MetaCatholic

I often disagree with Ben Witherington, but in a scathing review he rightly and convincingly blasts a particular sort of biblical reading that is far more widespread than it ought to be. The whole lengthy post is worth reading. I particularly enjoyed this comment about the sloppy assumption sometimes made about house churches and the New Testament. It reflects both BW3’s conservatism and where a careful and honest application of an evangelical view of scripture really leads.

We are given the usual litany about Christians meeting in homes, and how they did not have church buildings. This is of course partially true, so far as we can tell, but frankly they didn’t just meet in homes, nor were there any mandates for them to do so saying “in order to be truly Christian thou shalt meet in cramped quarters.” They also met in Solomon’s Portico, which is to say in the Temple precincts as the early chapters of Acts informs us, and furthermore they went to synagogue services in purpose built buildings, and furthermore they occasionally rented halls, like the Hall of Tyrannus in Ephesus, and later in the first century, as the archaeological evidence makes clear, they met in caves, namely the catacombs in Rome, as well. I don’t see much of a movement in the church today to go back to cave dwelling.

Michael Bird has drawn attention to an interesting series of posts on Darrell Pursiful’s blog, which I’d not come across before, but shall be adding to my feedreader. He discusses the separation of Eucharist and Agape, and has a lot of useful comment on the topic. He is quite right to state that:

It is universally agreed that the earliest forms of Christian worship were integrally related to the congregation’s communal meal or agape.

I do find myself wondering, however, whether that universal agreement is one that imposes a clearer shape on the evidence than it really admits, even while it seems the most likely overall pattern. I enter the following observations:

• The clearest NT evidence comes from 1 Corinthians. The problem is that in many respects this seems to have been a very atypical church, both in Paul’s day, and at the end of the first century when we encounter it via Clement. Given that the social mores of eating seem to have been a significant problem, how much should we assume about Eucharistic patterns elsewhere?
• The evidence of Jesus’ meals as sacramental of inclusion, forgiveness and the bonds of fictive kinship should not be overlooked as giving some force to the importance of a communal meal. There is no clarity, however, on how these relate to the Last Supper, nor on what seems to have led, quite early on, to a Sunday observance of Jesus’ actions with the bread and wine, taken out of the annual Passover context in which they originated.
• The Didache seems to talk about a eucharistic gathering which comes at the beginning of a meal (Did 9, 10), although exactly what it is describing is not as clear as we would like. But there is another eucharistic reference in Didache 14, which seems not to relate to a meal, but be a more cultic observance (and the first mention of Malachi’s pure sacrifice in relation to the Eucharist).
• I find the evidence of Pliny useful but not unambiguous. While it is most reasonable to assume that the Eucharist was part of their evening meal, it is not impossible that the ritual remembrance of Jesus with bread and wine was connected to the morning oath, and that may be why the evening meal is referred to as food “but ordinary and innocent food”. It is, after all, this latter evening meal that they appear to have given up on Pliny’s direction.

The way Darrell read the evidence, is that the separation of Eucharist and Agape begins to happen sometime between Pliny and Justin. This would be the near universal consensus. But he wants to give far more stress to the continuing pattern of conjoined Eucharist and Agape running alongside the increasingly widespread separation.

What I would suggest may be worth further consideration, however, is the possibility that the pattern of separate Eucharists and Agapes was pretty much always there — perhaps as a function of numbers, perhaps of persecution. At first it was unusual, but later it became more common, before finally displacing the conjoined celebration.

I confess to a fairly thoroughgoing ignorance of scholarship on John, so for all I know this ground is well-trod elsewhere, though I haven’t tracked anything down. But it seems to me that while everybody admits, in varying degrees if discord, to serious disagreements between James and Paul, the Jerusalem church and the Pauline mission, by contrast there’s little said about what I think is the far more serious case of John.

Whatever the level of disharmony between those associated with James and the Pauline churches, the evidence seems clear enough that Paul continued to seek recognition from Jerusalem, and James felt he had a say in the governance and shaping of the Pauline churches. They contend with one another for the definition of the same people of God, and one should not read the later developments of Ebionitism back into this dispute.

By contrast, the fourth gospel has some very harsh words about James (although he is not mentioned by name), words that are not taken back..

After this Jesus went about in Galilee. He did not wish to go about in Judea because the Jews were looking for an opportunity to kill him. Now the Jewish festival of Booths was near. So his brothers said to him, “Leave here and go to Judea so that your disciples also may see the works you are doing; for no one who wants to be widely known acts in secret. If you do these things, show yourself to the world.” (For not even his brothers believed in him.) Jesus said to them, “My time has not yet come, but your time is always here. The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify against it that its works are evil. Go to the festival yourselves. I am not going to this festival, for my time has not yet fully come.” After saying this, he remained in Galilee. But after his brothers had gone to the festival, then he also went, not publicly but as it were in secret. (John 7:1-10  NRSV)

This is one of those passages (like most of John?) where we should almost certainly read Judeans instead of Jews. Interestingly, Jesus’ brothers speak about “disciples” in Judea, whereas the narrator speaks about those who want to kill Jesus being there. Against private Galilean ministry the brothers’ seek public Jerusalem ministry, and Jesus himself keeps his doings secret from them. Above all, he identifies them with “the world” and so characterizes them as not truly his disciples.

It is, I think, difficult, especially in light of  what I see as the sectarian markers of the Johannine writings (for example, the great stress on not loving the world, while intensely loving one another),  not to see this as a coded conflict with the Jerusalem church, as led by James. Jerusalem is home to the Judeans, and those who make their home there identify with them. Jesus only visits, constantly returning to his home in Galilee.  For the narrator Judeans are mainly  the ones who oppose Jesus, who are not his disciples, but lovers of the world. For James and the brothers, however, it is ”your disciples” who are located in Judea, as they themselves came to be when they set up the church in Jerusalem, precisely the opposite view of the narrator. What does this say about relations between the Johannine community and the Jerusalem Church?