Ideas

by Peter Watson

  Paul’s differences in belief, compared with the disciples in Jerusalem, lay mainly in two areas. One, as we have seen, was his conviction that he was to preach among Gentiles. To begin with, this may have been special groups of non-Jews, sympathisers with the Israelite tradition but who refused circumcision, and were known as ‘god-fearers’ (Acts 13:26).14 Allied to this was Paul’s belief that Jesus was not just a martyr, but divine, and that his death had a more profound meaning–profound for those outside Israel and profound historically speaking.15 Paul’s aim, here, according to Christopher Rowland, cannot be understood without reminding ourselves of his Hellenistic background, in particular the idea of a salvation-god and the fallen state of man. The classic example of a saviour god, it will be recalled, was the cult that worshipped the Egyptian deity, Osiris. Followers of this god believed that he had once died and risen from the dead and that, through ritual worship, they could emulate his fate. Paul has also to be seen against a background of the many Gnostic sects, some of which had adopted Platonist ideas and taught that every human was a compound of an immortal soul ‘imprisoned’ in a physical (and mortal) body. Originally, the Gnostics said, the soul had fallen from its ‘abode of light and bliss’ and descended to the material world. In becoming ‘incarnated’ in this world, the soul had been ensnared by the demonic forces that inhabited earth (and other planets) and could be rescued only by a ‘proper knowledge’ (gnosis) of its nature. It was the object of gnosis to release the soul from its imprisonment in the body, so that it could return to its original abode.16 Paul’s Christianity was thus an amalgam of three elements: Jewish-Christianity (Jesus’ belief in a saviour-God and saviour-Messiah), pagan-saviour-gods and Gnostic ideas about the fallen state of man. The latter two ideas were anathema to the Jerusalem Christians, as was Paul’s view that the Law of Moses had been superseded by Jesus’ arrival.17 When Paul travelled to Jerusalem to negotiate these beliefs with the Jerusalem Christians he was set upon by a mob. He was rescued by Roman soldiers, whereupon he asserted his right as a Roman citizen to be tried before the imperial tribunal (he would almost certainly have been lynched in Jerusalem). This trial appears to have taken place in the year 59, though the verdict isn’t known.

  Paul’s ideas caught on because they seemed to account for what had happened. In Jewish tradition a cataclysm would precede the coming of the Kingdom and what was the sacking of Jerusalem, if it wasn’t a cataclysm? These events were seen as the forerunner of the Messiah’s return and the end of the world.18 Paul himself shared some of these views–for example, he never bothered to date his epistles, as if time didn’t matter. But of course, the Messiah didn’t reappear, the Second Coming didn’t materialise and, gradually, the early Christians had to adjust. They did not abandon their hopes of apocalypse, but that aspect of their belief system gradually assumed less importance. And this brought about another innovation of Paul. Hitherto, Jewish-Christianity had accepted the basically Jewish view of history, that time would culminate with the coming of the Messiah. But for Christians Jesus had come. If his incarnation was part of God’s plan for mankind, then time must be seen as having two phases, one that lasted from the Creation to the birth of Jesus, the preparation of Israel for the coming of Christ, which was documented by the Jewish scriptures; and a second phase from the time of Jesus forward. Paul had referred to the writings of the Jews as the Old Covenant, or Testament, and he now spoke of Jesus instituting a new covenant.19 He saw Jesus as a saviour, a path for people to follow, by which they might obtain eternal life. In this way, Christianity became a religion of Gentiles and actively sought converts, as the only true way to salvation.

  Paul also provided early Christianity with much of its ‘colouring’ around the edges. He condemned idol worship, sexuality and, implicitly, the practice of philosophy.20 In Rome in the early years, Christians often paraded their ignorance and lack of education, associating independent philosophical thinking with the sin of pride.21 Finally, we must note that this form of Christianity, Paul’s kind, emerged in a Roman world, with Roman law and surrounded by Roman–pagan–gods. (Paganus = villager.) Loyalty to Rome, very important in the imperial context, meant acceptance of the divinity of the emperor and acceptance of the state gods, which were much older than Christianity. Tacitus (c. 55–116) was just one who dismissed Christianity as ‘a new superstition’.

