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Baur based his account on a polarity--a binary opposition in earliest Christianity. For him, evidence in 1-2 Corinthians revealed Judaizing associates of Peter who confronted Paul in Corinth with not having been a disciple of the earthly Jesus. This led to "an opposition between two parties" whose differences pulsated through Christianity for at least two centuries. Philippians 3.1-3 shows Paul's attack on false teachers who insist on the value of circumcision, and the letter to the Galatians, in Baur's view, opposes the same Judaizing false teachers Paul confronted in Corinth. The Pastoral epistles represent a later, postapostolic period when loyal Paulinists were confronted with Gnostic misuse of Paul. By formulating an attack by Paul on the Gnostics, the Paulinists who wrote the Pastoral epistles made a cordial move toward the Judaizers that contained the impulse toward "the Christian Church as a catholic institution." The Acts of the Apostles contributes to a Paulinist "rapprochement and union of the two opposing parties" through its presentation of Peter in a Pauline mode and Paul in a Petrine mode. Baur was convinced that this framework of binary opposition followed by rapprochement was the key for understanding the nature of the remaining New Testament writings, the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, the controversy surrounding Marcion, and the data in the Clementine Homilies (Kümmel 1972: 127-143). Baur's work, supported by the energy of a Hegelian philosophical dialectic and intricate work in early Christian texts, produced a heritage that remains vibrant and alive more than a century and a half later. Ferdinand Christian Baur's binary or tri-partite approach to early Christian historiography is at its base a biographical approach. The authorization for writing a history of earliest Christianity in this way lies in the life and death of individual people who set the process in motion. Peter, Stephen, Paul, and James stand at the foundation of the framework. People who are "adherents" of Paul, Peter, or James carry the heritage of the founders forward for at least two centuries. Within the New Testament itself, the Acts of the Apostles authorizes this kind of historiography. In Acts, there is no attempt to write an account of the activity of every one of the twelve apostles of Jesus, nor of the seventy (or seventy-two) people Jesus sent out, according to the Gospel of Luke. Rather, the historiographical account focuses on Peter, Stephen, Philip, James, and Paul--a very interesting selection of people among all those who played a role in the birth and growth of Christianity during the first century. An alternative approach to the multiplicity of early Christian discourse appeared during the late 1960s with James M. Robinson and Helmut Koester's Trajectories through Early Christianity. Focussing on literary forms and genres, they expanded F. C. Baur's project by embedding early extra-canonical Christian discourses into his biographically conceived historiography (Robinson and Koester 1971: 20-70). Starting with 1-2 Corinthians--the same place F. C. Baur began--they established a framework for two trajectories: logoi sophon traditions and theios aner traditions. In the midst of the heterodox christologies that emerge in the context of these trajectories, the "kerygma" in 1 Cor. 15:3-5 establishes an orthodox "corrective" to guide Christians away from turgid fanaticism (p. 33), heretical interpretation (p. 34), potential heresy (p. 61), mistranslation of the kerygma (p. 62), and distorting transmission of traditions about Jesus (p. 62). One special contribution of their work is to add "Thomas Christianity" to the Petrine and Pauline forms of Christianity Baur identified (Robinson and Koester 1971: 114-157). Another contribution is to add a trajectory of Johannine tradition which includes both intracanonical and extracanonical gospels. The trajectory approach to the history of early Christianity was a step toward a rhetorically based account, since the authors had their eye on different kinds of discourse. Yet they did not use the resources either of rhetorical or of social analysis in their work. |