An essay by Scott Quimby
The first of great modern religions that arose within a world dominated by polytheism was, of course, Judaism. The earliest accounts of the Jews that can be placed within a historical context suggest that there were three waves of Hebrew settlement in Canaan, the modern Israel. The first was associated with Abraham, perhaps a wandering desert chieftain, who led his people to settle in Canaan somewhere around 1850 BCE. The second involved Abraham’s grandson Jacob, renamed Israel, whose sons emigrated to Egypt during a severe famine in Canaan. The third wave of Hebrew settlement in Canaan around 1200 BC involved tribes claiming to be descendants of Abraham. They had been enslaved in Egypt but liberated by a deity they called Yahweh, the god of Moses their leader. These people became allied with the original Canaan Hebrews and became known as the ancient Israelites.
Karen Armstrong in her A History of God points out that stories of the activities of these ancient people were passed down as oral narratives long before becoming written down as Biblical accounts, probably during the 8th century BCE. There was no single narrative source, and there was not one single author recording the stories. This explains why in the Bible there are quite different and sometimes contradictory accounts of some of the key events.
What is clear is that the monotheism of these peoples developed slowly over time. In fact, Biblical descriptions clearly suggest that Abraham, his son Israel, and his grandson Jacob, may well have been pagans who shared many of the beliefs of their neighbors in Canaan, including worship of El, the High God of Canaan. This god appeared to them as a friend and sometimes assumed human form, typical of polytheistic (pagan) beliefs where the divine was not essentially distinct from either nature or humanity. However, the Biblical account of Abraham and his god departs significantly from the beliefs of neighboring polytheistic people in at least one major respect. For them the activities of the gods took place in sacred primordial time described in myth. Worshippers gained access to their divine power and influence through retelling the myth and enacting accompanying rituals. Abraham’s god made his power effective in the real world of time and space. He first revealed himself through a specific command to Abraham to lead his people and travel to the land of Canaan.
Yahweh, the god of Moses, may originally have been a warrior god or a god of volcanoes worshipped in what is now Jordan, or he may have been first encountered by the Israelites. Whatever the case, Moses was able to convince his people that Yahweh was indeed one and same as El or Elohim. However, in the Biblical accounts he was characterized very differently due no doubt to different authors reflecting different narrative sources. Yahweh insisted on distance from his people and inspired terror. In the story of Moses and Mt. Sinai. When they arrived at the mountain, Moses warned them,
“Take care not to go up the mountain or touch the foot of it. Whoever touches the mountain will be put to death.” [The Book of Exodus 19.1]
Moses went to the summit alone and received the tablets of the Law handed down from on high, very different from pagan experience where principles of order and justice are inherent in the very nature of things. On behalf of his people Moses made a covenant with Yahweh in which they agreed to ignore all other gods and worship him alone. In return they would be his special people and enjoy his special protection. The fact that the Israelites agreed to abide by this covenant was a pragmatic decision. They had seen that Yahweh alone was beyond all other gods in power and effectiveness on behalf of his worshippers. This is the god who when the Egyptian Pharaoh refused to let the Hebrews go sent terrible plagues to the Egyptian people, turned the Nile to blood, and sent the Angel of Death to kill all their first-born sons. When they were allowed to leave, then were pursued by the Pharaoh’s army, he opened the Sea of Reeds, allowing them to pass safely. He then closed the waters drowning the Pharaoh and his army. [The Book of Exodus]
The Israelites were warned repeatedly by Joshua and others that Yahweh was extremely jealous. If they strayed from the covenant he would destroy them. Yet abiding by the covenant was not easy. They would forget the old story of the Exodus from Egypt. After all, Yahweh was not the only god. Within polytheism each god had his or her own particular sphere of power, expertise, and influence. None demanded or were given exclusive worship. Yahweh had demonstrated his skill in providing military protection. In times of war it was obvious the people would turn to him. He was not, however, seen by many Israelites as a god of fertility or other forces of nature impacting their lives. For everyday affairs of living they tended to turn to their more familiar deities. Fortunately for the history of Judaism Yahweh did not remain the violent and cruel god of the Exodus.
The years 800-200 BCE called the Axial Age saw momentous changes in all the main regions of the civilized world. A new prosperity evolved that led to the rise of a merchant class. The marketplace began to occupy the power that had been exclusive to kings and priests. New wealth led to the flowering of cultural and intellectual activity. Individuals began to develop an internalized ethical concern involving the realization that their own behavior could affect the fate of succeeding generations. Distinctive ideologies and religions arose in each region reflecting and addressing these developments. In China there were Taoism and Confucianism, in India Hinduism and Buddhism, and in Europe philosophical rationalism. In Iran Zoroaster and in Israel the Hebrew prophets respectively developed new versions of monotheism. [Armstrong – A History of God]
The ancient Israelites along with the Assyrians, Babylonians, Canaanites, and Phoenicians originally shared a similar culture, language, and religion. They all conceived of a universe with four levels consisting of a flat earth floating on water, large caverns underneath, a domed sky over the earth, and above that a heaven. There were a number of sky gods residing in heaven that were worshipped in public rituals. The underworld contained a place called Sheol that was thought to be the home of all people who had died. Some of these dead people became minor underworld deities, and descendants of the dead could interact with and secure blessings from them through private, family rituals. [Judaism and the Afterlife, Religious Tolerance.org, http://www.religioustolerance.org/aft_bibl1.htm]
Increasingly the Israelites placed emphasis on one God, Yahweh, and saw themselves as having a unique relationship with him as his chosen people. By 600 BC he alone was worshiped. Interaction with all other gods including deities of the underworld was totally discontinued as was ancestor worship Yahweh increasingly became viewed as the one and only exclusive creator and ruler of the universe. In addition to worshipping him exclusively through prayer and sacrifice as called for in the covenant, the Israelites were also to follow a strict ethical code of behavior. Originally this was set out in the Torah or teaching, which became recorded in written form in the first five books of the Bible (the Pentateuch). Over many generations in response to changing political and social circumstances oral interpretations of the written law became the basis for new or modified code of ethical customs.
The history of Israel for eight hundred years preceding the birth of Jesus is marked by periodic wars and almost continuous foreign domination. In 721 BC what was known as the Kingdom of Israel, the northern part of the land, was overthrown by the Assyrians. In 587 the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar conquered the southern Kingdom of Judah. They destroyed the Temple and sent the Judean leaders into exile. While there the Israelites were exposed to Zoroastrianism, a religion based of the teachings of the Persian prophet Zoroaster. He taught that after each individual dies there is a final judgment of his soul. The souls of people who have lived a good life and have been faithful to God will go to heaven as a reward. All other souls go to hell, a place of mild punishment. There will be an eventual battle between an all-good God and an all-bad Satan that God wins. People will be resurrected with a rejoining of body and soul. They will live forever on an earth cleansed of all impurities. Hebrew prophets and writers began incorporating many of these concepts. [Judaism and the Afterlife, Religious Tolerance.org, http://www.religioustolerance.org/aft_bibl1.htm]
Shortly after the Babylonian exile, Persians under Cyrus overran the Babylonian Empire. They allowed those leaders to return to their homes, and the Temple was rebuilt. The high priest in charge of the Temple was made local ruler although the Persian king retained ultimate authority. In 336BC Alexander the Great during his conquest of most of the lands around the eastern Mediterranean.overthrew the Persian Empire. He introduced Greek culture into these conquered regions building Greek cities and schools and encouraging the use of the Greek language. When Alexander died the realm was divided among his generals. Ptolemy, the general in charge of Egypt became ruler of Palestine.
In the ensuing years Greek or Hellenic influence became increasingly pronounced particularly among the wealthy upper classes. In the early part of the 2nd century BCE. Hellenizing Jews gained control of the high priesthood and Jerusalem became largely a Greek city with Greek institutions. Syria gained control of Palestine in 198 BC and their monarchs continued the push toward Hellenization. Jewish dissatisfaction with foreign domination intensified sparking a number of protests. In response the Syrian ruler Antiochus IV declared it illegal for Jews to circumcise baby boys and to maintain their Jewish identity. Jews were required to sacrifice to the pagan gods and the Jewish Temple was turned into a pagan sanctuary.
In 167BC a revolt broke out led by a family of Jewish priests known as the Maccabeans or the Hasmoneans. This small guerilla action mushroomed into an armed rebellion involving much of the country. The Syrian army was driven out of Palestine. The Maccabeans took over total control of the government and created the first sovereign Jewish state in over 400 years. In 164 BC they rededicated the Temple and appointed a high priest as the supreme ruler of the land. This period of self-rule survived only 80 years. In 63 BC Rome under its general Pompey came in conquest.
Under the Romans the Jewish high priest remained in office as a kind of administrative liaison with local Jewish leaders, but he had no real power. In 40 BC Herod the Great was appointed as ruler over Palestine. Although his parents had been forced to convert to Judaism before he was born, Herod was widely criticized as an opportunistic collaborator with the Romans, not a real Jew. He further alienated his Jewish subjects through a ruthless exercise of power. Following Herod’s death, Galilee in the northern part of the land was ruled by his son Antipas. Starting in the early years of the new millennium, Judea, the southern region, began to be governed by Roman prefects. During Jesus’ adult life and for some years thereafter this was Pontius Pilate. Although headquartered in Caesarea, he brought his troops to Jerusalem whenever needed.
During the period of Maccabean rule four Jewish sects emerged that came to play an important role in the political and social life: the Pharisees, Sadduccees, Essenes, and a group called by the Jewish historian Josephus simply, the Fourth Philosophy. The Pharisees were the largest and best known, although their actual numbers were no more than 6,000 out of perhaps three to four million Jews in the entire world at the time. They were a highly committed group of middle class liberal Jews who believed that an oral law was revealed to Moses along with written law, which they interpreted to meet the contemporary needs. The Pharisees emphasized the importance of performing all the commandments, even those that appeared to be relatively unimportant. They believed in reward and punishment in a world to come, providential governance of human events, in resurrection of the dead, and in angels.
