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Scriptura 59 (1996), pp. 341-351 Making Christian Culture in the Epistle of JamesAbstract Twenty years have passed since John A. T. Robinson threw a bombshell into scholarly circles by arguing for a radical redating of New Testament writings (Robinson 1976). Many New Testament scholars refused to sanction the debate by entering it directly. During these two decades, however, turmoil over the dating of early Christian writings has spread slowly but surely throughout New Testament studies, emerging with equal furor at embarassing times for the cautious and adventurous alike. Robinson wants to date the Acts of the Apostles as early as 62 CE--before the death of Paul--since there is no account of the death of Paul in the final chapter. For some interpreters, this is a highly welcome prospect. If Acts was written in the early 60s, this might bolster its historical reliability and free believer and scholar alike from a deadly disease of scepticism about the accuracy of story upon story in the account that intermingles historical, geographical, and biographical detail with legend, myth, and fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. For other interpreters, this is wishful thinking. The historiography in Acts is an ideological presentation that puts the kind of discourse that emerged from a half century of assertion, dialogue, and debate on the lips of apostles fifty days after Jesus' death and resurrection. Whether or not Acts was written early, some say, the earliest versions of the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Peter probably were written by 50 CE and influenced the presentation of both the teaching and the death of Jesus in the canonical gospels (Crossan 1985, 1988). Suddenly, then, into this early dating of Christian writings comes the prospect of ascetic, gnostic, and docetic beliefs as early as Paul's visits to Macedonia and Greece. 1. Introduction The major approach for addressing this issue has been a model of trajectories through early Christianity, introduced by James M. Robinson and Helmut Koester during the late 1960s and early 1970s (Robinson and Koester 1971). In the context of the application of this model, the arbitrariness of both historical and literary methods on many issues has become evident. Regularly the historical evidence is so limited or tendentious that a literary approach can make a persuasive case either for one way of influence (e.g., from the canonical gospels to the Gospel of Peter and the Gospel of Thomas) or for the reverse (from the Gospel of Peter and the Gospel of Thomas to the canonical gospels). Karl Donfried has presented an excellent summary in The Anchor Bible Dictionary of known historical events from the New Testament (Donfried 1992). It is informative that the article does not contain information like: "In March of 54 CE while Paul was in Ephesus, he wrote the letter of 1 Corinthians, sent it with Chloe to the Corinthian church, and Chloe delivered it to them in |