Following some remarks by Geoff Challinger about camping out with Christians (now, now…) I felt moved to try and sum up my historical understanding of the the origins of Christianity and the church.
A good starting point is to be clear that Jesus existed, has an historical record and is not a figment of the Church’s imagination. Admittedly, non-church records of him are scarce, there is no record of extraordinary feats, but that he was a notorious figure in Jerusalem who was crucified is beyond doubt. We know that he was born sometime between 4BCE(1) and 8CE, died between 30CE and 35CE, and was a Galilean Jew with a message.
But we have to go back before we can go forward. At this time the Jewish people were in turmoil. Their world was falling apart. As you may recall, the Jewish people did a deal with Yahweh; they would worship Him and no others, a unique proposition in the polytheistic world of the time, and in return the Jews would be the Chosen People, protected by the one and only God. It had all gone wrong about 350BC when they had been defeated and enslaved by the Babylonians. This shock had caused great heart-searching, and had caused an irreconcilable breach in the Jewish family. Those who had been enslaved returned to Israel with new ideas, and different perspectives. Most held to the view that God had punished them for their sloppy worship. They resolved to do better, but instead had been defeated and enslaved by the Romans. Had their God forsaken them? Was their understanding of the deal between them wrong? The Jewish people were already factionalised, Pharisees, Sadduccees, Samaritans; add to this the numerous sects (Essenes, Zealots) and the wandering preachers and holy men, mostly trying to stir up a mood for military resistance to the Romans, and you have a society in turmoil, ready to tear itself apart on all sides.
These were mad, bad dangerous times. Jesus(2) was certainly a wandering, nomadic preacher and rabbi from Galilee, probably married, possibly with children. It is unlikely he hailed from Nazareth (which probably didn’t exist, the description Jesus the Nazarene almost certainly denoting his sect rather than his town of origin) and he was certainly one of many. Galilee, as a Roman Protectorate rather than Province was known for the wild and revolutionary people who flocked there. When Jesus is referred to as ‘the Galilean’ it was almost certainly an insult, ‘one of them’, ‘ a bit of a nutter’. It seems as if he may have spent some time with a radical Jewish sect, maybe the Essenes or the Qumran Community (who bequeathed us the Dead Sea Scrolls) or maybe another one we know nothing of. Certainly some of his views were shared with both these groups. The Qumranians, for example believed that the Temple was not the centre of Judaism (as preached by the Pharisees) but that with the correct cleansing rules, the ‘temple’ could be relocated anywhere; ironically this was the theoretical basis for the synagogue movement (bitterly opposed by the Pharisees) which of necessity came to the ascendant after the destruction of the Temple in 70CE. Jesus understood, as any good Jew would, that the LAW is paramount. In many ways Judaism is not a religion as such, simply a collection of rules. It is run by lawyers who tot up the columns before pronouncing a man good or bad. If The Law is obeyed properly the individual is saved; if the group as a whole obey The Law collectively then the group as a whole will be saved. So rather than throw his weight behind the militaristic wing, Jesus preached that Romans would be defeated not by militaristic might, but by the Jrewish people looking into themselves and hence calling God into play on their side.
Now, to get into Jesus’ teaching is a minefield and a half; the gospels were written between 50 and 130 CE, and have been translated and copied many hundreds of times by scribes who had no real concept of objectivity. Medieval monks corrected ‘mistakes’ as they copied documents, an honest attempt to present the truth as they saw it (though we would call it forgery today). Modern linguistic analysis together with other stylistic devices allow us to get close to the original documents, but this is obviously a specialist business. Suffice it to say that it is generally thought that the most authentic record of Jesus’ actual teaching is the Sermon on the Mount. If anything espouses Jesus’ teaching it is this. But, despite popular belief, little in that passage is genuinely original; the essence of this teaching seems convincingly Essene in origin, though claims that it is lifted from Buddhism are certainly interesting. The Love your neighbour as yourself line is direct form Leviticus 19:18, so Jesus was pointing out historical precepts that he agreed with, rather than inventing a new philosophy. Where Jesus does seem to have been original is in his treatment of women; the church to this day has to explain away its misogyny which is so starkly obvious when set aside its creators actions.
Accounts of the crucifixion, as they come down to us through the gospels, are notable only for their complete variance. Few facts are agreed by all, whether the events happen before, during or after his death. Whether Jesus’ resurrection was a bodily or spiritual occurrence is never clearly established in any of them. It seems likely that his disciples saw ‘the resurrection’ purely as a spiritual concept. They were, after all, a millenarian group, operating in the certainty that the end of the world was upon them, that the good saints were about to rise up and destroy the evil of the world. There was little point in bodily coming back to earth; the point was to be dead but on the right side. Certainly the Jerusalem Jesus Party doesn’t seem to have seen the resurrection in a literal light. Despite the great claims made by the Church for Peter being The Rock(3), the new leader of the group was James, Jesus’ elder brother. James, like Jesus a Jew, continued Jesus’ work, preaching to Jews about Jewish matters. Universally acclaimed as a good man, and apparently far more popular than Jesus, James eventually fell foul of the authorities and was put to death in 62CE. But by then the damage had been done.
