Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (20 page)

One significant and at first sight puzzling peculiarity actually emphasizes Paul's break with Jesus's first followers in Palestine. His letters have a preoccupation with personal means of support, which he links directly to one of his few quotations of the Lord Jesus. Characteristically, he takes a contrary line to the Lord. Jesus had said that 'those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel': that is, they deserve support from others.
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Paul emphasizes that he has not done this: he tells us that he has supported himself, although in what seems to be an attempt to face down criticism, he proclaims his contradiction of Jesus's practice as a privilege renounced rather than an obligation spurned. He makes no bones about saying 'keep away from any brother who is living in idleness and not in accord with the tradition
that you received from us
'. So much for Jesus and his wandering Twelve. Paul was on the side of busy people who valued hard work and took a pride in the reward that they got from it: tent-makers of the world, unite.
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Christianity had become a religion for urban commercial centres, for speakers of common Greek who might see the whole Mediterranean as their home and might well have moved around it a good deal - Paul's restless journeyings are unlikely to have been unique. The communities associated with him included such figures as Gaius, wealthy enough to be 'host to me and the whole Church', or Erastus, a man prominent as 'the city treasurer' in the great city of Corinth.
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Although there is not much sign that Christianity had yet made inroads on 'old money' - the aristocratic elites of Mediterranean society - it was already gathering people across a wide spectrum of social status, and it is not surprising that differences of wealth and public esteem produced tensions and arguments.

Two examples involve food, but have much wider implications. The earliest specific description of Christianity's later central ritual meal, the taking of bread and wine in the Eucharist, is found in Paul's writings to the Corinthians, because this meal of unity had caused trouble there. Some had been withdrawing from the general congregation in order to eat in a separate group and Paul made it clear that it was the wealthy who were at fault. He emphasized that all must eat together.
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That tension can be laid alongside another concern already noted (see p. 106): some in the congregation at Corinth worried about banqueting with non-Christian friends who might offer them food offered to idols. Paul's proposed compromise solution allowed such Christians to maintain their private social links with the non-Christian elites of the city, while keeping public solidarity with less affluent Christians because they had avoided public contact with civic ritual.
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This set a significant pattern for the future: Christianity was not usually going to make a radical challenge to existing social distinctions. The reason was that Paul and his followers assumed that the world was going to come to an end soon and so there was not much point in trying to improve it by radical action. That attitude has recurred among some of the apocalyptically minded in later ages, although others have drawn precisely the opposite conclusion. Nevertheless, while sharing Jesus's belief in the imminent end, Paul drew very different conclusions from that prospect: in present conditions, 'every one should remain in the state in which he was called'.
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He made notably little reference in his letters to the 'kingdom of God', that concept of a radical turn to world history which had meant so much to Jesus and had accompanied his challenge to so many existing social conventions. Paul was a citizen of the Roman Empire, here and now, emphasizing without Jesus's witty ambiguity that everyone must 'be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.' His command to obedience had a great future in Christian conversations with the powerful.
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Paul's solutions to the two food problems preserved a delicate balance between equality in the sight of God and inequality in the sight of humanity. So in his famous declaration to the Galatians, equality within the Church remained an equality in spiritual status, looking forward to eternal life: 'neither Jew nor Greek . . . neither slave nor free . . . neither male nor female, for you are all one in Jesus Christ' - but not in the everyday life of the present world.
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Certainly he was aware that in the complex religious make-up of the eastern Mediterranean, there were cults which held ritual meals like the Christian Eucharist, and he was determined that Christian groups celebrating their Eucharist should not be mistaken for them. Hence his insistence that there should be no link between the 'cup of the Lord and the cup of demons', the 'table of the Lord and the table of demons'.
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The balance he struck represented a tension between a wish to keep the gatherings of Christians exclusive and a wish to keep the new religion's frontiers open in order to make more converts. This undercurrent of instability remained through the centuries during which the Church was identified with all society and has never wholly disappeared from Christian consciousness.

