and all the brethren who are with me, to the churches of Galatia: Galatians 1:2  NASB

Churches – We know that translators of the English Bible take considerable liberties with the word ekklesia.  We know that ekklesia never means “religious assembly” in non-biblical Greek literature.  We know that ekklesia is translated “church” when the context fits the doctrine of replacement theology but it’s translated “congregation” when it doesn’t fit.  We know that the Greek word synagoge doesn’t communicate the specific meaning of Torah-observant, Messianic followers.  We know all these linguistic clues point toward a very different view of the Body of believers in the first century.  Now Daniel Boyarin’s examination of the historical situation in the first century provides further evidence that the Church as we understand it (a “Christian” organization and assembly distinct from Judaism) did not arise until at least the third century and perhaps much later.[1]

Boyarin demonstrates that “Judaism . . . is not the parent religion of Christianity; indeed, in some respects the opposite may be as true.”  Boyarin’s research shows that conversion in the first century was more akin to absorption into a way of life than it was like any religious experience we associate with the term.  In his view, Christian (if the word is applied anachronistically) and Jew are equally compatible identities.  In other words, those believers who claimed to be followers of the Christ (the Messiah) in the first, second and third centuries also considered themselves Jewish in their way of life!  Boyarin shows that the opposition of Jew and Christian does not reflect the life experience of believers during the first three hundred years.  The opposition is the fabrication of certain intellectuals within the community of “believers” who had particular reasons for forcing a split between ethnic Jews and Gentiles who took on the Jewish way of living.  In fact, Judaism as we know it today is a reaction to this artificial, forced dichotomy.

“Our modern concept of religion is a historical product of Christianity,” says Boyarin.  He means that prior to the forced dichotomy followers of YHWH and Yeshua lived comfortably with each other despite debates over the status of the Messiah because they all, in one sense of another, embraced the Torah as life’s guidebook.  Boyarin demonstrates that Christianity separated religious belief and practice from cult and culture.  The Church created a new entity in the world – an entity called “religion” which was no longer simply the way people lived.  Now it was a formalized theology that dictated universal truth about heaven and earth.  Our modern concepts of religion, truth, cult and culture are the products of systematic disaggregation of social lived experience.

What is the bottom line?  The great red flag is our blindness in reading the Scriptures anachronistically, as if our concepts of “church,” “conversion,” “grace,” “faith,” and other key ideas are the same as those ideas in the thoughts of the authors.  We must rethink what we are reading or we will simply perpetrate the mythology.  We must constantly ask ourselves, “What would this mean to an audience that did not see any difference between faith and practice, that lived every day with a variety of ethnic and cultic affiliations and that did not recognize theological boundaries in the way that we do?”  When we proclaim that our faith is a living faith, do we really consider just what that means for the integrated congregations of early followers of the Way?  Is that how we live?

Topical Index: Boyarin, Galatians 1:2, church, ekklesia

[1] Daniel Boyarin, “Semantic Differences; or, ‘Judaism’/’Christianity’”, in The Ways that Never Parted, pp. 65-86.