The End of Christianity (4 page)

It was in this environment that Christianity first evolved. Or, more accurately, what first evolved was not “Christianity” but a typically tiny revitalization movement that has rightly been called the Jesus Movement; in their book titled
The Jesus Movement
, Ekkehard and Wolfgang Stegemann define it as “the Jerusalem primitive church and the ‘churches of Judea’ mentioned by Paul.”
⁸
Gerd Theissen, New Testament scholar, dates the period of the Jesus Movement from about 30 CE until about 70 CE.
⁹

There are several senses in which “Christianity” did not appear in those years or for many more years to come. The first is that the members “had no intentions of founding a new ‘church’” and instead “remained wholly within the framework of Judaism.”
¹⁰
Justo Gonzalez concurs: “The early Christians did not believe that they were founding a new religion. They were Jews, and…the Christian message to Jews was not that they should abandon their Jewishness. On the contrary, now that the Messianic age had begun, they were to be better Jews.”
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Accordingly, the Jesus Movement preserved most of the elements of Judaism it inherited (elements that themselves had coalesced over millennia of history-especially the Messianic idea), just like the other movements and prophets who shared the field such as Judas, Theudas, and Jonathan.
¹²

A second sense in which “Christianity” failed to materialize in that early period is the Gospels themselves. Christianity was a “multiple birth,” its origins being told in four different (official) versions that are not entirely compatible. Worse, as the scriptures of the movement
gradually
came into shape, many candidates for inclusion were voted out, such as the “infancy” Gospels of James and Thomas; the so-called Jewish Christian Gospels of the Hebrews, the Nazarenes, and the Ebionites; the Gospels of Thomas, Peter, Nicodemus, Mary, Philip, Judas, and Bartholomew; the “Gnostic” Gospels; and any number of other writings like Dialogue of the Savior, Apocalypse of Peter, Apocryphon of John, Coptic Gospel of the Egyptians, and on and on. The New Testament (or Testaments, for there are multiple versions of the official canon in different Christian traditions) is (are) a classic example of history being written, or assembled, by the victor. Worse yet, Elaine Pagels makes a compelling case for each canonical Gospel being a product of its particular moment and perspective of composition; each reflects the politics of its day by depicting Mark conciliating the Romans, Matthew railing against the Pharisees, Luke (the only non-Jewish Gospeller) writing to “those Gentile converts to Christianity who consider themselves the true heirs to Israel,” and John distancing himself from the entire corrupt Jewish community.
¹³

A third and final problem—which has remained the defining problem for unified Christianity—was the diversity of opinion and activity in the various local early Christian communities. This is the point of Paul's Epistles as well as his travels, for the disjointed movement took different directions in different locations. Paul struggled to impose a certain standardization, a certain orthodoxy on the disparate congregations. This is especially significant for the future of Christianity because Paul had never met or heard Jesus, and Paul's letters and preaching efforts took place
before
the composition of the Gospels. That is to say, Paul's Epistles are actually the earliest writings of the movement, so in many ways he shaped the Jesus Movement as much as or more than Jesus. Perhaps most significantly, as Theissen reminds us, Paul hardly ever quotes Jesus, because he never knew Jesus and because Jesus’ quotes had not been recorded yet.
¹⁴
Paul's main contribution was the creation of what Robert Wright in a cagey recent article called “a good Jesus,” a gentle teacher whose only “doctrine” was “love”—an opportunistic view that emerged “from the interplay between Paul's driving ambitions and his social environment.”
¹⁵
In short, Paul was crafting a message that would appeal to, and include, a wider audience, Jew and Gentile alike, “giving pragmatism priority over scriptural principle” (except that there was no scripture yet!).

