Fields of Blood

by Karen Armstrong

  This was potentially problematic for Paul’s Jewish and gentile converts in Antioch, Corinth, Philippi, and Ephesus, who, as monotheists, regarded Roman religion as idolatrous. Judaism was respected as a tradition of great antiquity, and Jews’ avoidance of the public cult was accepted in the Roman Empire. At this point, Judaism and Christianity were not yet distinct traditions:75 Paul’s gentile converts saw themselves as part of a new Israel.76 But in the crowded Greco-Roman cities, Christians often came into conflict with the local synagogue and, when they proudly claimed to belong to a “new Israel,” seemed to be behaving with impiety toward the parent faith—an attitude that Romans deplored.77 Paul’s letters show that he was concerned that his converts were becoming conspicuous in a society where difference and novelty could be dangerous. He urged them to observe the customary dress codes,78 to behave with the decorum and self-control expected of Roman citizens, and to avoid excessively ecstatic demonstrations of piety.79 Instead of defying the Roman authorities, Paul preached obedience and respect: “You must all obey the governing authorities. Since all government comes from God, the civil authorities are appointed by God, and so anyone who resists authority is rebelling against God’s decisions.”80 Rome was not an evil empire but the guarantor of order and stability, so Christians must pay their taxes, “since all government officials are God’s officers. They serve God by collecting taxes.”81 But Paul knew that this was only a temporary state of affairs, because Jesus’s kingdom would be established on earth in his own lifetime: “The world as we know it is passing away.”82

  While waiting for Jesus’s triumphant return, members of his community (ekklesia) should live as Jesus had taught them—kindly, supportively, and generously. They would create an alternative to the structural violence of imperial rule and the self-serving policies of the aristocracy. When they celebrated the Lord’s Supper, the communal meal in Jesus’s memory, rich and poor should sit at the same table and share the same food. Early Christianity was not a private affair between the individual and God: people derived their faith in Jesus from the experience of living together in a close-knit, minority community that challenged the unequal distribution of wealth and power in stratified Roman society. No doubt the author of the Acts of the Apostles gives an idealized picture of the early ekklesia in Jerusalem, but it reflected a Christian ideal:

  The whole group of believers was united, heart and soul; no one claimed for his own use anything that he had, as everything they owned was held in common … None of their members was ever in want, as all those who owned land or houses would sell them, and bring the money from them, to present it to the apostles; it was then distributed to any members who might be in need.83

  Living in this way gave Christians intimations of new possibilities in humanity epitomized in the man Jesus, whose self-abnegation had raised him to God’s right hand. All former social divisions, Paul insisted, had become irrelevant: “In the one Spirit we were all baptized, Jews as well as Greeks, slaves as well as citizens.” This sacred community of people who previously had nothing in common made up the body of the risen Christ.84 In one memorable story, Luke, the evangelist who was closest to Paul, showed that Christians would come to know the risen Jesus not by a solitary mystical experience but by opening their hearts to the stranger, reading their scriptures together, and eating at the same table.85

  Despite Paul’s best efforts, however, the early Christians would never fit easily into Greco-Roman society. They held aloof from the public celebrations and civic sacrifices that bound the city together and revered a man who had been executed by a Roman governor. They called Jesus “lord” (kyrios), but this had nothing in common with the conventional aristocracy, which clung to status and regarded the poor with disdain.86 Paul quoted an early Christian hymn to the Philippian ekklesia, to remind them that God had bestowed the title of kyrios on Jesus because he had “emptied himself [heauton ekenosen] to assume the condition of a slave … and was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross.”87 The ideal of kenosis, “emptying,” would become crucial to Christian spirituality. “In your minds, you must be the same as Christ Jesus,” Paul told the Philippians. “There must be no competition among you, no conceit; but everybody is to be self-effacing. Always consider the other person to be better than yourself, so that nobody thinks of his own interests first, but everybody thinks of other people’s interests instead.”88 Like the followers of Confucius and Buddha, Christians were cultivating ideals of reverence and selflessness that countered the aggressive self-assertion of the warrior aristocracy.

