Christianity's Origins Questioned by Sociologist
by David Klinghoffer, Religion BookLine -- Publishers Weekly, 11/15/2006
Westminster John Knox Press, affiliated with the Presbyterian Church (USA), kicked up a controversy this summer when it published a book alleging that 9/11 resulted from a Bush Administration plot. Critics, including Presbyterians, wondered what the press was doing promoting a conspiracy theory like the one in David Ray Griffin's Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11. Now WJKP is back with another title that may again leave the faithful scratching their heads in wonderment.
The book, out this month, is Why Christianity Happened: A Sociological Account of Christian Origins (26-50 C.E.) by James G. Crossley. It argues that a key feature of Christian doctrine was merely a response to social conditions. Specifically, the apostle Paul rejected observance of Jewish law as a requirement for new Christians, thus turning one of Jesus' original teachings on its head, simply because there were so many new gentile converts to the Jesus movement. It thus became implausible to require them all to follow Old Testament laws like circumcision and eating only kosher food.
"I don't think Paul was cynical," Crossley told RBL. "I just think he was very practical. It's a practical, rational reaction to what was going on in social history." The author, who teaches New Testament studies at England's University of Sheffield, charges that many Bible scholars are influenced inappropriately by their own religious beliefs to seek support in scholarship for accepted doctrines.
Crossley prefers a more secular approach and acknowledged, "I would like to engage with confessional [religious] types but some of them will be inevitably hostile." He also noted, "I've never had a problem with religion as such."
Is this a funny kind of a book to find in the catalogue of a church-affiliated publisher? Crossley's editor at WJKP, Philip Law, said that "I expect many will find this book controversial—both those who read it and those who don't. There will always be people who want to voice their opinions about books they've not read, and there will always be those who assume that the publishers must necessarily agree with all the authors they publish."
The idea that Christianity jettisoned Jesus' own faithful observance of Jewish law because of "social conditions" would, at least on the surface, appear to make mush of a foundational belief in Christian religious history. That belief holds that Christians were exempted from the Torah's commandments because God wished it to be so. If the break with Judaism was a matter of expediency, that undercuts a primary justification of Christian distinctiveness.
Asked if the book's thesis could be accepted by a Christian, Philip Law said, "I guess that depends on your definition of a 'Christian.'"
