Jack Poirier

The gospels, the book of Acts, and Paul’s letters tend to dominate our view of early Christianity.  With the possible exception of Revelation, the books that appear after the Pauline corpus (i.e., Hebrews, James, 1-2 Peter, 1-3 John, Jude) are usually treated as little more than extraneous sweepings, even by those who would never intend to slight any part of the Bible.  Among scholars, the older view is that most, if not all, of these writings are too late to serve as a window onto pre-Pauline Christianity.  Recently, however, that view has come under fire, and with that development some now contend that these books contain invaluable clues to the earliest Christian movement.

Those scholars who have busied themselves with this back-of-the-Bible material have known all along that there was more to these books than others were willing to credit, but it is not so much the ongoing work of New Testament scholarship per se that now promises to give these writings a more prominent and natural light.  Rather, this promise is largely due to developments in a neighboring field, Qumran studies, as well as the spillover from that field onto our understanding of popular Jewish piety beyond Qumran.  If asked which stream(s) of first-century Judaism Christianity most resembled, many scholars today wou