METHOD

&THEORY in the
STUDY OF
RELIGION

Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23 (2011) 193-215 brill.nl/mtsr

The Collection and Synthesis of “Tradition”

and the Second-Century Invention of Christianity*

William Arnal
Department of Religious Studies, University of Regina, Regina,
Saskatchewan S4S 0A2, Canada
william.arnal@uregina.ca

Abstract
The following paper argues that “Christianity” as a discursive entity did not exist until the second
century CE. As a result, the first-century writings that constitute the field of inquiry for “Chris-
tian origins” are not usefully conceived as “Christian” at all. They were, rather, secondarily
claimed as predecessors and traditions by second-century (and later) authors engaged in a pro-
cess of “inventing tradition” to make sense of their own novel institutional and social circum-
stances. As an illustration, the paper looks at the ways that a series of second-century authors
cumulatively created the figure of Paul as a first-century predecessor, and how this process has
affected the way the first-century Pauline materials are read. At issue in all of this are our imagi-
native conceptions of social entities (including “religions”) and what they are, and of how canons
and notions of social continuity attendant on them are formed.

Keywords
Paul, Christianity, Marcion, tradition, second century, Christian origins

I. The Problematic

Those of us who imagine our scholarly work on the New Testament and related
literature in non-theological terms have become accustomed to identifying
our field as “Christian Origins.” This language is intended to replace the ter-
minology of “New Testament Studies,” or, worse, “Biblical Studies,” which
seem at the very least to be indebted to particular confessional postures, and at
worst to be anachronistic and conceptually misleading. But there are some
ironies embedded in this shift in vocabulary. Arguably, such a change in terms

* A version of this paper was presented at the session on “Redescribing Early Christianity” at
the Annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, San Diego, November 17, 2007. I wish
to thank Willi Braun, John Kloppenborg, Chris Matthews, and William Richards for their
extremely helpful suggestions and criticisms.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/157006811X608359
194 W. Arnal / Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23 (2011) 193-215

does little more than deflect our attention from the fact that no fundamental
reconceptualization of the field, or of its data, has actually taken place. With
few exceptions (and those contested), our scholarship remains centered on the
canonical writings of the New Testament, and we continue to act as though
these New Testament documents represent expressions of a common—if,
admittedly, diverse—movement; and that as such they serve as sources for,
and stand in social, historical, and/or conceptual continuity with, the ecclesi-
astical structures and ideologies of the second century and later. In some
respects, the language of “Christian Origins” actually exacerbates the problem,
since in two words it manages to impute both an originary status to the
New Testament writings, and to claim for those writings a specifically Chris-
tian identity.
The issue is not merely one of nomenclature, but one of fundamental con-
ception: in referring to texts like the letters of Paul, or Q, or the Synoptic
Gospels as “Christian,” we are making covert or, at the very least, unargued
assertions both about these documents themselves, and about the nature of
their relationships to one another and to subsequent socio-cultural forma-
tions.1 By taking it for granted that Paul and his letters constitute part of the
“origins” of the ideas, practices, or institutions we later find in, say, the letters
of Ignatius or the writings of Irenaeus, we are implying that each can be under-
stood to some degree in light of the other—that, for example, Pauline institu-
tions, ideological claims, or practices represent an earlier instantiation of
analogous ideas animating Ignatius; and that the ideas and institutions we
find in Ignatius’ letters, correlatively, are versions—whether developed or
“perverted”—of those found in Paul. In addition, by identifying the scattered,
distinct, and theologically unrelated documents that happen to appear in the
New Testament as collectively originary for that later social movement known
as “Christianity,” we imply some sort of unity of conception or agenda behind
them, and so assume that to at least some degree the ideas or at least core com-
mitments and convictions found in one text might be taken for granted in
other texts in which they do not actually appear.2 In short, we continue to act

1
The issue is framed nicely by John H. Elliott (2007: 148): “As we professors are made well
aware by our students and fellow-churchgoers, a common notion of many contemporary Chris-
tians—and shared ironically by many Jews for that matter—is that Christianity was up and
running as a new religion from the moment Jesus’ infant feet hit the turf and his mother wor-
shipped the ground he stood on. The tertium genus of which Tertullian eventually spoke was
already in motion—so goes the common belief—from the first breath of baby Jesus.”
2
We see this tendency, for example, in the translation of 1 Corinthians 11:23 (ἐν τῇ νυκτὶ ᾗ
παρεδίδετο) as “on the night on which he was betrayed,” reading (and translating) 1 Corinthians
in light of the gospel narrative. The assumption of fundamental unity among “Christian” sources
appears to drive scholars such as Larry Hurtado (2003) and Arland Hultgren (1994), and now
 W. Arnal / Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23 (2011) 193-215 195

as though “Christianity” represents a coherent, sensible, and informative clas-

sification for what we are studying when we study the writings of the New
Testament, and this assumption continues to circumscribe what we regard to
be thinkable.3
What evidence is available to us, however, strongly suggests that not merely
the terminology but probably also the conception of “Christianity” are prod-
ucts of the second century.4 As is well known, only three occurrences of the
adjective “Christian” (Χριστιανός), typically presented as an outsider epithet,
appear in the New Testament, and they occur in documents that should be
dated to the second century: 1 Peter (see Horrell 2007: 361-381), and Acts of
the Apostles (on the late dating of Acts, see Mack 1995: 45; Pervo 2006;
Tyson 2006). The term does not appear at all in any of the canonical gospels
(nor the Gospel of Thomas, for that matter), nor in any of the letters of Paul,
whether authentic or pseudonymous. In the case of Acts, the use of the term
is retrojected back into the first century, but the document itself comes from
the beginning or even the middle of the second century, and thus indicates
only what was claimed about the first century by those of the second. Ignatius,
sometime in the early to middle second century, i.e., in the same time range
represented by 1 Peter and Acts, and by contrast to most of the New Testa-
ment writings, uses “Christian” freely (Eph 11:2; Mag 4; Rom 3:2; Pol 7:3),
perhaps reveling in his inversionary appropriation of this derogatory label.5

