Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (13 page)

One of the most significant Jewish communities formed in the Egyptian seaport city which remained as Alexander's most spectacular single memorial, Alexandria: a symbol of the success of Hellenistic culture throughout the eastern Mediterranean. By the time of Jesus there may have been a million Jews there, the largest single community of Jews outside Palestine, and they were kept from dominating city politics only by the exclusive practices of their religion.
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Naturally in such a wealthy and prosperous community, it was a great temptation to take on the ways of the surrounding world: a Greek world. At least a century before hatred of all things Greek pushed Judas Maccabeus and his fellows into open rebellion against Antiochos, the Jews of Alexandria commonly spoke Greek instead of Hebrew, to the extent that they were forced to translate their sacred books into Greek to make sure that they did not lose touch with the meaning. The name given to this collection of translations (together with the Apocrypha books in Greek which Hellenized Jews themselves added) was an indication of how proud Greek-speaking Jews were of their achievement; it became known as the Septuagint, from the Latin word for seventy. This was a reference to the seventy-two translators who, legend said, had produced it in seventy-two days, and who were themselves an image of the seventy elders who had been with Moses on the sacred mountain during the Exodus.
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Jews later lost their enthusiasm for the translation and abandoned it for others when Christians wholeheartedly adopted it.

In general these Hellenized Jews were much more interested in winning respect from Greeks for their culture than Greeks were interested in Judaism. They found that Greek reaction to what the translation revealed of Hebrew sacred literature posed problems: Greeks respected such ancient writings, but were also puzzled that a God who was supposed to be so powerful would do strange things like walk in the Garden of Eden or indulge in arguments with earthly men like Lot or Jonah. Many Jews came to feel that such apparent embarrassments in their stories must conceal deeper layers of truth and so must be allegories. Greeks had after all already applied this idea of allegorical meaning to their own myths and to the writings of Homer (see pp. 24-5), and the allegorical approach became naturalized among Alexandrian Jews in the biblical commentaries of Jesus Christ's Jewish contemporary the scholar and historian Philo.
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When a Christian community eventually became established alongside the Alexandrian Jewish community, it was much influenced by Philo's allegorical method.

Powerful currents of opinion within Judaism also continued to suggest modifications of aspects of Jewish belief if there seemed to be valuable material in the religions of others. Following Greek thought, Jews embraced the concept of nothingness, and that gave them a new perspective on creation. II Maccabees, a work of the Apocrypha probably written in the second century BCE, is the first in Jewish literature to insist that God did not make creation 'out of things that existed', unformed, chaotic material, but summoned creation out of nothing.
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This was important for Christians later, as they struggled to find a convincing way of expressing their conviction that God could remain divine while entering the world which he had created. Greek discussion of nothingness helped to change Jewish views on beginnings; Jewish thinkers also borrowed ideas to help them understand the end of human life and its aftermath. On the whole, before the time of the Maccabees, Jewish discussion of God had shown little interest in the nature of the afterlife; Judaism was concerned with this life and with interpreting the many tragedies that happened to people on earth. Because of this, the Tanakh does not have all that much to say about death and what comes after. What it does say, particularly in texts written before the Babylonian exile, suggests that human life comes to an end and, for all but a few exceptional people, that is it.

A new impulse to develop ideas about the afterlife seems to have been provoked by the terrible deaths of some of the heroes of the Maccabean war of independence, discussed in detail with pious horror in the histories of the wars. Surely such heroism deserved a particularly lavish reward? Some argued that God would grant back the martyrs bodily resurrection in this life, but inconveniently this failed to happen. Perhaps, then, the resurrection of the martyrs would be in a life to come, and the reward should be specific to individual suffering; this implied the prolonging of a recognizable personal existence.
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No doubt the era of the Maccabees was not the first time that this fairly obvious train of argument had occurred to thoughtful Jews, but now they could listen to voices in other religious or philosophical traditions which might give shape to the idea. The most readily available vocabulary and central concept was actually Greek and had been particularly developed by Plato: he talked of individual humans as having a soul, which might reflect a divine force beyond itself.