If the first stage of eventual Christianity was the Jesus Movement, then the next stage was the Hellenistic church, of which Paul was a major architect, himself a
Hellenized
(Greek-influenced) Jew. The Jesus Movement utterly failed at its original task to reform Judaism and effect any actual change in the political and spiritual fortunes of the Jews. The Jesus Movement essentially disappeared in Israel, moving on to the more urban and cosmopolitan centers in the Middle East and in the Roman Empire—and, according to Gonzalez, it survives partly
because
it moved on to these locations and by no longer being nor claiming to be a specifically Jewish phenomenon. Outside the parochial world of Judaism, the developing church encountered three important and intertwined influences. The first was a Roman social system that explicitly practiced religious syncretism, tolerating and even incorporating all sorts of religious practices and notions. The second was a whole world of quite similar “mystery religions,” many of them featuring god-men who died and returned to life as saviors; there is nothing unique or original to Christianity about this motif. The third was the dominant Greek-Hellenistic culture with its powerful intellectual and philosophical traditions. It was in this milieu that “Christianity” evolved from the simple Jesus Movement, and it was to such people that the reins of Christianity were passed with inevitable and indelible consequences.

Christianity only really began to evolve when the Jesus Movement crossbred with Hellenistic culture; Christianity is at least as much a Greco-Roman religion as a Judaic one. The emerging church found two particular allies in the Hellenistic world: the thought-system of Plato and the later philosophy of Stoicism. As Gonzalez aptly notes, Platonism had already questioned the pagan pantheon and posited a “higher realm” of ultimate truth, as well as an immortal soul that was superior to the inferior body. Stoicism was itself an adaptation of Greek thinking to the urban and fractured quality of contemporary life, holding up the idea of a universal natural law to which humans must adjust and submit; the point of life was overcoming passion and cultivating “moral insight, courage, self-control, and justice.”
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“All this many early Christians found attractive and useful,” and “although at first these philosophical traditions were used for interpreting the faith to outsiders, eventually they began influencing the manner in which Christians understood their own faith.”
¹⁷

Under the gravitational forces of Roman society and law and of Greek philosophy, an unavoidable problem arose: What exactly
were
the beliefs and practices of the new religion? These questions had never been settled, partly because there was no need to settle them—the church being relatively small and the end of time being supposedly nigh—and partly because the intellectual tradition of asking such questions did not exist until Christianity imbibed the Greek philosophical spirit. Now came the first great age of Christian disputation and, predictably, dissent. One issue was the relationship between Christian and non-Christian culture: some, like Tertullian, were opposed to “pagan” influences and yet evinced those influences by engaging in debates and written battles with nonbelievers, as in Tertullian's own
Prescription against Heretics.
Others like Tatian and Justin admired Greco-Roman culture and saw value, as well as the roots of Judeo-Christian belief, in it.

Another and more troubling issue was the precise meaning and interpretation of Christian beliefs: Jesus himself had written nothing and said many enigmatic things, and Paul had developed only certain aspects of doctrine—and those in only certain directions. There was much to settle and many different possible and available settlements. Many of these questions centered around the identity of Jesus and the correct reading of (recently amassed and obviously human-authored) scripture. One of the oldest and most persistent views was Gnosticism, which held that privileged people (the Gnostics themselves, naturally) had a deeper esoteric knowledge (
gnosis
is Greek for “knowledge,” often implying wisdom or profound understanding) not available to others. Gnosticism itself was a congeries of positions and movements, but all shared a dualistic notion of matter versus mind/spirit and of progress toward pure spirit through secret (i.e., nonscriptural) knowledge. Two main nonorthodox claims of Gnosticism were that God had a number of “emanations” or “sons,” including a daughter Sophia (wisdom), and that Jesus, being a pure and perfect spirit, did not have a human body and thus was never really incarnated. The developing “orthodox” opinion was that Jesus was both body and spirit, both man and God.

This business about the humanity and divinity of Jesus was one of the most vexing problems for early Christians and a source of many, if not most, of its heresies. Sabellius in the second century taught that Jesus, as well as the Father and the Holy Ghost, were three “modes” of the one God, making him completely divine and not human, and if Jesus was not also (and equally?) human, then he did not suffer and die, which contradicted the orthodox understanding of salvation. Docetism (from the Greek
dokesis
for “to seem”) insisted that Jesus only seemed to be human but that his physical body was an illusion; at the other end of the spectrum, “adoptionism” held that Jesus was a mere human who was adopted by God, either at conception or at baptism. Marcion's heresy was both more extreme and more effective, for he actually conceived of the biblical God Yahweh/Jehovah as a flawed or perhaps evil being who was not the Supreme Father; the God above Yahweh/Jehovah was all-good and the father of Jesus. Therefore, Marcion assembled his own scripture (before the “official” New Testament was established) that included only Luke and the letters of Paul. Most threateningly of all, Marcion organized his own church with its own leadership as a serious alternative to the budding “catholic” church.

