What are the origins of Christianity? Alfred Osborne claims in this book that the movement can be traced to second temple debates about the calendar that raged in the second century BCE.
Osborne argues that the curious epithet Nazarēnos or Nazōraois attached to Jesus and his followers in the New Testament (e.g., Matt 2:23) is the key to understanding the deep past of the Christian movement. Though the Gospel of Matthew associates this term with Jesus’s origins in a Galilean town called Nazareth, Osborne rejects that possibility in the first few pages of the book. Instead, he suggests, that these terms are transliterations of a Hebrew term,notsri. This term is used in the Babylonian Talmud (redacted in the sixth or seventh century, using older materials) to denote Christians—see, e.g., Babylonian Talmud Ta’anit 27b: “Why do they not fast on Sunday? Rabbi Johanan said: ‘Because of the Christians.’” This could not, of course, be the meaning of the term before there was a Christian community. Osborne, however, reconstructs an older meaning: “strict observers of the Law,” perhaps as used in Ps. 119:2, “Happy are those who observe his decrees [notsre ‘edotaw], who turn to him wholeheartedly.”
Aside from Christians, we know of no other group called this, but Osborne explains that this was an exonym applied to the group of Jews who remained faithful to a 364-day solar calendar like the one reflected in the writings found at Qumrān, as opposed to the lunisolar calendar followed by other Jews (and which has morphed into the Jewish calendar used today). While it is clear in scholarship and in the primary sources that the Qumran group did in fact follow such a calendar, it is far from clear that other Jewish groups knew of this solar calendar or held to it. Regardless, Osborne believes that the calendar was the cause of the intra-Jewish strife that led to the Hasmonean revolt but that the lunisolar calendar was later secretly adopted by the Hasmoneans who were victorious in that revolt. The calendar cause was later picked up by the “fourth philosophy” of rebels that Josephus faults with the rebellion that caused the destruction of the Jerusalem temple (Ant. 18.9–10) and that Osborne claims was the heretofore unknown source of the first Christians.
Osborne claims that the Jesus movement was an outgrowth of a longstanding group of Jews with a long tradition, and moreover that they were the Jews who kept to what they deemed to be the authentic ancestral calendar tradition, as opposed to other factions of Hellenizers and accommodators who changed the calendar to make it more comprehensible or amenable to Greek overlords. Ironically, this same group of proto-Christians was the one that later shed almost all of its distinctive Jewish practices and became the world religion which we know today. Osborne also tells a temptingly neat story about how and why Jews adopted the lunisolar calendar: after a failed attempt to shift to this calendar by Menelaus (172–163 BCE), which prompted the Hasmonean revolt, it was in the end quietly adopted by Hasmonean leader Jonathan. Osborne claims this happened inin 151 BCE.This in turn inspired a faction led by Onias IV to split off and build a temple in Egypt—an offense against the law seemingly less significant to him than adopting a different calendar. These calendar wars also prompted the formation of the Jewish sects Josephus famously describes — the Saducees, Pharisees, Essenes and the “fourth philosophy.” The followers of Jonathan found it expedient to scrub any references to the calendar controversy from the chronicles of the revolt.
The book is made up of four parts: the first is a survey of the terms Nazarēnos or Nazōraois in the gospels, and why Jesus is identified as one. It is the basis for Osborne’s theory—itself based on the work of Mark (Abraham Mordechai) Lidzbarski—that this was a reference to a group of people who were “keepers of the law.” This allows Osborne to progress to the second part, in which he surveys the history of the second century BCE in Judea through the lens of his theory, assuming both that the calendar was the central driver of intra-Jewish conflict, and that it was later hidden by Hasmonean chronicles. He details each phase of the Hasmonean kingdom and attempts to pinpoint the time at which the Hasmoneans adopted the Hellenizing lunisolar calendar, against their own professed nativist agenda. This fact never actually mentioned in any of the sources. In the third part, Osborne takes us to the first century CE and explains that the rebels against Rome who adhered to the “fourth philosophy,” were also adherents of the 364-day calendar, notsrim (the followers of Jesus had however already left Judaea to Transjordan, which is why they survived). Part 4 is devoted to the afterlife of this term in the Jewish liturgy in the form of what is known as birkat ha-minim—a part of the daily Jewish liturgy which prays for the downfall of heretics, informers, Christians and the Roman Empire.
