Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (19 page)

After the revolt of 66-70 no substantial Christian community returned to Aelia/Jerusalem until the fourth century. The Jewish-led Christ-followers regrouped in the town of Pella in the upper Jordan valley and maintained contact with other like-minded Jewish Christian communities in the Middle East. Their refusal to become associated with the second great Jewish revolt of 132-5 cost them dear in terms of violence from their fellow Jews, who regarded them as traitors, but even when the crushing of the rebellion brought them relief, their future was one of gradual decline. No longer did they have the prestige of a centre in the sacred city of Jerusalem. The fourth-century Roman scholar Jerome came across surviving Jewish-Christian communities when he moved to live in the East, and he translated their 'Gospel according to the Hebrews' into Latin, but after that they faded from history. The Church of Paul, which had originally seemed the daughter of the Jerusalem Church, rejected the lineal heirs of the Jerusalem Church as imperfect Christians. Soon it regarded their ancient self-deprecating name of Ebionites ('the poor' in Hebrew: an echo of Jesus's blessing on the poor in the Sermon on the Mount) as the description of a heretical sect. Interestingly, the later Christian historian Eusebius claims that the Ebionites rejected the idea of the Virgin Birth of Jesus. That may well have been because, unlike Greek-speaking Christians, they knew that the notion was based on a Greek misreading of Isaiah's Hebrew prophecy (see p. 81).
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The catastrophe for Jerusalem had another important effect: it left the Jewish intelligentsia determined to make their peace with the Roman authorities, to preserve their religion and to give it a more coherent identity. Like the Jewish Christ-followers, the surviving leaders of mainstream Judaism were forced to regroup away from the former capital and the Romans concentrated them on a former estate of the Herodian royal family at the town of Jamnia (Yavneh), near the coast.
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Here tradition says that this gathering was very influential in giving Judaism a unity of religious belief which it had not previously possessed; it hardly matters whether or not the story was really that simple, because the end result was indeed a much more clearly circumscribed identity for Judaism. The Sadducee leadership was dead or discredited, and so it was the Pharisee group which shaped the future of this ancient monotheistic faith, producing an ever-expanding volume of commentary on the Tanakh and a body of regulations to give a sense of precise boundaries to Jews in their everyday life. That was compensation for the tragedy that they could no longer look to the Temple to provide identity and purpose. Temple sacrifice ended for ever; what was left was the first religious tradition which could have taken the phrase which later became so important to Muslims and called itself the People of the Book. Instead of the Temple, the synagogues were now destined to carry the whole life and devotional activity of the Jewish people.