The Sadducees were much smaller in number although more powerful in influence. They were the upper-class aristocratic Jews heavily influenced by Greek culture. The chief priests were Sadducees, and it was they who represented local Jewish concerns to the Roman governor. The Sadducees accepted the Torah alone as authoritative and rejected many of the more supernatural elements accepted by the Pharisees. What mattered most to them was maintaining the sacrificial rituals of the Temple.
Although the Essenes were not explicitly mentioned in the Bible, we know a good deal about them due to a collection of their writings discovered in 1947 that have come to be known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Essenes were highly religious Jews who believed that most Jews had gone astray. Consequently they started their own communities where they could maintain their purity by rigorously obeying Mosaic law. They expected that an apocalypse was about to occur involving a final battle between the forces of good and evil. God would triumph ushering in a blessed kingdom for his children.
Josephus used the term Fourth Philosophy to refer to several groups of Jews who believed that because God had given them the land of Israel they should violently resist any foreign rulers and take back their homeland by force.These Jews prevailed and in the year AD 66 instigated a three and a half year revolt against Roman rule. Unfortunately for the Jews, the Romans succeeded in crushing their efforts. They destroyed Jerusalem and burned the Temple.
From its inception there was a belief in Judaism that the Israelites were a chosen people to fulfill God’s divine plan and in so doing provide a model for all people to follow. Divine sovereignty would then be restored over all creation. However, the Israelites continued to backslide. As a result throughout their history prophets appeared to summon them back to obedience. Warnings of disasters and threats of punishment if they continued in evil ways were counterbalanced by promise of a coming kingdom of peace and harmony under the leadership of an idealized ruler enjoying God’s favor This kingdom was originally conceived as an entirely natural entity and its ruler a normal albeit divinely inspired human being.
The belief grew into one in which the coming of this Kingdom of God, a transformation of the present day physical world, would be proclaimed by a flesh and blood person a descendent of King David. This person would be the “Messiah.” Messiah originally meant no more than a Jewish ruler anointed with oil, and came to be used to refer to foreign rulers, and finally a metaphor for any person who was genuinely doing God’s will.
With the increasing influence of Greek and the battles between the various Jewish factions ideas about the Kingdom of God began to take on increased importance. Among some Jewish groups the this-worldly kingdom heralded by a flesh and blood messiah became replaced by a more visionary apocalyptic belief. The messiah would be an other-worldly messiah from the heavenly heights who would bring a horrific battle between good and evil involving the destruction of the world and the installation of a supernatural Kingdom of God that was to transform the spiritual life of mankind forever.
By the time of the historical Jesus the Jews made up only a small portion, perhaps around seven percent, of the Roman Empire. The remainder of people in this vast region reaching from Syria to Great Britain, although members of a myriad of cultural groups, all held polytheistic (pagan) beliefs. Although by this time all Jews were strict monotheists, there continued to be a number different Jewish groups each with its own specific beliefs and practices. [Early Christianity:The Experience of the Divine, Luke Timothy Johnson, The Great Courses 2002]
The story of Christianity of course begins with Jesus Christ. While countless writings exist about him and his religion, what may come as a surprise to those not familiar with the history of Christianity is that we don’t have much solid objective information about the historical person Jesus. There are no existing accounts of Jesus and his teachings during his lifetime (4 BCE – 30 AD) in any language. In fact, there are no references to him among any non-Jewish or non-Christian sources during the entire first century AD. During this period he is mentioned very briefly in one Jewish source, the writings of the historian, Josephus. The Josephus account has remained highly controversial among historians of Christianity. Josephus was born in Jerusalem in AD 37/38 and wrote extensively about the history, customs, religion, wars, and politics of Jewish people until his death in AD 100. Among his existing works are a seven volume The Jewish War starting with the period of the Maccabees and concluding with accounts of the fall of Jerusalem, Antiquities of the Jews, a twenty-one volume discussion of the entire story of the Jews from the Creation forward (completed 96 AD), and Against Apion a two-volume defense of Judaism as classical religion and philosophy, [Josephus From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus]
The passage in question known as the Testimonium Flavianum appears in a section in Book 18 of Antiquities dealing with various actions of Pilate.
Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. He was the Christ, and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men among us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians so named from him are not extinct at this day. [Early Christian Writings Testimonium Flavianum
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/testimonium.html#conclusion]
Some have argued that the passage was written by Josephus, some that it was added to his work by later Christian writers, and some that it is partially his writing but a revised version. Whatever the case, the very minute space given to this account within Josephus’s voluminous works suggests that at the time he wrote it (probably 80-90 AD) either he didn’t have access to much in the way of source material or he didn’t consider this story to be particularly important.
The first mention of Jesus by any pagan source (non-Jewish/non-Christian) occurs in 112 AD in a letter from the Roman governor Pliny reporting to the Roman emperor that a group of people called Christians were gathering illegally. At the time all social groups were forbidden to meet out of fear of political uprisings. Pliny points out in his letter that these people are called Christians because they worship someone as a god named Christ. Reference to Christians began to appear more frequently in pagan sources in subsequent years, but they don’t provide information as to what Jesus said and did. (From Jesus to Constantine lecture transcript pg 44)
What we do have in the way of information about the life of Jesus is almost entirely in the four gospels in the New Testament. Unfortunately these accounts raise a number of questions. Who authored the gospels and when has remained a much debated issue. Traditionally three of the authors of the gospels have been said to be people very closely associated with Jesus, the disciple Matthew, the tax collector, and John, the beloved disciple, and Mark, secretary for the apostle Peter. Luke was the traveling companion of the apostle Paul.
Scholars who have carefully studied the gospels generally agree that this was not the case. The consensus is that they were actually written by anonymous authors many years after the events they describe. The authors were highly educated Greek speaking Christians. Jesus’s disciples were illiterate and spoke Aramaic. The disciples lived in Palestine, the gospel writers in other parts of the empire. The gospels were written years after the events they record. The picture is considerably clouded by the fact that the source material available to the gospel writers consisted primarily of stories they heard about Jesus that had been circulating throughout the region since his death. In the telling and retelling details in these stories could well have been changed, embellished, or made up by the story tellers.
The purpose of the gospel writers was not to record an objective factual history of Jesus but rather to proclaim the good news of salvation that he brought. They were his followers and wanted to promote faith in him. No doubt they selectively drew from their already problematic sources and even conveyed information that was not historically accurate. It’s not surprising that the gospels differ from one another, sometimes considerably when it comes to details provided and emphasis given to them. In fact, there are some cases of flat out contradictions.
Biblical scholars have developed criteria to help them weed out accurate details about Jesus and his teachings from material that was changed to make a particular theological point. Earlier accounts are assumed to be more historically accurate than later accounts. In this regard the gospel of Mark is considered contain better historical information than the gospel of John. Other criteria hold that the best information is conveyed independently in more than one source, does not obviously support a particular theological bias, and fits with what we know about the conditions and events of first century Palestine.
From a careful consideration of gospel accounts scholars have been able to agree on several elements in the life and teachings of the historical Jesus. If we accept the gospel of Mark as the most reliable we encounter Jesus as a perfectly normal man. He has a family including brothers and sisters. No angels are mentioned that announced his birth. There was nothing about his birth or adolescence that could be regarded as remarkable in any way. In fact, once he began preaching his neighbors in Nazareth were amazed that the son of a local carpenter could have turned out to be so talented. [Armstrong, History of God]
Jesus began his ministry when he was around 30 and spent from one to three years wandering about from place to place in Galilee as an itinerant sage teaching and healing. Galilee comprised the northern portion of Palestine at the time, with Judea in the south and the territory of Samaria dividing them. It’s likely that he was baptized by John the Baptist, a historical person, but that he didn’t remain a follower of John and in fact acquired his own followers.
Those closest to Jesus during his ministry were likely to have been illiterate. As far as we know, nothing about what he said or did was put into written form during his lifetime. Following his death memories were circulated by word of mouth for two decades. However, as hope faded that he would soon return as the cosmic messiah, scholars believe his followers began to write down his sayings.
Most Biblical scholars believe that there was a Gospel older than the traditional Gospels compiled by some of Jesus’ earliest followers in his native Galilee. Written in the 50’s of the first century only a couple of decades after his death, this Gospel they believe is the closest we can come to the historical Jesus.
The very existence of such a Gospel is only hypothetical as no copy has been found. The basis for believing that it once existed originated in the 1830’s in Germany with the work of Christian Weisse, a lecturer in philosophy and theology at the University of Leipzig. Weisse believed, as other Biblical historians of his day, that the authors of Matthew and Luke had copied heavily from the Book of Mark, the earliest of the four Gospels. But Weisse determined they also contained identical sayings not in Mark. If, as Weise and others believed, Matthew and Luke were not acquainted with one another’s Gospels, then they must have drawn from the same earlier account. This soon became known as “Q,” from the German word “Quelle” or “source.”
Over the next 150 years the Q hypothesis continued to attract scholarly support. In 1945 this idea was given a great boost when the Gospel of Thomas was discovered among the Nag Hammadi manuscripts. This previously lost Gospel containing 114 sayings purportedly spoken be the living Jesus over one-third of which were similar to those believed to have been in the Lost Gospel Q.
If Q in fact existed, as most scholars believe, then along with the letters of Paul, it provides the earliest information we have as to the historical Jesus. And Paul’s letters themselves say relatively little about his actual activities and teachings. Q, on the other hand, is made up primarily of sayings attributed to Jesus and a few to his contemporary John the Baptist. In considering Q however, Marcus Borg, in his preface to The Lost Gospel Q cautions us to remember that just because Q is the earliest Gospel, it was the product of a developing tradition and nothing like a “near transcript of events and teachings going back to Jesus himself.”
Q differs from the traditional Gospels in containing no stories about Jesus’ birth, death, or resurrection and almost no miracle stories. What the majority of the sayings contain is wisdom teachings, how to live. Others involve His criticisms of practices and groups that were part of his social world, responses to criticisms directed against him, threats of a coming judgment by God (but not necessarily the “last judgment”), and teachings about Jesus himself involving his relationship to God being like that of a son to a father, and his temptation by and responses to Satan.