especially Richard Bauckham (2006), who seem to regard it as almost unthinkable that diverse
Christian documents would not share the same information and beliefs about Jesus.
3
Note the comment of Rowan Williams (2002: 3), regarding no less a figure than Walter
Bauer: “ ‘The Christian religion’: Bauer assumes that such a category would make sense of Paul,
perhaps even to Paul. There is a spiritual center, after all, to the Christian phenomenon, with
some kind of self-correcting, self-directing energy.”
4
In addition, both the nomenclature and conception of “Christian” may also have been
imposed from without, as an outsider-designation, before it came to be adopted by Christians
themselves. The meaning of the term as something like “Christ-lackey,” as well as its Latin deri-
vation, would already imply this. All of the New Testament references likewise imply or describe
the imposition of the term from without: in 1 Peter 4:16 one might suffer “as a Christian”
(ὡς Χριστιανός), i.e., in light of the charge of being Christian; in Acts 11:26 it is said that
Antioch is where believers were first called Christians, and in Acts 26:28 it is Agrippa, not Paul,
who uses the term. For a thorough and wide-ranging discussion, see Elliott 2000: 789-97.
5
The usage in Romans 3:2 in particular would support such a reading, associating his own
martyrdom with truly earning the term “Christian.” But elsewhere (Magnesians 4), Ignatius
generates a similar opposition between simply being called a Christian, and actually being one,
this time in terms of obedience to the bishop. The general inversionary principle seems to be one
of self-denial, whether minor (obedience) or extravagant (martyrdom). For Ignatius, truly being
a “Christian” involves some form of self-abnegation: giving one’s time to God, obeying the
bishop, accepting martyrdom. The term also appears once in the roughly contemporary Didache
(also a text concerned with the authority of bishops; Did 12:4), and several times in the later
second-century Martyrdom of Polycarp (3; 10:1; 12:1-2).
196 W. Arnal / Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23 (2011) 193-215

In non-Christian materials, the term shows a similar use and distribution.

These references, like those of the New Testament, appear in the context of
outsider accusations and prosecution. The earliest appearances of the term
include the famous references to the Neronian persecution by Tacitus (Annals
15.44) and Suetonius (Nero 16); as well as the letter of Pliny to Trajan
(Ep. 10.96). In Tacitus and Suetonius, as in Acts, “Christians” are described
with reference to the first century, but the texts themselves date to the early
second.6 By the middle of the second century, the term begins to appear
more freely, and as a simple identification even outside of forensic contexts,
e.g., in the writings of Lucian (Alexander the False Prophet 25, 38; Peregrinus
11, 12, 13, 16).
The abstract noun “Christianity” (Χριστιανισμός) is exceptionally rare, but
is also more significant. Its first known use, and perhaps its invention, is to be
traced to Ignatius, who uses it four times (Rom 3:3; Mag 10:1, 3; Philad 6:1;
see Elliott 2007: 148, n.125). It is a striking coinage, and implies much more
than the adjectival “Christian.” Its form—Χριστιανισμός—and its juxtaposi-
tion with an implicitly analogous ᾽Ιουδαϊσμός (as in Philad 6:1; Mag 10:3)
transforms a sobriquet of patronal affiliation into an ideological system and an
overarching way of life. This innovation in terminology is accompanied by a
behavioral reinforcement: Ignatius is acknowledging and thereby generating,
in his letters and his visits, a unity with various scattered individuals and espe-
cially groups in Asia Minor (and in Rome). The act of mutual recognition of
common identity actually creates a distinct shared identity which Ignatius
identifies as “Christianism,” thus enacting such an identity in both word and
deed. While apparently lacking the terminology of “Christianity,” the author
of Luke-Acts does something similar on a narrative scale: he constructs a tale
in which a huge variety of individuals and events are fused together in a com-
mon story, a synthesis that asserts the social and ideological unity of these
persons and events, their shared identity.
It cannot be doubted, of course, that some contact and some shared sense
of purpose animated some groups of Jesus-people in the first century. Paul
refers to the “ekklēsiai of Judea” (e.g., Gal 1:22), has contacts with the “pillars,”
and believes that his own ekklēsiai should provide financial support to “the

6
That Nero suppressed people who, retrospectively, could be designated as “Christ lackeys”
indicates nothing about the status of “Christianity” in the first century; only that, as Suetonius
notes, Nero aimed to cleanse the city of Rome of marginal or questionable clubs.
 W. Arnal / Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23 (2011) 193-215 197

saints” (οἱ ἅγιοι) in Jerusalem.7 The gospels use one another as sources,8 and
clearly depend upon a more or less shared oral collection of tales and popular
wisdom. All speak of Jesus, of course, to greater or lesser degrees. But these
first-century materials lack an explicitly unifying and synthetic conception of
being part of a broad movement (or institution, or ideology, or life-style);
other groups may or may not refer to Jesus, and may or may not do so “cor-
rectly,” and this in turn may require or promote some form of exchange (of
money, ideas, traditions, etc.), but none of this seems to carry with it a sense
of either institutional or ideological identity. So, for instance, Q shows no
interest at all in any other Jesus-people, instead imagining itself as directed to
and engaged with “this generation” of the people of Israel. It comes to speak
to “Christians” only by virtue of being absorbed into Matthew and later into
Luke. Similar in its way is the Gospel of Thomas, whose theology seems to lack
an interest in Jesus’ salvific death or resurrection, or an awareness or concern
for an institutional church or even a distinctive broad lifestyle beyond its own
immediate circle, promoting instead an apparently isolated, mystical school of
philosophy whose teaching it attributes to Jesus. As some scholars have noted,
however, the manuscript form in which we have Thomas uses the staurogram
for the single occurrence of the word “cross” in the entire text (saying #55).9
Like Q, Thomas becomes meaningfully Christian by virtue of later Christian
claims upon it, which shift its frame of reference from an isolated Jesus-school

7
We must be very careful with Paul, however, not to let our tendency to assume unity of
purpose and/or identity among different Jesus-people to lead us to invent evidence of this unity
in the Pauline corpus. But Paul’s identification of his collection as for “the poor among the saints
(τῶν ἁγίων) at Jerusalem” (Romans 15:26) indicates a group of Jesus-people conceived in some
form of union with Paul’s groups; “the saints” is the closest Paul comes to a general and shared
designation for Jesus-people. The collection—itself an act of unification and mutual recogni-
tion—is one of the rare instances in which Paul applies this term unambiguously to those outside
of his own ekklēsiai. The same is true of his references to the “churches” of Judea—normally
the term ekkēlsia is reserved for Paul’s own groups, but it is sometimes used to refer to Jesus-
people associated with Judea and/or Jerusalem. It should be noted, however, that this example in
some ways reinforces the over-arching point of this paper rather than constituting an exception
to it: Paul is claiming the “pillars” as predecessors, a claim that they themselves might find
uncomfortable.
8
Though even this occurs rather late in the first century, and then only in the case of
Matthew. The use of sources by Luke is a second-century phenomenon, and the situation with
John is unclear.
9
Hurtado 2000: 271-88 discusses this phenomenon. There is no question that it represents a
unifying tendency in the manuscript tradition, and one that may be properly designated “Chris-
tian.” This does not, however, imply a retrospective “Christian” identity to the composers of
Thomas—only that the text was later claimed as such.
198 W. Arnal / Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23 (2011) 193-215

to a movement within a broader theological or institutional stream.10 Simi-

larly, the gospels do not explicitly refer to each other’s stories—it is clearly not
important for the evangelists to comment on and explicitly engage with the
intentionality, usage, or “community” circumstances of the texts they rewrite
and/or pillage for source-material.11 They treat their sources as manipulable
information about Jesus, not as theological statements or expressions of
“church life” that have an integrity of their own.12 The examples could be
multiplied indefinitely.13