  A tightly knit and isolated community, however, can develop an exclusivity that ostracizes others. In Asia Minor a number of Jewish-Christian communities, who traced their origins to the ministry of Jesus’s apostle John, had developed a different view of Jesus. Paul and the Synoptics had never regarded Jesus as God; the very idea would have horrified Paul who, before his conversion, had been an exceptionally punctilious Pharisee. They all used the term “Son of God” in the conventional Jewish sense: Jesus had been an ordinary human being commissioned by God with a special task. Even in his exalted state, there was, for Paul, always a clear distinction between Jesus kyrios Christos and God, his Father. The author of the Fourth Gospel, however, depicted Jesus as a cosmic being, God’s eternal “Word” (logos) who had existed with God before the beginning of time.89 This high Christology seems to have separated this group from other Jewish-Christian communities. Their writings were composed for an “in-group” with a private symbolism that was incomprehensible to outsiders. In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus frequently baffles his audience by his enigmatic remarks. For these so-called Johannine Christians, having the correct view of Jesus seemed more important than working for the coming of the kingdom. They too had an ethic of love, but it was reserved only for loyal members of the group; they turned their backs on “the world,”90 condemning defectors as “anti-Christs” and “children of the devil.”91 Spurned and misunderstood, they had developed a dualistic vision of a world polarized into light and darkness, good and evil, life and death. Their most extreme scripture was the book of Revelation, probably written while the Jews of Palestine were fighting a desperate war against the Roman Empire.92 The author, John of Patmos, was convinced that the days of the Beast, the evil empire, were numbered. Jesus was about to return, ride into battle, slay the Beast, fling him into a pit of fire, and establish his kingdom for a thousand years. Paul had taught his converts that Jesus, the victim of imperial violence, had achieved a spiritual and cosmic victory over sin and death. John, however, depicted Jesus, who had taught his followers not to retaliate violently, as a ruthless warrior who would defeat Rome with massive slaughter and bloodshed. Revelation was admitted to the Christian canon only with great difficulty, but it would be scanned eagerly in times of social unrest when people were yearning for a more just and equitable world.

  The Jewish revolt had broken out in Jerusalem in 66 after the Roman governor had commandeered money from the temple treasury. Not everybody supported it. The Pharisees in particular feared that it would make trouble for diaspora Jews, but the new party of Zealots (kanaim) thought that they had a good chance of success because the empire was currently split by internal dissension. They managed to drive out the Roman garrison and set up a provisional government, but the emperor Nero responded by dispatching a massive army to Judea led by Vespasian, his most gifted general. Hostilities were suspended during the disturbances that followed Nero’s death in 68, but after Vespasian became emperor, his son Titus took over the siege of Jerusalem, forced the Zealots to capitulate, and on August 28, 70, burned city and temple to the ground.

  In the Middle East, a temple carried such symbolic weight that an ethnic tradition could barely sustain its loss.93 Judaism owed its survival to a group of scholars led by Yohanan ben Zakkai, leader of the Pharisees, who transformed a faith based on temple worship into a religion of the book.94 In the coastal town of Yavneh, they began to compile three new scriptures: the Mishnah,
completed around 200, and the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds, which reached their final form in the fifth and sixth centuries respectively. At first, most of the rabbis probably assumed that the temple would be rebuilt, but those hopes were quashed when the emperor Hadrian visited Judea in 130 and announced that he would build a new city called Aelia Capitolina on the ruins of Jerusalem. The following year, as part of his policy of uniting the empire culturally, he outlawed circumcision, the ordination of rabbis, the teaching of the Torah, and public Jewish gatherings. Inevitably, perhaps, there was another revolt, and the tough Jewish soldier Simon bar Koseba planned his guerrilla campaign so skillfully that he held Rome at bay for three years. Rabbi Akiva, a leading Yavneh scholar, hailed him as the messiah, calling him Bar Kokhba (“Son of the Star”).95 But Rome finally gained control, systematically destroying almost a thousand Jewish villages and killing 580,000 Jewish rebels, while countless civilians were either burned to death or died of hunger and disease.96 After the war, Jews were expelled from Judea and would not be permitted to return for over five hundred years.