If Q can be assumed to contain what was most central to the group of people that produced it, then it provides evidence for an early Christian community that didn’t make Jesus’ death and resurrection its central message. They did not emphasize a belief that Jesus died for our sins and then rose again. This earliest form of Christianity is thus clearly quite different from most traditional and modern forms of Christianity centered around the theology of Paul.
What was important in Q was Jesus’ teaching which follow a form of the classic “Two Ways” teaching known in Jewish tradition and most religions. In this tradition there is a wise way and a foolish way, the narrow and broad way. The former leads to life, the latter to death.
Q provides a glimpse into the actual person Jesus. Borg identifies a number of major elements. First, Jesus was a wisdom teacher with a metaphoric mind who commonly taught with memorable aphorisms. He was “a master of the one-liner. Second, he was a sharp and passionate critic of the wealthy and ruling religious, political and economic elites. Third, he was a religious ecstatic. That is, he experienced visions, undertaking a wilderness vision quest, spent long hours in prayer, was called spirit-possessed by his critics, and spoke of God with intimate metaphors. Fourth, we can gather that he was a healer and exorcist. Although Q contains only one healing story, it does include sayings relating to both healings and exorcisms. Fifth, the community spoke of him as “the Wisdom of God” and as the “Son of God.” Borg points out this was not meant in an “ontological sense,” and whether either “christological image” goes back to Jesus remains uncertain. Sixth, Jesus spoke of both an “apocalyptic” eschatology and a “sapiential” eschatology. The former has to do with a supernatural intervention by God coming in the imminent future, the latter with the ending of the world of cultural consciousness and domination brought about through response to an enlightened teacher. [pgs 18 – 19]
In 1945 ancient writings were discovered in Egypt referred to as the Nag Hammadi library which contains a great deal of information about the early Christians. Among the 50 books is the complete text of the Gospel of Thomas which can be dated back to the second century CE. Thomas is a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus. Close to half overlap those scholars have called Q.
What these sayings reveal is a predominant theme running through all of his teachings, the Kingdom of God. Jesus talked about this kingdom in terms drawn from the everyday world. Although he often used parables and aphorisms, the settings and events consisted entirely of common daily happenings involving ordinary people. Jesus didn’t develop major philosophical or theological themes based on Hebrew scriptures, he didn’t often interpret the finer points of Jewish law and when he did he often parodied the legal process, and he didn’t recount epic events from the Israelites past. However, while he spoke in mundane everyday terms, Jesus’ followers recognized that he often had something else in mind, that he was speaking metaphorically. And the basic metaphor was God’s reign and the Kingdom of heaven. (Honest to Jesus 149-150)
All of Jesus’ teachings were drawn from Jewish scriptures and his interpretations of them. First and foremost he was Jewish through and through. Jesus carefully followed Jewish customs and encouraged others to do so. All of his followers (in his lifetime) were Jewish. They considered him to be a great teacher of the Law – Torah. The controversies he engaged in all involved fellow Jews and typically had to do with how best to interpret the law and will of the Jewish God. pg 24
While Jesus has been seen as a Jewish rabbi, a Jewish holy man, and a teacher of wisdom, he can best be understood as a first century Jewish apocalyptic prophet. His message is comparable to that of other prophets in the Hebrew bible and is completely within the confines of Judaism of his day.
Although Jesus uses the term “Son of Man” in several different ways in the gospels, in regard to the coming kingdom he clearly appears to be making reference to the book of Daniel in the Hebrew scriptures. There a prophet is shown a vision of the future of the earth in a dream. Four wild beasts trample the earth and maim and kill a lot of people. Then according to the dream one like the Son of Man comes on the clouds of heaven in judgment. He is given power and dominion forever and ever to rule over the earth.
The coming judgment would entail a complete destruction of the present social order, a reversal of fortune for the powerful and the oppressed. People in power would be taken out of power and replaced by the low and the humble. To prepare for the kingdom people needed to repent for their wrongdoing, give up their power and wealth, and live completely for others. This is the message Jesus preached to the rural areas of Galilee. [Jesus to Constantine pg 51]
In his preaching when Jesus referred to the rich and powerful he didn’t distinguish between the Roman and the Jewish aristocracy. In Jerusalem at this time the Jewish Sadducees were the aristocracy. They had been given the right by the Romans to run local affairs. Sadducee priests were in charge of the temple. The coming destruction Jesus preached would be aimed at them as well as the Romans.
During what was to be the last week of his life Jesus traveled to Jerusalem to take his message to the heart of Judaism. Thousands of Jews were assembled for the Passover feast. A number of Sadducees obviously didn’t appreciate this. They also didn’t want the crowds of people in Jerusalem for Passover stirred up. Apparently there had been previous instances of disturbances and rioting during Passover feast. To avoid this potential instigators were arrested
The local leaders, Sadducees, dealt with Jesus in the same way. They had him arrested and taken to the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate. The Roman governors were responsible to keep the peace and raise taxes. They had complete authority over all matters of life and death. For Pilate getting rid of another rabble-rouser was just part of his job. Probably with little interrogation and a very brief trial he decided Jesus was a trouble-maker. He ordered that he be crucified. This was carried out immediately on the morning of Passover. H to C pg 53
Had matters ended at that point most likely the name of Jesus would have soon been forgotten. There would be no Christianity. It’s what happened, or is said to have happened, following Jesus’s death that changed everything. However, the details are confusing. The gospels tell us that Jesus was buried and three days later was raised from the dead.
There are several accounts of an empty tomb. However, apparently the very earliest written accounts, Paul, Q, and the Gospel of Thomas, didn’t mention this. Following discovery of an empty tomb, there are a number of accounts of Jesus being seen by various people, Peter, Mary of Magdala, Jesus’s brother James, and Paul, individually, as well as all the apostles as a group, and various others. Peter’s vision was not merely of a risen Jesus but a Jesus glorified at the right hand of God. Surprisingly, Mark, the earliest Biblical gospel, doesn’t mention any appearances of Jesus.
Accounts of sightings of the luminous figure of Jesus continued for months after his death. In fact, Paul’s vision must have occurred three or four years after his crucifixion. Apparently Jesus appeared differently to different people. The earliest accounts were of a blinding light surrounding an indistinct figure accompanied by auditory communication. In later accounts the appearances tend to be more physical and tangible and to be linked to the story of the empty tomb. [Honest to Jesus pgs 259-271)
The followers of Jesus almost immediately after his death began to believe that he had, in fact, been raised from the dead. Whether this was an actual, objective event in the literal sense is problematic for scholars. Such an occurrence would constitute a miracle, and miracles, by definition, are supernatural or outside the laws of nature. What is clear from the gospel accounts and from Paul is that this was believed, and this belief became the basis for a new religion.
How to best understand the resurrection has inspired a very large and mixed literature from that time forward. One view, advocated by Ehrman (From Jesus to Constantine), builds on the fact that Jesus had talked about the coming resurrection of the dead as part of his apocalyptic message. Seeing that Jesus himself had been raised from the dead and that he had said that the resurrection was to come at the end of this age that was imminent, his followers concluded that the end had begun. Jesus said that when this occurred the Son of Man from heaven would bring judgment. His followers began to say that that he had been exalted to heaven and that he was in fact the Son of Man who would return to bring judgment on the earth. Jesus talked about the coming of the kingdom that would be ruled by God’s messiah. His followers concluded that he was that future messiah. Jesus talked about having a special relationship with God the ‘father of all.’ They came to believe that after the resurrection he was the distinctive son of God. Eventually they transformed this belief to the extent that they began to say that Jesus himself was divine.
Other issues, according to Ehrman, had to be addressed. If Jesus is the Son of Man who is coming to bring judgment, why did he come in the first place only to live and die as an ordinary human being? Jesus had done nothing wrong to deserve his death. Yet if he is divine, his death couldn’t have been a simple miscarriage of justice. If he had no sins deserving punishment, he must have died for those people who did deserve to be punished. Jesus’ death came to be seen as a sacrifice for the sins of others.
There were other issues for Jesus’ followers. There was no record in Jewish scriptures of a suffering messiah. certainly not one who was weak and who was killed by crucifixion, a death reserved for low-life criminals. As we have noted, Jews for the most part thought that the messiah would likely be a great political leader and warrior who would lead them in victory over their enemies, currently the Romans who had conquered Palestine in 63 BC. He would establish a sovereign state favored by God. It’s important to note that “Messiah,” a Hebrew word referring to someone anointed, in Greek is translated as “christos.” Jesus became Jesus Christ or Jesus the Messiah.
To explain this very different kind of messiah, Ehrman speculates that Jesus’s followers searched their Hebrew scriptures for clues. They found a reference in Isaiah 53 to a righteous man who suffered for the sake of others. While the term ‘messiah’ was not used, could that person not be predictive of Jesus? In Psalm 22 they found someone who seemed to be abandoned by God, who uttered the words “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?,” yet who at the end acquires God’s special favor. Again, this sounded much like the plight of Jesus. On the basis these endeavors Jesus’ followers came to believe that his death was according to God’s plan, which was predicted by the Hebrew prophets. [Ehrman – Jesus to Constantine]
Apparently this new formulation of Judaism began to take shape shortly after the death of Jesus. None was more instrumental in developing and expanding it than the apostle Paul. Paul was born sometime in the first decade AD and raised outside of Palestine. He was a Pharisaic Jew, thus committed to strictly following the Law of God. Sometime, probably within a few years after the death of Jesus, he began to hear stories about this new messiah. Being a strict Jew Paul found them to be blasphemous and, in fact by his own account, began to rigorously persecute the Jesus followers to try to make them recant their beliefs.
At some point Paul had a visionary experience of Jesus after his death that convinced him that Jesus had in fact been raised from the dead. This changed everything for Paul. Because he was an apocalyptic Jew, Paul believed in the imminent coming of the kingdom of God. He drew from his experience the same conclusions that were developing among the original Jesus followers. Jesus had died for the sins of the world. He was raised as the messiah, the Christ, who would bring judgment and the possibility of salvation in the kingdom of God.