The first Jewish texts to say much about the soul therefore appear in the Hellenistic period, in 'Inter-Testamental literature' dating after the closure of the Tanakh, like the so-called
Wisdom of Solomon
, probably written between the mid-second century BCE and the early first century BCE.
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The Book of Daniel (or at least most of its text) managed to find a place in the Tanakh, but likewise it is almost certain to have been written as late as the second century. It is unprecedented in Jewish sacred literature in spelling out the idea of an individual resurrection of a soul in a transformed body in the afterlife - though still not for everyone!
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Naturally all these developments within Judaism were highly controversial and provoked continuing argument; yet by the time Christians were beginning to construct their own literature, their writers clearly found such talk of the individual soul and of resurrection completely natural, and it became the basis of that Christian concern with the afterlife which sometimes has bordered on the obsessional.

It was the Hasmonean dynasty, significant power players in the eastern Mediterranean in the wake of the successful revolt of the Maccabees, which first established official contacts between Judaea and the Romans, during the second century BCE. At that stage, Rome was far away, a possible ally against the hated Seleucids, and relations remained friendly for about a century, until the Romans invaded Judaea in 63 BCE as part of their mopping-up operations around the conquest of their real prizes, the Seleucid and Egyptian empires. A mixture of deportees from this latest catastrophe for the Jews, together with generations of traders making the best of a bad situation, created an increasingly large and flourishing Jewish community in Rome itself, concentrated in the downtown area across the River Tiber from the main city (Trastevere), where the Basilica of St Peter now stands (the first Christian groups in Rome probably emerged from this Jewish quarter). In Judaea, finding no convincing or compliant Hasmonean candidates for a Jewish throne, in 37 BCE the Romans displaced the last Hasmonean ruler and replaced him with a relative by marriage, who reigned for more than three decades. This puppet king, an outsider whose forebears came from the territory to the south of Judaea which the Romans called Idumea (Edom), was Herod, 'the Great'.

Herod rebuilt the Temple with unprecedented magnificence, making it one of the largest sacred complexes in the ancient world; the quality of his masonry in the visible surviving sections of its monumental precinct wall can still be admired. Yet he got little thanks from his subjects, who were equally ungrateful for his attempt to please them with such foreign innovations as Greek-style public sporting contests, gladiatorial combats or horse racing in newly built arenas.
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Complications continued after Herod's death in 4 BCE because his sons took the extensive territories which the Romans had allowed him to build up and divided them between themselves. During the first century CE the Romans experimented with a mixture of indirect rule through various members of the Herodian family and direct imperial rule of parts of Palestine through a Roman official - Pontius Pilate was one of these. Within Judaea itself, there were at least four identities for Judaism, Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, Zealots, and probably many lesser sects. Even though they tolerated each other's existence, each saw itself as the most authentic expression of Jewish identity.
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Perhaps one way to understand the differences between them is to realize that they took distinguishable stances towards the Hellenistic world ruled over by the Romans, and towards all the temptations away from Jewish tradition that it embodied: they represented different degrees of distance or accommodation.

The Sadducees provided the elite which ran the Temple. They had done well out of successive regimes, both Jewish and non-Jewish, and they continued to do well when the Romans were in charge. It was therefore not surprising that they were the most flexible of our four groups in relation to outsiders. For them, it was enough to keep the basic commands of the Law in the scriptures and not to add the complex additional regulations which governed the everyday life of the Pharisees and made Pharisee life obviously distinct from the world of non-Jews around them. Significantly, being conservatives and minimalists in their view of Jewish doctrine, Sadducees had little time for the comparatively recently evolved discussion of the afterlife; Jesus is portrayed as on one occasion teasing Sadducees on this subject, to the pleasure of some Pharisees, and the writer of Acts tells a story of the Apostle Paul making a bid for Pharisee sympathy on the subject against the Sadducees when he was in a dangerous situation.
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Both Jesus and Paul can be identified by their backgrounds as closer to the Pharisees than to any other religious grouping, though it is unlikely that Jesus had anything like the pungent command of everyday Greek which is evident in Paul's surviving letters and which marked Paul out as part of the dispersed and Hellenized Jewish population - the
diaspora
which could now be found all round the Mediterranean and into the Middle East.