II. The Invention of Tradition

How, then, should we understand the relationship between those first-century

documents preserved in the New Testament, and the Christianity—as an at
least conceptually (if not institutionally) unified social movement—that we can
see clearly for the first time only by the second century, and that ensured the
preservation of these earlier artifacts?14 I propose what is admittedly a fairly

10
An effort to understand Thomas as having always been the product of a recognizable insti-
tutional “Christianity,” even from a very early date, is provided by DeConick 2005. In many
ways, this reading is a step forward, insofar as it attempts to approach Thomas in much the same
fashion as other, canonical texts are used; for once, Thomas achieves parity with some of the New
Testament writings. On the other hand, the historical reconstruction is rather a priori—Thomas
is more or less fitted into an extant (and debatable) historical outline of ancient Christianity
emphasizing originary apocalypticism, “delay of the Parousia,” and “cognitive dissonance,” even
when those features are not readily apparent in Thomas at all. In any case, while treating Thomas
on par with the New Testament writings is generally to be desired, what is being criticized here
is precisely how those New Testament writings are treated, so for this reason DeConick’s admi-
rable even-handedness and openness to Thomas actually diminishes the text’s value as indepen-
dent evidence for the earliest followers of Jesus.
11
The obvious exception to this general statement is the prologue of Luke, in which
the author explicitly refers both to prior accounts and to sources. But this is one of those excep-
tions that proves the rule: Luke-Acts is one of those second-century documents that manifests
the synthesizing tendencies which I am claiming are foundational for the developing sense
of “Christianity.”
12
This is not to say that those sources were not respected or adhered to in detail. On the
unusually high degree of verbatim agreement among the synoptics, as compared to other con-
temporary uses of source material, see Kloppenborg 2007: 63-77.
13
As but two possible additional examples, see John Marshall’s argument that the Apocalypse
is a Jewish text (2001); and the assertion that the Gospel of Mark is an extended reflection on the
nature and ramifications of Jewish ethnic identity (Arnal 2008b).
14
In creating this distinction between first and second centuries, I am by no means suggesting
that early Christians themselves recognized anything like this division, or that some identifiable
sea-change took place in the year 101 CE. The point is rather that a conceptual foundation for a
Christian identity began to be laid almost one hundred years after the foundational events to
 W. Arnal / Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23 (2011) 193-215 199

extreme answer to this question: that we should assume a fairly strong discon-
tinuity among and between them, at least for analytic purposes, and instead
see the connection of these documents with one another, and with the ideol-
ogy and social features of the second century, in terms of a process of inventing
tradition, that is, in terms of variegated second century efforts to conceive of a
common Christian identity by invoking and laying claim to a scattering of
earlier texts or the stories and figures contained in them as somehow ancestral
to groups these innovators sought to sculpt (cf. Raymond Williams 1977:
116). Or, as Eric Hobsbawm expresses it most clearly: “the peculiarity of
‘invented’ traditions is that the continuity with it is largely factitious. In short,
they are responses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old
situations, or which establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition”
(Hobsbawm 1983: 2).
For the sake of clarity, it might be worth putting this as baldly as possible
when it comes to understanding the history of “Christianity.” The earlier New
Testament writings are rather like displays in a second-century museum; as
with museum collections, they are important symbols of who “we” are or want
to be, how “we” see ourselves, but without actually having been produced by
“us” at all. As a case in point, the collection of art at the Museum of Modern
Art is an important reflection on the identity of New Yorkers (and perhaps
Americans in general), simply by the act of laying claim to it, assembling it,
and investing it with significance—but the individual items in the collection
are not all or necessarily the product or property of (specific) New Yorkers or
Americans. That similar claims to tradition were instrumental for identity-
formation in antiquity is evident in, for example, the seizure by Ptolemy III
Euergetes (246-221 BCE) of the “official” Athenian copies of the tragedies
of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides for the Alexandrian library, essentially
by fraud (the official copies were “borrowed” from Athens against a deposit of
15 talents—the copies were kept and the deposit forfeited (Green 1990: 89)).
This is what a very concrete act of “claiming” tradition looks like.
The theoretical procedure suggested here is not, in itself, especially counter-
intuitive. Historians of other periods have noted something similar: that even
modern groups seeking to define themselves and their identity in the present
do so by inventing or laying claim to an ancestral identity which unifies, iden-
tifies, and gives them august (or respectable, or congenial) roots. The most
obvious example is also the most insidious: the nascent nation of Germany in

which it laid claim, and decades after the earliest documents that attend to those events were
composed.
200 W. Arnal / Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23 (2011) 193-215

the nineteenth century (and into the twentieth) sought to invent an identity
for itself not only by political means (i.e., state unification and expansion) but
also by mythic appeal to a much broader and more ancient “Aryan” identity.
German nation-building thus laid claim to an invented “racial” (and with it,
cultural) continuity with the very roots, supposedly, of European tradition.
The more genuinely well-established national identities of France and Eng-
land are entirely trumped in the process.
Another modern example, albeit one less fraught with the myriad negative
connotations of German nationalism, is the invention of Scottish highland
tradition in the eighteenth century and into the Victorian period, a matter
discussed by Hugh Trevor-Roper, who concludes that the “traditional”
signifiers of highland identity—the bagpipes and the kilt—were appropriated
(bagpipes) or outright fabricated (the kilt in its classic expression) after the
union of Scotland and England in 1707. As Trevor-Roper makes the point:
“So far from being a traditional highland dress, it [the kilt] was invented by an
Englishman after the Union of 1707; and the differentiated ‘clan tartans’ are
an even later invention” (1983: 19). As for the bagpipes, they existed prior to
this period, but were generally regarded as a symptom of unattractive rusticity,
not a proud hallmark of Scottish nationalism. Hobsbawm (1983: 7) cites
as additional examples the nationalist “rediscovery” or outright fabrication
of ancient European “ancestral” figures such as Boadicea, Vercingetorix,
Arminius the Cheruscan, and Ossian. A more recent example is the recent
re-vivification of Hebrew as the living language of the state of Israel.
For their part, historians of antiquity have also noted efforts on the parts of
a variety of different groups to invent traditions for themselves by collecting,
editing, and laying claim to cultural products of the past: the treatment of past
figures and of tradition by the second sophistic.15 The same might be said
regarding the collections of past legal traditions, disputes, and stories in rab-
binic anthologies.16 It is easy enough to imagine, then, that the same kinds of