Having been raised as a strict Jew and rigorous follower of the Law, Paul was faced with a problem. God had provided the Law to the Jewish people as the way for salvation. Follow the Law and you would become right or stay right with God. If this were true, then why did God have to send Jesus to die for people’s sins?
In thinking through this problem, Ehrman suggests Paul developed a new understanding that gets a bit complicated. The Law, Paul concluded, was well and good in itself. It could tell people how to live, but this didn’t provide the power to do what it required. The difficulty is that that people are controlled by the power of sin. Sin is not just disobeying God’s rules. It is a demonic cosmic power that enslaves people and compels them to violate the Law. Sin entered the world when Adam and Eve ate the apple in the Garden of Eden, and it enslaved everyone since.
Death in Paul’s understanding is related to sin. Death isn’t just a natural phenomenon that occurs when someone stops breathing and their heart stops beating. It is another power that enslaves people and will annihilate them. Sin forces a person to go against God. Death annihilates that person and separates her eternally from God.
Through dying for the sins of others, Jesus overcame the power of sin. And by being raised from the dead, he demonstrated that death had no power over him. He overcame the power of death. Salvation comes through the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Paul’s notion of salvation apart from the Law allowed Christianity to expand beyond Judaism and become a separate religion available to anyone. Without it, Jesus’ followers would have remained a Jewish sect. [From J to C pgs 83-86]
After he had developed his understanding of salvation through Jesus the Christ, Paul adopted as his mission to take this good news to others. He embarked on missionary journeys throughout what is now Greece and Turkey setting up churches in major urban areas to proclaim this new belief and convert former pagans. Apparently he would enter a town, set up a business to support himself, and preach to whomever he could. When there were enough converts, he would establish a church. When the church reached sufficient size to be self-sustaining, he would move on and repeat the process in another town.
Although Paul is, of course, the best known of the missionaries to the pagans, he was not the only one. Others converted as well and became involved in spreading the word to urban communities around the Mediterranean. When Paul moved on from one of the churches that he had established and other Christian missionaries arrived, often difficulties surfaced. Sometimes these new people said something different from Paul. Sometimes questions of doctrine arose or
ethical questions were raised. Paul addressed these by writing letters back to the churches he had left explaining what people should believe and how they should act.
A number of these letters became incorporated into the New Testament. In fact, 13 of its 27 books were said to have been written by Paul, although modern scholars have concluded that probably only seven were. The letters of Paul were written around AD 50 – AD 60 and thus predate the earliest Gospel, that of Mark, by an estimated five – 10 years. Thus, they provide the earliest source of written New Testament information following the death of Jesus.
Paul saw himself as fully Jewish. He continued to worship the Jewish God and believed in God’s promises. However, as we have noted, Paul developed the belief that the death and resurrection of Jesus, not the Jewish Law, was the only way to salvation. Thus, he emphasized that Christians could be made right apart from the Law. Pagans who converted to Paul’s Christianity did not have to keep the provisions of the Law such as Sabbath observance, circumcision, and kosher food laws. While these views in effect established the beginnings of a new Christian religion, Paul believed that he was representing the views of the Jewish God set forth in the Jewish Bible.
The issue whether or not the Jewish Law had to be followed was one of several thorny issues that faced the early Christians. The author of the Gospel of Matthew, in fact, stresses the importance of the ongoing observance of the Law of God, and not just the Ten Commandments, but the entire Law. Some Christians in subsequent years took the position of Matthew, some that of Paul. These two positions represent extremes as most Christians of the time accepted the Jewish scriptures as a revelation of the Jewish God but, being Gentiles, also believed that they did not have to follow those laws that made Jews Jewish.
This raises the question as to how these Christians could claim the Jewish Scriptures as theirs and not keep the Law since there were old and thriving Jewish communities who had been given these same scriptures and were in fact following the laws they set forth and required. Among more mainline Christians two positions were developed in response. One maintained that the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures, isn’t and never was a Jewish book at all. It is, in fact, a Christian book. The Jews from the very beginning have misunderstood it. The second position regarding the Jewish Scriptures, now being called by Christians the Old Testament, held that they predicted and foreshadowed Jesus and the New Testament. This was the position that came to dominate Christian thinking. [Jesus to Constantine]
At the time in Palestine, as was typical throughout the ancient world, things of antiquity were valued over the new and the novel. If a belief system was to be viewed as true, it had to be old. Judaism was respected by the Roman authorities because it was an ancient and venerable religion. Because of this Jews had been granted certain privileges such as being exempted from some obligations required by everyone else in the empire.
Christianity obviously came into being with Jesus or, more precisely, the death of Jesus. It was very recent. It thus faced a major challenge in terms of legitimacy. Christians were at risk of losing the Jewish favored status. They responded by making the claim that their religion was the true fulfillment of the Jewish scriptures. Jesus had been predicted by the Old Testament prophets, and. Jews had not understood this. From the beginning of time it was them alone who had the truth. By making this claim they could point to traditions going all the way back to Moses. Moses lived 400 years before the venerable Greek poet Homer and 800 years before Plato the first great Greek philosopher. These traditions were recorded in the Old Testament, the Jewish Bible. By calling them their own Christians gained the legitimacy they badly wanted. Of course this stance was met by considerable Jewish hostility.
From the outset relations between the newly emerging Christian sect and the Jews was marked by considerable ill will. Paul himself tells us that as a strict Jew he was originally incensed by the claims of the Christians that the crucified man Jesus was the Messiah, and he started a rigorous campaign to persecute them. During the ensuing years, as we have discussed, not only were Christians seen by Jews as making blasphemous and ludicrous claims about Jesus, but they were attacking the very heart of the Jewish faith, the Torah itself, by claiming that it was misunderstood by the Jews and in fact supported their own claims. Some Jesus followers went even further.
Writing in 135 Justin of Rome, better known as Justin Martyr, in pointing out that Christian didn’t have to follow the practices required by Jewish law, made this point regarding circumcision. It was not, as Jews believed, a practice given to them to show they were a special people with a special relationship with or covenant with God. It did mark them off from all other, Justin stated, but to show that they were deserving of God’s punishment. A bit of historical context is necessary here. By the time Justin was writing the Jews had staged an uprising against the Roman Empire with the desire to set up their own sovereign Jewish state. The Roman army defeated and devastated the Jewish forces, kicked Jews out of Jerusalem, and didn’t permit them to return. But, wrote Justin, the tribulations imposed on the Jews were not just for their political rebellion. Jews had murdered “the just one.” This was what their punishment was about. They had murdered Jesus, and God punished them for it. This charge against Jews as Christ killers continued on down through the centuries. [Jesus to Constantine]
During its early years in the first and second centuries, Christianity was a rapidly growing but still very small sect made up largely of the poor. In their minds statements about Jewish beliefs and practices that Jews saw as hostile were attempts to save them with the correct understanding of their common faith from the imminent coming of kingdom of God with its punishment of the wicked, the unbelievers. Jews didn’t accept this and in fact were punishing them for their efforts. Of course, the more inflammatory Christian statements were, in effect, a kind of defensive posturing. Christians at the time had little actual power. They were engaged in hostilities with the much more numerous and powerful Jews, but their only weapon was words. The Jews could and did persecute them. In the ensuing centuries as the Christians gained numbers, including the rich and powerful, and acquired legal, military, and economic authority, they began to take the early Christian rhetoric seriously and use it to support their own persecution of the Jews.
The followers of Jesus increasingly came to view themselves not just as movement or sect of Judaism but as a distinct new Christian faith during the second half of the first century. The first reference to Christians as distinct from Jews from nonChristian sources appears to be in the writings of the Roman Tacitus. In his history of Rome written in the second century he discusses the fire that burned large parts of Rome in 64 AD. According to Tacitus it was widely suspected by people at the time that the Roman emperor Nero himself instigated the fire because he wanted carry out an ambitious building plan that couldn’t proceed with the buildings as they were. To take the blame off himself, Nero needed a scapegoat, and he fingered the Christians as a group as the responsible party. Because, as Tacitus points out, Christians were hated, this was an obvious choice. Nero had them rounded up, put them to public torment and torture, and killed for something he had actually done. But it was Christians, not Jews, Nero singled out thus clearly indicating that by that time, among Romans, the two groups were distinguished.
We need to remember that at the time of Jesus’s death, he had only a very small number of actual followers. Almost his entire ministry had taken place in Galilee in Northern Israel. He didn’t go down to Jerusalem until the final week of his life. After his death there, his disciples and some others who continued to believe in him remained there. This could have been as few as the actual 11 (Judas Escaria had killed himself) plus some few women and possibly as many as 120 suggested by the Book of Acts. It was this small band that started the Christian mission.
The population of Christians grew rapidly in the ensuing years. By the end of the third century, some 270 years after the death of Jesus, by best accounts they numbered something like three or four million people, some five to seven percent of the entire Roman empire.
The Book of Acts describes huge conversion taking place at one time. Some 3,000 to 5,000 people are said to have converted in one day upon hearing the apostles Peter and John. These numbers are extremely doubtful. Records outside of Christian writings don’t indicate massive conversions. What they do describe is individual conversions probably spreading steadily by word of mouth. Sociologists who have looked at the numbers point out that all you need is a steady rate of increase of 40 percent each decade to reach the three to four million figure. That’s the rate of growth of the Mormon Church throughout the 20th century.
A number of factors were involved in the success of the early Christians in getting their message accepted by the pagan people throughout the Roman Empire. As pagans these people worshipped many gods who served many functions. Pagans viewed and practiced their religion as something immediately practical and applicable to their daily lives. They looked to the gods to ensure that their harvests would be bountiful, for protection from natural disasters, and for help to heal their sick and defeat their enemies.
When Christians spoke about Jesus they emphasized that Jesus had been a living being who accomplished miracles in the lives of people he encountered. He healed the sick, he materialized food for the hungry, he cast out demons, and he even brought the dead back to life. And when he had been crucified, God raised him from the dead. Clearly this God was indeed very powerful. But the miracles didn’t end with Jesus. Paul himself talked about how, although he was a lowly person who was weak and frail, God had empowered him to do signs, and wonders, and mighty works. The other apostles could do the same. The Book of Acts provides accounts of a number of their miraculous deeds that directly demonstrated the power of their living God. Witnessing these miracles brought home to many pagans that this was a God who could provide immediate help with their lives where the old gods had often been unreliable. Those gods were represented by idols made of wood and stone. They were inert dead things that could be easily destroyed. They couldn’t possibly represent the living God.
