Motivated by a general dissatisfaction with the established methods, questions, and answers of contemporary New Testament scholarship, a small," diverse, but influential group of scholars has turned to sociological analysis. For now, they are united more by the search for alternatives than by any shared method or theory. They agree that the promise of form-criticism to locate texts in concrete Sitze im Leben has not been fulfilled; they find that NT theology often ignores the connections ofideas to social life? In contrast, they strive to recover a sense of earliest Christianity as a living religion. To aid their search; they have borrowed liberally from the social sciences.
The central question posed by tile sociological interpreters of the NT differs little from that ofother observers from Celsus in the second century to Adolf Harnack in the twentieth. In the words ofGerd Theissen: 'The basic problem in a sociology of primitive Christianity is this: How could this marginal, It subcultural, current conquer and transform an entire culture? 2 While Celsus traced that most unwelcome transformation literally to magic, 3 Harnack saw instead the 'inevitable' victory of a unique religion. 4 In itselfneither analysis is particularly enlightening. Theissen and those who share his interests seek an explanation that is simultaneously more concrete, specific, nuanced, local, and rooted in social experience.
In this programmatic essay on 'The Social Description of Early Christianity' Jonathan Z. Smith lists four major options for research: (a) description of social facts, (b) composition of social history, (e) analysis of social organizations, (d) investigation of social worlds, s Smith provides several examples of each of those approaches, but it is the last which seems to have generated the most interest. However defined, the notion of a 'social world' depends on the assertion that human beings through language and other symbolic activity construct, maintain, and inhabit worlds of meaning. That idea is expressed succinctly by Peter Berger at the beginning of The Sacred Canopy: 'Every human society is an enterprise ofworld-building. Religion occupies a distinctive place in this enterprise. '6 Though some distance lies between the description of social facts and the analysis of a social world, the pursuits are complementary 0048-721X/84/010091 + 09502.00/0 f~1984 Academic Press Inc. (London) Ltd.