  The violence of this imperial assault profoundly affected Rabbinic Judaism. Instead of allowing Jews to bring their more aggressive traditions to the fore, they deliberately marginalized them, determined to prevent any more catastrophic military adventures.97 In their new academies in Babylonia and Galilee, they therefore evolved a method of exegesis that excised any adulation of chauvinism or belligerence. They were not particularly peaceable men—they fought their scholarly battles fiercely—but they were pragmatists.98 They had learned that Jewish tradition could survive only if Jews learned to rely on spiritual rather than physical strength.99 They could not afford any more heroic messiahs.100 They recalled Rabbi Yohanan’s advice: “If there is a seedling in your hand and you are informed ‘King Messiah has arrived,’ first plant your seedling and then go forth to greet him.”101 Other rabbis went further: “Let him come, but let me not see him!”102 Rome was a fact of life, and Jews must come to terms with it.103 The rabbis scoured their biblical and oral traditions to show that God had decreed Rome’s imperial power.104 They praised Roman technology and instructed Jews to make a blessing whenever they saw a gentile king.105 They devised new rules forbidding Jews to bear arms on the Sabbath or to bring weapons into the House of Studies, because violence was incompatible with Torah scholarship.

  The rabbis made it clear that instead of being an inflammatory force, religious activity could be used to quell violence. They either ignored the bellicose passages of the Hebrew Bible or gave them a radically new interpretation. They called their exegetical method midrash—a word derived from darash: “to investigate; go in search of something.” The meaning of scripture was not, therefore, self-evident; it had to be ferreted out by diligent study, and because it was God’s word, it was infinite and could not be confined to a single interpretation. Indeed, every time a Jew confronted the sacred text, it should mean something different.106 The rabbis felt free to argue with God, defy him, and even change the words of scripture to introduce a more compassionate reading.107 Yes, God was often described as a divine warrior in the Bible, but Jews must imitate only his compassionate behavior.108 The true hero was no longer a warrior but a man of peace. “Who is the hero of heroes?” asked the rabbis. “He who turns an enemy into a friend.”109 A “mighty” man did not prove his mettle on the battlefield but was one “who subdues his passions.”110 When the prophet Isaiah had seemed to praise a soldier “who thrusts back his attacker to the gate,” he was really speaking of “those who thrust a parry in the way of Torah.”111 The rabbis described Joshua and David as pious Torah scholars and even argued that David had had no interest in warfare at all.112 When the Egyptian army drowned in the Sea of Reeds, some of the angels had wanted to sing Yahweh’s praises, but he had rebuked them: “My children lie drowned in the sea, and you would sing?”113

  The rabbis acknowledged that there were divinely ordained wars in their scriptures. They concluded that the campaigns against the Canaanites had been “obligatory” wars, but the Babylonian rabbis ruled that because these peoples no longer existed, warfare could no longer be compulsory.114 The Palestinian rabbis, however, whose position in Roman Palestine was more precarious, argued that Jews were still obliged to fight sometimes—but only in self-defense.115 David’s territorial wars had been “discretionary,” but the rabbis pointed out that even kings had to ask permission of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish governing body, before taking the field. Yet they concluded that because the monarchy and Sanhedrin were no more, discretionary wars were no longer legitimate. They also interpreted a verse in the Song of Songs in such a way as to discourage mass uprisings that could lead to gentile reprisals: “I charge you, daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles, by the hinds of the field, not to stir my love, nor rouse it, till it please to awake.”116 Israelites must not take provocative action (“to stir love”); there must be no mass migrations to the Land of Israel and no more rebellions against gentile rule until God issued a directive (“till it please to awake”). If they remained quiet, God would not permit persecution, but if they disobeyed, they would, “like the hinds of the field,” be fair game for gentile violence.117 This abstruse piece of exegesis effectively put a brake on Jewish political action for over a millennium.118

