My attention was recently drawn to a book by Alison Morgan called Following Jesus (Resource, Wells, Somerset 2015) with the interesting sub-title: The plural of disciple is church. In this book Alison Morgan emphasises the importance of discipleship. She says: “if the church is not about making disciples, it is not church. Discipleship is not something the church does; it is what the church is; the church is the community which supports and directs our discipleship in the world. But she also notes that that while the word ‘disciple’ occurs frequently in the Gospels and in the Book of Acts, it is not used in the letters of Peter, Paul, James and John.
The question arises: why is the word ‘disciple’ only found in the Gospels and in the Book of Acts? According to Alison Morgan: “The difference is that the emphasis is now not on the individual, responding to the call of Jesus, but on the group, learning to reshape their lives in the light of that call”. She concludes: “The plural of disciple is church. A church is a community of disciples, a gathering of people who have been called individually and collectively into relationship with God.”
Having read what Alison Morgan had to say in what is essentially a popular guide to Christian discipleship, I thought I would see what New Testament scholars have to say. In particular I consulted Paul Treblico, Self-designations and Group Identity in the New Testament (Cambridge University Press, 2012). According to Treblico:
Jesus transformed and radicalised the meaning of mathetai (disiciples), so that it was particularly associated with his call to follow him, which involved literal itinerancy and breaking ties with family and livelihood, as well as danger, hostility, and cross-bearing. This means that ‘disciples’, as used by the historical Jesus, was a narrow and restricted concept… It was difficult for Paul and others to apply it to Christians in their own day.
As a result, Paul used other expressions such as ‘believers’, ‘saints’, ‘in Christ’, and the language of Jesus as Lord.
Furthermore, like Alison Morgan, Trebliko notes that the word ‘disciple’ need imply nothing about community; indeed, in the Greco-Roman world, a disciple would be entirely independent of other disciples. Given the very strong sense of community in the early Christian churches, the term ‘disciple’ said too little with regard to horizontal relationships
So the question arises: if the early church gave up on the term ‘disciple’, are we wise today to use a term which does not really belong to our culture? According to Luke, it was in Antioch that the ‘disciples’ were first called ‘Christians’. But the ‘term’ Christian is only found in two other places (Acts 26.28; 1 Peter 4.16). The most common word used as a term of ‘self-designation’ in the New Testament is ‘brothers’ (Greek: adelphoi) , which in those days was an inclusive term referring to ‘brothers and sisters’. This term used in the metaphorical sense of being a ‘follower of Jesus’ is found some 271 times in the New Testament. Significantly it was also a term that Jesus used a good deal : indeed, one could argue that ‘brothers and sisters’ was the key term Jesus used for his followers. For instance, there was the occasion when his mothers and brothers came to see him (Mark 3.31-35 with parallels in Matt 12.46-50; Luke 19.21). They sent a message to him saying that they were outside waiting for him. But Jesus replied: “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?” He then went on to say: “He looked at the people sitting round him and said, ‘Look! Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does what God wants him to do is my brother, my sister, my mother’”. This was radical stuff. It is not exaggeration to say that at this point Jesus redefined the family. For him family was defined by a new relationship with God, in which blood relationship could no longer take precedence. Furthermore, although in our context today it sounds frightfully old-fashioned, the fact that ‘we are family’ is the glory of the church. Unfortunately, however, the expression ‘brothers and sisters’ is not a very distinctive term to describe a group of Christians. Trreblico argues that if we wanted to use a more distinctive New Testament term, then we should probably opt for ‘believers’ or perhaps even for ‘saints’!
If I am honest, I am not smitten by the term ‘disciple’ – but I do like the term ‘church’. For togetherness is of the essence of the Christian faith. As Alison Morgan says, Christian discipleship is about “setting out on a shared journey”. But what we call ourselves individually, that is perhaps open to debate.
The words of Jesus “Who is my mother?” ought to strike terror into the Catholic Church. Their answer would have been ” Your mother is the Mother of God,the Virgin Mary , selected by God to bear you in her womb, herself immaculately conceived, by her mother Anne. We have hundreds of thousand of paintings all over the world portraying her holding you as a baby, along with an assortment of wise men and animals”
Jesus, no doubt would have been astonished by this reply.Oddly enough, Jesus’s mother was distressed when he went missing for three days as a child. Seems rather strange, since according the the nativity story, she had been told by the angel Gabriel that she was favoured by God and she herself was saying “henceforth shall all nations call me blessed”.
Baptists, very wisely, omit the mother of Jesus from their theology.
Authors who write commentaries on the Bible are in an awkward situation, in that if the Bible is the Word of God, then everything in it would be perfectly comprehensible to anyone, without explanation. Translations of the Bible into every language would be identical.The only reason a human being would write about a divinely inspired book, would be if they knew themselves they were being divinely inspired, otherwise they would do well to leave well alone. George Beasley-Murray, for example, wrote a book ” Baptism in the New Testament” . The writing of this book would have been totally unnecessary, if the New Testament explained clearly what baptism meant,which it does not. Bible study groups in churches ought to be totally unnecessary,since reclining in your armchair at home, you could extract from the pages of the Bible everything you needed to know.Do the enormous number of books written over the centuries about the Bible, suggest that the Bible was written by humans, who were not guided from Above?