It is interesting to see this development reflected in the Gospels. If any section of the Jewish nation had been responsible for the train of events leading up to the death of Jesus, it had been the Temple establishment of Sadducees, but the Pharisees come in for far more abuse recorded by the Gospel writers, often in the mouth of Jesus, despite the fact that Jesus seems to have resembled the Pharisees in much of his teaching and outlook. When the Gospels were compiled in the last decades of the first century, the descendants of the Pharisees, the leaders at Jamnia, were a living force, unlike the Sadducees, and many Christian communities had become strongly opposed to them. John's exalted Christ, echoing the exaltation of Christ in the writings of Paul, is emancipated from any concern for Jewish sensibilities about his identity, and in John's picture of Jesus's life, 'the Jews' repeatedly and often menacingly prowl around the Jesus story as if they had no organic connection with the carpenter's son from Nazareth.
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The growing coherence in Judaism, the narrowing in variety of Jewish belief, meant that by the end of the first century CE a break between Christianity and Judaism was more and more likely: a symptom of that is John the Divine's readiness to replace the Temple with the Lamb Jesus.
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In many communities, the break probably occurred two or more decades earlier. Christ-followers had taken a decisive step away from Judaism by offering worship specifically to Jesus: there was no precedent in the tradition for this in Judaism, even though Jews had commonly recognized and celebrated the existence of supernatural beings like angels or the personified Wisdom of God.
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Moreover, at some very early stage, Christians celebrated their main worship on a different day: the day following the Jewish Sabbath. Many Christian cultures refer to it by its pagan Roman name, Sunday, but in many languages other than English it is called the Lord's Day, as it was the day on which the Lord had risen from the dead, according to the accounts in the Gospel Passion narratives.
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And central to worship for Christians was that meal in which they shared bread and wine. By the beginning of the second century at least, we find Ignatius, leader or 'bishop' in the Christian community of Antioch, calling this 'Eucharist'.
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In everyday life, the Roman imperial authorities unwittingly encouraged the process of separation between Jews and Christians by imposing a punitive tax in place of the voluntary contributions which Jews had once paid to the Jerusalem Temple. For Roman bureaucrats, therefore, it became important to know who was and was not a Jew. Despite all the Jewish rebellions, tax-paying Jews continued to enjoy a status as an officially recognized religion (
religio licita
). In fact, despite the brutality with which Rome crushed various Jewish rebellions both in Palestine and beyond, it is remarkable that the Romans continued to regard Judaism with such respect and forbearance - most notably in adopting the Jewish division of the week into seven days rather than the traditional Roman eight, probably in the same century that they destroyed the Temple.
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Christians who finally broke their links with the parent culture would find no such recognition from the Roman government, although it also meant that they avoided the special tax, and they may have been anxious to avoid association with the 'guilt' of the Jews in the rebellion of 66-70 as well. Interestingly, such was Christians' sense of alienation from the Jewish world that they made no attempt to cling on to that privileged status.
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Thanks to these developments, and to the energy of Paul's work in reaching out to the non-Jewish world, the movement which had started as a Jewish sect decisively shifted away from its Palestinian home, and all the sacred writings which form the New Testament were written in Greek. The Christ revealed in the letters of Paul, the Gospel of John and the Book of Revelation, much more than in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, was a cosmic ruler and his followers must conquer the whole world. For Paul, that meant setting his sights westwards across the Mediterranean Sea, to the capital of the empire of which he was a citizen, Rome. But very early on, other preachers of Christ looked east, to the capital of the Persian king at Ctesiphon in what is now Iraq, or even beyond, to the remote cultures with which the Mediterranean world traded, far to the east in India and maybe further. Paul had apparently met failure in his first mission to Arabia; these others did not, as we will see.

If the new religion had remained focused on the Middle East, there were obvious contenders among Roman imperial cities to replace the lost Jerusalem in its significance for the followers of Christ. There was Alexandria, capital of Egypt, home to the largest single Jewish community beyond Palestine itself, and there was also Antioch of Syria, the old Seleucid capital, still then the chief city in Rome's eastern imperial provinces. It was in fact in Antioch, according to the Book of Acts, that colonial Latin-speakers coined a word for Christ-followers (in no friendly spirit) -
Christiani
.
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This name 'Christian' has a double remoteness from its Jewish roots. Surprisingly in view of its origin in the Greek eastern Mediterranean and amid the Semitic culture of Syria, the word has a distinctively Latin rather than Greek form, and yet it also points to the Jewish founder not by his name, Joshua, but by that Greek translation of Messiah,
Christos
. With its Latin development of a Greek word summing up a Jewish life-story, this very name 'Christian' embodies a violent century which had set Rome against Jerusalem, and the word has resonated down nearly two thousand years, during which Christianity in turn has set itself against its surviving parent, Judaism. 'Christian' embodies the two languages which became the vehicle for talking about Christianity within the Roman Empire: Latin and Greek, the respective languages of Western Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy.

