You’ve come here because you’re gawking at the ridiculous title of this post. Of course, you think to yourself, there are Christians in the New Testament. That’s what it’s all about isn’t it?
From a contemporary, post-fourth century CE point of view, you’re definitely right. The New Testament is used by Christians who identify the characters, stories, thought, and revelation inside its pages as “Christian.” But what does it mean for something to be “Christian”? More importantly for us here, what did “Christian” mean for the initial writers of the New Testament texts?
If you spend any amount of time among New Testament scholars today, the question of whether the earliest followers of Jesus were “Christians” invariably comes up. I would know; I poked the bear earlier this weekend:
The Twitter thread above is worth reading through because there are many different scholars and experts, many of whom have thought much more about this than me, who offer their insight into why the term "Christian” is a problematic label for the earliest followers of Jesus and the writers of the texts which came to be known as the New Testament.
Like all terms, “Christian” can mean ten different things to any one person. It can entail a set of theological beliefs, a denomination, a political worldview, etc. Because it is so loaded, some scholars wish to avoid it so that students are challenged to rethink their assumptions about what it meant to be a “Christian” in the ancient world.
One such scholar who challenges us is Dr. Maia Kotrosits. Her book, Rethinking Early Christian Identity, challenges both scholars and non-scholars like to be aware of imposing artificial unity and importance on the label “Christian” when it comes to the earliest texts of the Jesus movement. In other words, when we label such texts “Christians” it can make it seem like the movement is exceptionally homogenous toward what we understand to be Christian aims. But what Dr. Kotrosits finds in her work is that texts from the New Testament where terms related to “Christian” are found, like Acts, 1 Peter, Hebrews and the Gospel of John, are not really concerned with what it means to be “Christian.” Rather, such texts are concerned with “participation in Israelite diasporic culture.”1 It is not that Christian identity doesn’t exist and cannot exist in the New Testament from our point of view today, but that early Jesus followers were not concerned with negotiating “Christian identity” but their relationship to ancient Judaism(s).
In my opinion one of the most important reasons why “Christian” should be avoided when talking about the earliest layer of Jesus believers is because it obscures and elides the Jewishness of this movement. The New Testament was birthed within forms of ancient Judaism, and this fact is something many New Testament scholars have been working to re-affirm in the past century of scholarship. Forgetting the Jewishness of the early Jesus movement and those Christ followers gives way to antisemitism and anti-Judaism. It also distorts the interpretation of New Testament itself.
It is ironic that by imposing a uniform “Christian” label on the texts of the New Testament, one removes what is essential to such texts—their Jewishness. All the more reason why every single word that we use to analyze such scriptures—even the term “Christian”—must bear scrutiny. Every single word.
Kotrosits 2015, page 14.
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I love that last line. I loved the whole text but that last line was a banger. 👌🏻