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Heirs of Abraham: The New Covenant as a Theological Norm in Early Christianity

Mark R. Saucy, SEND International, Kyiv Theological Seminary, Kyiv Ukraine

In its understanding of early Christianity, evangelical theology occupies the middle

ground between the poles of radical skepticism exhibited in W. Bauer`s thesis of Christian
origins

and the high confidence in the post-apostolic Church`s traditioning found in Catholicism

and eastern Orthodoxy.

In this essay I will contend that both of these polarities are lacking in

their attention to the Old Testament, particularly the eschatological promise for a New Covenant,
for both determining what are the legitimate sources of Christianity and how they are to be
understood. In this thesis it will be necessary to undertake two tasks: first to establish the
fundamental story the Old Testament itself tells and looks forward to in a New Covenant; and
second, to trace that storyline through the early Christian period in it major expressions. Much
like a DNA test in modern criminal and legal investigations, the matrix of the New Covenant is
the best determiner of which christianity` is the heir of Abraham and which sacred texts are its
legitimate record and interpreter and which are not.

The contention that there is one story being told in the Old Testament that extends to and

concludes in the New Testament immediately, of course, calls up all of the concerns about
relationship of history to faith in the Old and New Testament documents that have funded higher
criticism characteristic of Bauer`s thesis since Reimarus first questioned the historicity of the
gospel accounts 250 years ago.

It also calls up the particular expression those concerns have

taken in the modern biblical theology movement which has tended to neglect salvation-historical
categories and to focus on diversity and discontinuity within canonical documents because unity
is the particular provenance of unacceptable historical` views of inspiration and canon
formation.

Yet, the higher critical atomization of texts and Tendenz, with its numbing

skepticism about the connection Christianity has with the historical Jesus and the connection the
Old Testament has to true Christianity now shares the academic stage with methodologies much

Since the publication of Walter Bauer`s Orthodoxy and Heresy (German original, 1934; most recently as

Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, trans. ed. Robert A. Kraft and Gerhard Krodel [Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1971]), claims such as those of Bart D. Ehrman (Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the
Faiths We Never Knew (Oxford: OUP, 2003) that the existence of equally early and vastly different interpretations
of Jesus (i.e., christianities`) with the corollary that the orthodox` version was the happenstance victor of the early
intrigue and polemics is considered a dogma of scholarship.` The Bauer thesis has achieved great exposure in the
immensely popular novel by Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (New York: Doubleday, 2003).

Whether by the Church`s magisterium embodied in the Pope or by the more collegial version of the Orthodox

Church, Holy Church Tradition is the hermeneutical prism for understanding Scripture in these denominations.
Because Scripture was born and shaped in a community of faith, the wider Tradition of the Spirit-led Church is
determinative in hermeneutics as seen in Breck`s recent discussion from an Orthodox perspective (John Breck,
Scripture In Tradition: The Bible and its Interpretation in the Orthodox Church [Crestwood: St. Vladimer`s
Seminary Press, 2001], quote from p. 3). For a presentation of the differences of views on the relationship of
Scripture and Tradition between Orthodox, Catholics and Protestants, see Daniel B. Clendenin, Orthodoxy on
Scripture and Tradition: A Comparison with Reformed and Catholic Perspectives, Westminster Theological
Journal 57/2 (Fall 1995): 383-402.

Reimarus` Fragments were part of a larger, Apology or Defense of the Rational Worshippers of God, published

posthumously by Gotthold Lessing from 1774-1778. Of the seven Fragments, the most significant was the last one
which discussed The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples and questioned the historicity of the gospel accounts of
Jesus` life. Ehrman chronicles the heritage of higher-criticism that founds Bauer`s theory in chapters eight and nine
of Lost Christianities.

Robert. W. Yarbrough documents the current negative assessment toward salvation-history in biblical studies in

general and within Pauline studies in particular in Paul and Salvation History, in D. A. Carson, Peter T. O`Brien,
and Mark A. Seifrid, eds., Justification and Variegated Nomism: A Fresh Appraisal of Paul and Second Temple
Judaism. Vol.2: The Paradoxes of Paul (Grand Rapids/Tübingen: Baker/Mohr Siebeck, 2004): 297-342. Canon
and inspiration are the two points of contention for the critics as Schlier points out in his essay Meaning and
Function of Theology of the New Testament, (in The Relevance of the New Testament [New York: Herder and
Herder, 1968], 19 as cited by Frank J. Matera, New Testament Theology: History, Method, and Identity,
Catholic Biblical Quarterly 67 [2005], 20, n. 46).