  In Rome the secular and religious life had always been intertwined. Each city in the empire was ‘protected’ by its own god and the buildings in ancient Rome, from baths to circuses, were graced with statues of the gods, with altars and small shrines. Augustus was very concerned with the religious life and during his reign restored eighty-two temples which had fallen into disrepair and authorised the building of another thirteen.22 But no one in the pagan world expected religion to provide an answer to the meaning of life. People looked to philosophy for that kind of understanding. Instead, Romans worshipped the pagan gods to seek help during crisis, to secure divine blessing for the state, and to experience ‘a healing sense of community with the past’.23 The Christian god seemed to educated pagans as primitive. Whereas it made sense for a great emperor and warrior such as Alexander the Great to be a god, or the son of god, to worship a poor Jew who had died a criminal’s death in a remote corner of the empire made no sense.24 Although there were many gods which the pagans worshipped, and shrines everywhere (‘The shrine is the very soul of the countryside’, said one writer), in practice three cults in Rome were more important than the others. These were worship of the emperor, of Isis, and of Mithras.

  Julius Caesar was deified posthumously after his death in 44 BC, the first emperor to receive this accolade. Being related to Caesar, Augustus openly referred to himself as the ‘son of [the] god’.25 He too was deified after his death, as was his successor, Tiberius. His successor, Caligula, deified himself during his lifetime. The pagans had a tradition of free thought and citizens were free to vary in the literalness with which they viewed the emperor as god. In the western part of the empire, it was often the emperor’s numen, a general divine power, attaching to the rank, which was worshipped. In the east, on the other hand, it was often the man himself who was believed to be a god.

  Many worshipped Apollo, the predominantly solar deity, which was encouraged by Augustus but also popular was the cult of Isis and Serapis (originally Osiris), which had been first conceived in Egypt. Serapis was identified with the divine Bull, Apis, which Osiris turned into after death, and this allowed him to be linked to Zeus, Poseidon and Dionysus, all of whom were associated with bulls in the Middle East. Isis was the mistress of magic and the bringer of civilisation to the world. She was a saviour-goddess, and reminiscent of the Great Goddess of earlier ages.26 Mithraism was an offshoot of the Zoroastrian religion in Persia. The emperor Commodus (180–192) worshipped Mithras and the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius founded a Mithraic temple on the Vatican hill. This cult appears to have begun in Syria around AD 60 and was brought to Rome by soldiers: it remained a religion for soldiers, with no place for women in its rites.27 There was an elaborate, and fearsome, initiation ceremony and seven grades of membership. Followers were called sacrati, ‘consecrated ones’, and the practices included a communion meal. Possibly for this reason, many Christians saw the Mithras cult as a debased and blasphemous version of their own faith. One of the central ideas of Mithraism was the dualistic notion that there is abroad in the world a perennial battle between good and evil, light and darkness. This too was shared with Christianity and contrasted strongly with the rest of pagan ideas, which saw the natural world as either basically good, or neutral. The feast day of Mithras was 25 December (this was a world without weekends, remember, when feast days were the only holidays). Although these figures were the dominant ones, it was not in the Romans’ nature to conceive a monotheistic religion. They were more interested in finding links between their gods and the gods of other people. This made them tolerant.

  Besides the three main cults, there was a pagan institution
that was not paralleled in either Judaism or Christianity. This was the oracle. As in classical Greece, so in Rome: oracles were shrines, often much more than shrines, such as caves, where, it was believed, the gods spoke. Normally, an elaborate ritual was associated with this, with a dramatic and mysterious build-up, often at night. The gods spoke through individuals (the ‘prophet’) to whom the pilgrims put questions. Sometimes, the prophet was a local priest, sometimes he or she was chosen from among the pilgrims themselves. Sometimes there were two: one made inchoate noises, and the other turned them into verse. The best known were the oracles to Apollo at Didyma and Claros, both on the Ionian coast of modern Turkey. Robin Lane Fox tells us that pilgrims to Claros came from forty-eight cities stretching from modern Bulgaria to Crete and Corinth.28

  Judaism and Christianity differed from pagan religions in the important respect that they offered ‘revelation’ rather than mystery. Each of the pagan cults offered a secret experience, initiation by way of ceremony, leading to a specific experience and message. Judaism and Christianity, on the other hand, offered a general truth, applicable and available to all, and were quite open about it.29

  Christianity had been a separate religion from Judaism since the time of Paul. Following the Jewish revolt, and the destruction of Jerusalem, in 66–70, it had taken the Jews about twenty years to reorganise themselves. This they had done by abolishing the Temple priesthood and its sacrifices, replacing it with a rabbinical structure and, in the process, excommunicating all Christians.

  Many of the most basic Christian ideas were anathema in Rome. For example, the idea of the spiritual worth of the poor was revolutionary. In the same way heresy was a foreign notion. People were free in Rome to belong to as many cults as they liked, though atheism was frowned upon. (Atheism, as we mean it, didn’t exist. ‘Atheists’ were Epicureans, who denied the gods’ providence, though not their existence.30) The implacable nature of the early Christians can be gauged from the behaviour of one group, who sold themselves into slavery in order to ransom fellow Christians who had been imprisoned.31 The fact that women played a conspicuous role in the early Christian congregations was also at odds with Roman practice. But the greatest difference between the ideas of pagans and Jews on the one hand, and Christians on the other, lay in their attitudes to death. Pagans and Jews died and even if they believed in some sort of ‘afterlife’–the Islands of the Blessed, for example–they did not envisage full bodily resurrection here on earth. The Christians did. The Second Coming might no longer be seen as imminent, but there was no doubt that, one day, resurrection in the full sense would occur.32

  At that time, however, the empire was suffering on several fronts. There was a trade recession, the birth rate was falling, the Goths were threatening across the Danube and, to cap it all, the army returning from the east in 165–167 had brought with it the plague. This situation was made worse in the years that followed, as Rome allowed migrating tribespeople from outside the empire to join the army and, in consequence, to settle inside the boundaries (limes). Control of many units soon passed to able barbarians and, since the army played a major role in electing emperors, this diversity and instability was reflected in politics. Of the twenty emperors between 235 and 284 all but three were assassinated.33 These circumstances were propitious for new ideas to flourish. One was the rise of Neoplatonism, brought from Alexandria to Rome by Ammonius (fl. 235), Plotinus (204–275) and Porphry (fl. 270). They taught the ultimate unity of all religions, preaching the doctrine of ‘emanation’ from the spiritual Unity, the One, to the material multiplicity of the world. The Neoplatonists were rivalled by Mani (d. 276), who taught the essential evilness of the material world and the necessity for believers to continually purify themselves, in order to approach closer and closer to the eternal Light.34 Mani believed that each human being had an angelic Twin, watching over and guarding him or her. Particles of light and goodness were trapped in evil matter, and both eating meat and working the soil were anathema. Stories were told about how vegetables had once wept to Mani, as they were about to be cut, and palm trees complained when they were about to be pruned.35 When the Elect died, they went to the kingdom of light, whereas disbelievers went to hell at the ending of the world. This, the Future Moment, would follow Jesus’ Second Coming, when the world would collapse in a massive fire lasting 1,468 years.

  With orthodox and even heretical Christians unable and/or unwilling to accept the traditional practices of Rome, and with so many of their own ways at variance with established ritual behaviour, their faith and their loyalty naturally came under suspicion. Although the early church was not consistently suppressed (by 211 there were bishops around the Mediterranean and as far afield as Lyons), there were emperors who were very cruel in the number of martyrs they created. Given the apocalyptic view of the early Christians, this only added to their sense of mission and drama (virgins had sixty times the reward of ordinary Christians in heaven, it was affirmed, but martyrs received rewards a hundredfold).36 And so, when Constantine became emperor in AD 312, and the fortunes of Christianity changed, persecution being replaced by favour, there was a great sense of triumph.37 By this stage a canon of scriptures had emerged, which confirmed for the faithful that the ‘divine purpose for mankind’ had two phases, and that the slow but steady triumph of the Christian doctrine was part of that purpose.