15
One distinctive feature of the so-called “second Sophistic”—and the only one that is really
relevant here—is its appeal to past historical figures. See Bowersock 1969; for a more recent
discussion of this category and the problems with it, see Broadhurst 2005: 57.
16
See Lightstone (1997: 277-78), who notes that everything Burton Mack claims about
ancient Christianity holds for the rabbis as well; and that scholarship on rabbinic origins is just
“a scholarly refinement of rabbinic literature’s own account of its own literary history” (278).
Willi Braun (2007: 64) characterizes Lightstone’s views thus: “The circular consensus of the Rab-
bis’ self-account and scholarly accounts of Rabbinisms has produced a ‘historical narrative’ in
which literary history and corpus, embracing pre-70 ‘oral Torah,’ Mishnah, and the later canons
of the Babylonian and Palestinian academies, is ‘a largely self-consistent whole.’ Similarly, argues
Lightstone, in this narrative the rabbis are a ‘synthesis’ marked by a genealogical continuity
between generations of pre-destruction Judean and Galilean sages, the Yavneh academy, and the
 W. Arnal / Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23 (2011) 193-215 201

processes controlled the relationship between the second-century projects of

self-definition and the earlier interests of the New Testament writings. As Willi
Braun notes:
The past is convertible to social power in the present—hence the variety of
“instant-aging” manoeuvres familiar to us from the early Christian groups we
study. “Strategic tinkering with the past” is a ubiquitous cross-cultural social
rationalizing and formation device . . . and not restricted to times of social de- and
rearranging out of which new groupings emerge. But moments of emergence
demand it with accentuated urgency and provide exciting opportunity for tinker-
ing, precisely because these are moments when the social world as it is experienced
is exposed as fabricated (rather than self-evidently natural) and therefore also as
fabricatable (Braun 2007: 55; cf. Hobsbawm 1983: 4-5).
My proposal, then, is intended to be programmatic: Christian origins are
really to be sought in the ways in which a rapidly self-defining social move-
ment of the second century invented a tradition for itself. It did so by laying
claim to, and thus retrojecting its own sense of identity onto, scattered and
variegated past artifacts: stories, sayings collections, letters, and individual
characters such as Peter and Paul. This act of laying claim was supported by
redaction and embellishment of the artifacts in question, generating a cumula-
tive and synthetic body of putative forerunners, now invested with a retro-
spective unity and identity. Such a view would also accord well with the general
observations of Tomoko Masuzawa about our conceptualization of origins in
the study of religion—and the recognition that what we imagine in terms of a
pristine and absolute original is in fact an act of repetition or doubleness; that
pointing to moments of origination actually involves acts of endless and
imperfect duplication and repetition, in which there is no real original, or in
which what is original is constructed as such by the very act of duplicating it:
representation is a function of difference, of repetition without unitary origin.
But the repetition is precisely what covers this doubleness and makes it
invisible. . . . Yet this veiling that poses as laying it bare is essential to . . . the “dis-
course of originality”; for this discourse operates on the assumption of absolute
origin, and the concomitant occultation of the corresponding other, namely,
absolute repetition; in other words, this discourse is based on a repression (Masu-
zawa 1993: 25).
Meanwhile, for our own historical purposes, these sorts of artifacts, taken on
their own terms, and disentangled from the substantive and conceptual syn-
thetic processes of the second century, are probably better thought of in isola-
tion from one another, and independently of that powerful analytic framework

school that produced the Mishnah under the direction of Judah ben Simeon ben Gamaliel at the
end of the second century C.E.”
202 W. Arnal / Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23 (2011) 193-215

known as “Christianity,” with all of its implications.17 If this proposal has any
validity, then if what we really want to explain are the origins of Christianity,
we should not do so by looking at the origins and concomitant mythmaking of
the earlier New Testament writings, but by looking at how these writings came
to be collected together, shaped, and claimed as formative and ancestral.
Let me be clear: this is by no means to suggest in any way that such a shap-
ing process was itself unified or monolithic. The claim is not that a diverse
first-century Jesus-movement came to be overshadowed by a coherent second-
century Christianity. It is, rather, that a number of first-century documents
came to be re-imagined, and conceived as ancestral, by a variety of different
second-century (and later) efforts to establish a Christian conceptual identity.
That process of identity-formation, of course, never came to a conclusion or
ceased to be contested. The process did not end in the second century; but, I
am claiming, it did begin then.18

III. The Figure of Paul

As one among many possible examples that might be exploited to illustrate

this point, consider the figure of Paul. Paul, as the character we have inherited,
is imagined an evangelist letter-writer, a missionary, miracle-worker, and mar-
tyr, a contemporary and intimate of Jesus’ original disciples whom he had
earlier persecuted, and, ultimately, the authoritative founder of Gentile Chris-
tianity.19 Through his travels he established and exhorted a worldwide network
of Gentile churches, and used letters to maintain communication among these
scattered groups and between these far-flung Christians and the authoritative
hub of the movement, represented either by Paul himself or by the “pillars” in

17
Again, the matter is nicely expressed by Elliott (2007: 143): “Subsuming the variety of
groups of followers of Jesus Christ in the New Testament period under the singular term ‘Chris-
tianity’ is similarly misleading as well as anachronistic. The present use of this singular term in
reference to the New Testament era not only obscures or denies the plurality and diversity of the
several groups of Jesus followers in this early period. This usage is also anachronistic, since the
term itself did not even exist.”
18
For a fascinating discussion of how this process may have occurred, or been initiated, see
the speculative but reasonable proposal of David Trobisch (2000). If Trobisch is correct that the
New Testament came together all at once as a single published anthology—the most concrete
reconstruction of the realities behind the appearance of the Christian canon that I am aware
of—then the thesis of this paper, that the second century “Christianized” a series of essentially
pre-Christian documents by laying claim to them, is all the more tangibly illustrated.
19
This latter characterization is adopted in many quite critical approaches to the origins of
Christianity, apparently without recognizing the extent to which it relies on an uncritical accep-
tance of a late and synthetic characterization of Paul. See, e.g., Lüdemann 2002.
 W. Arnal / Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23 (2011) 193-215 203

