Jesus disciples spit (belief vs. doubt) Initial explication of Jesus mythology Initial realities of posthumous Jesus cult Initial local franchising of Jesus clubs First formalized statements of belief (jan 1, 30 – dec 31, 49)

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Jesus’ disciples split in the aftermath of his death. Some of the disciples simply persist in a state of complete denial: despite all appearances to the contrary, Jesus is the messiah, and furthermore, he’s not even really dead. This sort of doubling down in the face of a radical disconfirmation is common to cult movements. There are multiple strategies the human mind might turn to in order to buttress such a dogged belief:
> “Visionary” experiences of Jesus – perhaps nothing more complicated than intense, anguished dreams about him. Early Christian writings are positively packed with references to Jesus or heavenly instruction being experienced via mystical vision, hinting that this is indeed what some of his bereaved followers experienced in the wake of his death.
> Seeing other (real) persons and “perceiving” Jesus instead; or, Jesus appearing in some other, unexpected form. Traditions about Jesus’ ability to ‘shapeshift’ and take on other likenesses are very common in early Christian literature, and provide hints to another possible way that his followers might have argued that they “saw” him alive again.
> There’s a slight suggestion that some may have believed Jesus was taken up to heaven directly from the cross. This seems a strange claim on the face of it, but if none of Jesus’ disciples were actually there to see him die, some of them may have found a way to convince themselves of this.

Other disciples doubt these claims that Jesus is somehow still alive, and fall away from the movement. Indications of such doubt are independently attested in every gospel tradition, even when it makes no narrative sense, strongly hinting at some underlying historical reality.

The followers who persist in their belief that Jesus was/is the messiah have their work cut out for them in rationalizing how this could be. Jesus was tortured and executed by God’s enemies, completely contrary to any known Jewish expectations for the messiah up until this point. The postmortem messianic claim comes to be propped up via a two-pronged approach:
> Pulling prior messianic expectations closer to Jesus: The followers go on a motivated hunt through the Jewish scriptures, seeking any passages into which they can willfully retroject Jesus and the events of his life. The “suffering servant” of Isaiah does much work here, along with countless other passages have no messianic connections or context and which Jews had never interpreted in that fashion previously. This effort will continue over the entire time period, eventually reaching such a pitch that Christian writings will claim that the OT prophets were preaching Jesus all along.
Efforts even extend into the investigation and reuse of the Sibylline oracles. It is possible that not everyone thought that this pesheresque process of scriptural “Where’s Waldo (Jesus)” was a necessary move, but on the whole it is a defining feature of early Christian writing.
> Pushing the historical Jesus closer to these new messianic expectations: Jesus’ followers would then have been apt to “re-remember” things that he said and did during his lifetime, in support of their new conception of what the Jewish messiah was actually supposed to be; a process similar to this is attested multiple times in early Christian writings.
> Once thought of as human only, Jesus will come to be conceived of in more and more divinized ways as the scriptural “references” and “fulfillments” pile up. This is a long and inconsistent process with a huge variety of resulting Christologies in the manuscript trail.

At the same time as they are shoring up the messianic claim, Jesus’ persisting followers had to address the question of why, if he truly was God’s chosen messiah, he would be allowed to (or needed to) suffer and die at the hands of God’s enemies, something that (as far as we can tell) no Jew had ever previously expected out of their messiah. It couldn’t have been as punishment for Jesus’ own sins (this was probably dismissed out of hand); well, per the existing sacrificial logic of Judaism, it clearly had to have been for the sins of others. The doctrine of atonement emerges.

The core mythology of Jesus Christ was now in place: He was God’s messiah, destined (and predicted!) to suffer and die for the sins of others. After having done so, he’d been raised from the dead and had “appeared” to his most diehard followers.

James “the Just” (Jesus’ brother) takes over leadership of the movement in Jerusalem, after claiming to have had a vision of Jesus as well. o In the context of its socio-cultural time and place, the original Jesus cult is an evangelizing sect of Judaism that maintains adherence to Mosaic law. They may be known as the Nazarenes. oAdherents of the Jesus cult face extreme social discord with their friends and family, a trend which will only continue as the movement spreads into the gentile world. This could have begun even while Jesus was alive, but it was almost certainly worse after his death. Jews insisting that a crucified criminal was their messiah, and gentiles turning away from state gods that shaped the shared social experience of the Greco-Roman world, would have been making quite offensive statements in the contexts of their own cultures.

Antioch becomes a prominent hub for the early Jesus club. Taking Acts as a reliable history of the early church is a seriously dicey proposition, but there seems to be little reason to doubt the general picture of a messianic movement attempting to spread regionally. Jesus club(s) are eventually established in Rome as well. There is no attested history in the early Christian writings as to how this happened.

This early Jesus club franchising may have coincided with the development of the first formalized statements of beliefs, which would in theory have been useful tools to try to keep far-flung Jesus cult adherents on the same page. However, the Pre-Pauline creeds do preserve a notable diversity of Christological belief (the relatively “lower” Christology may have been favored by the Roman Jesus club(s)). Creeds as late as the pastoral timeframe continue to attest the use of low or unorthodox Christologies (Jesus as a human being; his resurrection “in spirit” seen by “angels”).

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