Jesus clubs: shifting realities (1 gen 70 anni – 31 dic 249 anni)

Descrizione:

The overall balance of demographic influence in the Jesus cult shifts from Jews to gentiles. The timing on this is uncertain, but it’s reasonable to presume that the Roman-Jewish War may have put an end to the Judean core of the movement as surely as it did larger sects of Judaism. There are hints in the manuscript trail of increasing gentile dominance; the epistle of Barnabas is the most extreme example of this, arguing that the Jews have gone completely astray and share no part in the covenant of God, and dismissing Jewish legacy terms like “son of man” and “son of David” as appropriate titles for Jesus.

Even as they hold to the idea of the Parousia to come, some Jesus cult writers begin to noticeably lose or push back against the sense of its imminence. This would be a natural development, as the promised apocalypse has been “at hand” for decades, with most of those who first spread the news of it now dead. Increasing distance from the Roman-Jewish war may have accelerated the process, as the synoptic narrative explicitly tied the end of the age with the culmination of the war. Paul's own voice is recruited by the author of 2 Thessalonians in order to issue a corrective to his obvious prior expectation of the return of Jesus during his own lifetime. Other writers seem to display no expectation of a pending end of the age, or dabble in a form of realized eschatology wherein the kingdom of God already arrived, in the form of Jesus himself.

As compared to the earliest phase where women may have held substantial sway in the Jesus movement,post-Pauline writers and interpolators swing back towards the gender norms of the cultures in which they were produced, primarily situating women in submissive domestic arrangements and scaling back or completely negating women’s authority and voice in the movement. A few writers on the furthest fringe seem to view femininity itself as a defect, or women as nothing but common property.

There is a suggestion that wealthy individuals are investigating/joining the Jesus clubs, even as the majority of adherents are still drawn from the poor. The anti-wealth stance earlier attributed to the historical Jesus remains attested all throughout the period, to an occasionally strident degree.

By the mid- to late-second century, Christianity continues to grow. Believers are a mix of Jewish and Gentile “God-fearers”, but the latter now outnumbering the former. The religion is seen as a subversive mass movement appealing to those on lower rungs of the social strata: the poor, the uneducated, the unskilled, women. At the same time, there are indications of some Christians of means, or even of wealth.

By the time of the Didascalia (200-250 CE), Christianity has clearly grown to the point of holding large assemblies rather than small house churches, but the work still presents a picture of social separation, advising Christians to completely separate from the wider Greco-Roman world, including familial relations, popular literature of all kinds, and the secular legal system.

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