Pagans weren’t particularly interested in an afterlife. Inscriptions found on tombstones throughout the pagan world emphasized that most people thought when people died, that was it. They were dead and gone. But the Christian message about the power of God in this world no doubt encouraged pagans to accept the Christian apocalyptic teachings that the world as they knew it was about to end, that Jesus the Messiah was returning to save them from the judgment and wrath that was to come, and that they could then enter the kingdom of God. Those who failed to accept this message and convert to Christianity would experience an eternity following their death characterized by every conceivable kind of torment, punishment, and damnation.
Christianity offered the world something else that was unique and compelling in that it was exclusivistic. Christians proclaimed an exclusive attachment to the one true god. This god was jealous and would tolerate no rivals. Only by believing in the death and resurrection of His son Jesus could one be saved from the terrors of hell. No other religion, no other belief or practice would help. [Jesus to Constantine]
At this time throughout the world, aside from the Jews, a very small minority, all other people were polytheists. They didn’t insist that if you worship Zeus you couldn’t also worship Athena. The great gods didn’t say you couldn’t worship the local gods. The polytheistic pagans were, for the most part, tolerant of one another. So were the Jews. Although they only worshipped their own god, they weren’t troubled by others worshipping the god of their choice. They never held that unless a person converted to Judaism, he or she was going to suffer in hell forever.
Although Christianity was accepted by many for reasons we have seen and spread quite rapidly throughout the Roman Empire, it was met by strong opposition by most pagans. Two major factors were involved.
Pagans viewed their gods as helpers and protectors of their communities. They wanted to ensure the continued favor of the gods and were afraid of what might happen if the gods were offended. Christian refused to worship the state gods, and for this reason they were called atheists. When crops failed, widespread sickness broke out, conflicts ended badly, pagans often viewed these disasters as retribution by the gods for those communities that harbored these atheists. Christians thus posed a serious threat.
Pagans observed the Christians engaging in what they viewed as strange and appalling practices. Christians met for their worship services in darkness before the sun came up (This practice was no doubt necessitated because they were among the lower classes who had to work during daylight hours.) They were observed calling themselves “brothers” and “sisters” and greeting one another with a kiss. In their services they were said to “eat the flesh” and “drink the blood” of Jesus, the Son of God. Out of these observations, stories began to proliferate among pagans that these Christians were in fact engaging in acts of incest, infanticide, and cannibalism. They were not only dangerous, but they were morally reprehensible as well.
Pagans at times went on the offensive against these Christian enemies by engaging in acts of persecution that could be quite violent. These persecutions in the early days of Christianity were typically sporadic and began at the grass-roots level. Occasionally complaints were taken to the officials who then dealt with them as they thought best. It’s important to note that Christianity was not illegal. The offense concerning the officials was refusing to worship the emperor, a divine being, and the state gods,
There are a number of accounts that indicate that Christians so charged were often if not typically given an opportunity to recant. If they demonstrated a willingness to do so by performing some act of sacrifice, they were not punished. Some took this way out. Others remained steadfast in their views and were then put to death, often violently. Stories of these martyrs were circulated among Christians and were offered to the pagans as evidence of the power of their faith. There is no way of knowing how many Christians died in these early persecutions. Sources from the time suggest that it may have been in the hundreds. Later accounts indicating many thousands were certainly exaggerated
Persecution of Christians because of their beliefs on official orders by the Roman emperor didn’t occur for some time. We have noted that Nero in 64 AD ordered a number of Christians be tortured and killed. However, this was not due to their beliefs, but because they were hated and served as a ready scapegoat for an act Nero himself instigated. It wasn’t until the middle of the third century when Christianity had grown to a sizable minority in the empire that any emperor made a sustained effort to eliminate it. In 249 the emperor Decius declared that every citizen of Rome had to perform a sacrifice to the Roman gods. Failure to do so would result in execution. Decius died two years later and official desire to get rid of Christianity declined.
In 303 the emperor Diocletian began what is known as the “Great Persecution” that lasted around nine years. Laws were passed requiring that Christians perform sacrifices to the Roman gods. Refusal to comply resulted in death or some such awful punishment as forced labor in the salt mines. They were made to give up their sacred books, and their churches were demolished. Class privileges were removed. High ranking Christians were imprisoned. Even though this was meant to be a systematic persecution to exterminate Christianity once and for all, it was not systematically enforced. Christians did not recant, at least in large numbers. For a number of reasons, chief of which was the conversion to Christianity of the emperor Constantine, official toleration of Christianity was pronounced throughout the empire in 313. [Jesus to Constantine]
Thus far in our discussion of the spread of Christianity and the opposition it encountered several characteristics of this new religion have been mentioned that made it unique in regard to both Judaism and the polytheism of the pagans. This doesn’t mean that early Christianity itself was necessarily one coherent set of beliefs and practices. We have already encountered several different opinions among groups of Christians in such areas as their views of the Old Testament and the importance of the Jewish law. Over the first centuries this diversity mushroomed into intense and often hostile debates among various factions of believers. One of the most intensely debated issues was the nature of Jesus, the Messiah or Christ. Was he an ordinary human being chosen by God to fulfill a special mission or was he in fact a divine being or perhaps in some way a combination of the two.
Early on after Jesus’ death some of his followers began to proclaim that he was in some sense divine. In one of his letters Paul quoted an earlier source who appeared to make this claim. Some early Christians took the position that the Jewish scriptures in fact talked about Christ being present from the beginning. One of the best known advocates of this position, Justin of Rome or Justin Martyr, pointed out that throughout the Old Testament there are instances of Christ appearing even though Jesus had not yet been born. As one example he refers to the book of Genesis when, during His Creation, God decides to create people. He says, “Let us make man, and make him in our image.” Who is he talking to? According to Justin, to the pre-existent Christ who was with him since the beginning of creation.
The view of Jesus as some kind of pre-existent being was alluded to as we have seen in some of Paul’s writings. Paul’s views of Jesus as the Christ were complex. He believed that Jesus had been the Messiah, the anointed one, Christ. He also clearly seemed to believe that Jesus was more than an ordinary human being. When Paul referred to Jesus as the Son of Man, he meant someone who possessed God’s powers. Throughout his letters in describing his experience of Jesus Paul used the phrase “in Christ.” This was more of a mystical account than a logically thought out argument.
At times Paul made statements that seemed to express a belief that Jesus enjoyed some kind of pre-existence with God. This theme appears more clearly in the Gospel of John, written some 40 years after Paul’s epistles. In the prologue the author talks about the Word, logos, that had been “with God from the beginning” and had been an agent of creation. “Through him all things came to be, not one thing had its being but through him. ” (John 1:3). [Jesus to Constantine]
Armstrong points out the author’s use of the “word” refers to God’s activity in the world and emphasized a difference between this and the incomprehensible reality of God itself. When Paul and John talked about Jesus as if he had some kind of pre-existence with God, they weren’t suggesting that he was some kind of a second divine person, co-equal with God. This view came later in the history of Christianity with the doctrine of the Trinity. Paul certainly never thought of Jesus as an incarnation of God himself. (History of God pgs 82-89)
According to Gospel accounts Jesus was given certain divine powers by God to heal the sick and forgive sins. Through his use of these powers he apparently came to represent to his followers a living image of what God must be like. There is an account repeated in three of the Gospels of Jesus taking Peter, James, and John up on a high mountain where he was “transfigured” before them. His face and clothing shown with white light. Moses and Elijah appeared beside him and they conversed together. A voice said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; he enjoys my favor. Listen to him.” (Matthew 17.5) Jesus according to the Gospels never claimed that these divine powers were exclusive to him. Repeatedly he told his disciples that if they had faith, they too would enjoy them and could do everything he could do. In fact, so could all people of good will.
After his death the disciples continued to believe that Jesus had in some way presented an image of God. From very early on they started to pray to him. From a man who had stressed his own weak, mortal humanity, yet who was extraordinary in the sense that he possessed God’s powers, Jesus became transformed in the minds of his followers into a divine being. This belief in the incarnation of God in Jesus scandalized Jews and would be in later years be considered blasphemous by Muslims. (H of G pg 83)
Armstrong draws a parallel between the early Christian’s impulse to make Jesus divine and developments at around the same historical period in Buddhism and Hinduism. After Buddha died in the sixth century BC people wanted some way to remember him. However, since upon death he entered nirvana and no longer existed in a normal sense, creation of concrete images seemed inappropriate. However, by the first century BCE the finer points of theology gave way to a growing personal love of the Buddha. The first statues of him began to appear. in the first century BCE and came to provide power and inspiration to the faithful. The fact that this personal devotion to something outside of the self, known as bhakti, was clearly at odds with the interior discipline that the Buddha had preached did not appear to pose a problem for most Buddhists.
In the first century CE the figure of the bodhisattva emerged. This is a being who followed the Buddha’s example and put off his own entry into nirvana so that he could rescue people in pain. In so doing he acquired an infinite source of merit which was available to all. A person who prayed to a bodhisattva could be reborn into one of the Buddhist paradises where the attainment of enlightenment would be easier. The same impulse leading to the Buddhist devotion to the Buddha and Bodhisatvas appeared in Hinduism as well. There it centered on the figures of Shiva and Vishnu, two main Hindu deities. A popular personal devotion to these deities developed that differed significantly from the more austere and philosophical views set forth in the much older Hindu Upanishads. Armstrong points out that the development of bhakti, devotion, to a concrete being, seemed to answer a deep-seated need for some kind of personal relationship with God as the ultimate. It is this same need that transformed the followers of Jesus from believers in his teachings to believers in him as God incarnated. [H of G]
Within the first three centuries several movements developed that took quite different views regarding the issue of Jesus’ nature and relationship to God. One group, the Ebionites, were strict monotheists following their Jewish heritage. They insisted that there is only one God to be worshipped. Jesus was obviously not God. He had to be separate from God otherwise there would be two gods. Jesus was a man born to Joseph and Mary through normal sexual intercourse not in some miraculous way to a virgin. Because Jesus was righteous, in fact the most righteous man on earth, God chose him to be his son and made him the messiah to bring about the salvation of the world.