  By the middle of the third century CE, the Roman Empire was in crisis. The new Sassanian dynasty in Persia had conquered Roman territory in Cilicia, Syria, and Cappadocia; the Gothic tribes in the Danube basin continuously attacked the frontier; and Germanic warrior bands harried Roman garrisons in the Rhine Valley. In a short span of sixteen years (268–84), eight emperors were assassinated by their own troops. The economy was in ruins, and local aristocracies fought for power in the cities.119 Rome was eventually saved by a military revolution, led by professional soldiers from the frontier region, which transformed the Roman army.120 Aristocrats no longer filled the top positions, the army doubled in size, and legions were broken up into smaller, more flexible detachments. A mobile cavalry force, the comitatus, supported the garrisons on the borders, and for the first time Roman citizens were taxed to finance the army. By the end of the third century, the barbarians in the Balkans and northern Italy had been repulsed, the Persian advance had been halted, and Rome had recovered its lost territory. The new Roman emperors were no longer of noble birth: Diocletian (r. 284–305) was the son of a freedman of Dalmatia, Galerius (r. 305–11) a former cattle herder in Carpathia, and Constantius Chlorus (r. 305–06) an undistinguished country gentleman from Nis. They centralized the empire, taking direct control of taxation instead of leaving it to the local nobility, and most significantly, Diocletian shared power with three co-emperors by creating the tetrarchy (“rule of four”): Maximian and Constantius Chlorus governed the western provinces, and Diocletian ruled in the east with Galerius.121

  The third-century crisis brought Christianity to the attention of the imperial authorities. Christians had never been popular; by refusing to take part in the civic cult, they seemed suspicious and easily became scapegoats at times of social tension. According to Tacitus, Nero had blamed Christians for the great fire of Rome and put many to death—these people may be the martyrs seated near God’s throne in the book of Revelation.122 The North African theologian Tertullian (c. 160–220) complained: “If the Tiber rises to the walls, if the Nile fails to rise and flood the fields, if the sky withholds its rain, if there is earthquake or famine or plague, straightway the cry arises: ‘The Christians to the lions!’ ”123 But it was not customary for an agrarian ruling class to interfere with the religious lives of its subjects, and the empire had no standard policy of persecution. In 112, when Pliny, governor of Bithynia, asked the emperor Trajan how he should treat Christians who were brought before him, Trajan replied that there was no official procedure. Christians should not be actively hunted out, he advised, but if they came before the courts for some reason and refused to sacrifice to the Roman gods, they should be executed for defying the imperial government
. Christians who did die in this way were venerated in their communities, and the Acts of the Martyrs, which told the stories of their deaths in lurid detail, were read aloud in the liturgy.

  Yet against all odds, by the third century Christianity had become a force to be reckoned with. We still do not really understand how this came about.124 It has been suggested that the rise of other new religious movements in the empire had made Christianity appear less bizarre. People were now seeking the divine in a human being who was a “friend of God” rather than in a holy place; secret societies, not unlike the Church, were mushrooming throughout the empire. Like Christianity, many of these had originated in the eastern provinces, and they too required a special initiation, offered a new revelation, and demanded a conversion of life.125 Christianity was also beginning to appeal to merchants and artisans like Paul, who had left their hometowns and taken advantage of the Pax Romana to travel and settle elsewhere; many had lost touch with their roots and were open to new ideas. The egalitarian ethic of Christianity made it popular with the lower classes and slaves. Women found the Church attractive, because the Christian scriptures instructed husbands to treat their wives considerately. Like Stoicism and Epicureanism, Christianity promised inner tranquillity, but its way of life could be followed by the poor and illiterate as well as by members of the aristocracy. The Church had also begun to appeal to some highly intelligent men, such as the Alexandrian Platonist Origen (185–254), who interpreted the faith in a way that interested the educated public. As a result of all this, the Church had become a significant organization. It was not religio licita, one of the approved traditions of the empire, so could not own property, but it had ejected some of its wilder elements, and like the empire itself, it claimed to have a single rule of faith; it was multiracial, international, and administered by efficient bureaucrats.126