Abstract
F. Gerald Downing, Order and (Dis)order in the First Christian Century, Novum Testamentum, Supplements 151, Brill: Leiden, 2013; 408 pp.: 9789004251755, £105.00/€171.00 (hbk)
Gerald Downing, Hon. Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, now retired, has contributed to historical New Testament scholarship for over forty years, his eminent contribution marked by monographs like The Church and Jesus (1968), Jesus and the Threat of Freedom (1987), Cynics and Christian Origins (1992), and earlier collections of essays in 2000 and 2008. Order and (Dis)order is a further collection of fourteen essays, nine previously published, three of them extensively recast.
In the Introduction Downing expresses the hope for the volume that ‘an appreciation (will be gained) of the extent of the shared opinions and attitudes across many groups; but also something of the diversity even within the surviving writings of an individual (NT) author’ (p. 2). The volume offers a survey of opinions on the theme of Order and Disorder, principally descriptive (p. 3). Downing’s hope is that the study will be of interest and useful to students of the history of early Christianity, and wider.
Part One (chs 1—7) is headed ‘Order’, with two essays on ‘Unity, Order and Problems of Disorder’ and two on ‘Order Within: Passions, Divine and Human’, previously unpublished. The opening and longest essay begins by asking, ‘In what ways did early Christians in general envisage coping with a perceived call to be coherently distinctive … ?’ It goes on to examine ‘the theoretical or ideological basis for the widespread acceptance of unity, order, harmony as ideals’ (p. 11). The conclusion is ‘that there was considerable pressure in civil society in the East Mediterranean to achieve and maintain unity, harmony, concord; and widespread agreement on many ways in which this was to be done’ (p. 48). Chapter 2 concludes that the Christian response to ideals of peace and order was much more nuanced than is often suggested, with a ‘varied range of qualifies affirmations and oppositions’ (p. 82).
Four chapters on ‘order’ reach the unsurprising conclusion that ‘people in the Graeco-Roman world of the first century
Part Two (‘Law’) examines law seen as social engineering, first-century critiques of law, and ancient judicial procedures, further illustrated by analysing the judicial procedures used by Pliny the Younger against Christians in the early second century. In describing Paul’s disturbance of good order, Downing writes of ‘Paul’s Cynic-like anarchism’ in responding to his Galatian converts (p. 217), and concludes that Paul’s negative comments on ‘law’ look very like attitudes characteristic of Cynics (p. 229). More controversially he concludes Chapter 10 (‘Justification as Acquittal?’), that in Paul’s view ‘there is no warranted or unwarranted acquittal of guilt, nor[sic, not] its transfer (let alone any implicit substititutionary punishment). It is simply and splendidly an exercise of divine royal prerogative’ (p. 254). And in Chapter 11 he reaches the somewhat surprising conclusion that there was no official court action against Christians in Syria, Asia, Pontus and Bithynia prior to Pliny.
Part Three focuses principally on defending Downing’s most distinctive thesis: that Jesus ‘is displayed in the synoptic texts exhibiting and articulating dissident ideas, attitudes and practices resembling strands of Cynicism in recognizably Cynic ways’ (p. 309), and that ‘Paul perceived the young Jesus movement as a sort of Jewish Cynicism (or Cynic Judaism)’ (p. 311). His conclusion is that ‘this Cynic Judaism (or Jewish Cynicism) must seem to have been part of the earliest origins of the (Christian) movement’ (p. 318). The chapters are worth reading for themselves, though the extent to which Downing’s findings and thesis should influence or diminish respect for Jesus and Paul is less than clear.
Overall, the attempt to set Jesus, Paul and early Christianity within the historical context of the time is both illuminating and challenging.