Sociology and Exegesis

Extract

Theology is a deeply conservative discipline, which is why the panic that breaks out immediately at the threat of new questions must always seem so exaggerated to people trained in other fields of study. Any new approach is usually rejected at first on the grounds that there is no evidence for it. As soon as the exponent of the new approach has shown that there is indeed evidence for his interpretation he is at once accused of reducing all the evidence to fit his thesis, and of wanting to reinterpret the whole of Christianity in function of his new insight. Finally, when he shows that he has no such intention, he is told that what he has found out has been well known all along. The new approach is first rejected because it is impossible, then because it is illegitimate, and finally because it is old hat.

Gerd Theissen has undertaken a sociological analysis of the earliest phase of Christianity, which he defines as “the renewal movement within Judaism brought into being through Jesus and existing in the area of Syria and Palestine between about AD 30 and AD 70” (p. 1). Far from enjoying august and exalted status as Professor of New Testament in the University of Bonn, as the blurb proclaims him to be, he is (at the time of writing) still fully employed as a school-teacher. He gives lectures as a Privatdozent, for which of course he receives no salary. He thus has neither the leisure nor the technical apparatus to armour his research with the impenetrable shield of erudition and argument behind which most theological work is conducted. In fact, as he writes in the Preface, “the work came into being while I was involved in teaching religion and German, and is addressed to readers who are also involved in practical work of this kind”.