Meeks, Wayne A.

Revistes Catalanes amb Accés Obert

RCatT XXIXl2 (2004) 235-238 O Facultat de Teologia de Catalunya 
CHRISTIANITY: 
A RELIGION BETWEEN TWO CULTURES 
Wayne A. MEEKS 
It is a teinse time in the Middle East. A new but rapidly expanding Western 
power has inoved aggressively into the region of the Eastern Mediterranean. 
First to come were its merchants, who in many places have come to dominate 
local commerce. Then its burgeoning military might has followed to protect 
their econornic position. Almost without intending to, it has become an imperi- 
al pclwer. Inideed, despite conflicts at home as well as resistance abroad, it has 
become a siiperpower. The domestic politics of this superpower infect the ten- 
sions that allready exist in the region and transform them into more dangerous 
forms. 
Iri the previous centuries, the local cultures of the region had already 
absorbed the results of an earlier military and cultural imperialism, leaving an 
overlay of a world language imposed on a complex mosaic of local tongues 
and customs, and a self-conscious artistic and literary culture that threatens to 
subrrierge ancient local traditions. New power structures impose themselves on 
ancie:nt clans, tribes, and cities. 
For many people, the changes bring frightening disorientation, impoverish- 
ment, loss of freedom. For others, however, new possibilities are emerging, of 
weallth, power, and liberty. Local communities develop varied and conflicting 
responses to the twin challenge of the new world culture and the new imperial 
supei-power: assimilation, accommodation, resistance. Each group has its mod- 
ernizers, its traditionalists, its revisionists. In severa1 places, resistance reaches 
the point of armed uprisings against the occupying forces or against local 
exploiters of the new situation. The new powers respond with brutal suppres- 
sion of the nativizing movements. Over al1 these changes hangs a curious 
irony: Both the imperial powers, the older and the newer, pride themselves on 
their democratic institutions as well as their humane culture. Yet, as they have 
236 WAYNE A. MEEKS 
settled into the management of empire, both have resorted more and more to 
brute force, even committing unspeakable atrocities in order to maintain what 
they call «peace». 
The time is two thousand years ago. The young power is Rome, the older, 
those Successors of Alexander the Great who brought «Hellenization» to the 
lands of the eastern Mediterranean. It is out of that clash of forces and mixing 
of cultures, out of that chaos of fears and hopes in what we conveniently call 
«the Graeco-Roman world», that the new religious movement emerged which 
came to be «Christianity». How did that happen? What were the connections 
between that new movement and the cultural forces that preceded and sur- 
rounded it at its birth? These are questions that have fascinated inquirers for 
two millenia, and they still intrigue us. Was Christianity a combination of 
things old, or was it a new thing? Oddly, its own literary representatives from 
the beginning said it was both, both ancient and familiar and at the same time 
radically new. What did they mean? And, knowing what we do about the polit- 
ical and social currents of their time, how should we understand and evaluate 
those claims? 
These are some of the questions that preoccupy the Studiorum Novi Testa- 
menti Societas, the international Society of New Testament Studies, which is 
meeting here this week and which is sponsoring this evening's symposium. 
The New Testament remains our primary set of documents for pursuing such 
questions. But the way we read the New Testament, if we are historians, 
depends in large part on the ways we understand that cultural environment and 
the clashes of forces within it. Our knowledge of that environment has been 
vastly enriched in recent decades by archaeological investigations, by chance 
discoveries of important manuscripts, by technical advances, and by the devel- 
opment of new ways of analyzing evidence. Nevertheless, much about the ori- 
gins of Christianity remains mysterious. Moreover, when we are honest with 
ourselves, we have to admit that the stories we te11 about the past are always 
shaped in part by our own experience and beliefs, our desires and expecta- 
tions, our self-interest, and the prejudices and limited vision of our own cul- 
ture. 
Our conversation tonight has the title, «Christianity: a Religion Between 
Two Cultures». The two cultures are «Judaism» and «Hellenism». This frame- 
work follows a convention suggested by some of the writers of the New Testa- 
ment itself. The apostle Paul, for example, could say: «The gospel is the power 
of God for salvation to al1 who believe, first to the Jew, and also to the Greek» 
(Rom. 1:16). The world seems to comprise just these two, Jews and Greeks. 
And we hear also about a conflict within the very early Christian community, 
between «Hebrews» and «Hellenists» (Acts 6:l). It seems quite natural, then, 
to speak of Christianity as a «new religiom emerging out of the encounter 
between two great cultures, that of the Hellenistic world and that of ancient 
Israel. For some purposes that is a convenient shorthand, and this theme, of the 
CHRISTIANITY: A RELIGION BETWEEN TWO CULTURES 237 
meeting of Judaism and Hellenism, has had a powerful influence on the way 
