A New and Very Different Testament
Before Jesus
Sometimes it’s difficult for we moderns to fully appreciate how radical the Biblical writers were for their time. Let’s begin with how radical the Hebrew Bible was, then we’ll come forward in time to the New Testament.
In the Hebrew Bible, some of the authors taught for the first time ever that there was only one God, and you had to exclusively worship him, according to his written law. And their writing so affected the world that we even thousands of years later often don’t realize that in the ancient world the conceptions of the gods and how to worship them was just the opposite. In the ancient world, you could worship multiple gods, and syncretism, the mixing of religions, was the norm, not usually taboo. Nor did the ancient world have anything like the Bible; sure there were holy books, such as the Vedas of India, and even Homer was hugely influential for even the daily lives and values of many Greeks. But there was no holy book with such a radical message and highly authoritative divine laws as those of the Bible.
The Bible was also unique for what it didn’t say; as we’ve noted, the Hebrew Bible has no warning of punishment in the afterlife, and barely any acknowledgement that there was one. Most ancient cultures were quite concerned with what happens in the afterlife, at least by the middle of the second millennium BCE. For example, the New Kingdom of Egypt was particularly concerned with it, leaving us the Book of the Dead for how to navigate that existence. The prevailing belief in Homer suggests that Greeks believed in a shadowy Hadean realm where all souls end up, where there is no glory or enjoyment as on earth. But by the time of Plato (the fourth century BCE), you’d almost think you were reading a Christian, except for the belief in reincarnation:[1] his Socrates argues extensively for the existence of an afterlife, where the bad are punished, and the good rewarded. Apart from this, he often spoke of a great God in the singular, even though he believed in plural gods, and he saw this God as transcendently good.
Although the histories of the Bible have distinct agendas, they were very unique in another way from the ancients: they were quite capable of criticizing their own rulers, and addressing their faults, and those of their own nation. This is nearly unheard of in the ancient world: a critic of a current king would usually not have been permitted to survive, much less have his writing be esteemed as a holy book, or at least part of a national narrative and holy tradition. And although many ancient texts recognize the sins of the people and their resulting punishment from the gods when something like a plague happens, the Bible is quite unique in its often almost anti-nationalistic portrayal of the people as almost continually rebellious; and this is the case even in some of the most clearly expressed “manifest destiny” revelation of the entire Bible, in Deuteronomy 7: if the Hebrews wanted to justify the genocide of multiple people groups in order to make room for them to live in the land, you’d think they’d throw in some nationalist rhetoric: instead we’re told that their God isn’t doing it because there’s anything special about them. It does say that he is doing it for them because he loves them, which in fact sounds like he’s being partial, but if you read the rest of the book, he threatens to treat them just like the nations if they refuse to be loyal to him. In fact, he predicts that that is exactly what will happen, a reality with which the post-exilic Jews were all too familiar. The Hebrew Bible also contains much less hagiography than most ancient sources, even of its obvious heroes. Many mentions of flaws of figures such as David or Moses are often portrayed as evidence of redactions, but I do not believe that it can be denied that the biblical authors were among the most brutally honest writers of the ancient world.
Anno Domini
The Bible is perhaps most unique for its story and portrayal of the nature of God, an almighty God who walked among them and had a divine plan to bless the nations through one man’s offspring. The great god of virtually all other nations was always remote and unapproachable, unconcerned with the affairs of men. And what the biblical story would become in the first century was even more radical, as we’ll see.
It’s hard to compare the two “testaments” in hindsight, but try to imagine you’ve never heard of the New Testament, and all you’ve ever known was the Hebrew Bible. Now consider just how radical the New Testament would have been. Recall the absolute insistence that the Lord is one, and there is no other. Yet now this Messiah from Galilee is supposed to be the son of God, and also worshipped as God? And the son of David you’ve been waiting for to restore God’s kingdom…is dead? And the Romans continue to rule? What is going on? And we’re supposed to wait around because he’s coming back soon to finally get the job done?
The situation seems to become even more bizarre if we ask what Jesus taught. His teachings were far more in-line with the Judaism of the first century than what you hear taught in churches today. I’ve never heard Christians today, for example, teach a gospel by going into a town and telling them to repent or be destroyed, very soon, which is exactly the gospel they taught when Jesus was alive, as found in Matthew 10:5-15. His first followers were Jews. Paul was a Jew. Jesus certainly did not teach anything resembling what Christianity would become, the topic to which we now turn, though only in brief. To read that, check out my book here.
[1] See especially Phaedo.