The Ebionites found support for their views in what they called the Gospel of the Nazareans which closely resembled the Gospel of Matthew. Matthew is the most Jewish of what came to be the New Testament gospels emphasizing the Jewishness of Jesus and his followers and the necessity of strict adherence to the Jewish law. The Ebionites rejected Paul’s message and saw him as a heretic for teaching that salvation resulted from faith in Christ apart from the law.
Another group of early Christians were followers of the second century philosopher/ theologian Marcion. This group strongly favored the teachings of Paul. In contrast to the Ebionites, Marcion emphasized an absolute distinction between Paul’s gospel of salvation through Christ’s death and resurrection and the Jewish law. The gospel of salvation came from Jesus. The law came from the God of the Old Testament. Jesus is merciful and loving. The Old Testament God is harsh and demanding. The two were seen as so different by Marcion that he concluded that there must be two different gods. The God of the Old Testament gave Jews the Law, but this law was in several respects so demanding that it was impossible to strictly follow. Who, for example, could live a life and fail to covet something, yet to so was against God’s commandment. Breaking a commandment was serious indeed as the punishment was death. The God of Jesus sent him into the world to save people from this harsh and wrathful God.
According to Marcion and his followers the God of Jesus did not create this world and in fact had nothing to do with it before sending Jesus here. This God of Jesus was an unknown God, foreign to this world. He was, in fact, called the “stranger God.” Jesus didn’t belong to and wasn’t part of this material world that was created by the Jewish God. In fact, he was never actually born and only appeared to be a flesh and blood human being.
The Marcionites had two books to support their views. One was a collection of sacred texts put together by Marcion to form a canon of scripture, a New Testament. (It’s important to note that the collection of books that make up our official New Testament wasn’t ’t agreed to for another two hundred years.) This canon consisted of eleven books, ten of Paul’s letters plus the Gospel of Luke, the most Gentile of the Gospels. In the second book called the Antitheses, Marcion carefully spelled out the differences between the Old Testament God and the God of Jesus.
A third important group were the Gnostics, so called because they emphasized knowledge which in Greek is gnosis. In the ancient world there were a large number of Gnostic religions that shared certain beliefs. Although the Christian Gnostics were frequently referred to by their enemies, we only gained an insider’s look at what they believed with the 1945 discovery of a collection of Gnostic writing near Nag Hammadi, Egypt.
The Gnostics believed that the material world wasn’t actually created by the Jewish God. Instead, according to their myths, there were a number of gods in a primordial divine realm. A catastrophic event occurred in which one of these divine beings was kicked out or removed, but after he fell he managed to capture an element of the divine. This lower God then created the material world and its people as a place to imprison the divine element. It resides within each of us. The goal of Gnosticism is to liberate this divine spark. What we need to do so is divine knowledge. For the Gnostic Christians it was Jesus the Christ, the divine redeemer who came in the form of human flesh to reveal the knowledge necessary for people to escape from this evil material world. This knowledge of salvation is secret knowledge available only to those elect people chosen to receive it.
The Gnostic Christians didn’t form their own churches, and they participated in the same religious services as other Christians. But they claimed to be the spiritual elite because they knew that there was a deeper meaning involved in the teachings. Not surprisingly, they were commonly viewed as dangerous
Among the most important of the Gnostic writings discovered at Nag Hammadi is the Gospel of Thomas, said to have been written by Jesus’ brother Didymus Judas Thomas. This is a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus. Some are very similar to the sayings of Jesus in the New Testament. Some are quite different insofar as they emphasize the Gnostic belief that eternal life comes not as Paul taught by believing in the death and resurrection of Jesus but by interpreting the secret teachings of Jesus that this Gospel conveys. [Jesus to Constantine]
As we know, none of these three major Christian groups, neither the Ebionites, the Marcionites, nor the Gnostics survived to represent mainstream Christianity. What did come to dominate and become the orthodox Christian religion was a fourth group. This wasn’t a movement with a founder or leader. What it was is a body of beliefs developed and refined by a number of people largely as efforts to counter what they viewed as the heretical views of the three movements we have discussed.
Among the best known are Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Ignatius, and Tertullian. It was Tertullian around the end of the third century who spelled out a set of tenets that he maintained were to be subscribed to by all Christians. These included belief in only one God who created the material world, and belief in his son Jesus who was both human and divine, and belief in his miraculous life, death, resurrection, and ascension. Furthermore, one needed to believe that the Holy Spirit was to remain on earth until the end at which time there would be a final judgment with the righteous being rewarded and the unrighteous being condemned to eternal torment. [Jesus to Constantine]
Among the doctrines that came to characterize the orthodox Christian position none is more distinctive or historically significant than the doctrine of the Trinity. According to this doctrine there are three persons in the Godhead, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They are all of the same substance and equally God. They comprise only one God who is indivisible in nature.
Belief in the Trinity wasn’t present from the outset. Like the other doctrines that came to occupy a central place in the faith, it developed over time and out of a great deal of debate and controversy. No doctrine of a Trinity was taught by the historical Jesus, Paul, or any other Christian writer during Christianity’s first 100 years. The New Testament does contain a number of references to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but they don’t state that all three are all one person, God. One passage in the New Testament does refer to this doctrine, but it is from a disputed verse.
Around 320 a fierce theological controversy raged among the Christian churches of Asia Minor, Egypt, and Syria that were ignited by Arius, a charismatic presbyter in Alexandra. Arias argued as numerous people before him had, that Jesus could not be divine by nature. After all he had specifically said that the Father was greater than he. Arius was a skillful propagandist and attracted a large following. The bishop of Alexandria, Alexander and his brilliant assistant Athanasius, realized that this challenge to what they considered the correct view, had to be met.
By this time an intellectual shift had occurred among a significant group of Christians. Arius, Alexander, and Athanasius had all come to believe that God created the world out of nothing (ex nihilo). This was an entirely new doctrine. It had not been taught by the earlier Christian theologians and it was alien to Greek thought. While the notion that God created the entire world out of a complete vacuum isn’t found in the book of Genesis account of creation, the proponents of this view claimed that scripture supported it.
The doctrine of creation ex nihilo held that the world is inherently imperfect and fragile. As such it is separated from God by a vast chasm but utterly dependent on God for all life and being. Greek thought held that God and mankind were akin. A great chain of being emanated eternally from God which people could ascend through their own efforts, and an intermediate world of spiritual beings transmitted sacred power to the world. The creation ex nihilo view clearly implied that because God had created every single person out of nothingness, he could withdraw his life sustaining support at any moment or he could ensure their eternal salvation.
These Christians all knew that by his death and resurrection Jesus had saved them from extinction and enabled them to one day share the existence of God. Through Jesus’ supreme sacrifice they would be able cross the gulf that separated God and mankind. The debate sparked anew by Arius was whether in accomplishing this Jesus belonged to the divine realm, the domain of God alone, or whether he belonged to the fragile order of creation. (Armstrong pg 108)
Arius held the view that Jesus the Christ had exceptionally high status. He was, in fact Word, the Logos, created as a special but nevertheless human being and given divinity by God to become his instrument. But Christ’s divinity was not natural for him; it was a reward for his perfect obedience. He was thus essentially different from God who is remote and utterly transcendent. If Jesus hadn’t been a human being but instead God by nature, there wouldn’t be anything worthy in his life for us to imitate. It is by contemplating his life of perfect obedience that enables Christians to become divine themselves.
Athanasius viewed mankind as inherently fragile, coming as we did from nothingness, and prone to fall back into that same nothingness when we sin. Only through participating in God through his Logos could we avoid this annihilation because God alone is perfect. If the Logos himself, Jesus the Christ, were a vulnerable creature he couldn’t save humanity. As a frail creature he could himself fall back into nothingness. In Athanasius’ theology the Logos, Christ, had been made flesh and descended into this corrupt and mortal world to give life, salvation in God’s divinity. Only the God who created the world could save it. Christ, the Logos made flesh, and God the Father must be and are of the same nature. (Armstrong pgs 109-110)
The controversy regarding the nature of Jesus became so heated that the emperor Constantine himself intervened and summoned a synod to Nicaea in modern Turkey to settle the issue. In 325 he invited all the bishops of the Roman empire, some 300, to gather at the palace of Nicea to restore order to the church.
Although initially few of the bishops shared the exact views of either Arius or Athanasius, it was Athanasius who was able to impose his theology on the delegates. Everyone but Arius and two others signed his Creed that made creation ex nihilo and the trinitarian perspective that God the Father, Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit were one essence the official Christian doctrine. While the this show of unity pleased Constantine, it didn’t really end the controversy which continued for another 60 years. Throughout this period there remained a commitment on the part of a significant number of Christians to hold fast to the belief that Jesus is divine. Theologians also continued to struggle with the concept of the Trinity.
It was not only tensions involved in understandings of the father and son that posed difficulties with the doctrine of the Trinity. The Holy Spirit, although in different ways, also was problematic. According to Christian scripture before Jesus died he promised the disciples that God would send the Holy Spirit to remain with them and carry out his task of salvation. They subsequently experienced this directly at their Pentecostal gathering in Jerusalem as an intense visionary encounter when the Holy Spirit is said to have descended into their group accompanied by a sound “like a mighty wind” that filled the room with “tongues as of fire” appearing above them. For the disciples this was overwhelming and indisputable proof that Jesus the Christ continued to be present among them in spite of his death and ascension. Acts of the Apostles reports that immediately after this occurrence the disciples were inspired to begin preaching ecstatically to the multitudes. This Pentacostal experience marked the beginning of a new age with the pouring forth of the Spirit upon all people within the Christian community.