Jerusalem (among whom he takes his place as a leader). Such a presentation is

enormously influential in our reading of Paul’s letters and in our historical
reconstructions, and is rather puzzling at the same time. Paul appears to be
one of the earliest “Christians” about whom we can say anything with cer-
tainty, yet he also seems to attest to a level of Christian development, unity,
and self-consciousness that sources we know to be later are lacking, including
texts like Q, the synoptic gospels, and the Apocalypse. This has led some
scholars to argue for a revision to the date of Paul’s letters, seeing them as
second-century forgeries (see, e.g., Detering 1996). The intuition here is prob-
ably right, even if the conclusion may be wrong: there is something decidedly
second-century, or even later, about this way of imagining Paul.
But this conception is not the product of his own writings, even though it
may be, and often is, read back into them; nor is it the fabrication of any
single one innovator, but is the outcome of many, many contributions in
which the paramount and significant activity is that of collecting, laying claim
to, embellishing, and synthesizing a diverse body of material attached in some
fashion or another to the name “Paul.” Among these multiple contributions
must be included Apocryphal Acts, various theological uses of Paul (including
uses of his letters and of Paul as a character), and especially Christian exegesis
(both orthodox and non-orthodox). Nonetheless, the primary figures in the
resulting and still dominant portrait of Paul are probably Irenaeus, and, before
him, Marcion. The contribution of Irenaeus is definitive for the canon: Paul is
constructed as, in part, a letter writer, but an orthodox letter-writer, one con-
cerned with church order, one who emphasizes conventional morality and
discourages theological speculation, and one who is set alongside—and thus
read through—the story of Jesus as contained in “the fourfold gospel.”
This construct is achieved in two ways, both of them synthetic and aggrega-
tive. One is the addition of the three Pastoral epistles, particularly 1 Timothy,
to the already-extant Pauline corpus of ten letters (or seven, depending on
how they are organized and counted);20 such an addition may have also been
supplemented by textual glosses coherent with the style and ideology of
the Pastorals (or again, specifically of 1 Timothy), such as 1 Corinthians
14:33b-35.21 The addition of the Pastorals to the then-extant corpus had the

20
There is some evidence that the initial collection of a Pauline corpus of the ten canonical
letters (minus the Pastorals) was organized and thought of as a set of letters to seven churches,
with what are now 1 and 2 Corinthians, and 1 and 2 Thessalonians, and Colossians and Phile-
mon, each treated as single letters. See Gamble 1995: 59-62.
21
The removal of this text from the “original” of 1 Corinthians is not special pleading in the
interests of a congenial Paul, as would be, for instance, the excision of 1 Corinthians 11:2-16.
Not only do these verses fail to fit the context (into which they are intrusive, and introduce a new
subject without transition), use non-Pauline-sounding arguments (particularly the appeal to the
204 W. Arnal / Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23 (2011) 193-215

effect of significantly modifying and controlling the interpretation of the orig-

inal letters, providing a clear hermeneutical lens, and doing so in a direction
that was not only decidedly institutionalizing, but strongly anti-Marcionite as
well. Ambiguous texts such as 1 Corinthians 7:7, “I wish that all were as I
myself am,” and 1 Corinthians 10:31-32, “whether you eat or drink . . . give no
offense to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God,” are clarified by appear-
ing in the same epistolary corpus as 1 Timothy 4:1-3, which refers to “doc-
trines of demons, . . . the pretensions of liars whose consciences are seared, who
forbid marriage and enjoin abstinence from foods which God created to be
received with thanksgiving.”22 Irenaeus did not write the Pastorals, of course,
but by quoting from them as an integral part of that corpus, he contributed a
new way to filter or control the manner in which the collection as a whole was
to be read.
The second synthetic contribution of Irenaeus is to set his selective collec-
tion of Pauline writings alongside a selective collection of Jesus-writings, i.e.,
the four-fold gospel. Two distinct anthologies are thereby juxtaposed, each
imagined to comment on, and serve as an interpretive filter for, the other. The
result is that the “story” of Paul—itself artificially embellished and expanded
by editorial unification of the letters as well as the addition of two distinct
series of pseudonymous addenda to the corpus23—is now imagined as part of
an even larger story, which includes the story of Jesus.24 The juxtaposition of

Law), explicitly contradict what was assumed earlier in the letter (i.e., that women do in fact
speak actively in the context of the assembly, see especially 1 Cor 11:5), and use language and
arguments akin to those in 1 Timothy 2:8-15 to promote a conclusion identical to that of
1 Timothy 2:8-15; in addition, they are also textual variants for this passage, with the material
in 1 Corinthians 14:33b-35 being variously located in different manuscripts.
22
1 Timothy in particular is, to my mind, one of the most clear, straightforward, and dog-
matic of all of the Pauline letters. That clarity ensures that its ideological line becomes the dom-
inant hermeneutical ruler for one’s approach to the other letters, or to the figure of Paul and the
shape of Paulinism in general, at least among those who accept this letter. The issues addressed
in 1 Timothy and “corrected” by it are not trivial: celibacy was a major point of contention
between Marcionite and non-Marcionite Christians in the second century and beyond, and
“idol-meat” was an issue for later Christians as well.
23
I.e., the initial addition to the “original” corpus of the pseudonymous 2 Thessalonians,
Colossians, and Ephesians; and the secondary addition to this corpus of ten (or seven, see above)
letters of the Pastorals, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus. In my view, the initial three “deutero-
Pauline” letters are all distinct and separate products, each composed by a different author with
a different agenda, and based on quite different Pauline letters (or, in the case of Colossians,
some other source?). The Pastorals, by contrast, seem to me to be the product of a single author,
agenda, and context, but this, too, may be a function of redactional emendation from the con-
trolling perspective of 1 Timothy, i.e., they may not be an original unity. See Richards 2002.
24
Which in its turn is not simply one of several stories, but a metanarrative encompassing no
less than four distinct narrative accounts, the number four itself invested with metaphysical sig-
nificance (see Against Heresies 11.8: “It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or
 W. Arnal / Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23 (2011) 193-215 205