modern scholars have understood Christianity's beginnings. 
However, we have to be careful. The reality was much more complicated, 
as oilr two speakers will indicate. Moreover, this picture of the clash of two 
cultuires is jtself part of one of the master narratives that shape our sense of 
who we are, a narrative constructed over centuries by people trying to under- 
stand themselves within other kinds of cultural changes and conflicts. 
This narrative is based on a special way of reading the whole Christian Bible 
-wliich of course did not yet exist when the New Testament writers lived- 
a story transformed by a triumphant great church in the age of Constantine 
and later. This master story imposes upon the complexity and ambiguities of 
life Iin the early and later Roman Empire a vastly simplified plot of con- 
frontation and synthesis, both between «Judaism» and «Hellenism», often 
framed as «Judaism vs. paganism», or «Judaism vs. idolatry», and between 
«Jews» and «Christians». 1 do not have to remind you that the simplified 
story has sometimes had terrible consequences in the attitudes and actions of 
Chriistians toward other groups, not least in the emergence of modern anti- 
semitism. 
If we are careful not to be blinded by our own theoretical abstractions, it is 
nevertheless useful to think about Christianity as a movement emerging out of 
the pluriform experiences of ancient Judaism, which was itself deeply embed- 
ded in the varied and rapidly changing culture of the Greek and Roman worlds. 
First of all, we have always to remember that what we cal1 Christianity was in 
the beginning a sect among the severa1 sects and movements of ancient 
Judaism. Even after its membership became predominantly gentile, it retained 
that Jewish identity -indeed, it eventually coopted Jewish scriptures and 
many parts of Jewish tradition and custom. If we are going to understand any- 
thing at al1 about the origins of Christianity, we have to understand Judaism as 
it was lived in the Roman Empire. 
On the other hand, we have to divest ourselves of the late medieval and 
early modern picture of Jews living in a ghetto, cut off from the larger society 
and culture around them. The Jews were one of many ethnic groups trying to 
cope with the sea-change brought to the Mediterranean world by «Helleniza- 
tion» and «Romanization». It was a time of great mobility, by ancient stan- 
dard~.  People in large numbers migrated from their homelands to live in the 
new and renewed cities that were expanding al1 over the Graeco-Roman 
region. Al1 of them had to find ways to retain their own identities, somehow 
keeping alive the ancient traditions and practices that made them who they 
were, while participating effectively and safely in that new, diverse civiliza- 
tion. Assimilation, accommodation, and resistance were al1 possibilities -in 
everjr combination. So, too, we find a vast range of different responses to that 
new situation on the part of the Jewish communities, both those at home, now 
under direct Roman rule, and in the Diaspora. 
238 WAYNE A. MEEKS 
We have been greatly helped in our recognition and understanding of the 
variety of Jewish response in the Roman period by the discovery in the 1940s 
of a quite remarkable group of manuscripts in the desert of Judea, which we 
cal1 «the Dead Sea Scrolls». Not only did they reveal the peculiarities of the 
small group that used and then hid those scrolls in the first century of our era, 
they also forced us to rethink what we thought we knew about other patterns of 
Jewish life at the time. And they have given us new insights as well into the 
origins of that younger sect of Judaism, Christianity. We are fortunate to have 
with us tonight one of the world's leading experts on those manuscripts, Pro- 
fessor Florentino García Martínez. Professor García Martínez will help us to 
understand something of Christianity's debt to the Jewish world at its begin- 
nings. 
One of the great mistakes made by some modem scholars was to set «Hel- 
lenism» and «Judaism» against each oiher as opposite poles, as if they repre- 
sented two forms of life that were always at war with each other. As if when 
Christianity was being «Jewish», it must be anti-Hellenist; when it was «Hel- 
lenistic», it must be anti-Jewish. There were even early Christians who talked 
that way, but the reality was always much more complex. Just as Jews had dis- 
covered many ways of living in the multicultural situation of the Graeco- 
Roman world, so also did the new movement that emerged from Judaism to 
embrace many gentiles. The broad currents of life and thought in the larger 
Graeco-Roman culture shaped the practices, attitudes, thought, and language of 
the early Christian communities in ways that were infinitely varied and perva- 
sive. Few scholars know more about those interactions than our first speaker, 
whose numerous writings discuss the cults, rhetoric, and mores of the Hellenis- 
tic tradition and their appropriation or resistance by the Christian groups. He is 
Professor Hans-Josef Klauck, and he will speak first on «Emerging Christiani- 
ty and Graeco-Roman Culture». He will be followed by Professor García 
Martínez. 
Wayne A. MEEKS 
President, Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas 


Christianity: A Religion between two Cultures

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