Up until now I have only shared thoughts of others and sometimes added my own commentary. Now I think I am in a position where I can put my years of reading together and propose how it appears to me that “Christianity began”.

What we recognize as “Christianity” — embrace of the gospels and letters of Paul, Jesus as the saving Christ and fulfillment of Jewish Scriptures, organized assemblies — emerged on the scene after the second great Jewish revolt, the Bar Kokhba war of 132-135 CE. Before that time, though there were beliefs associated with “Christ”, and with Jesus, we have to conclude that they knew nothing of the Jesus of the gospel narratives. Among Judeans themselves there were various ideas about the Messiah or Christ, but after 135 we can say, generally speaking, that “Judaism” divided: rabbinic Judaism appeared on the one hand and “Christianity” on the other.

The gospels were part of a wider literary effort to make a former “Judaism” after the genocidal catastrophe of the Bar Kokhba Revolt respectable to the Roman world. Ever since the time of Augustus, Judeans had established themselves with favour in the imperial court. Just as back in the days of Antiochus Epiphanes there were pro-Hellenists and anti-Hellenists, so a similar division appears again with Roman rule. That favour was savagely lost with Trajan’s and Hadrian’s wars against the Judeans. An academic in personal correspondence with me suggested that what the “Christians” were doing after 135 was seeking to reestablish the favour Judeans had long held up until the days of Trajan and Hadrian. (The war of Vespasian and Titus that resulted in the destruction of the temple in 70 CE did not have the same overriding consequences for Judeans.)

I need to explain my approach to sources that has given rise to the above picture. I treat the gospels as products of the second century because, firstly, it is then that we have the first independent witness to their existence. Secondly, a comparative analysis of their literary and ideological content matches the conditions and ideas widely prevalent in second century culture and is in many respects a mismatch with the previous century. The historical background (political, social, cultural) throughout Palestine in the first century (both around the 30s, the time setting of Jesus, and the 70s, the time of the first war) can be demonstrated to lack the explanatory power of the contents of the gospels that is provided by the historical background of the early and mid second century.

The non-Christian sources likewise must be addressed, of course. The first secure record we have of “Christians” is Pliny’s letter to Trajan, written about a decade into the second century from Asia Minor. The practices described there raise questions when compared with what we learn from early Christian sources. The writings of Tacitus and Suetonius will require discussion with respect to what they reveal and do not reveal about early “Christianity”. As for Josephus, I don’t think the reasoned rejection of his testimony by some of the great scholarly luminaries of the past (Walter Bauer, Albert Schweitzer, Charles Guignebert) has ever been overturned. That can also be addressed in detail up ahead.

As for the early debates among Jewish teachers themselves, these, too, must be dug out as much as possible, and compared with the early ideas we find in the Christian literature. That’s another dataset up for discussion.

Along the way we will encounter a number of common arguments that attempt to cement the gospels and Pauline letters prior to the fall of the temple in 70 CE. One of these is the assertion that no-one would write failed prophecies after they could be clearly seen to have failed. I hope to show that in some cases this argument arises from widespread assumptions read into the prophecies, and in other cases the argument nullifies its corollary, that redactors regularly rewrote or omitted what they found embarrassing. The gospels and epistles will be interpreted through other literature and historical circumstances of the times.

Dates of other Christian writings will be determined primarily through the earliest external evidence for their existence and from that point assessing where their contents most closely match social or political circumstances. The self-testimony of documents will always need to prove itself against the above method. Self-claims of writings can never be assumed factual. That does not mean they are “guilty of fraud” by default, but it means we must suspend judgment until we have independent confirmation one way or the other.

So much for the methods. The conclusion being argued is that Christianity as we recognize it, the narratives of the gospels, the epistles as we have them in our canonical form,  with Jesus the Christ and fulfilment of the Old Testament, appeared on the scene as a response to the conditions arising from the total devastation of the wars against Judeans/Jews in the first decades of the second century.

This is not a new thesis. Others have arrived at the same general idea independently, each with somewhat varying explanations. What follows will be mine.

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