By the time of James’ death, Paul of Tarsus(4) was already spreading a very different version of Jesus’ story. Indeed, Paul’s version of events seems barely reconcilable with the views in Jerusalem. Paul was hounded out of Jerusalem on several occasions for espousing his heretical views and his letters are everywhere full of the evidence of the bitter battles he fought with the close followers of Jesus(5). But this was because Paul came to Jesus from a completely different angle. Firstly, he was a Jew of the Diaspora. Even at this time the majority of the Jews lived outside Israel. The Diaspora Jews were a cultural, urbane people, hard working, honest and thoughtful. Generally very Hellanised(6), they were liberal and intelligent and actively proselytised their version of Judaism to the polytheistic peoples they lived and worked with. To the Diaspora Jews, the people of Israel were strange, fanatical hotheads with little understanding of the real world. To Paul, a Roman citizen, a universalist, it was obvious that Jesus’ message was meant equally for the gentiles as for his brothers; equally obviously, to Jesus’ followers (and the insular Jesus himself) his message was of importance only to fellow Jews.
The other fundamental difference between Paul and followers of Jesus was that Paul only knew Jesus through divine revelation and had never known him as a real person. Hence Paul’s ease at taking him as a God rather than a man. Those that knew Jesus placed him within a temporal and cultural context, whereas to Paul he was a spiritual being only. The disciples and apostles (two puzzling groups whose members are never clearly defined and who may or may not have overlapped) struggled to understand the significance of their friend and leader but Paul KNEW.
Nonetheless, it seems likely that Paul’s mission would have been severely compromised by the Jerusalem Jesus Party had the Jews not done what Jesus preached against, raised up in revolt against the Romans in 66CE; the resulting war ended 4 years later with the destruction of both Jerusalem and the Temple, an act of bloody and terrible vengeance typical of the Romans. The Jerusalem Jesus Party were wiped out and Paul became the lone proselytiser of Christianity in the West.
The Catholic church did not spring up fully formed on Jesus’ death; the development of an orthodox Christianity took about 250 years, and it seems to me that the orthodoxy we actually received was only one of a number of equal alternatives.
As previously explained, within a very few years of Jesus’ death, Paul chose to interpret Christ’s message in a fundamentally different way from Jesus’ immediate family and followers. In the event Paul pursued his version of ‘Christianity’ to the Diaspora Jews and Gentiles, while James and the Jerusalem Church continued to work solidly within the confines of traditional Judaism. The terrible events of 66-70 AD virtually destroyed the Jerusalem Jesus Party, though remnants of this first church, the Ebionites, eventually re-formed in Egypt.
Already, Hellenised groups of Gnostics were giving their own gloss on Jesus’ life and mission. There were Gnostic sects attached to all the religions at that time, and Gnostic influences were around early enough for Paul to be alarmed by them (see his letters to the Corinthians). While difficult to define, Gnostic sects essentially held that a) Jesus was a man, not a God and b) That he passed secret knowledge to the apostles which was only to be handed on to selected individuals. Over time a wide variety of Gnostic ideas coalesced into a general set of beliefs, and they evolved their own gospels and network of meeting houses (they had no professional clergy or separate religious house)
The most serious theological problem for the nascent church was to define the exact nature of Jesus; Christian theology has never really sorted out whether it is really monotheistic of not. This problem is the basis for most of the schisms and splits in the church over the past two thousand years; indeed, it is the heart of the very original split between the Jerusalem church and Paul’s mission. Put succinctly, the problem is as follows;
If Jesus was a Messiah, then Christianity is compatible with the rigorously monotheistic Jewish religion, and this was the position of the Elders in Jerusalem. But if Jesus was truly the son of God, as Paul taught, then this took Christianity away from it Judaic roots, since it makes Christianity a religion with at least two Gods - God and Jesus. And with the whole murky business of the Holy Spirit knocking about, possibly three Gods, making Christianity just another polytheistic religion like dozens of others. On an emotional basis, if Jesus was a God, then his suffering on Earth becomes something of a sham, an act for the gullible, since he would have clearly been above the sufferings he seemed to bear. Alternatively, if he was but a man, albeit divinely guided, then worship should be of God (or Yahweh) alone rather than directed at Jesus.
Throughout the 150 years following Jesus’ death different sects grew up covering the entire spectrum between these two extremes; Marcion, for instance, took an extreme Pauline position, rejecting the Old Testament in total and all connections with Judaism. He was denounced as a Heretic by an early giant of the ‘orthodox’ church, Tertullian. Marcion’s God was one of Love, whereas Tertullian’s was the God of fear. Marcion’s followers continued to defy the establishment for several centuries. As did those of Montanus, a prophet and charismatic. Montanus taught poverty, gave senior posts to women, permitted an independent role for the spirit and created a church-like structure, raising money for charity and to pay the clergy. Despite being slandered by the church in Rome, the great scourge of early heresy, Tertullian joined the cult in his later years. The vital aspect for Tertullian was the possibility of a direct connection with God, something he was not prepared to condemn.
