Customer Reviews

The Origins of Christianity: A Historical Introduction to the New Testament (Oxford Bible Series)

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I've started studying the origins of Christianity, not out of religious devotion, but to understand the formation of this institution which has played so large a role in Western history. I'm not finding any single source which provides a comprehensive survey on the topic, though the lecture course put out by The Teaching Company called "The Beginnings of Christianity" provides a good overview. Otherwise, the books seem to focus on particular aspects of, or take limited approaches toward, the topic; so each of the books, while not comprehensive, contributes in its own way to the larger discussion. That's the case with Brown's book: it emphasizes the origins of Christianity as revealed in Biblical text, as opposed to outside historical sources. Brown views the Bible as the primary historic resource, the book that speaks most directly to the historic events of early Christianity. So you won't get any "contextualized" history from Brown, no fitting in of Christianity with cultural or religious currents of the times.

This doesn't mean he just reiterates "the story of the Bible"; he engages in close and detailed textual analysis to distinguish the subtexts of the different gospels (e.g., Matthew more traditionally Jewish than the others)to ascertain the nature of the earliest currents of Christian thought and belief. This I found interesting. What I found less appealing is when Brown begins to take the texts at face value, giving them too much credit for narrative historical accuracy. His approach is, apparently, that it's a narrow-minded historian who won't take a text at its word. For instance, he says about the stories of miracles in the New Testament: "[the historian] is not entitled to reject a priori the the occurence of extraordinary events attested in his sources simply because they are not part of his everyday experience." Brown doesn't support this provocative and somewhat outlandish statement, but tries to quell dissent by disparaging "dogmatic scepticism". I had no idea that a historian was somehow required to check his/her critical thinking and common sense at the door and assign credibility to claims of the supernatural. It may be fine for believers, but it will be an unhappy day for secular history if historians are required to give credence to every tall claim made throughout the ages.

Anyway, Brown's book is otherwise well-written and scholarly, even though its scope is limited, and though some of his basic premises give his conclusions limited value for a secular reader.