ABSTRACT
This section will look at some of the key theological themes in the New Testament relating to the emergence of Christianity as a religion in its own right in distinction from Judaism and the pagan world at large. In many ways the distinctions were never clear cut on the ground because Christians belonged, like many other people in the ancient world, to different social groups and, as we saw in the previous section, this led to some questioning about how to behave in different settings and to a range of reactions. However, as we also saw, New Testament texts did try to construct a distinctive identity in the ancient world. This section will build on these questions but the focus will predominantly be on the general construction of Christianity emerging and splitting from Judaism, regularly labelled rightly or wrongly as ‘the parting of the ways’. In particular this section will look at some of the main ways in which scholarship has looked at this shift. The first ways are fairly conventional, though I will try to tie these approaches in with the approaches of the previous section, and they are: Christology and issues of Law, faith and works. The third is becoming conventional, though here I will provide a particularly contemporary twist, and that involves Paul in relation to politics and Empire and the idea of Paul’s ‘revolutionary’ ideas as some kind of blue print for ‘western’ culture. While this is increasingly a major issue in New Testament studies, I will look at this through the eyes of a parallel development which has taken place outside conventional New Testament studies and is now just starting to make its presence felt in mainstream New Testament studies, namely, Paul according to contemporary critical theorists and philosophers.
