What Do You Do With a Chocolate Jesus? (26 page)

Montanus
(mid-2
^nd
century) launched a movement in Asia Minor that claimed the Second Coming of Christ was near. Yeah, well, the line forms over there. They claimed direct contact with God, and his following became famous for its ecstatic women priests (cool!) and its moral rigor (not so cool).

Celsus
(mid-2
^nd
century) was not a Christian, but he was important to the debate because he stridently took them on. He was a Greek philosopher, and a skeptic, who was famous for mocking Christians for their ignorance and superstition. He noted that a god who worked with his hands and took a day off wasn’t much of a god. A real wise-ass, this guy. I like him.

The Gnostics:
In 1945, writings by a prominent Christian sect dating back to the second century were discovered near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi. They include the Gospels of Thomas, Mary, and Philip, and they paint a very different picture of Christianity than most of us are taught. The Gnostics reveled in the mystery of the
gnosis
—that is, secret knowledge. They believed that each of us contained a spark of divinity and that we needed to discover “the Christ within.” For this, you didn’t need a church, so they were firmly in the heresy camp.

The Gnostics (a label given to them by later scholars) are a fave among New Age types because they had women priests and were of a very spiritual bent, to the point of thinking that Jesus’ appearance on earth was a projection rather than a flesh-and-blood guy. Some also read into Gnostic writings the
Da Vinci Code
idea that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had an intimate relationship.

Well, this didn’t go over well with the mainstream Church and, after a couple of centuries, the Gnostics were muscled off the stage. But the documents they left behind hint at the great variety of Christian religions that existed in the early days.

Century Three

And the hits just keep on coming:

Origen
(ca. 184–254) The most optimistic of the great Church fathers, he was one of the last to stand for reasoned thought and free debate in theology. He developed a sophisticated philosophy based on a loving and forgiving god, and thought everyone would be saved in the end—a concept called Christian universalism. He didn’t think sex was demonic, as others did, but he did idealize celibacy. The first great interpreter of the Bible, he saw stories like Adam and Eve as allegories, and regarded hell as a temporary punishment. The Church, wanting none of this, later turned against his ideas and deemed them heresy.

Plotinus
(ca. 204–270) founded the school of Neo-Platonism, an updated version of Plato’s metaphysics—the notion that a perfect, higher reality paralleled our imperfect physical existence. For every saggy butt perched on a bar stool there was an ideal J-Lo tush nestled on a throne, or something like that. Plato’s metaphysics had a huge influence on later ideas about heaven and the soul.

Eusebius
(263–339) was the Bishop of Caesarea, and the grand maestro of Church propaganda under Emperor Constantine—the first Christian emperor of Rome. Eusebius is hugely important because much of what we know about the other early Christian thinkers, and the Church itself, comes only through him.

This is why it’s unfortunate that Eusebius was a self-serving bullshit artist of the first order. He quoted letters that he claimed were written exchanges between Jesus and a certain King Abgar V of Edessa. He gave us the legend of St. Peter going to Rome, and he also believed that the John of the Gospels was the same John who wrote
Revelation.
Not so. More importantly, he helped pioneer the idea that victory in war was proof of God’s blessing—a handy concept over the next thousand years.

Eusebius defended telling falsehoods in the service of God, and he routinely availed himself of the privilege. In his
Ecclesiastical History
, he admitted that he would only offer details about Christian persecutions that served his purpose, and that he wouldn’t discuss the notorious activities of the Church. As mentioned, Eusebius may be the man who added the suspect passages about Jesus to the works of Josephus. The guy isn’t even a saint and, given that there are about ten thousand of them, that doesn’t say much for his reputation.

The fact that this pious liar is the conduit for much of our knowledge of Christianity’s first three centuries says something about the reliability of
anything
we know about Jesus. It also underlines God’s long disinterest in good record-keeping. Anybody know where they stashed the Ten Commandments?

Atheists for Jesus

The Romans came up with a word to describe the growing number of Jesus people—atheists. For many, the Christian unwillingness to accept the traditional gods made them immoral and a threat to society—an attitude Christians themselves would later perfect. Pretty soon nasty rumors about them started circulating the same way urban legends did about satanic cults in the 1990s. “Did you hear? They eat babies and wash them down with body shots of blood!” Christians became the target of slanderous whisper campaigns.

Presumably, this made them easy marks for opportunists like Emperor Nero, who, if the account is true, blamed them for that fire in Rome in A.D. 64. His year-long purge against them in Rome was horrific, and it convinced them that they were pitted against the civilization of Satan.

Nero, however, was the exception. Generally, the Romans allowed for religious freedom, certainly more than the Christians would allow for once they took charge. But Romans were also sticklers for ritual and, as mentioned, Christians refused to cooperate. As they grew in number, their separatist attitude alarmed the public and, on occasion, this bubbled up as persecution.

Over three centuries, ten persecutions took place, most of them likely exaggerated by Christian historians. To hear them tell it, the Romans did little more than feed Christians to lions while taking suspiciously long baths. The purges were ghastly, but most of them were short-lived (lions are an expensive way to kill people) and limited in scope, unlike the baths. Some crusades reaped as few as ten victims, and some of the victims actually wanted to be martyrs—not that this was any excuse. Tertullian wrote of one group around A.D. 185 that
asked
the governor of Asia to execute them. He refused, and suggested they hang themselves or go jump off a cliff. He actually told them that. He wouldn’t be the last.

