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• W1550316795 abstract "Reviewed by: After the Apostles: Christianity in the Second Century Thomas M. Finn Walter H. Wagner. After the Apostles: Christianity in the Second Century. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994. Pp. x + 287. $16.00. Feeling the lack of a full picture of second-century Christianity, Walter Wagner seeks to tell the “story of the second century’s challenges and leaders in ways the bring events, ideas, and persons in a readily comprehensible manner” (ix). He succeeds admirably. Wagner sets the stage in the first part, Kingdom and Empire, with Christian expectations and frustrations (ch. 1), Jews and Christians (ch. 2), imperial visions and realities (ch. 3), and Greco-Roman dilemmas (ch. 4). The story in these chapters yields two arresting points. The first is much recognized but little realized—the sacred books depicted in Jewish hands are the Septuagint, but when they are taken into Christian hands, the Christian community becomes the septuagintal ekklesia of Deuteronomy, which was bound to the Temple where one expected to encounter “the One who called it into being” (19). So, wherever this septuagintal community gathered, even if it were two or three, the One (Jesus), was in their midst. And more: in addition of the Temple on earth, the church became the Temple in heaven, that is, in the age to come. To the extent that second-century Christians had an ecclesiology, the author has put his finger on it—the church as the sacrament of the encounter with the risen Jesus, who will surely return. The second point Wagner makes is one that many have seen but not quite in his telling of it. The imperial vision was of a golden age, but the author deftly ties the vision to the desperate hunger that pervaded all social classes in the Empire for just such an age, a hunger that made the Christian eschatological message so appealing. I also like the way in which Wagner delineated the dilemmas of the Empire (ch. 4), namely the problem of the one and the many, the human predicament and the pursuit of excellence (arete), the educational system (paideia) and cultural continuity, and the diversity of religions. On the classical problem of one and many, he considers the Middle Platonic answer. About the religious pluralism of the Empire, the author perceptively reminds one that the emperor-cult was, in fact, an Empire-cult that “attempted to establish a common base of devotion and loyalty among the different and competing claims of gods and cults in the Empire” (59). Naturally, non-compliance was treason. I consider the human predicament and the educational system below in connection with Clement of Alexandria. In the second part, Wagner presents the challenges Christians faced and a range of answers. Principal among the challenges were 1) how time and space started (ch. 5), 2) who humans are and where they are going, 3) who Jesus was and what he accomplished (7), what the church’s place and role in society were (8), and 4) the challenges within the church and between church and society (9). Throughout this part of the study, with skill and insight Wagner brings to bear the visions of the apocrypha, especially, 2 Esdras, 2 Baruch, Enoch, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and the Psalms of Solomon. Other scholars [End Page 107] often treat the visionaries and their visions as peripheral to the main currents of the century, but not Wagner. They articulate the pervasive golden-age hunger—messianic, ascension, merkabah, apocalyptic, gnostic—especially at the level of popular culture. In the process, Wagner finds what seems to me to be the proper home for the intertestamental world and its seers: a world hungering for a golden age. When he concludes that men and women became Christians “mostly because they felt that the traditional religious expressions failed them” (130), however, he would have done well to add that they also became apocalyptics, merkabah mystics, gnostics, and Bar-Kochba revolutionaries just to name the most prominent. The third part of the study explores the responses of Ignatius (ch. 10), Justin (ch. 11), Clement (ch. 12), Tertullian (ch. 13), and Irenaeus (ch. 14). Since one cannot comment on all of them, I..." @default.
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• W1550316795 title "Book Review: After the Apostles: Christianity in the Second Century" @default.
• W1550316795 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/earl.1997.0021" @default.
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