Gentile "God-fearers" cozying up to Judaism (1 gen 125 anni a. C. – 31 dic 99 anni)

Descrizione:

Even with a unique strategy for dealing with radical disconfirmation, the early Christian movement would almost certainly have vanished from the face of the Earth had it remained nothing but a messianic Jewish cult of personality. The fact that it spread out into the wider Greco-Roman world is likely what ensured its survival beyond the Roman-Jewish war that would put an end to even the great Jewish factions of the day (Pharisees, Sadducees, etc.), as well seeding the initial steady growth that would allow Christianity to slowly consume (via asymmetric theological warfare) the polytheistic religious milieu in which it found itself. None of this would have been possible if there had not been a concerted effort (by Paul and others) to sell the Christ cult to non-Jews, and such an effort would likely have been for naught had there not already been a subset of non-Jews who were attracted to Judaism.

To varying degrees, these “God-fearers” participated in Jewish traditions and appreciated features of Judaism in general, but for understandable reasons found it unappealing to obey the entire body of Jewish religious law, and especially to be circumcised. Lo and behold, what do we see in Paul’s writings but a theological case for why the law no longer holds sway, and why circumcision in particular is totally anathema. In other words, Paul and those like him found a way to pitch a version of Judaism to God-fearers that ruled out exactly the specific practices which had previously kept them from becoming full-fledged initiates. This enabled the rapid formation of Jesus clubs in multiple major Greco-Roman cities along the upper Mediterranean. Paul certainly appears to have worked hard at it, but for a (supposed) tent maker, these were, in a memetic sense, “easy up”s. The key ingredients were already there; the particular genius at work here seems to have been just meeting a demand with a supply.

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