The Formation of Christianity in Antioch: A Social-Scientific Approach to the Separation Between Judaism and Christianity (review)

Anyone expecting to find an historical account of the origins of the Antioch church in this book will be sorely disappointed. By "formation" Zetterholm really means "what led to the separation of Jews and Christians in Antioch?" This is a question of no small importance, but we are reminded that the subtitle is more indicative of the content of the book than the title itself.

The book is a revision of Zetterholm's doctoral dissertation and part of a multidisciplinary project at Lund University. The author identifies the main problem of the study in this way: the Jesus movement started as a Jewish messianic movement (3). Why is it, then, that Ignatius of Antioch finds Judaism to be so incompatible with Christianity? This is an important question, and Zetterholm brings to bear on it the resources of sociological study and the importance of ideology.

There are limits to the study, as Zetterholm himself admits. First, the search for an answer is confined to the church at Antioch and to the period up to the death of Ignatius. Secondly, it is impossible to reconstruct from the available texts the entire process of separation. We simply do not have enough information. As a result, Zetterholm uses sociology to go beyond the literary sources, and he also draws on comparative materials from antiquity. He says, "if we find something in texts about the local situation that makes sense from an underlying social-scientific perspective, and if this text can be analyzed with modern theories in order to extract more information from it, and if we also find expressions of the same phenomenon in other ancient texts dealing with other locations, I would say we have a case" (14). This statement both reflects the methodology of the study and raises a red flag. The caution is that information in the texts must make sense from the perspective of the social sciences and that such information must be susceptible to analysis in accord with modern theories. Does Zetterholm put too much weight on social science theories, sometimes to the point of over-riding the text?

Chapter 1 deals with methods and perspectives with a heavy emphasis on the social sciences. Chapter 2 introduces the history of Antioch as a city, the history of the Jewish community in Antioch, and the social and religious life of the city. In chapter 3, the author is concerned with an analysis of religious differences in the Jewish community, using modern theories about international migration and assimilation, and chapter 4 focuses on the interaction between Jews and Gentiles in Antioch, particularly in the Jesus movement. Note that chapter 4 is the first time we actually deal with the Christian church. In chapter 5 Schwartz uses social science theories about collective action as the hermeneutical tool to suggest how and why the separation between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians happened. An Epilogue ties together the main results of the study, and the book includes an extensive bibliography, an index of passages, and an index of subjects.

Perhaps the strongest case the book makes and its most important contribution to our understanding of Christian origins in Antioch is an understanding of what it meant for "Godfearers" to break with their Gentile religion. The volume is also helpful in understanding the tensions between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians.

But there are questions as well. Can we rely on modern theories of migration and assimilation to give us an accurate picture of first century Judaism in Antioch? Is it safe to assume that social situations 2000 years apart can shed enough light on each other to provide reliable results? And then an historical question: why did Zetterholm ignore the increasing political pressure for Christians to separate from Judaism? The period covered in this study includes the First Jewish War, the Jewish Revolt in Egypt, and the pressures that would lead...