Another major heresy, Donatism, arose from a disputed bishopric in Carthage. The Bishop the established church wanted was rejected and the local church appointed Donatus instead. Despite Constantine ruling against him, Donatus retained his position, and much of North Africa remained loyal to his rigorous ideas for many generations, for Donatus seems to have been a pious and serious churchman, although he was more than prepared to play the political game to deadly affect.
Perhaps the most important leader of the monotheistic tendency was Arius; he proclaimed that Jesus was created by God as an instrument for the creation of the world. This view gained huge adherence and swept though many parts of the world. All the Germanic tribes were originally Arian and had later to be converted to Catholicism, while in the East Arianism was arguably in the majority.
Meanwhile the church in Rome began to assert its authority; Rome was the centre of the Empire, it was the place in which two of the apostles were martyred and anyway, after the fall of Jerusalem it was the obvious centre for Christianity. Slowly it began to establish itself as the most important and influential of the urban churches. It took a deliberately universalist stance, opting against extremism and for inclusiveness wherever possible. With the early expectation of the end of the world subsiding, the need for an Orthodoxy became more and more manifest, and Rome’s cultural superiority, universalist approach and the ambition of its early Bishops ensured that it became the centre of the church, even though its claim for authority was never accepted by any other city.
Despite one last attempt at serious repression in by Decian in 250, it was becoming increasingly obvious that the Roman state could not persecute the Christians without persecuting itself. The church was already modelling itself on the state institutions, and so it was that the best of the late Roman politicians, Constantine, recognised the need to ally the state with the christianity. In 313 he issued the Milan Edict which guaranteed Christians equal rights with pagans. Constantine then made Christianity the official religion of Rome, built the magnificent cathedral of St Sophia in his new capital city, organised the Council of Nicea to thrash out the problems of monotheism and the status of Jesus and set the church on its path to becoming the first genuine world religion in history.
The Council of Nicea’s first task was to solve the problem of Arianism; after heated debate over several months, the council condemned Arianism and those who sought to present Jesus as human, and instead produced the absurd term consubstantiality to express the co-eternity and co-equality of God the Father and God the Son; it took the Catholic church another 500 years to rid the West of Arianism; in the East, Arianism thrives to this day amongst the Copts in Egypt, the Armenians, Ethiopians and Syrian Jacobites. In fact, consubstantiality was never really taken very seriously East of Asia Minor and became one of many theological points that the Eastern Church would pick over for centuries.
On a very practical level, the much more straightforwardly monotheistic forces of Islam swept victoriously through the lands of Christian schism just 300 years later; The church’s inability to tackle the very nature of Christ had cost them half an Empire.
Orthodoxy, in the shape of the Roman Church, triumphed at Nicea, but Constantine’s establishment of a new centre of empire created a deadly rival to Rome. Almost immediately conflicts arose between the Greek and Latin elements of Orthodoxy, caused as frequently by language as dogma, and the eventualy split between rome and Constantinople was probably inevitable.
The Roman Orthodoxy which formed in the early centuries and which was confirmed by Constantine was a carefully constructed compromise drawn from the plethora of beliefs and practises of the time. It deliberately chose to be inclusive and universal, but also centrally controlled and, as you might expect of a Roman church, legalisticaly based.
It was a church of its time, appeasing the might of Rome and set up to exert conformity and leadership to the Known World. Even at this early stage, with its structure of Bishops, Deacons and Priests, its wealth and political influence, it was a church Jesus would have failed to recognise. Once Augustine the Great had mapped out its plans to dominate and control every aspect of society, its claim to represent Jesus at any level must be doubted.
But that is another story....
In the West, the great heresies tended to revolve around Jesus’ concept of poverty. At times throughout the next 1500 years individuals of great piety or asceticism would set themselves up as the true models of Christian poverty, inviting the people to compare and contrast their own position with that of the established church, while in the East the theological concepts surrounding the true nature of Jesus and God continued to spawn schisms and sects for the rest of the millennium.
Refs:
(1) BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era) are increasingly used as non-religious dating references.
(2) Jesus was almost certainly known as Yeshu bin Joseph, and it is under this name that contemporary references may be found ( for instance in the Jewish Mishna)
(3) A reference scandalously exploited in later centuries as being the foundation of the Catholic Church and the authority of The Pope.
(4) Paul, then known as Saul, was famously a persecutor of Christians who received a vision when ‘on the road to Damascus’ (itself a puzzling journey to be taking) and thereafter became the principle proselytiser of the nascent Christian Church.
(5) Paul’s letter to the Galatians is a good example of this.
(6) Although Rome was the occupying power and supplied the military might, the philosophy of the Roman empire was supplied by Greece. This Greek influence was known as Hellenisation.