As it later came to be understood as the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit is the spirit of truth and wisdom as well as the divine principle of life that is manifest in material creation and in spiritual rebirth. It was the divine source of inspiration that spoke through the Hebrew prophets as well as progenitor of Christ within his mother Mary. It was present at the beginning of his ministry when he was baptized by John the Baptist. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Christ through which mankind could be restored to divinity.
Jesus had died that the Spirit might come to all: only thus could take place humanity’s death and rebirth into the fullness of God. Through the continuing influx of the Spirit, a progressive incarnation of God into humanity was being effected, renewing and propelling the divine birth of Christ in the continuing Christian community. Although a human being’s mortal reasonings were valueless by themselves, with the inspiration of the Spirit one could attain divine knowledge. Although on one’s own resources a human being could not find sufficient love within oneself for others, through the Spirit one could know an infinite love embracing all humanity. The Holy Spirit was the Spirit of Christ, the agent of man’s restoration to divinity, God’s spiritual force acting through and with the Logos. The presence of the Holy Spirit made possible a sharing in the divine life, and a state of communion within the Church that was in essence a participation in God. Finally, because the Holy Spirit’s presence brought divine authority and numinosity to the Church’s believing community, the Spirit was seen as the basis for the Church itself, expressing itself in all aspects of the life of the Church – its sacraments, prayer, and doctrine, its developing tradition, its official hierarchy, and its spiritual authority.
A problem soon arose when individuals claiming to be possessed by the Holy Spirit began producing charismatic phenomena such as speaking in tongues, spontaneous spiritual ecstasies, miraculous healings, prophesies, and assertions of new divine knowledge. These phenomena easily became disruptive when they occurred in church services. Wandering preachers proclaiming supposedly Spirit inspired but unorthodox messages were clearly a problem to a church attempting to define and teach one correct set of beliefs. Increasingly as more structured and formal church organization developed these activities were discouraged. The Holy Spirit came increasingly to be seen as solely invested in the authority and activities of the institutional church. (Passion of Western Mind pg 157)
A major view propounded by Gregory of Nyssa held that God in his essence is unfathomable. We can only know Him through the manifestations he reveals to us: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These terms provide a partial and incomplete glimpse into the divine nature that is fully present in each, and the three are interdependent We would never know about the Father were it not for the revelation of the Son, and it is the indwelling Spirit that makes the Son known to us. According to this view the Trinity can only make sense as a spiritual or mystical experience. It is not a logical or intellectual formulation. It must be lived, not thought about because God transcends all human concepts. Armstrong points out that this view particularly resonates today with Greek and Russian Orthodox Christians who find contemplation of the Trinity to be an inspiring religious experience. Western Christians accept the concept of the Trinity, but many find it simply baffling. (A History of God pgs )
We have mentioned the emperor Constantine several times. He brought an end to the official persecution of Christians carried out under the previous emperor Diocletian, and he convened the Council of Nicea. But his influence in the history of Christianity goes well beyond that. In fact, were it not for Constantine, it’s very likely that Christianity would have remained a small provincial faith had it survived at all.
At the time that Constantine came to assume the status of emperor the situation in the Roman Empire had seen several years of intense political intrigue. Diocletian, the emperor who unleashed persecution of the Christians, before his death devised a system of power sharing involving four individuals that came to be called the Tetrarchy. Two members held the higher rank of Augustus and two the lower rank of Caesar. An Augustus and a Caesar ruled over the Western provinces and a similar pair over the eastern provinces.
Following Diocletian’s death a frantic struggle occurred among the four for supremacy. Constantine’s father Constantius the Pale held one of the four positions, Maximian and Galerius two of the others. Constantine in the meantime gained prestige as a successful military commander. He became betrothed to Maximian’s daughter but did not marry her for several years and in fact took up with another woman. Upon his father’s death, Constantine was elevated to the lowest of the four ruling positions, Caesar of the Western region, under the Augustus, Severus. Constantine abandoned his mate and married Maximian’s daughter. He then defeated his father-in-law in battle and permitted or compelled him to take his own life. The next year Galerius died. Constantine’s main competition then became his brother-in-law, Maxentius, son of Maximian, who was headquartered in Rome. On October 28, 312 he marched his army out of the city to face Constantine, who had marched from Gaul winning victory after victory on his way. Both recognized that this would be a decisive battle.
Constantine until this time had courted the same gods and goddesses as the other contenders for power in the empire. However, as he approached Rome, he became consumed by anxiety that all the pagan deities might side with Maxentius. He could only hope that one of them might look favorably on him and trusted that this would be Sol Invectus, the Unquored Sun. However,
something quite unexpected happened. According to the accepted but controversial account, on the day before the battle Constantine looked up in the sky and saw something truly remarkable, the figure of a cross and Greek letters spelling out the phrase, “In this sign, conquor.” He was then instructed in a dream to inscribe the sign, chi-rho, signifying Christ, to a battle standard. As the story goes Constantine marched out to face Maxentius with troops carrying shields marked with the cross and following a battle standard that instead of the golden eagle of pagan Rome, was decorated with the chio-rho, sign of the Christian god. Even though his forces were smaller, Constantine prevailed defeating Maxentius who was killed. As a result of his good fortune in receiving the support of this powerful god Constantine converted to Christianity. The conversion of Constantine was to change the face of Christianity.
In the meantime Constantine still faced one rival, Licinius co-emperor in the east. Rather than engage in another military campaign, he secured a diplomatic solution by offering his half-sister in marriage to Licinius. The fact that Licinius dutifully worshipped the Roman gods didn’t appear to be a consideration. Soon after the marriage Constantine prevailed on Licinius to sign a document known as the Eddict of Milan that dismantled the Great Persecution of the Christians.
Relations between the two rulers soon deteriorated. Licinius began to fear Constantine, particularly as a Christian ruler who, in a conflict, his own Christian subjects might follow. He issued decrees forbidding his Christians subjects to serve in government, the palace, and the army. Constantine recognized this renewed persecution as a lofty rationale to launch a military campaign against Licinius. Again Constantine prevailed defeating Licinius and cementing his power as the one and only emperor.
Constantine resolved to use his new authority to unify the Christian church. He accepted the one and only Christian god and expected his subjects to submit to the sovereignty of one god, one emperor and one church. His recognition that the heated theological controversy regarding the divinity of Christ was stirring up passions and could have political consequences prompted him to convene the Council of Nicea. (God Against God pg )
Constantine went on to bestow certain favors on Christians. He gave lands to the churches, he constructed churches, and he gave authority to the Christian bishops. Membership in the church grew by leaps and bounds as people clearly saw the advantages of aligning themselves with the new faith. One of Constantine’s successors, the emperor Theodosius, in 380 outlawed pagan practices and made Christianity the official state religion.
In 330 Constantine founded a new capital for the eastern part of the empire, a “New Rome,” at the site of the ancient Greek city of Byzantium (currently Istanbul, Turkey) which he named after himself, Constantinople The location was ideal for purposes of security and was able to repel all invaders for more than 1000 years until the Muslims finally conquered it in 1453.
Constantinople from its founding was a Christian city. Materials from pagan temples were used in its construction, and pagan idols were melted to provide gold for ornamentation. It was to become a genuine rival to the old Rome and thrived even when the old capital was weak challenging Rome for primacy in every respect. [Johnson History of Christianity course guidebook pgs 95-96]
Christianity, as we have seen ,started from population of probably less than 100 at the time of Jesus’ death. By the end of the third century some five to seven percent of the entire population of the empire were Christians, three to four million people. By the end of the fourth century Christianity had become the religion of half of the empire, perhaps 30 million people.
While the debate went on for three centuries as to the status of Jesus, a similar and closely related controversy involved what writings would be accepted as the correct scriptures. This was an extremely important issue for those who came to represent the orthodoxy. However, the idea of having a set of sacred texts to represent the heart of a religion was unheard of in the ancient pagan world.
Pagan religions were centered around the view that what mattered in life was proper worship of the gods because they controlled such things as the harvests, weather, and good health. By so doing the quality of everyday life could be assured. No written texts were necessary because it was correct practice that was important, not any one set of beliefs about these gods.
Christianity differed from all the pagan religions insisting that it was the only right religion, the only way to God. To follow this path required correct understanding and beliefs. Anyone with wrong knowledge or wrong beliefs was necessarily estranged from God. It was thus of utmost importance that proper authority be established for determining exactly what these beliefs and knowledge were to be. Originally, of course, this was Jesus and, upon his death, his disciples. But in time they also died.
Leaders of the various Christian sects that arose in the ensuing years sought to ground their beliefs and thus their authority in written rather than verbally transmitted accounts because those were thought to be more permanent and certain. A number of written accounts were produced over the years, each with its own supporters. Mention has already been made of the Ebionites, the Marcionites, and the Gnostics which each had their own sacred scriptures. But, as we know, none of these three groups emerged, after the theological battles had died down, to represent the final orthodox Christian understanding.
Those theologians representing what came to be the orthodox position worked out four criteria to decide whether a given text should be included in the body of accepted sacred writings. (1) A book had to be ancient, that is, written in the first century. While more recent writings might be valuable, they could not be considered scriptural. (2) A book had to be connected to an apostle, that is, written by an apostle or by a companion of an apostle. (We need to remember that these decisions were being made many years after the accounts were written. The theologians considering them accepted that these writings were in fact authored by the actual person bearing their name.) (3) A book had to be widely accepted by those churches considered to hold the correct theology. (4) Most importantly, the book had to espouse the accepted orthodox theology.
By the fourth century there were a number of candidates. In addition to the 27 books that we know as the New Testament, a number of other sacred writings existed that one Christian group or another considered as representing sacred scripture. We have already mentioned the Gospel of Thomas in connection with the Gnostics. Among the many others are the Gospel of Peter, the Apocalypse of Peter, the Secret book of John, the Shepard of Hermes, and the Epistle of Barnabas.
The Gospel of Peter was mentioned by the early church historian Eusebius in the 4th century as having been used in the 2nd century. However, the actual book was lost until a fragment was discovered in the 19th century. This is the only early gospel that offers an actual account of what happened at Jesus’ resurrection. It was not finally accepted by the orthodoxy because it was believed to suggest a view of Jesus as not being fully human (as well as fully divine) but only appearing so.