Rome owes its exceptional historic position in the Church to the Roman Empire - not merely the simple fact of the city's status as the imperial capital, resonant throughout the Mediterranean world and beyond, but the actions of first-century emperors: the sack of Jerusalem and two executions of key early Christian figures, the Apostles Peter and Paul, in Rome itself. When Jerusalem was wrecked by the Roman expeditionary force in 70 CE and the oldest and most prominent community of Christians was permanently dispersed, Peter and Paul had probably been dead for around half a decade, apparently victims of a persecution whipped up in Rome by the Emperor Nero. The Book of Acts says much about Paul's journey to Rome under arrest, and previously one of his most important letters had been written to Christians already living there. Scripture says nothing to link Peter and his death to Rome, and the suspicion does linger that the story of Peter's martyrdom there was a fiction based retrospectively on the undoubted death of Paul in the city. Nevertheless there are strong witnesses in tradition and archaeology that at least as early as the mid-second century the Christians of Rome were confidently asserting that Peter was buried among their dead, in a cemetery across the Tiber beyond the western suburbs of Rome.
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The leadership of the Western Church went on to build on that memory or claimed memory over a thousand years, to create one of Christianity's most noble and dangerous visions, the Roman papacy. Their building was literal, in the massive shape of the Basilica of St Peter above Peter's supposed grave site, a building which we will repeatedly encounter in Christian history. The city of Rome is now the centre of the largest branch of Christian faith, which styles itself the Catholic Church, but we should remember that this is an oddity: Rome was, after all, the capital of the empire which killed Christ. Without the tragedy of the destruction of Jerusalem, Rome might never have taken the unique place which it has held in the story of Western Christian faith. But no one would have realized this even two centuries after the death of Jesus Christ; and for centuries more there was as much likelihood of Christianity spreading as strongly east as west from the ruins of Jerusalem, to become the religion of Baghdad rather than of Rome. That is why the next stage of this story will take us east, rather than in the westward and northward directions so often chosen by the historians of Christianity.

4

Boundaries Defined (50 CE-300)

SHAPING THE CHURCH

According to legend, nearly three centuries after the Crucifixion a Roman emperor's mother called Helena headed an archaeological expedition to Jerusalem which, with a spectacular good fortune rare in modern archaeology, quickly achieved its precise goal: the rediscovery of the wooden cross on which Jesus had died (see pp. 193-4). Later archaeologists have been less easily rewarded in searches for material remains of the earliest Christians. Christianity had no specific ethnic or social base, and to begin with it was a movement too insignificant to leave artefacts or even much trace in literary sources outside those which Christians themselves created. So if we want to get a picture of who Christians were and what their lives were like, we are forced to meet them virtually exclusively through their documents (see Plate 1). Indeed, one of the earliest known definitely Christian artefacts is a fragment of text bearing two little patches of John's Gospel; the style of its handwriting suggests a date in the second century CE, perhaps within decades of the first composition of the Gospel.
¹
Even then, we have to remember that the vast majority of early Christian texts have perished, and despite many new archaeological finds, there is a bias among those that survived towards texts which later forms of Christianity found acceptable. One expert on the period has recently estimated that around 85 per cent of second-century Christian texts of which existing sources make mention have gone missing, and that total itself can only represent a fraction of what there once was.
²
The documents which do survive conspire to hide their rooting in historic contexts; this makes them a gift to biblical literalists, who care little for history.

The series of letters generally agreed to come from Paul's own hand are characterized by very specific references to situations, mostly of conflict, and by references to named people, often including a little description to give us some sense of those who were important in their communities, at least in the eyes of Paul. So to the Christians in Rome, he sends greetings to a long list, including 'Epaenetus, who was the first convert in Asia for Christ . . . Mary, who has worked hard among you . . . Andronicus and Junias, my kinsmen and my fellow prisoners . . . Ampliatus, my beloved in the Lord . . .'
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The most striking feature of the correspondence is the locations of its recipients: in busy Graeco-Roman towns, commercial centres throughout the eastern half of the Mediterranean as far as Rome, and including people like Epaenetus, who had much experience of travel. By contrast, the story of Jesus told in the Gospels had been played out in a rural and largely non-Greek environment, where villages within an easy day's journey of each other could naively be described by the writers as cities and where only the denouement of the story took place in a real city, Jerusalem. Now Paul, the Apostle of the Gentiles, divided up the world he perceived around him into city, sea and wilderness (II Corinthians 11.26), and despite his pride in his Jewish roots, he unselfconsciously divided the people of that world into Greeks and barbarians (Romans 1.14).