Paul with the gospel is not original to Irenaeus (it had already been under-
taken by the author of Acts, and before him, by Marcion), but the decision to
juxtapose Paul with not one but four gospels probably is. The effect is, inter
alia, to demonstrate what “the gospel” is—it is, as the four versions of it attest,
a narrative story about Jesus culminating in the Passion. The effect of having
four such narratively similar gospels is also to circumscribe the parameters of
what variant tellings of the story are possible or thinkable. The content of
Paul’s preaching, which he calls his “gospel,” must have been the narrative
of Jesus’ life as is also told, very similarly, by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Paul’s letters simply provide the ramifications of Jesus’ life-story for morals and
community organizing.
At this point, I should add that this conclusion is neither as tendentious nor
as abstract as it may sound—the fact is, Irenaeus quotes copiously from all of
these sources, and juxtaposes them freely and regularly. Thus it is not simply
that Paul’s letters appear in a different light by virtue of being in the same
general category (of quotable scripture) as the four gospels; it is that selections
from Paul’s letters quoted in Irenaeus are juxtaposed, fore and aft, with quota-
tions from one or more gospels. The hermeneutical effect is immediate and
concrete. By supplying a Jesus-centered “meat” to the Christian message, in
other words, the gospels serve to de-theologize Paul’s letters.
In addition, presenting Paul in terms of both a collection of letters and the
narrative characterization in Acts25 is an important innovation. The effect is to
expand generously the image of Paul. The addition of the Pastorals makes Paul
the letter-writer safe for Orthodoxy; while the retention of Acts incorporates
the figure of Paul as an actor, a narrative player and hero of the apostolic
church, appropriately unified with the twelve, to whom he may even be com-
pared favorably as a founder of the Irenaeus’ own, Gentile, church: “Where-
fore he who had received the apostolate to the Gentiles, did labour more than
those who preached the Son of God among them of the circumcision” (Against
Heresies 24.2). The narrative Paul of Acts—missionary, martyr, bearer of the
apostolic torch to the Gentiles—becomes the model through which to read
the letters, now not as disembodied theology from which to draw speculative
conclusions (a use of Paul already prohibited in 1 Timothy 6:3-5, 20), but as
the rule book and moral commands of a founder of the church whose actions

fewer than in number than they are. For since there are four zones of the world . . . and four
principle winds . . .” etc.). Likewise, of course, the theological convictions about Jesus appearing
in the Pauline corpus are read back onto the character who appears in the gospels.
25
Strikingly, see Irenaeus’ use of Acts to characterize the theology of Paul, quoting extensively
from the Areopagus speech (Acts 17:22-31) in Against Heresies 12.9. Note in particular the
explicit way that Acts is used to domesticate Paul in Against Heresies 14-15.
206 W. Arnal / Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23 (2011) 193-215

spoke louder, still, than his words. A body of writing is authorized by being
given an author, whose personality binds together the various writings as a
corpus. As Foucault observed, something along these lines has occurred with
the Hippocratic materials (Foucault 1984: 107; cf. Juschka 1997). The estab-
lishment of Paul as a narrative character, as occurs in Acts, enhances the letter
collection as authoritative and unified—when the two are are brought together,
as Ignatius does—by relating it to a fixed and “known” character, that is, an
author.26 Acts makes Paul a pan-Christian hero; the letters supplementarily
preserve a vivid and detailed picture of this heroic martyr-missionary, whom
we would do well to heed and emulate. Multiple gospels alongside the letters
and Acts show that Paul is part of a larger story still, that of Jesus, and specify
and elaborate the object of his “faith.” Bringing them all together both domes-
ticates and authorizes the letters, verifies Acts, and interprets the gospels,
which in their turn show us that Paul’s community organizing and rule-making
was about Jesus; and so gives us a picture whose whole is greater than the sum
of its traditional parts. Thus is the Paul of the early second century appropri-
ated, reinterpreted and turned into a Christian hero, Christian evangelist, and
moralizing rule-maker by the creative juxtapositions and anthologizings of the
late second century.27
The author of Acts himself, of course, makes a major contribution to this
canonical picture of Paul as well,28 especially in his emphasis on Paul’s activity
rather than theology and letter-writing, and in the narrative appropriation of
Paul into a unitary story of the foundation of the Christian church, unified,
that is, not only with the gospel narrative of Jesus (i.e., Luke), but especially
with Paul’s apostolic forebears (as in the first half of Acts). This tendency to
envision Paul as a churchly actor, hero, martyr, rather than as an essentially
independent letter-writer, thinker, or philosopher, is also attested to some
degree in a variety of apocryphal Acts (the strong tendency of Acts to subordi-
nate Paul to apostolic or analogous authority is often absent in the apocryphal
Acts), as well as, still earlier, in texts such as 1 Clement (5:3-6:1):
Let us set before our eyes the good apostles: Peter, who because of unrighteous
jealousy suffered not one or two but many trials, and having thus given his testi-
mony went to the glorious place which was his due. Through jealousy and strife

26
This may also be part of the function of the pseudonymous 2 Timothy. See the discussion
in Fiore (2007: 8-9) of this text as a testamentary letter.
27
One imagines that this literary and/or ideological process corresponds to the social process
of claiming and absorbing Pauline schools.
28
But it is a contribution whose weight is somewhat vitiated by Irenaeus’s later favoring of a
four-fold gospel, rather than a single narrative account spanning both Jesus’ life and the origins
of the church, as well as being watered down by the inclusion of Paul’s letters in the canon.
 W. Arnal / Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23 (2011) 193-215 207

Paul showed the way to the prize of endurance; seven times he was in binds, he was
exiled, he was stoned, he was a herald both in the East and in the West, he gained
the noble fame of his faith, he taught righteousness to all the world, and when he
had reached the limits of the West he gave his testimony before the rulers and thus
passed from the world and was taken up into the Holy Place,—the greatest exam-
ple of endurance. To these men with their holy lives was gathered a great multitude
of the chosen.
What I take to be especially synthetic about Acts, and what sets it apart from
earlier notices like the one in 1 Clement, is not only its consistent integration
of Paul into the organization and ideology attributed to the apostles before
him, but also its absorption of the Pauline letters. Like these other treatments,
and very much unlike the treatment of Paul as an independent theologian by
Marcion, and by Paulinists before him, the Paul of Acts is not conceived of as
a thinker, a creative formulator of doctrine or theology, but as a missionary of
the unified message of the church. Acts famously and deliberately fails to pres-
ent Paul as a letter-writer, and fails to duplicate the theology found in the
letters (see especially Vielhauer 1966: 33-50). But, as has been argued at length
now by Richard Pervo and Joseph Tyson, Acts seems to have derived some of
its biographical details, episodes, and characterizations of Paul not simply
from Pauline letters, but actually from an extant corpus of Pauline letters
(see Pervo 2006: 51-147; Tyson 2006: 15-22).
Thus, while deliberately aiming to minimize Paul’s independent theological
contributions—and especially the theology of the letters, perhaps in response
to Marcionite uses of Paul—the author of Acts does not so much ignore or
suppress the letters as use them as sources for biographical detail. He thus
absorbs the letters into his story, as he understands them to be, i.e., as vivid
windows into the Pauline mission. Thus are martyr and missionary traditions
brought together with the letter corpus to produce an over-arching, synthetic
narrative portrait of an appropriately subordinated and non-Marcionite, but
still heroic, Paul. The linkage of Acts with the Gospel of Luke, of course,
embeds Paul all the more broadly into the story of Jesus and his church.
The choice to emphasize Paul’s life and read him as an active hero of the
church was a contribution of Luke-Acts. But the choice to combine Paul with
the gospel—that is, to see Paul as a supplement to, and part of the same story
as, the narrative of the life of Jesus (and the teachings of Jesus included in
that narrative)—predates Acts: that decision was made most emphatically by
Marcion, though he, too, had his conceptual predecessors. Marcion appears to
have been the first to conceive of linking a corpus of Pauline letters, as a fixed
textual body, to the narrative of Jesus’ life, each interpreting the other.
Marcion also aimed to produce a definitive version of the putatively corrupted
Pauline corpus, exercising a (perhaps tendentious) brand of text criticism.
208 W. Arnal / Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23 (2011) 193-215

