An analysis of How Jesus Became Christian

Douglas Tennant B.Sc., B.A., CMMIII

Professor Jeff Wilson

RS 260 – The Study of Religion

Wednesday October 21, 2009

An analysis of How Jesus Became Christian

            I received Barrie Wilson’s How Jesus Became Christian as a gift in 2008. I was fascinated by his detailed analysis of biblical and Ebionite primary sources and his central thesis that there was a conscious cover-up by Paul to make Jesus appear/become a Pauline ‘Christian’ (Wilson 2). I had always wondered and struggled (sometimes out loud) with how the Jewish Jesus I learned about in Sunday school could actually have come to be known as a ‘Christian’ i.e. not Jewish. Concomitantly, how did I, as a Christian, i.e. not Jewish, come to worship someone who was born, lived and died a Jew? The analysis of this secondary text from my Christian tradition affords an opportunity to uniquely explore how Jesus became Christian.

            Barrie Wilson Ph.D. is a Jew who converted from Episcopalianism and thus presents his text from a uniquely insider/outsider viewpoint (xiv). Wilson, a professor of humanities and religious studies at York University,  joins other modern scholars in not shying away from making his “personal orientation evident” to us (Rodrigues 138) when he states that “[w]ithin early Christianity,  my sentiments are with the Ebionites, not with Paul” (Wilson xiv). Notwithstanding this rather bold statement, Wilson’s comparative review of religious phenomena from the tenuous early days of Christianity remains quite scholarly, detailed and faithful to his thesis. He does not let his personal sentiments get in the way of presenting a managed scholarly presentation throughout the book. In keeping with Ninian Smart, he discusses his primary thesis of how Jesus became Christian using a well laid out array of “interrelated dimensions of doctrine, experience, mythology, art, ritual, ethics and social institutions” (Rodrigues 83).

            Wilson is adept at keeping the reader engaged through basic anthropologically and sociologically related questions about the early Christians and Jews such as “[h]ow did the Jesus Movement worship? Interpret Torah? What were their relationships with other Jews?” (157). As well, his non-intimidating and easy to grasp historiographic information supports his analysis of the “Christification” (Wilson 241) of Jesus.

            The main thrust of this text is about how the original Jesus Movement ceased to exist and was completely overshadowed and ultimately replaced by Paul’s Christ Movement (Wilson 167). Throughout the book Wilson lays out an expansive and detailed comparative review of primary sources (53, 151,154, 158, 159), Jewish and varied early Christian cultures (7-47, 248) and communities (95-102, 181) and religious phenomena (158 – 162, 174-176, 187). He is one of those “[s]cholars inside or outside a religious tradition [who] can conduct phenomenological observation, analysis and interpretations of patterns in religious practice and belief” (Rodrigues 78) to make his point plausible.

 Admittedly, Wilson does not shy away from controversy, and states himself that (presumably traditional Christian) readers may be “startled or even shock[ed]” (3) by what he covers in the text. I surmise that Wilson has chosen this populist format of writing to present his scholarly work so that it would receive a much wider than normal (not just academic) readership.  On the face of what and how Wilson presents his evidence regarding the Christification of Jesus it is logical and quite convincing. From a personal perspective I have had a growing “gut feeling”, a ‘je ne sais pas quoi’ for years that there was just something about the various Pauline New Testament writings that did not completely mesh together. I accept from a scholarly viewpoint, Wilson’s assertions that Paul created the Christ Movement religion and Christified Jesus (114 – 130).

Another interesting aspect of Wilson’s thesis about a Jesus cover-up is his segment about a new way of understanding Christian anti-semitism (3).  Wilson asserts that after a detailed review of early first and second century documents, Christian anti-semitism was well entrenched (230). He goes on to suggest that “[t]he various contributing factors…for Christian anti-semitism are simply symptoms of a pervasive underlying guilt” (252) and that “[t]he root problem is psychological” (253).

An extremely interesting aspect that is raised but not expanded upon at any length by Wilson is his speculation that the Jesus Movement was ultimately “absorbed into Islam, which shares some of their views of Jesus – as human, teacher, and prophet” (167). From a scholarly perspective, researching for evidence to back this posit up would be quite challenging and engaging.

This analysis was challenging in several ways. It entailed re-reading the entire book in a short period of time, adjusting an appreciation and understanding of it from a theological basis to one of a scholarly pursuit and then limiting the paper to an acceptable word count. Wilson uses a novel and popular format to present a uniquely scholarly mixture of religious history, complex cultural concepts of Jewish and early Christian societies, and religious phenomena into a strikingly plausible new way of viewing Paul’s Christification of Jesus.

Works Cited

Rodrigues, Hillary and John S. Harding. Introduction to the Study of Religion. New York:    

            Routledge, 2009.

Wilson, Barrie. How Jesus Became Christian. Random House Canada, 2008.