The list of early heresies could continue and has been well researched. Montanus offered a form of Christianity encouraging ecstatic states and prophesying and, of course, placing Montanist prophecies above biblical ones or even above the life and sayings of Jesus. Praxeas maintained a position sometimes called
patripassianism
, that God as father suffered crucifixion, since God sometimes took the form of father, sometimes son, sometimes ghost. Pelagius suggested that original sin did not forever stain human nature (so humans could be good without a god), while the Euchites or Messalians argued that the essence of the Trinity was perceptible to the senses and that salvation could be obtained by prayer alone, without the church or its rituals and sacraments. Extreme dualisms like Manichaeism and Mandaeism opposed the light (usually spirit) against the dark (usually the body and the material world). However, one of the most stubborn heresies was Arianism, proposed by Arius in the early fourth century, which asserted a particularly strict sort of monotheism such that Jesus could not be divine (only God was divine) and that Jesus had not existed eternally with God but had been created later by God.

Christological controversies of this sort are irrelevant, even silly, to non-Christians, but these were the subjects that tried men's souls in the Hellenistic church. The questions were supposedly answered in the third species of Christianity, the imperial church. When Roman emperor Constantine converted to the new faith and appointed himself its chief spokesman and mediator, many of these disputes were allegedly ended by decree or majority vote. The Council of Nicaea in 325, for instance, adopted a creed or statement of faith that was deemed authoritative—Jesus was “begotten, not made” and “of one substance” (the technical term is
homoousia
, for “same-substance”)—and anyone who continued to believe that Jesus was “of a different substance” or that “before being begotten He was not” (i.e., Jesus did not exist “in the beginning” alongside God) was “anathematized” by the official church.

The church doctors, of course, failed to arrest the evolution of Christianity, even as imperial adoption itself contributed to further evolution. For one thing, Constantine illustrated that Christianity did not so much replace previous religions as piggyback them: the emperor never abandoned his pagan religion, remaining high priest of the Roman cult and instituting the first day of the week, the pagan day to honor the Unconquered Sun—or “Sunday”—as the Sabbath of Christianity. The elevation of Christianity to official status ended the persecutions and thus the subculture of martyrdom, which had thrived under the oppression; Tertullian, among others, insisted that there was no way to achieve salvation except through the shedding of one's own Christian blood. Once in power, Christians soon dropped that attitude. Another attitude they dropped was opposition to military service: early Christians had often refused (or been forbidden) to serve in the army on the political premise that such duty required veneration of the emperor as much as on the spiritual premise that killing was wrong. But the Christian objection to war was soon overcome when the religion attained political primacy; indeed, “[t]he practice of early Christianity was so far reversed by the early fifth century that under Theodosius II those polluted by pagan rites were excluded from the army—only Christians could serve.”
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The Christian embrace of war would reach its climax in the Crusades (“wars of the cross”) in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with literally battalions of warrior-monks like the Knights Templar wreaking havoc on the Holy Land because
Deus lo volt
—“God wants it.”

In the imperial church period, if orthodoxy was not firmly established, at least many of the styles of what would evolve into the Catholic Church were instituted: “Christian worship began to be influenced by imperial protocol,”
¹⁹
from luxurious clerical robes to ornate cathedrals and intricate rituals. Christianity not only borrowed forms from the political-secular realm but also contributed to the stability of the latter: the religion “became more and more the social cement of the totalitarian state of late antiquity.”
²⁰
This included censuring the enemies of the state-church, and these enemies included not only rival empires and barbarian bands but heretics who challenged state-church unity and orthodoxy. The Council of Chalcedon (380) made heterodoxy a crime punishable by the state (the church often palmed its dirty work off on secular authorities). Subsequently, “[r]eligious intolerance soon became a Christian principle”: