From Yahweh to Zion

by Laurent Guyénot

  It was mainly Matthew, followed by Luke, who reintroduced the apocalyptic into the message of Jesus. (It is also in Matthew alone that Jesus says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel” 15:24). Mark’s only apocalyptic passage in chapter 13 is a condensation of apocalyptic imagery from the books of Daniel, Isaiah, and Ezekiel, henceforth repeated in many Christian writings.131 This is the only time that Jesus uses such apocalyptic imagery, and the length of this logion contrasts with the usual brevity of the words of Jesus in Mark; the passage is therefore unanimously considered a late addition.

  The most important apocalyptic text of the Christian tradition, known as the book of Revelation, is not only foreign to the message of the earthly Jesus, but is today regarded as of non-Christian origin, for its central part (from 4:1 to 22:15) refers neither to Jesus nor to any Christian theme evidenced elsewhere. Only the prologue (including the letters to the seven churches in Asia) and the epilogue are ostensibly Christian, and they are attached to the body of the text by easily identifiable editorial transitions (not to mention the double signature of “John” in 22:8 and “Jesus” in 22:16). The book of Revelation takes up in part the animal symbolism of Daniel (the two monstrous beasts and the dragon of chapter 13, followed by the lamb of chapter 14) and displays a ferocious hatred of Rome, as well as of those who sympathize with Hellenism: “To anyone who proves victorious, and keeps working for me until the end, I will give the authority over the nations which I myself have been given by my Father, to rule them with an iron scepter and shatter them like so many pots” (2:26–27).

  We may therefore look at the apocalyptic current as the result of a re-Judaization of the Gospel message, under the influence of a turn of mind foreign to Jesus. This is a relevant observation for our time, for we shall see that apocalypticism has distorted so-called “evangelical” Christianity to the point of transforming it into an objective ally of American-Zionist militarism. How can we not think of an atomic war when reading, in Revelation 19:11–20, how the angel “called Trustworthy and True,” with eyes like “flames of fire” and a cloak “soaked in blood,” will smite the earth? “From his mouth came a sharp sword with which to strike the nations”; he will then invite the birds to “eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of great generals and heroes, the flesh of horses and their riders and of all kinds of people, citizens and slaves, small and great alike” at “God’s great feast.”

  More important still in the evolution of Christianity was the adoption of the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, into its canon. What has Christ to do with Yahweh? How can we think of Yahweh as the Father (Abba) that Jesus knew? How should we interpret the fundamentally anti-Jewish dimension of the Gospels, whose supreme expression is the accusation hurled by Jesus at the “Jews” (meaning the mob as well as the political and religious elite): “You are of the devil, your father, and it is the desires of your father you want to accomplish. He was a murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44). Who is this diabolos who wants to murder Christ, if not Yahweh-Seth? Is not this Yahweh who promises his people, in exchange for their submission, domination over the nations of the world (Deuteronomy 28:1) the very Devil who offers Jesus the exact same bargain (Matthew 4:8-10)? The so-called Gnostic Christians were well aware of the problem. They held Yahweh as an evil demiurge who had enslaved men through terror and deceitful promises of material well-being, while the loving God of Christ came to liberate them through “knowledge” (gnosis, a term indicating a deeper transformation of the self than a mere intellectual understanding). Yahweh, they believed, is the Prince of this world, while Christos came from heaven to rescue them.

  Unfortunately, radical Gnostics, while they recognized Yahweh as evil, did not contest his claim of having created the world; and so they held the physical world inherently evil. This paradoxical position led them to take the side of the serpent of Genesis, which was like vindicating Baal, but which has passed, in the Christian confusion, as the mark of Satanism. The Gnostic text The Testimony of Truth rewrites the story of the Garden of Eden from the point of view of the serpent, presented as the principle of divine wisdom. He convinces Adam and Eve to partake of knowledge (gnosis), while the Demiurge tries to keep them away from it by threatening them with death.132