For the group known as the Essenes, however, even the distinctiveness which the Pharisees maintained was not enough to keep them from pollution in semi-colonial Palestine. The Essenes left ordinary society by setting up their own separate communities, usually well away from others, with their own literature and their own traditions of persecution by other Jews. Sometimes it has been suggested that the early Christians were close to the Essenes, but that seems unlikely. Essene separation from the rest of Judaism was a matter of principle, whereas the eventual Christian separation was a result of Christianity's failure to become the leading force within the Judaism of the first century CE, and Christians became eager to move out into the world beyond Palestine, as we will see (see pp. 108-11).
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The Zealots held a militant version of the same Essene theme of separation: for them, the only solution to the humiliation of Roman rule over the Jewish homeland was to take up Maccabean traditions of violent resistance, and it was they who gave impetus to the successive disastrous revolts which by the mid-second century CE had shattered Jewish life in Palestine (see pp. 106-9).

Out of that destruction emerged a group which at first seemed just another minority answer to the problem of Jewish identity. Now it did much towards the permanent shaping of that identity, as well as becoming a world religion in its own right. The Jewish sect which became Christianity borrowed the sacred literature created by the Jews and shaped Christian belief in its founder-Messiah along lines already present in the sacred books of the Tanakh. Christian history thereafter is shot through with and shaped by the stories of the Tanakh - they became particularly useful when Christians allied with monarchies, for the Christian New Testament has little to do with kings, while the Old Testament has much to say about them. When Christians created a sacred book of two 'Testaments', they turned their brand-new belief system into one which could stand on an ancient sacred tradition and claim to be the most ancient religion of all. Muslims likewise took over this claim to antiquity, remaining conscious of the two older assemblies of books, but Muslims replaced the authority of the two Testaments with a further book which became their supreme revelation of God's word, the Qur'an. For Christians, that revelation had already appeared in the Jew Jesus of Nazareth.

PART II

One Church, One Faith, One Lord? (4 BCE-451 CE)

3

A Crucified Messiah (4 BCE-100 CE)

BEGINNINGS

And so to Bethlehem of Judaea, where Jesus was born in a stable because there was no room at the inn. Or perhaps not. We learn of these events within four books of the Christian 'New Testament', credited with authorship by early followers of Jesus called Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They shine four different spotlights on the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and, as we will see, all four were probably written not less than half a century after his death (see pp. 84-5 and 102-3). They are collectively called the Gospels, a word which started life as the Greek for 'good news',
evaggelion
. Significantly, the first Latin Christians did not seek an exact equivalent in their own language and simply slurred the word with a Latin lilt into
evangelium
. Many modern languages have in turn borrowed from the Latin: hence, in English, 'evangelist' and 'evangelical'. Far away from Mediterranean society in England, during what we misleadingly used to call the Dark Ages, Anglo-Saxon scholars were more adventurous than the early Christian Latin-speakers: they considered the etymology of the original Greek and came up with their word 'Godspell', once more meaning 'good news' - Gospel.

This care to find a special name for the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John reflects their oddness. Biographies were not rare in the ancient world and the Gospels do have many features in common with non-Christian examples. Yet these Christian books are an unusually 'down-market' variety of biography, in which ordinary people reflect on their experience of Jesus, where the powerful and the beautiful generally stay on the sidelines of the story, and where it is often the poor, the ill-educated and the disreputable whose encounters with God are most vividly described.
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In the Gospels, events in historic time astonishingly fuse with events beyond time; it is often impossible to define a distinction between the two. The only other books specifically to be called Gospels apart from the canonical four are their literary rivals or imitators, written solely by Christians for the same purpose: to tell stories about the life and resurrection of Jesus. The so-called 'Gospel of Thomas' is one of the better known, since its collection of sayings attributed to Jesus resembles more than most the four Gospels contained in the New Testament. By transfer, 'Gospel' describes the whole message contained in all the biblical books, not just in the Gospels: the multiform, restless story of good news which is Christianity.