Paul's acceptance of the secular status quo had especial implications for two groups whose liberation has over the last quarter-millennium sparked conflict worldwide, but especially within Western Christianity: slaves and women. One short letter of Paul from a Roman prison to a fellow Christian called Philemon is undoubtedly genuine, since it contains no useful discussion of doctrine and can only have been preserved for its biographical information about the Apostle. It centres on the future of Onesimus, a slave to Philemon. He had recently been serving Paul in imprisonment and the letter contains a none-too-subtle hint that Paul would appreciate continuing to enjoy the benefit of Onesimus's service. There is no suggestion that he should be freed, only that now he could be 'more than a slave' to Philemon; and certainly there is no question of consulting Onesimus about his own wishes. The Epistle to Philemon is a Christian foundation document in the justification of slavery.
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Slavery was, after all, an indispensable institution in ancient society. A Christian writer from a generation later than Paul, who bore the name of Jesus's disciple Peter but who is unlikely to have been the same man, wrote a miniature treatise which became one of the epistles accepted into the New Testament. It told house-slaves to compare their sufferings to the unjust sufferings of Christ, in order that they should bear injustice as Christ had done. That did not say much about the writer's expectations that Christian slave owners would be better than any others, and it followed a strong command to 'be subject to every human institution'.
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In the early second century, when the Church's leadership was beginning to be concentrated in the hands of single individuals styled bishops (see pp. 130-37), Bishop Ignatius of Antioch observed in a letter to his fellow bishop Polycarp of Smyrna that slaves should not take advantage of their membership in the Christian community, but live as better slaves, now to the glory of God - and his opinion was that it would be inappropriate to use church funds to help slaves buy their freedom. By the fourth century, Christian writers like Bishop Ambrose of Milan or Bishop Augustine of Hippo were providing even more robust defences of the idea of slavery than non-Christian philosophers had done before them - 'the lower the station in life, the more exalted the virtue', was Ambrose's rather unctuous opinion.
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If the coming of Christianity thus made little significant difference to the position of slaves, there are plenty of signs that Christians began by giving women a newly active role and official functions in Church life, then gradually moved to a more conventional subordination to male authority.
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The Gospel narratives give a prominence to women in the Jesus movement unusual in ancient society; this culminates in the extraordinary part which they play in Matthew's, Mark's and John's accounts of the human discovery of the Resurrection. All three evangelists make women the first witnesses to the empty tomb and resurrection of Jesus; this is despite the fact that in Jewish Law women could not be considered as valid witnesses. The most prominent named woman, first in all three accounts, is Mary Magdalene ('from Magdala' in Galilee). She was a close associate of Jesus in his public ministry and has continued to arouse a set of variously motivated fascinations among Christians throughout the ages. Some overexcited modern commentators and mediocre novelists have even elevated her (on no good ancient evidence) to the status of Jesus's wife.