Thus both in Marcion’s work and in what it implies about his predecessors, we
have evidence for not simply a preservation of Paul’s letters but of an active
shaping of them in order to make of them suitable traditional predecessors.
Moreover, Marcion inspired some significant reactions. Whoever actually
composed the Pastorals—documents which became exceedingly influential
through their decades-later addition to the Pauline corpus by Irenaeus—prob-
ably did so as a rejoinder to Marcion. With Joseph Tyson, we should probably
also see Acts of the Apostles as a reaction to Marcion, so that the initial com-
position of two of the most influential bodies of writing for the future of
Paul—the writings that “saved Paul for orthodoxy” (i.e., the Pastorals and
Acts)—were probably called forth as antithetical reactions to Marcion’s own
claims on Paul. What remained, however, was the assumption that Paul con-
stituted a later portion of the story that began with Jesus; that the apostle to
the Gentiles belongs side by side with, and must be read in conjunction with,
the gospel.
One could go on: Marcion was by no means the first to collect, edit, or
embellish a set of Pauline letters—a corpus predates him, and seems to be
the work of a Pauline school (or schools). This school collected, edited,
and preserved the authentic Pauline letters from the first century onward,
gradually creating composite letters from original letter-fragments,29 adding
pseudonymous compositions, collecting and circulating a canon of Pauline
letters, embellishing and reorganizing that canon, and ultimately producing
that body of ten letters—thought of as seven30—that was an artifact subject to
competing claims by Marcion, on the one hand, and his opponents, contem-
porary and subsequent, on the other.31 At roughly the same time, tentative
steps were already being made outside of Paulinist circles in the direction of
recasting this intellectual and letter-writer as a martyr and missionary, as
someone acting on the stage of a unified and universal church. Some of the

29
Particularly Philippians and 2 Corinthians, as well as Romans (the addition of chapter 16)
and possibly 1 Thessalonians. There is some evidence that both Polycarp and the author of the
pseudonymous Letter to the Laodiceans knew Philippians in a version at odds with the canonical
form. See Sellew 1994: 17-28.
30
Again, see the brilliant discussion in Gamble 1995: 58-63. Gamble argues very plausibly
that the initial Christian adoption of the codex over the scroll occurred in connection with this
“seven-letter” Pauline corpus, which was much too large to circulate, as a unity, in a single scroll.
We should probably imagine the circulation of individual letters like Romans and 1 Corinthians
as having occurred first, in scroll form, followed by the collection of a corpus, now in codex
form.
31
The process may have begun with Paul himself. David Trobisch (2001) suggests that
the first collection of Pauline letters was a compendium of Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and
Galatians drawn together and edited by Paul, as other ancient letter-writers also produced
editions of their own letters.
 W. Arnal / Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23 (2011) 193-215 209

first steps in this direction were made by Ignatius,32 whose creative mimesis of
Paul not only helps to construct Ignatius as a Paul-like figure, i.e., establish
Paul as a traditional predecessor; but also serves to construct Paul the prede-
cessor after the image of Ignatius. By presenting himself as a travelling letter-
writer who communicates on behalf of “the church” to scattered communities
of strangers, Ignatius’ frequent adoptions and echoes of Pauline epistolary
language serve to interpret Paul in a similar light, and thus to cast Paul as
Ignatius casts himself: as bishop, martyr, traveler, as one addressing the morals
of the gospel and the refutations of heresy to strangers, as a major authority in
a unified church, as, ultimately, an actor on the very large and single stage of
Χριστιανισμός.
Paul himself—that is, the actual first-century figure whose activities and
rhetoric are attested in at least portions of some of the letters attributed to
him in the New Testament—is even now read through all of these lenses,
meaning, in the end, that he is still treated as a Christian. Scholarship on Paul
for “Christian origins” still to a significant degree takes it for granted that Paul
was indeed one early stage in the story of Jesus and his movement, and thus
should be found in some form of continuity with this “movement” and its
actors. This influences our understanding in both directions: we assume that
those whom Paul mentions by name—especially Peter/Cephas and James and
a spectral “Jerusalem community”—are “founders” of “the church”; and we
assume that Pauline theology must owe something to such figures who in their
turn are directly in continuity with Jesus. Once again, Paul becomes “part
two” of the gospel story. Likewise we still speak of a corpus of Pauline letters,
with the seven authentic letters read by most scholars as an integral unity, thus
homogenizing each letter to the situation and circumstances of the others.
Likewise, we still act as though the letters as we have them are more or less the
letters as Paul wrote them.33 Worse, we still use Acts as a source for general
characterizations of Paul even if we are less tempted to use it as a biography.
But most of all, we assume that the people who preserved Paul’s letters as a
collection and claimed them for their own pedigree were essentially right.
What would it mean not to treat Paul as a Christian? How would this
change things? Perhaps such an approach would look something like the work
Karen King has done on “Gnostic” texts, providing them with comprehensible
points of reference in ancient culture and society as a whole, rather than a

32
And by the later construction of Ignatius in narrative and in letter collections (especially a
collection of seven letters!).
33
Again, see Trobisch 2001 for the argument that the four “major” authentic Pauline
letters—Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Galatians—are editorial embellishments of Paul,
and not the original letters as Paul sent them.
210 W. Arnal / Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23 (2011) 193-215

mechanical explication of their conformity to the predetermined, uninforma-

tive, and self-referential framework of “Gnosticism” (see King 2003b; cf. also
King 2003a and 2006). With respect to Paul himself, perhaps if we jettisoned
the notion that he was a first-century “Christian,” and recognized his Christi-
anity as an act of “adoption” undertaken much later, we could dispense with
idealist readings of Paul that seem to find sufficient explanation for his activity
in the propagation of “the Christian message,” and in the tracing of that mes-
sage backward to Paul’s apostolic predecessors and forward to his “converts.”
Or again, perhaps we could think of Paul’s activity in more concrete and pre-
cise terms than our current descriptions of “churches.” This term and concept
all by itself has at least three prejudicial implications:

1. It makes the social institutions Paul writes to into groups that cannot
predate their adoption of a Pauline ideology, which in turn means that
the specific groups Paul is addressing apparently have no social history
prior to Paul’s appearance on the scene.
2. Relatedly, the term makes the groups into sui generis social institutions,
since no “churches” existed in the contemporary social world apart from
Christianity.
3. The concept homogenizes the groups to one another, since one “church”
must be the same as the next, more or less.