The Apocalypse of Peter was broadly recognized to be part of accepted scripture up until the 4th century. It provides an account of Christ giving Peter a guided tour of heaven and hell and is the first Christian description of these realms. Eventually it was rejected as part of the official canon because it contained a too literalistic portrayal of the afterlife.
In 367 Athanasius became the first theologian to list 27 books and proclaime only those 27 books (now our New Testament) were to comprise the correct canon of scriptures. But the controversy didn’t end there. It wasn’t until the 5th century when most Christians had pretty much settled on which books would constitute the official canon of scripture (the Athanasius 27 books).
In 367 Athanasius became the first theologian to list the 27 books and only the 27 books (now our New Testament) that were to comprise the correct canon of scriptures. But the controversy didn’t end there. It wasn’t until the 5th century when most Christians had pretty much settled on which books would constitute the official canon of scripture (the Athanasius 27 books).
The books of the New Testament fall into four groups according to genre. There are the four Gospels, 21 Epistles or letters written by Christian leaders, 13 of which were said to have been written by Paul (modern scholars say seven), the Book of Acts, a historical account of the life of the Christian Church and its missionary efforts after Jesus’ resurrection, and the Book of Revelation, an apocalyptic vision of the end of the world.
We have discussed Paul’s letters and the Gospels at some length as they are best known and more closely meet criteria scholars have established for historical accuracy than other New Testament writings. [They are closer in time to the events they describe, they occur in more than one source, they don’t obviously support a particular theological bias, and they fit with what is known about conditions and events in Palestine at the time.] [Jesus to Constantine]
We should say something also about Acts and Revelation, particularly as they have continued to have a major influence on Christian thinking. The Book of Acts was written by the same anonymous author as the Gospel of Luke somewhere around 80 AD. The first part describes events taking place in Jerusalem including the resurrection and ascension of Jesus. There is an account of the Holy Spirit descending on a large group of Jesus’s followers on Pentacost. They hear a mighty wind and see “tongues of flames” come down from heaven and go up over their heads, and they start speaking in tongues which can be understood by each person in his own native language. The apostles Peter and James are described preaching to crowds in Jerusalem and performing many of the same miracles as Jesus such as healing the sick, casting out demons, and raising the dead. These activities brought new converts to the faith but also attracted increasing persecution. Acts describes the arrest and flogging of some of the apostles.
The second part of Acts describes the ministry of the apostle Paul. An account of his conversion experience on the road to Damascus (actually three versions) tells how a light from heaven flashed around him that was brighter than the sun. He fell to the ground, heard a voice saying “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? … I am Jesus,” and was subsequently blinded for three days.
Several years later Paul set out on a mission through Asia Minor (13-14) to further spread Christianity, particularly among the Gentiles, preaching and visiting churches as he went. He too performs the same miraculous acts as those attributed to the other apostles. At some point he then traveled to Jerusalem where he met with them. A disagreement ensued over whether Gentile Christian converts need to follow all of the Mosaic Law. Paul argued that they do not, a view that prevailed.
Paul continued his travels starting churches and visiting existing churches. While back in Jerusalem he was accused of teaching against the Law of Moses and nearly beaten to death by a mob. A Roman commander rescued him, but he was accused of being a revolutionary and imprisoned in Caesarea. Paul requested a trial in Rome since he was a Roman citizen. This occurred, and he was put under house arrest. Acts doesn’t detail the final outcome although some traditions claim that he was ultimately executed in Rome.
The Book of Revelation, as an apocalyptic vision of the end of the world, is a type of writing or genre that is fairly common in the ancient world and can be found in the Old Testament Book of Daniel. Revelation provides an account of a prophet named John ascending to the heavenly realm where he observes God on His throne. He then has a highly symbolic and metaphoric vision of events taking place in heaven that reflect events taking place on earth. According to this vision there are seven seals of a large scroll that are broken. After each happens a set of catastrophes take place on earth. When the final seal is broken seven angels appear each blowing a trumpet that heralds more disasters. Following the seventh, seven more angels appear, this time with bowls of God’s wrath that they pour out one by one on the earth. After all of these judgments and famines and wars the end finally comes when God sends Christ back to earth to set up a perfect millennial kingdom. This will be a place where people who have followed Him will live forever with no sin, no hatred, and no war. [Lost Christianities, Christian Scriptures, and the Battles over Authentication, Ehrman, Teaching Company lecture]
As is typical of other apocalyptic writings in the New Testament, this revelation of John describes realities that are soon to occur for Christians of that time (1st century AD). The symbolism refers to harsh political and social conditions that people were experiencing, and the point being made was that people needed to hold on just a little while longer. Soon God was going to intervene to overthrow the forces of evil and bring in His heavenly kingdom on earth. Ehrman cautions us that The Book of Revelation was a book for its own time, and it should not be ripped out of its own historical context and made to speak about something that its author did not have in mind at all, our own future here at the beginning of the 21 st century, some 1,900 years after it was composed [Lecture 9, The History of the Bible, Teaching Company lecture]
The Book of Revelation was controversial and not immediately accepted as part of the canon of orthodox Christian writings. One difficulty was uncertainty over the identity of the author. While it claims to have been written by John, this doesn’t seem to be the same person who authored the Gospel of John as the writing style is quite different. Some Christians felt that its literal portrayal of a 1000 year reign of Christ after terrible tribulations was a too naively literalistic understanding of events at the end of time.
While the new faith was growing and becoming more clearly defined, another important development was occurring regarding the way the newly established churches were organized and operated. As we earlier discussed, Paul, in taking the message of salvation through the death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ to the pagans, remained in one community long enough until there was a body of converts large enough to form a sustainable church, and then he moved on to another community. Paul, as we’ve seen, was an apocalypticist, believing as Jesus before him that the present age controlled by evil forces was coming to an end to be replaced by a new kingdom God. Jesus had taught that his own generation would see the Son of Man arrive from heaven to destroy the evil forces and establish this kingdom. Paul believed that it would be Jesus himself as the messiah or Christ who would return to bring judgment and salvation. This would happen very soon. The resurrection of Jesus signaled that this process had begun.
The churches Paul established were only going to be needed during the short interim period before return of Jesus and the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth. These churches therefore were not organized with the kind of structure that is familiar to us with clergy chosen to exercise particular responsibilities. Instead Paul maintained that God had provided for their temporary governance through gifts of spirit or charismata given at baptism to individual members of the Christian community by the Holy Spirit itself. Among these gifts were the ability to know God’s will, to heal the sick, to teach God’s truth, to tend to the needs of the poor, and to speak prophecy directly from God, sometimes in unknown languages (tongues), requiring another gift, the ability to interpret tongues.
The idea was that this would create a community of equals with people having different gifts all of which were important for the well-being of the church. Things would work harmoniously, and nobody needed to be in charge. Unfortunately, at least in some cases, when members attempted to conduct worship services and conduct other business with this charismatic model, confusion and discord resulted. As time passed and the return of Jesus had not occurred, the need for more structure became increasingly apparent. Church communities responded by creating more top down forms of organization with leaders appointed by members to take charge of church activities. Writing in the early years of the second century Ignatius of Antioch issued strong support for a structure involving one bishop to head the church with elders, presbyters and deacons serving clearly defined support functions. Members, in turn, were to be obedient to these officials.
Writing to the Christian community in Corinth around the end of the first century Clement offered what was later to become a major defense of the status quo regarding church officials. Apparently what had occurred was that one group of church leaders had been replaced by another. Clement urged that the original group be reinstated by arguing that they had been appointed by people who had been appointed by the apostles. The apostles had been sent directly by Christ who had been sent by God. By opposing people in church leadership positions one is actually opposing God’s will. This argument was to become known as apostolic succession.
Over the ensuing years church structure and functioning became increasingly formalized. Hippolytus one hundred years after Clement set out in his writings an even more precise and detailed form of church structure that included the higher-level offices of bishop, presbyter, and deacon, and such lower-level positions as church sub-deacons, widows, readers, and virgins. For each he described a precise method of ordination. Hippolytus also described liturgical practices in considerable detail. Baptisms, for example, were to be conducted in a specific way. Candidates were required to undergo a three year waiting period during which instruction in the faith was offered accompanied by complex preparatory rituals involving fasting and exorcisms by the bishop to free them from any demons.
As time passed and churches developed more formal and complex structures, leaders of larger churches assumed jurisdiction over neighboring smaller churches. Eventually the bishops of the largest churches came to acquire control over the other bishops within their regions. When Roman emperor Theodosius declared Christianity to be the official religion at the end of the fourth century, he specified that it be Christianity as interpreted by the bishop of Rome. The Roman bishop thus became head of the church and extremely important. However, it was only later that he came to be called the pope. [Jesus to Constantine]
The emergence of the Roman school of Christianity as the one true church also had to do with the apostle Peter. A number of sources that came to be accepted as orthodox described Peter as primary among the apostles. Matthew 16:18 records Jesus saying to Peter, “And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” Early Christian tradition associates Peter with Rome although the New Testament itself is almost silent on this point. Mention of Peter arriving in Rome in Acts of the Apostles gives no indication that he was there as a bishop or even as a resident. Paul’s epistle to the Romans devotes an entire chapter to greetings for many Roman believers without mentioning Peter’s name. However, the story gained credence in the second century that Peter left Jerusalem going first to Antioch then on to Rome where he was crucified. It was the Roman church that claimed apostolic succession dating back to Peter.
By the end of the fourth century AD Christianity had pretty much become the religion we know today. However as we’ve seen, for the first four hundred years of its existence Christianity had been very much a work in progress. Although the actual person Jesus remained central to its history, it was his death and what was believed occurred afterward that came to define the new faith. Over those years the understanding of Jesus was elevated from a normal human being described in the earliest gospel, Mark, to that of a divine figure, God’s son, co-equal and present with Him since the beginning. Belief in Jesus and the salvation He offered through His death on the cross became the central tenant of the Christian faith, more important for many believers than His teachings and activities on earth.