Osborne’s book is erudite, and the sources dealt with span the gamut between the Hebrew Bible and the Cairo Genizah, in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. His command of Josephus, the books of the Maccabees, and the New Testament is impressive, as is his ability to cogently present a historical narrative. At the end of the day, however, it is unconvincing. As Osborne cheerily admits often, none of this narrative is explicit in the sources. Trying to explain this, he reconstructs a widespread move to edit the struggle out of the history books. “The history of the struggle over the calendar that emerges from a critical examination of the extant Greek sources tells us why the creation calendar is never mentioned in texts that support the Hasmoneans […] the Hasmonean rulers of Judaea found their own part in the story far too embarrassing” (185). But if this is a Hasmoneans story, why does Josephus also say nothing? And why do none of the early Christian texts refer to the 364-day solar calendar?
Osborne’s defense (pp. 185–196) that this is the result of intentional obfuscation is enticing but can prove nothing positive. Even the Qumran texts, which explicitly espouse a 364-day calendar, have a great many other grievances against the other Jewish groups that compelled their schism with the temple and retreat to their own communities: in their own words, these include “the first one, fornication, the second, the wealth, and the third, defiling the temple” (The Damascus Document, CD 4:17). For Osborne, none of these aside from the calendar is material.
Moreover, the etymological claim is shaky. The earliest Christian sources use Nazarēnos or Nazōraois believing it refers to Nazareth, and this place is mentioned a number of times in the New Testament as Jesus’s hometown (Matt. 2:23; 4:13; 21:11; Mark 1:9; Luke 1:26; 2:4, 39, 51; 4:16; John 1:45-46; Acts 10:38). Why did Christians stop using this epithet? Possibly because they preferred being associated with a messiah, which is what “Christ” literally means, than with a small backwater in Galilee. Still, the epithet lived on amongst non-Christians: Jews most famously, because they denied that Jesus was in fact a messiah, but also in Syriac (e.g., in the Julian Romance, ed. Sokoloff 39 l. 7) and Arabic (e.g., Quran 2:62, 2:111, 2:113, 2:120, 2:135 and nine other times, all referring to Christians).
Additionally, Osborne makes no mention of a central tenet of Christianity that was closely associated with the Pharisees, and not with any other second temple era Jewish group: the resurrection of the dead. Jesus was famously resurrected, and the belief in this resurrection is promoted by Paul in Romans 15 as the foundation of the Christian faith. To garner sympathy from Pharisees, the character of Paul in Acts 23 says that he is a Pharisee himself, on trial περὶ ἐλπίδος καὶ ἀναστάσεως νεκρῶν, “for the hope of the resurrection of the dead.” The Mishnah—created by the self-described heirs of the Pharisees—says that those who say “there is no resurrection” (Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:1) have no share in the next world, a belief attributed to the Sadducees in Acts 23:8. Would Osborne’s hypothetical non-Jews have believed in a future resurrection? What about the resurrection of Jesus himself?
Finally, the reconstructed narrative seems to me (and perhaps just to me) to echo supersessionist theological claims under the guise of academic scholarship. A very niche intra-Jewish controversy brought a physical downfall to the Judeans in the first century, but with that birthed a new world religion in the form of Christianity which preserved the authentic form of Judaism. Osborne presents (contemporary) Jews and their lunisolar calendar as hellenized and accommodating, while (contemporary) Christians are the “spiritual heirs” of the adherents of the “creation calendar.” The body of the Jews was killed, but the spirit lives on in the Church, the “true Israel.”
This book raises important scholarly issues regarding the books of 1 and 2 Maccabees, Josephus, and early Christianity. It is a good resource for central questions on the chronology of Seleucid and Roman Judea. It would be best used critically by experts in these fields.