  A more moderate form of Gnosticism almost prevailed in Rome at the beginning of the second century under the authority of Marcion, a Christian of Stoic culture who had assembled the first Christian canon (limited to a short version of Luke’s Gospel without the Nativity, and ten epistles of Paul). “Marcion’s heretical tradition has invaded the whole world,” Tertullian warned in his book (Against Marcion V.19).133 It was in reaction to Marcion that the competing group, known today as the “Great Church,” created its own canon including the Hebrew Bible. In the sixteenth century, the Council of Trent declared the Old and New Testaments as being of equal divine authority and as part of a single book. In many ways, Christians today take the Old Testament more seriously than the Jews, who do not give it the status of a divine revelation. Unfortunately, by admitting the Old Testament into its canon, the Church has placed itself in a dilemma that would, in the long run, destroy its credibility: how to reconcile Yahweh and Christ, when they are opposites like Osiris and Seth? Having adopted and sanctified the Old Testament, the Church had to forbid the people from reading it, lest they grow ashamed of the God they are asked to worship. Its free access in vernacular languages in the fifteenth century marked the beginning of dechristianization.

  The Old Testament was to become the Trojan horse of Yahwism within Christianity. By enhancing its status, the reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries launched an irreversible return to Judaism. For this reason, some Catholics call Protestantism “Old Testamentism.” That is overly simplistic: it was the bishops of the first centuries who opted for the adoption of the Hebrew Bible into the canon. Later the “reforming” popes of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries relied heavily on it to mobilize the crusaders. Be that as it may, the Judaization of Christianity, to which Protestantism made a decisive but not exclusive contribution, paved the way for the anti-Christianism of the Enlightenment. Voltaire, for example, denigrated the Christian God by citing the Old Testament: “Never was common sense attacked with so much indecency and fury” (Sermon of the Fifty).

  The purpose of this chapter is not to quarrel with the Christian canon or dogmas, but simply to understand the extent to which Christianity is the child of Yahwism. It must be noted, for example, that it carries within its genes an exclusivism that derives directly from the ideology of the jealous god: it was not enough that Jesus was a son of god, or even that he was the son of the only God; he had to be the only son of the only God. And since, according to Yahwist dogma, only God can be the object of a cult, it was finally necessary that Jesus be God. The Council of Constantinople, summoned by the emperor Theodosius in 381, proclaimed Jesus “the only begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all the centuries, a light born of the Light, true God born of the true God, begotten not created, consubstantial (homoousios) to the Father, by whom everything was created.”134 Thus exclusive monotheism, which had produced in Judaism the monstrous idea of a law-making God, produced in Christianity another poison: dogmatism, that is, the legal obligation to believe in absurdities. Contrary to common opinion, it is not by virtue of its Hellenistic heritage that Christian dogma came to declare the crucified Galilean and the Divine Creator nearly identical; for among the Greeks a hero has never been confounded with the supreme God. It is, rather, the exclusivist obsession inherited from Judaism that finally erased the distinction between the Son and the Father.

  And yet, paradoxically, it was the deification of Jesus, not only in mythical and liturgical discourses but also in logical discourse, which allowed medieval Christianity to largely emancipate itself from Yahwism, at least until the printing press and the Reformation reintroduced the Old Testament. For it was only by becoming God himself that Jesus was able to eclipse Yahweh.
But to eclipse Yahweh was not to destroy him. And if Christianity can be seen as a victory of Osirism over Yahwism, from another point of view it is a Judaized form of Osirism.

  The Miracle of Constantine

  What can explain the success of Christianity? Its merits, first of all. From the beginning, the cult of Christ was a popular religion, which quickly overflowed the narrow circle of a Jewish sect to arouse contagious enthusiasm among the non-Jewish subjects of the empire. This enthusiasm stemmed not only from the new cult’s powerful Osirian resonances, but also from its revolutionary dimension; not only from its links with tradition, but also its modernity. Christ was the hero of the oppressed of the Roman Empire. To the people subjected to the unprecedented physical violence of the empire, it brought the consolation of a spiritual victory: the promise of a kingdom that is not of this world, but one that the humble can experience in this life.

