The First Christian: Universal Truth in the Teachings of Jesus

by Paul F.M. Zahl

Book Overview

In this book Paul Zahl seeks a broader understanding of the life and teachings of Jesus. What was it within his message that burst his first-century Jewish context? What was creative, fresh, and universal about his message? What did Jesus maintain, within his own setting and period, that is still true and applicable today?

In pursuing these questions, Zahl swims against the current of modern scholarship, arguing that Jesus was more "Christian"...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802821103
• ISBN13: 9780802821102
• Release Date: June 2003
• Publisher: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
• Length: 138 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Skip to the middle, if you must

Zahl, true to the tradition of German theological scholarship, employs the first chapters of his book as response to questions raised by both his predecessors and his successors. Though essential to understanding the work within the matrix of "Historical Jesus" scholarship, such methodology can, for non-academic readers, seem dreadfully tedious. Complexity notwithstanding, this book is an essential read. If you find the first chapters tiresome, skip them. Once you understand the intricacy of the claims Zahl is advancing and refuting, you may choose to re-read the introductory chapters for advice on where to look for counter-argumentation.

Picking a (good) fight.

Given an unfair choice between understanding Jesus as a first century Jew, or Jesus as a Christian, Paul F. M. Zahl, dean of the Cathedral of the Advent (Episcopal), would probably choose Jesus as the original, "first" Christian. He suggests as much in the title of this provocative short work. Zahl's small but rich book deals with the fundamental questions surrounding the relationship of Christianity to its mother faith, Judaism, and more specifically, the relation of Jesus of Nazareth to first century Judaism. Zahl attempts to provide a corrective to what he sees as the prevailing re-judaizing and re-culturation of the founder of the Christian faith, Jesus of Nazareth. This tendency, he believes, has been motivated by a shared Christian "Holocaust guilt" and results in a contextualized second-century historical figure that is inadequate to the realities of the unique claims of both the founder and the faith or Christianity. Zahl claims that "what has occurred within wide sectors of Christian self-understanding since 1945 has been so to detach the Jesus of history from the Christ of faith that it has become hard to say whether the Christ whom Christians worship is the same as the rabbi Jesus who taught and lived in a specific time and place." (p. 5). The result of this has been the tendency to understand Christianity as a variant of first-century Judaism, not much different in substance from the norms of Jewish ethical teachings and monotheistic belief. In the end, the risk is, as Zahl sees it, that Christianity becomes "a form of Judaism for non-Jews" (p. 5). The corrective for this inaccurate understanding of Christianity is to understand its founder, Jesus of Nazareth, as uniquely Christian and discontinuous with his contemporary Second Temple Judaism. It is this discontinuity, claims Zahl, that becomes the centrifugal force of the movement that ultimately became the Christian church. As such, Zahl emphasizes that Jesus of Nazareth was indeed, "the first Christian" who was at the center of this centrifugal dynamic. Zahl is not unaware, nor insensitive, to the potential discomfort that a position of choosing to understand and interpret Jesus as uniquely and overtly Christian over his ethnicity may cause. He handles those objections not only through acknowledging the risk involved, but more importantly, through the courageous commitment to theological and scholarly discipline. The early chapters of the book contain the groundwork for the treatment of Jesus as the first Christian. They include a survey of the search for the historical Jesus movements, a responsible and balanced treatment of Jesus as a first century Jew and as a religious figure who shaped a unique eschatology that led, naturally, to a discontinuity with the Jewish religion of his time. The heart of Zahl's arguments is found in the subsequent chapters titled, "Jesus the Christian" and "The Centrifugal Force of Jesus the Christian." This is a readable but respons

Creative, compassionate, shocking - like the first Christian

A bold and timely application of innovative research to the human condition: SUMMARY Preface. This book defies the traditional categories of New Testament studies and systematic theology. Introduction. Zahl hopes his presentation of Jesus' message will help heal racial and ethnic divisions. Chapter 1. Search #1 for the historical Jesus failed because it sought the rationalistic Jesus of its own time. Search #2 ended with a Jesus consumed with an eschatology (theology of the end) that is as alien to modern mankind as to traditional Christianity. With the immense human suffering of the 20th century, Search #3 found hope in his eschatology. Search #4 ignored the results of Search #3 to find the Judaistic Jesus that seemed to sever the root of past anti-Semitism. Zahl sees his work as springing from Search #3. Chapter 2. Obviously, Jesus was a first-century Jew who ministered almost exclusively to Jews in the context of his culture. Chapter 3. The difference between the eschatology of John the Baptist and that of Jesus gave rise to Christian compassion. Chapter 4. Five radical themes of Jesus' teaching originated from his unique eschatology: 1. repentance of the whole person, not just of specific sins; 2. exorcisms that announced the coming of the kingdom of God; 3. opposition to the contemporary interpretation of the law of Moses; 4. inner purity; 5. association with sinners. Chapter 5. Jesus' teaching on the inability of the human heart to overcome its own depravity is supported empirically, and yet psychologically that idea cannot be accepted without the hope of salvation from above. CRITIQE There are some minor problems that future revisions could remedy. In some places, the book could have been improved by better editing, e.g., "former" and "latter" should have been transposed in the last sentence of the first paragraph of p. 41. Controversial statements, e.g., that the Council of Trent in effect repudiated Augustinianism, are sometimes made without supporting arguments. References provided to arguments deemed beyond the scope of this short book would help some readers.