To be sure, Christians were sometimes victims of diabolical cruelty. They might be covered in honey and locked up with a hive of wasps, or stuffed in a sack and made a plaything for wild bulls. Some were perched atop a metal pyramid to be split apart. Women were publicly raped. Believers were strapped into a hot iron chair and cooked to death. Eyes were gouged out with iron tools. Others starved in prison. A molten lead enema took care of the body orifices. Whips encrusted with hooks or seashells flayed flesh from bone. And so forth.

Some of these accounts are propaganda, but all too many of them are true. And if they have a medieval ring to them it’s because God-fearing Christians would eventually adopt many of these same methods of torture and execution once
they
got to do the persecuting.

The worst purge—The Great Persecution—was launched by Emperor Diocletian in the early fourth century. In direct opposition to the Greco-Roman tradition of tolerance, Diocletian outlawed Christianity in A.D. 303, closed the churches, and forced Christians to perform pagan sacrifices after they handed over their Bibles for burning. This went on for years and claimed some 2,000 lives. Fortunately, Diocletian fell ill in 305 and abdicated his office. But the persecutions went on until about 311, when they finally stopped.

Church and State—Together Again

Enter Diocletian’s more reasonable grandson, Constantine—an ambitious general and builder, who became emperor. Tradition, (meaning Eusebius) says that on the eve of a critical battle in 312, Constantine saw a heavenly vision of the cross, or something like it, in the sky. He placed this icon on his battle standard and, when he won the conflict, he credited the victory to the Christian god. In 313, he issued the
Edict of Toleration
, which ended the attacks on Christianity and made the faith legal. Christians emerged from the shadows and the religion built up a fresh head of steam.

Constantine had a simple plan to restore order to the chaotic and divided Empire of the fourth century: Use the Christian cult to his own ends. The Empire could be unified under their single, all-powerful deity: One God. One Empire. One Emperor. No arguments.

Ah, but most of the Empire was still pagan. What to do? Let’s see now. Pagans worshipped a Sun God (Sol Invictus). Christians worshipped the Son-of-God. Hmm. To unify the Empire, Constantine fused these rival deities into two sides of the same coin—literally. Coinage was struck with the pagan Sun God on one side and a symbol of Christianity on the other. He melded both traditions in his official ceremonies, temple artwork, and political rhetoric as well.

By A.D. 325, Christianity was the dominant faith of the government. (It would become the official faith in 381 under Emperor Theodosius.) The victory of the religion made hash of the prophecies in
Revelation
, which put Christians at war with Rome. But nobody harped on that anymore. From now on, the emperors were working for Jesus.

Unfortunately, if Constantine thought the recognition of Christianity would get everyone on the same theological page, he was mistaken. Religious guys love to argue, and Christians found lots of things to argue about even amongst themselves.

The Right Stuff

From the very start, Christians faced a theological dilemma that had never confronted the Jews. In the Hebrew Bible, God was God. Yahweh. One guy. Pretty simple. But in the New Testament, God is mentioned as the Father in heaven, the Son on earth, and the Holy Spirit, which was sort of everywhere. What exactly was the relationship between these three aspects of the Almighty? Was Jesus a deity, the son of a deity, or a human with godly powers? Were God and Jesus made of the same stuff, similar stuff, or different stuff? Did God create Jesus, or did they always co-exist? And where did the Holy Spirit fit in? Was God a unity, a trinity, or a barbershop quartet? Floor wax or dessert topping?

People stayed up late at night fretting over this nonsense. For three centuries these issues provoked fistfights in the streets, stone throwing, church burnings, and attempts by bishops to slander and even attack their rivals. It was the kind of insanity you get when institutions are founded upon religious speculations—a society that fights over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. (The answer, by the way, is nine…unless the angels are really fat.)

As to the question of exactly what Jesus was made of, there were many schools of thought, and this led to a crisis that would shape the future of the faith and of the western world. Everyone had a pet theory; here are just a few:

The Trinity:
God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit were the
same
stuff—three personae in one divinity. This is the Catholic view.

The Homoean Creed:
God and Jesus were
similar
stuff, but not the
same
stuff. Still, they were a lot alike.

The Dated Creed:
God and Jesus were
similar
stuff, but the Son was begotten of the Father.

The Eunomian Heresy:
God and Jesus were
different
stuff because the Son was begotten of the Father.

Apollinarism:
Christ’s body was human, but his mind and soul were divine—
two kinds
of stuff in one Jesus.

Docetism:
Jesus was made of
no
stuff. He was fully divine, but not flesh and blood. What people saw on the cross was a projection, like a hologram or the Wizard of Oz.

The Logos:
Jesus was
logos
stuff; the ordering principle of the universe. But the
logos
was less than God, which meant Jesus was less than God, which meant you were in deep doo-doo with the Church.

Adoptionist Theory:
Jesus was
human
stuff and God adopted him as his son.

The Two Sons Formulation:
Jesus had been conceived
twice
—once in divine form and once in human form. But he had only one belly button.

Sabellianism:
God had three “manifestations,” Jesus being one of them—like two sides of a coin. This differs from the Trinity, which is more like equating four quarters to a dollar. Get it? No?

If you wonder why people haggled over these dizzying theories, it’s because they had real-world consequences. If God and Jesus were the same, and the Church was the living extension of Jesus’ ministry, it put the churches and the emperors who loved them that much closer to God. People listened to you more carefully if you had divine authority. It was all about power.

The Arian Heresy