  But the success of Christianity is also undoubtedly linked to its way of posing and responding to the “Jewish question” at a time when the influence of the Jews on the affairs of the empire was becoming a major concern. The Gospels denounce the corruption of Jewish society and religion by money, as well as the ability of Jewish elites to crush their enemies using political pressure, while controlling crowds. Christ is the heroic figure opposed to excessive Jewish power. These are the two major virtues of original Christianity: by sharing the passion of Christ, the Christian frees himself from the joint power of Rome and Jerusalem.

  This popular enthusiasm for Eucharistic worship, however, does not explain the political triumph of the Church. The true “miracle” of Christianity, it has been said, was the “conversion” of the Roman emperor Constantine in 312. His favor granted to the Church transformed a persecuted sect into a powerful institution that soon began persecuting all competing cults. Why did one Roman emperor favor, and another (Theodosius in 395) elevate to the rank of state religion, a cult glorifying a man crucified by the Romans as a bandit, while forbidding its faithful to express their loyalty to the emperor through the customary civic worship? An explanation for this turning point is given by the authorized biographer of Constantine, Eusebius of Caesarea: Constantine supposedly received a vision, then a military victory under the sign of Christ. But it is hardly convincing. Historians doubt whether Constantine really became a Christian, for he maintained and renovated pagan religious traditions (including a cult of Sol Invictus) and retained the religious title of Pontifex Maximus (literally “the great bridge builder” between gods and men). So why did Constantine legalize Christianity? We must suppose that he saw in Christ a new version of Osiris, and in the cult of martyrs a new heroic, popular, and nonmartial religiosity.

  But he may have had another motivation. Several sources attribute to him, before his support for Christianity, a virulent Judeophobia, and the opinion that “the Jews, who had spread everywhere, actually hoped to become masters of the Roman world.”135 His antipathy to “this disgraceful sect” is therefore more likely a cause than a consequence of his benevolence toward Christianity. Constantine was in this matter merely the heir of his predecessors—who all had to answer the grievances of their subjects against the Jews—before he even heard of Christianity. Tiberius (14–37) had expelled the Jews from Rome in 19 CE. Claudius (41–54) had renewed the operation (as mentioned in Acts 18:2). Hadrian (117–138), who had to suppress the revolt of Simon Bar Kokhba in Palestine, forbade circumcision and once again expelled the Jews. Only Nero and Trajan were favorable to the Jews. In the absence of another convincing explanation, it is therefore natural to suppose that by favoring Christianity, Emperor Constantine and his successors (with the exception of the ephemeral Julian the Apostate, Christianophobic and Judaeophile) hoped to solve the thorny “Jewish question” with which all empires from Babylon onward had been confronted. Did not the Church pretend to be the gate of salvation for the Jews, and had it not been so for thousands of Jews?

  For there to be a door, there must be a wall, and it was indeed at this time that Christianity and Judaism completed their separation. Constantine actually forbade Christians to go through the door in the other direction. An edict of 329 punished every Christian who converted or reconverted to Judaism. Another, in 335, prohibited Jews from circumcising their Christian slaves. In 353, his son Constantius II decreed the expropriation of every Christian who had become a Jew. 136

  For the Jews, the door became more and more narrow as the doctors of the Church, seized with dogmatic hubris, turned Jesus into God. Jews were asked to relinquish whatever common sense they had to convert to the Christian creed. To this must be added the Judeophobia of the Great Church under imperial protection. The Talmud was the Jews’ response to the appropriation by Christians of their heritage. It transformed rabbinic Judaism into a fundamentally anti-Christian religion. Christianity and Talmudism were both born from the ashes of the old biblical religion after the crises of the first two centuries CE, which saw the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 and the expulsion of its Jewish population in 135. Both reached their discernible outlines only in the fourth century, and both pretended to reform ancient Judaism, but in opposite directions and in vicious competition: Talmudism, emerging from the Pharisaical current, exacerbated the purificationist, ritualistic, legalistic, and separatist tendencies; while Christianity opposed it and, under the inspiration of Paul, rejected circumcision and the Mosaic law as a whole. Christianity must be regarded as the elder of the two—as Osiris is the elder of Seth—insofar as it exercised more influence over its competitor than it received. The great Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner goes so far as to write that “Judaism as we know it was born in the encounter with triumphant Christianity.”137 Rabbinic orthodoxy, which became the new cement holding the Jewish community together, hardened in the rejection of Christianity and its growing influence. At the beginning of the second century, a ritual prayer was introduced into synagogues to curse the mînim or “sectaries,” a term referring particularly to Christians.

