Paul allude to a conflict." They were the
same adversaries he was to meet everywhere: in Galatia,
Corinth, Colossae, Rome and Antioch.
The Syro-Palestinian coast from Gaza to Antioch was
Judeo-Christian '"as witnessed by the Acts of the
Apostles and Clementine writings". In Asia Minor,
the existence of Judeo-Christians is indicated in Paul's
letters to the Galatians and Colossians. Papias's
writings give us information about Judeo-Christianity in Phrygia. In Greece, Paul's first letter to the
Corinthians mentions Judeo-Christians, especially at Apollos. According to Clement's letter and the Shepherd
of Hermas, Rome was an 'important centre'. For Suetonius
and Tacitus, the Christians represented a Jewish sect.
Cardinal Daniélou thinks that the first evangelization
in Africa was Judeo-Christian. The Gospel of the Hebrews
and the writings of Clement of Alexandria link up with
this.
It is essential to know these facts to understand the
struggle between communities that formed the background
against which the Gospels were written. The texts that we
have today, after many adaptations from the sources,
began to appear around 70 A.D., the time when the two
rival communities were engaged in a fierce struggle, with
the Judeo-Christians still retaining the upper hand. With
the Jewish war and the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. the
situation was to be reversed. This is how Cardinal
Daniélou explains the decline:
"After the Jews had been discredited in the
Empire, the Christians tended to detach themselves from
them. The Hellenistic peoples of Christian persuasion
then gained the upper hand. Paul won a posthumous
victory. Christianity separated itself politically and
sociologically from Judaism; it became the third people.
All the same, until the Jewish revolt in 140 A.D.,
Judeo-Christianity continued to predominate
culturally"
From 70 A.D. to a period sometime before 110 A.D. the
Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John were produced.
They do not constitute the first written Christian
documents: the letters of Paul date from well before
them. According to O. Culmann, Paul probably wrote his
letter to the Thessalonians in 50 A.D. He had probably
disappeared several years prior to the completion of
Mark's Gospel.
Paul is the most controversial figure in Christianity.
He was considered to be a traitor to Jesus's thought by
the latter's family and by the apostles who had stayed in
Jerusalem in the circle around James. Paul created
Christianity at the expense of those whom Jesus had
gathered around him to spread his teachings. He had not
known Jesus during his lifetime and he proved the
legitimacy of his mission by declaring that Jesus, raised
from the dead, had appeared to him on the road to
Damascus. It is quite reasonable to ask what Christianity
might have been without Paul and one could no doubt
construct all sorts of hypotheses on this subject. As far
as the Gospels are concerned however, it is almost
certain that if this atmosphere of struggle between
communities had not existed, we would not have had the
writings we possess today. They appeared at a time of
fierce struggle between the two communities. These
'combat writings', as Father Kannengiesser calls them,
emerged from the multitude of writings on Jesus. These
occurred at the time when Paul's style of Christianity
won through definitively, and created its own collection
of official texts. These texts constituted the 'Canon'
which condemned and excluded as unorthodox any other
documents that were not suited to the line adopted by the
Church.
The Judeo-Christians have now disappeared as a
community with any influence, but one still hears people
talking about them under the general term of 'Judaïstic'. This is how Cardinal Daniélou describes
their disappearance:
"When they were cut off -from the Great Church,
that gradually freed itself from its Jewish attachments,
they petered out very quickly in the West. In the East
however it is possible to find traces of them in the
Third and Fourth Centuries A.D., especially in Palestine,
Arabia, Transjordania, Syria and Mesopotamia. Others
joined in the orthodoxy of the Great Church, at the same
time preserving traces of Semitic culture; some of these
still persist in the Churches of Ethiopia and
Chaldea".
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