The Gospels' threefold affirmation of Mary Magdalene's Resurrection experience can account for a good deal of the subsequent interest in her, but it is also apparent that she became a symbol of resistance to the way in which the authority structures of the Church began to crystallize exclusively in the hands of men. Feminist theologians have naturally found this of great interest, but it is worth noting that elsewhere the status of Mary Magdalene is repeatedly shown as being supported by some men against other men. The Gospel of Thomas, which of all such Gospel pastiches beyond the New Testament most resembles the four 'mainstream' Gospels in its content and its likely dating to the late first century, describes a confrontation between Mary Magdalene and the Apostle Peter, in which Jesus intervenes on her behalf to reproach Peter. This theme of arguments between the Magdalene and Peter occurs elsewhere. The Gospel of Mary, for instance, is a 'gnostic' work probably of the second century and represents a fairly even-tempered attempt at conversation with non-gnostic Christians. Here, Jesus's disciple Levi is presented as exclaiming to Peter, 'if the Saviour made her worthy, who are you then to reject her? Certainly the Saviour knows her very well. That is why he loved her more than us.'
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Paul is apparently inconsistent about the status of women. In his seven authentic letters, various women are named as office holders: amid the large number of people whom he lists as sending greetings to the Romans are Phoebe the deacon (administrative officer or assistant) in the Church of Cenchreae (a port near Corinth), Prisca, a 'fellow worker' and Tryphaena and Tryphosa, 'workers in the Lord' - descriptions also applied to men in the same passage. Most strikingly, there is Junia, a female 'apostle', so described alongside another 'apostle' with a male name - this was considered such an appalling anomaly by many later readers of Romans that Junia's name was frequently changed to a male form in the recopying of manuscripts, or simply regarded without any justification as a man's name. Early biblical commentators, given a strong lead by the great fourth-century preaching Bishop of Constantinople John Chrysostom, were honourably prepared to acknowledge the surprising femininity of Junia, but then there was a sudden turn in the writings of Giles of Rome in the thirteenth century, which was only rectified during the twentieth century. Likewise, historians have tended to view Phoebe's status as that of a 'deaconess'; yet this is probably reading back from the third and fourth centuries, when female deacons were restricted to roles necessarily reserved for women, like looking after scantily clad female candidates in services of baptism. First- and second-century Christians may not have made such a distinction between male and female deacons or the part that either played in the life of the Church.
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While Paul thus provides evidence about the roles that women were playing in positions of authority in Christian communities, his list of witnesses to Resurrection appearances significantly contrasts with that of three Gospels, by not including any women at all. He also insists in his first letter to the Corinthians on a hierarchical scheme in which God is the head of Christ, Christ the head of men and a husband the head of his wife: quite a contrast to his proclamation of Christian equality for all. That leads to a passage notable for its confusion of argument, in which he tells women to cover their heads when prophesying, yet elsewhere when addressing the same community in Corinth, he forbids women to speak in worship at all.
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This was not a stable position and a second generation was bound to move to clarify it. Paul's admirers evidently decided to place increasing emphasis on his hierarchical view of Christian relationships and on his awareness of the scrutiny of Christian communities by non-Christians.

Perhaps this was not surprising as hopes of Christ's imminent return began to fade in the later first century and Christians began to realize that they must create structures which might have to last for a generation or more amid a world of non-believers. The change is visible in a series of further epistles which, although they assume the name of Paul, display a distinctive vocabulary and a mechanically intensive reuse of phrases from his writings. They should be thought of as commentaries on or tributes to his impact and teaching. Two which are now given addresses to Churches in Colossae and Ephesus are very closely related: Ephesians contains a patchwork of words and phrases from Colossians and from authentic letters of Paul, to the extent that it seems to be a devout attempt to provide a digest of Paul's message.
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Three other epistles, supposedly addressed to Paul's close associates Timothy and Titus, seem to be circular letters to Church communities in Paul's tradition, hence their common collective designation as the 'Pastoral Epistles'.

What is striking in this literature is the way in which the idea that the end is at hand, so prominent in Paul's letters, has faded from view. The author of Ephesians is prepared to talk about 'the coming ages', which seems to mean a long time on this earth.
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Nowhere is this shift more perceptible than in one feature of these documents, also to be found in the first of the two epistles attributed to Peter, which also takes many cues from Ephesians: sets of rules for conducting a human household, which in the sixteenth century Martin Luther styled
Haustafeln
, 'tables of household duties'. What is particularly remarkable about the
Haustafeln
is that they include commands to children 'that they may live long in the land': the Church must now consider the next generation and its earthly future.
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Indeed, the writer to Timothy tells women that their salvation comes from having children (not a text to find favour with countless generations of women in the monastic life in later centuries).
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These lists repeat the commonplace Hellenistic wisdom of their day, but they give it a gloss from Paul's argument that the relationship of husband to wife is like Christ's relationship to his Church: '[T]he husband is head of the wife as Christ is head of the Church, his body, and is himself its Saviour.'
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Now the various gradations of status and authority to be found in the world are to shape the way in which Christians conceive their faith. And there is an extra consideration, connected to the Pastoral Epistles' insistence that Church leaders must be beyond reproach outside the community as well as inside it.
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The Church is worried about its public image and concerned to show that it is not a subversive organization threatening the well-being of society, 'that the word of God may not be discredited'.
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As we have seen (see pp. 103-5), the only dissident voice against this frank quest for respectability is to be found in that very unusual entrant into the Christian New Testament, the Book of Revelation.