  The Levitical Vatican

  One must bear in mind that, after the fourth century, the Roman Empire was centered in Constantinople, not Rome. The Italian city had plunged into irreversible decadence. It had ceased to be the imperial capital by 286, having been replaced by Milan, then by Ravenna. The common representation of the “Eastern Roman Empire” as the continuation of the empire founded in the Latium, whose capital had simply been transferred to the Bosphorus, is a misleading viewpoint inherited from Western historiography. Modern Byzantine studies rather insist on the essential differences between the Greek-speaking Byzantine civilization and that of imperial Rome, which was a vague and distant memory at the end of the first millennium CE. Scholars describe the Byzantine Empire (which actually called itself a kingdom, basileia, ruled by a king, basileus) as a commonwealth, that is, “the supra-national idea of an association of Christian peoples, to which the emperor and the ‘ecumenical patriarch’ of Constantinople provided a symbolic leadership—even if each of these peoples was fully independent politically and economically.”138

  Unlike Rome, Constantinople was Christian by birth. Its foundation is inseparable from the adoption of Christianity by its founder Constantine the Great. The two major centers of outreach of the Christian faith were Antioch and Alexandria, but it was around Constantinople that the unity of the Church was forged, at the so-called “ecumenical” councils (the Œkumene meant the civilized world placed under the authority of the basileus), whose participants were exclusively oriental: no Latin bishop was present at the Council of Constantinople in 381. From the sixth century on, the patriarch of Constantinople was the keeper of orthodoxy, but the emperor was nevertheless the protector of all Christian communities within the commonwealth, many of which rejected the orthodox creed.

  The emperor also maintained good relations with the Shiite Fatimid caliphate of Egypt, which had conquered Jerusalem and lower Syria from the Abbasids in the 960s. Many Christian churches operated freely on their territory, and th
ere was a great Shiite mosque in Constantinople. Destabilization came from the common enemy of the Byzantines and Fatimids: the Seljuq Turks. But final destruction emerged, unexpectedly, from the West, in the form of the Frankish crusaders, a new species of mercenaries paid in spiritual currency and looting by the Roman church.

  The global power of the Roman popes, and their amazing capacity to mobilize the Western warrior class, had grown in the tenth century when German king Otto I had made alliance with the local ruling family of the Latium, the counts of Tusculum, who had by then established a hereditary right on the bishopric of Rome, but who exerted no authority beyond the Latium. The Roman pope (from the Greek papa, a Greek word that had hitherto been applied respectfully to every bishop) and the German emperor thus cofounded the Holy Roman Empire, in imitation and as a challenge to the patriarch and the basileus of Constantinople. In the next two centuries, the power of the popes continued to grow, through constant struggle with the German emperors, especially those of the Hohenstaufen dynasty. The popes resorted to their newly invented psychological weapon of excommunication, which could be used to undermine any sovereign’s authority. In the middle of the eleventh century, triumphant popes developed a radical political vision of their own universal empire, best summarized by the Dictatus Papae, a series of 27 statements by Pope Gregory VII, which included the following claims:

  “1. That the Roman church was founded by God alone. 2. That the Roman pontiff alone can with right be called universal. 3. That he alone can depose or reinstate bishops. […] 8. That he alone may use the imperial insignia. 9. That of the pope alone all princes shall kiss the feet. 10. That his name alone shall be spoken in the churches. 11. That his title [Pope] is unique in the world. 12. That it may be permitted to him to depose emperors. […] 19. That he himself may be judged by no one. […] 22. That the Roman church has never erred; nor will it err to all eternity, the Scripture bearing witness. 23. That the Roman pontiff, if he have been canonically ordained, is undoubtedly made holy by the merits of St. Peter. […] 27. That he may absolve subjects from their fealty to wicked men.”