To some degree, we can already see what the effect of dispensing with a Chris-
tian Paul might look like, by turning to the work of a handful of scholars who
have tried to think about Paul in terms more indebted to his immediate social
context than to his supposed ideological trajectories. Richard Ascough (2000),
for instance, has argued that the Thessalonian ekklēsia might have been a trade
club which Paul persuaded to adopt a new divine patron, i.e., the Jewish
God and his son Jesus. Jonathan Z. Smith has contended that the people
Paul is addressing in 1 Corinthians are actually a collection of ethnically-
displaced people engaged in some form of ancestor veneration, into which
Paul aims his own specific interventions (2004). One could also construct
Paul as an evangelizing Jew, seeking to make ethnic Gentiles into “citizens” of
an “imperial Israel.”34
As yet another example, consider the way Paul’s peculiar letter to the
Romans has been read, as, essentially, the theological centerpiece and master-

34
This claim has been made in Arnal 2008a. The argument is based to a considerable degree
on the better “new perspective” treatments of Paul, especially Gager 2000, and Gaston 1987, as
well as some recent work on Paul that has laid great stress on the issue of ethnicity, including
Buell and Hodge 2004 and Hodge 2007; cf. Buell 1999.
 W. Arnal / Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23 (2011) 193-215 211

piece of Paul’s gospel. Once, however, the “homogenizing” textual addition of

chapter 16 is removed, it becomes rather less clear to whom or what Paul was
writing.35 The very common and distinctive Pauline term ekkēlsia does not in
fact ever occur in Romans 1-15, uniquely of the authentic corpus. It seems
worth noticing that the only occurrences of the word in Romans are in chap-
ter 16, an observation that would be significant even if chapter 16 were an
original part of the letter. Contrast this to 1 Corinthians, in which the term
occurs 22 times; 2 Corinthians in which it occurs 9 times (including at least
once in all the major constituent parts of this composite letter); and even once
in Philemon. All of the authentic letters use this term, and all but Romans and
Philippians (itself an edited composite) use the term in the letter’s opening
greeting.
So if Paul himself is not willing to call the Roman group to which he is
writing a “church,” what exactly is it? Might one not imagine instead that Paul
is writing to a group that conceives of itself as a school, or as some other form
of organization? This would be a nearly unthinkable possibility for as long as
Paul is classified as, and assumed to be, a Christian.

IV. Implications and Conclusions

In sketching out just a few of the ways in which a Christian identity has been
imposed on the figure of Paul—gradually, cumulatively, and by different
agents—I have tried to make the point that it is this process of claiming
Paul that has produced for Paul the place he currently occupies in the Lukan-
Eusebian myth of Christian origins. If we want, therefore, to understand this
myth, to trace its development, and ultimately to replace it with something
more historically and imaginatively productive, we will need to pay as much,
or more, attention to the ways in which our first century artifacts have been
appropriated by a more or less self-conscious (if variegated and divided)
second-century movement that came to call itself “Christianity.” It is here that
we will find “Christian origins.” It is also likely that here we will find the
grounds for liberating older texts such as Q, Thomas, Mark, Matthew, and the

35
I say homogenizing because this chapter consists almost exclusively of personal greetings,
thereby implying a kind of context and tone analogous to that found in Pauline letters to groups
with which he is already familiar. In fact, the homogenizing force is even greater, since the greet-
ings involve individuals known from other letters, thus imputing the “membership” of specific
named Pauline “Christians” in the Roman “church.” For Romans 16 as a separate letter-fragment
(authentically Pauline, from Corinth to Ephesus) secondarily added to Romans 1-15, see, among
others, Koester 2007: 253-54.
212 W. Arnal / Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23 (2011) 193-215

(authentic) letters of Paul from the conceptual framework that is inadvertently

imposed every time we identify these objects as “Christian.” It must be stressed
that the argument here is not that Christianity was transformed at some point
during the second century, or that religious traditions change over time.
Such a conclusion is too obvious to require argument: as Marshall Sahlins
has noted, every deployment of “tradition” involves (somewhat ironically)
a recreation and transformation of whatever is being cited as “traditional”
(Sahlins 1987: 153). The point, rather, is that the nature of the change that
occurred in the second century was of a different character than that which
occurred between second and third, or third and fourth centuries, or in any
other historical period. These latter shifts represent the kinds of transforma-
tions of a tradition and an identity by those who already view themselves in
terms of that tradition and identity. But the fabrication of Christianity that
occurred through the second century represents an invention of the tradition
and identity itself, through, among other techniques, the confiscation36 of
characters, events, and writings, that previously had not been thought of either
as a unity or in terms of the identity with which they came to be associated. It
is for this reason that I think that the current interest in “cultural memory,”
with its implications of transformation in continuity, will not provide much
assistance in explaining the origins of Christianity, though of course it will
continue to be of value in studies of the development of Christian identity.37
We remain beholden to the second-century myth of origins even when we
know better, and the vector for this myth’s entry into our scholarship is pre-
cisely the second-century identification of scattered first-century writings and
characters as ancestral, as originary, and hence as “Christian.” The whole
process is summed up and reinforced in the nomenclature and concept of
“Christianity.” It is precisely such a concept that makes the work adumbrated
by Burton Mack, and further explored in the essays in Ron Cameron and
Merrill Miller’s Redescribing Christian Origins (2004), seem intrinsically
implausible to many: one encounters again and again the criticism that such
work has atomized ancient Christianity and needlessly proliferated indepen-
dent “communities” with their own distinctive theologies (see especially
Dunn 2005). Such a criticism relies for its force precisely on the unstated and
unargued acceptance of the second-century’s own story of its origins, and its
own claims to privileged artifacts, as the true and correct history of both.
Once such a “circular consensus” (in which the data is read through a mythic
construct in such a way that the data thus interpreted more or less automati-

36
I borrow this terminology from Willi Braun.
37
On “cultural memory” see especially Assmann 2006. For an excellent application of this
concept to ancient Christianity, see Castelli 2004.
 W. Arnal / Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23 (2011) 193-215 213

cally reaffirms the inevitability of that construct) is disrupted, a little room

emerges to read the materials of the first century in different ways. A sustained
investigation of just how, and why, Pauline letters, or stories about Jesus, or
collections of wisdom were drawn together by emerging Christians in the sec-
ond century as part of an effort to define their own identity and establish their
ideology’s pedigree38 could end up providing some data that would help sup-
port the plausibility of a wholesale revision of our understanding of both
“Christian origins” and of the (earlier, and mostly quite distinct) writings of
New Testament.

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