  This takes us back to the new view of time. Traditionally, time had been seen as moving in cycles. This was reinforced by the movements of the stars, each of which had a cycle, and many people felt that once these cycles were understood the mystery of the heavens would be revealed. But a cyclical view of time in a sense made history meaningless (it just repeated itself), whereas Christians now came to see time as a linear process, according to God’s will. This meant that history moved towards a definite end, or teleos. The birth of Christ was the focal point in this linear process, but it now became the purpose of Christianity to understand the role of the incarnation as a way to help the salvation of all humans on earth. The early Christian writers were not backward in making the most of this situation. For example, Julius Africanus (c. 160–240) argued that the world would last for six thousand years. According to his calculations the birth of Christ had occurred exactly 5,500 years after the Creation and therefore, by his lifetime, there were about three hundred years waiting before God accomplished his divine purpose. In this way, Christianity was set apart. In the creation myths of other religions, there were only vague references to events that occurred in an indeterminate and remote past. But Christianity was specific; for Christians their God had intervened in history, proving he had a purpose, and that he was the true god.

  These ideas had great appeal, the more so for the poorer slaves and labourers of the Roman empire. The reasons were obvious enough: Christianity argued that ‘suffering is noble’ and offered a better world in the future, with the Second Coming imminent. This was most attractive for people at the bottom of the ladder and it was among the urban masses, rather than the Roman aristocracy, or the upper ranks of the army, for example, that the new religion caught on. (The pagans did not, of course, just give way. The emperor Maximin Daia introduced anti-Christian schoolbooks, which pictured Jesus as a slave and a criminal.38)

  Not even the most passionate Christian, however, could wait for the Second Coming for ever, and other devices were needed. One was provided by persecution. To begin with, as has been noted, the Romans were fairly tolerant, and required only that conquered peoples recognise Roman gods in the same spirit as their own. But they grew less tolerant after the inauguration of emperor-worship. Like many ancient peoples they believed that the continued prosperity of the state depended on continuing favour of the gods. Christians did more than refuse to worship the Roman gods, and the Roman emperor: the very idea of salvation, or a Second Coming, implied the overthrow of the state by somebody. That was bad enough but when they refused to hold public office or to undergo military service, that was a more direct affront. Moreover,
in their services they did not distinguish between slaves and masters and that was an equally serious social flaw. They did pray to their God for the ‘welfare of the state’ but it wasn’t enough and, slowly, imperial policy turned against the Christians.39 First, the emperor Trajan made it a capital offence to fail to pay homage to the emperor. Then, in 248, after Christians had refused to take part in the celebrations to mark the thousandth anniversary of the founding of Rome, they became especially unpopular and Decius decreed that everyone must appear before a magistrate to offer sacrifice to the Roman gods. At this time, according to some estimates, Christians comprised as many as 10 per cent of the population and so the population of martyrs was especially high. But the Christians counter-argued that the reason for the obvious decline in the empire, which was evident to all at the time, lay in the fact that the Romans worshipped the wrong gods. This began to cut some ice with the upper classes and forced both Valerian and Diocletian to attempt to root out Christianity completely, by threatening senators with loss of office for life, if they converted, by purging the army, by destroying churches and burning books.

  By the third century, a curious cross-over time had been reached, when ‘the desire for martyrdom was almost out of control’.40 By now Christians deliberately flouted Roman practices–they insulted magistrates and destroyed effigies of the pagan gods, in an attempt to emulate the suffering of Jesus. Persecution was what they sought. ‘For suffering one hour of earthly torture, it was believed, the martyr would gain an eternity of immortal bliss.’41 These were (depending on your point of view) fine sentiments. But in fact the crucial change, from persecuted religion to the official faith of the empire, came about not for any fundamental change in philosophy in Rome but because one emperor, Constantine (306–337), found Christianity more practically useful. In 312, at the battle of the Milvian bridge, outside Rome, Constantine faced the usurper, Maxentius. Constantine was advised by his Christian supporters that if he sought support of their God, he would win. In some accounts he is reported to have had a vision in which he was instructed to have his troops paint a looped cross, , on their shields.42 He agreed, and his victory was decisive. Thereafter, he allowed all faiths in the empire to worship their own gods and, most importantly, removed the legal constraints that had been directed at Christians. From then until his own deathbed conversion, Constantine believed that he was guided by Christ. In frescoes he was depicted with his head surrounded by the nimbus of a saint.