Season 5: The New Testament, Apostolic Age, and Early Christianity

The World of the Apostolic Age

The story of the New Testament is simple. A savior arrives. His intrepid mission is cut short by a tragic death. But his apostles preserve his teachings, and his message lives on. What many of us gloss over when we read the New Testament, though, is its cultural context. Jesus Christ was born at antiquity’s crossroads. He and every one of his disciples were Jews, and Jewish culture lay deep in the soil of the Levant. But in and around modern-day Israel, so, too, did Greek culture and language. To the south, Nabataean culture was a gateway to the Arabian Peninsula. To the east, the Parthian Empire flourished. And everywhere, in equal parts a stabilizer and a parasite, Roman administrations controlled colonized peoples and cultures.

Jesus was born at a historical crossroads, as well as a geographical one. Everywhere, beleaguered Romans were turning away from indigeneous polytheistic systems and toward salvific cults focused on the care of the self. Rome had just changed from a republic to an empire. It would continue to hold sway long after the Apostolic Age. But under its rule, civic participation became increasingly meaningless as the empire decomposed further and further into an autocracy. In past seasons of the podcast, we’ve learned about all of this. We’ve learned about the world before Judaism in Season 1, and the Old Testament and its history in Season 2. We learned about ancient Greek culture in Season 3 and spent dozens of hours with Roman history and culture in Season 4. It’s finally time to move into the Common Era.

Herod, the Gospels and Acts

We begin the story of the New Testament with Episode 76: Judea Under Herod. The program traces the history of the Hasmonean Dynasty after the Maccabean revolt, and offers a snapshot of the complex layer cake of administrations that governed Jesus’ world – emperors, provincial governors, client kings, ethnarchs, and powerful clerics. Next, we explore the Gospels. Episode 77 contains a full, comparative summary of the Gospels, and discusses scholarship on who wrote them, and when and how they were written. The same program discusses a few of the New Testament’s possible influences (this subject is explored extensively in our Bonus Series, Christianity’s Roots), and concludes with a look at the literary devices employed in Christ’s speech. What’s next is Episode 78: The Book of Acts. This book chronicles Saint Paul’s journeys around the Aegean rim during the first century. With a wealth of historical details, and a narrative style that in places resembles contemporary ancient Greek novels, Acts is a remarkable piece of prose. Additionally, Acts serves as a strong introduction to some of the early schisms in Christianity, schisms that would proliferate long after the Apostolic Age.

The Epistles and Revelation: Christianity’s Struggles During the Apostolic Age

Galatians describes a disagreement between Peter and Paul. The basis of this disagreement is whether Christians need to follow Jewish Law. And while the New Testament epistles contain plenty of doctrine, wisdom, and gorgeous prose, they also contain many clues about early Christianity’s growing pains. Should gentile converts, indeed, follow the old laws of the Torah? Had Jesus been man or God? If he had been a deity through and through, then what did his sacrifice mean? How did salvation work? If a savior had come, why were Apostolic Age Christians still having such a hard time? These questions are at the heart of the Epistles. They are enigmas that lay behind the faithful counsel that the letters provide. Episode 79: The Pauline Epistles summarizes and analyzes the fourteen epistles traditionally attributed to Paul. Episode 80: The General Epistles explores the rest of them.

The Apostolic Age grinded to an uncertain end in the 90s CE. This same decade likely saw the writing of the Christian Bible’s final book, Revelation. The Bible’s Prophetic Books (Episode 24) had long prophesied the gory deaths of nonbelievers. In Episode 81: Revelation, we take a look at Christianity’s most important text on the apocalypse, considering this uniquely influential book’s reverberations in later literature.

The Apostolic Age’s Aftermath: Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, and Manichaeism

From the Book of Revelation, we move on to the subject of Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism may be Earth’s oldest monotheism, and it was certainly the religion of the Persian Empire by the 500s BCE. An ethical, individual-centered religion with a bipartite afterlife, good and evil, and a coming judgment day, Zoroastrianism is of the same family and genus as the Abrahamic religions. In Episode 82: Zoroastrianism, we consider Zoroastrianism’s co-evolution with Judaism and Christianity in the Achaemenid, Hellenistic and Roman empires.

Next, we move to Christianity in the aftermath of the Apostolic Age. The more appropriate word would perhaps be “Christianities.” Between 100 and 400 CE, the new religion proliferated into dozens of sects. Today, we know more about those sects than ever. In Episode 83: Gnosticism, and Episode 84: Manichaeism, we study two of the most important alternate branches of early Christianity.

Gnosticism, though diverse, had some pervasive traditions. Gnostics had a Platonic view of the cosmos. In Gnosticism, the material world is debased and foul, and the spiritual world luminous and perfect. Gnosticism’s view of salvation was quite different than Apostolic Age Christianity’s. Gnostics believed that esoteric knowledge (gnosis) could lead them to a celestial reunion with their true selves. They also believed that Christ had been a spectral being – even an illusion – rather than a flesh-and-blood person. Manichaeism shared much of this. But Manichaeism, with Zoroastrian influences, also hypothesized a cosmic evil force opposed to Jesus, laid out a complex tripartite universal history, and recommended a routine of personal purity for salvation.

Following this look at the heterodox world of Early Christianity, Literature and History concludes with Episode 85: River. We also announce our Bonus Season, The Rejected Scriptures on the subject of late Biblical apocrypha. Next up is Season 6: Late Antiquity.