In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

by Tom Holland

  A ringing statement—but ambiguous all the same. It was given to few Christians to claim, as Paul himself had done, a personal vision of the risen Christ. How, then, in the absence of such direct communications, were the faithful to know what, precisely, “the way” might be? Jesus himself, when commanding his followers to “make disciples of all nations,” had instructed them to do so “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”54 Here, however, was only further ambiguity—for who, or what, was “the Holy Spirit”? The answer to this question, one that many generations of Christian sages would labour at providing, did not come easily: for it touched upon the ineffable mystery that was the identity of God Himself. How fortunate it was, then, for the less intellectually inclined among the faithful, that the Holy Spirit might be experienced without necessarily being comprehended. Whether imagined as a dove, or as fire, or as a sound “from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind,”55 it was, so Christians believed, the very breath of the divine upon the world. Whenever they felt themselves moved by the rapture of faith, a flickering-like ecstasy about their souls, then they could know themselves possessed by the Spirit. Not, however, that the evidence of its workings was confined to their inner lives. The Spirit was to be traced as well in the unity that it brought to the Christian people everywhere. No matter where these men and women might live, no matter what their status, they had all shared a single ceremony of initiation: an immersion in water that they termed “baptism.” “For by one Spirit we were all baptised into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.”56 Without it, there could be no unity, no shared Ecclesia—no Church.

  Which meant in turn that Christians everywhere could throw themselves into the business of constructing a globe-spanning bureaucracy and feel that they were thereby serving the purposes of their Lord. A relish for firing off letters was yet another way in which Paul had blazed a trail. Long-distance communications were cherished by the faithful throughout the Roman and the Iranian worlds as the lifeblood of the Church. The most trivial, as well as the most transcendent, topics were vigorously debated by Christians across the entire sweep of the rival empires. Not even a Caesar, not even a Shahanshah, could boast a perspective to match. Christians, well aware of this, positively gloried in the fact: “Any country can be their homeland—and yet their homeland, wheresoever it may be, is to them a foreign place.”57 There seemed no limit to the expanding scope of their identity.

  Yet it was not only by thinking on a global scale that the Christian Church had succeeded in fashioning itself, over the course of barely a few centuries, into the most formidable non-governmental organisation that the world had ever seen. It operated locally as well. Little more than a generation after Jesus’s crucifixion, Christians had already grown obsessed with the need for disciplined book-keeping. The paperwork of each individual church had duly been entrusted to an official chosen by the local congregation to serve as an “overseer,” or “episcopos”: a “bishop.” Soon enough, however, and these same bureaucrats had begun soaringly to outgrow their origins as mere functionaries. Three centuries on, and it had become the entitlement of a bishop to rule almost as a monarch over the congregation that selected him. He it was who would act as spokesman for local Christians in their dealings with the broader Church; move to resolve their problems and defend them in times of crisis; define for them their beliefs, and prescribe for them the texts they should read, and answer for them before God. “It is manifest that we should look upon the bishop even as we would look upon the Lord Himself—standing, as he does, before the Lord.”58

  Here, then, was authority such as even a Roman or a Persian aristocrat might appreciate. Although bishops tended to shun the silks and jewels beloved of the upper classes, the coarse wool of their robes could not disguise the fact that they too, like any great magnate, dealt ultimately in patronage. “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor.”59 This injunction of Christ’s, while not always followed to the letter, had nevertheless inspired among Christians a tradition of charity that was capable of providing bishops, the men who administered its fruits, with immense reserves of largesse. In city after city, the Church had come to constitute not merely a state within a state but something altogether more exceptional: a welfare state. In a world where there were few safety nets for the destitute, or the widowed, or the sick, this might serve to endow the local bishop with an often brilliant aura of holiness—and holiness, to the Christian people, spelled power. Much, in turn, was bound to flow from this. With power, a bishop could impose discipline upon his flock; and with discipline, the Church could maintain itself as something truly universal—as “catholic.” Three centuries on from the lifetime of Christ, and there was nothing that would have borne a surer witness to the glory of His triumph over death, and to the workings of the Holy Spirit, than a Christian people who stood as one.

  Certainly, as their propagandists never tired of pointing out, there was nothing in all the bewildering kaleidoscope of idolatrous cults that could remotely compare with the sense of common identity that most Christians did authentically share. That did not mean, however, that the Christian people enjoyed a perfect unity. Far from it. The world remained a realm of sin, and the body of the Church, as that of Christ had been upon the cross, was racked and twisted by the tortures inflicted upon it by the wicked. Not everyone who laid claim to the name of Christian was necessarily willing to acknowledge the authority of a bishop. “Beware of false prophets,” Christ Himself had warned, “who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravening wolves.”60 Food for thought—for how to tell a sheep from a wolf disguised inside a fleece? Writing in Carthage, a famous and wealthy city in North Africa, a Christian philosopher by the name of Tertullian had proffered some helpful advice: “It is the sources and the originals of the faith which must be accounted the truth.”61 Nothing was to be reckoned authentically Christian, in other words, that could not be traced, generation back through generation, to the time of Christ Himself, and of His first followers, the apostles. If this was true for doctrine, Tertullian argued, then so also was it true for priests. Any bishop who stood in a line of succession from one of the original apostles served as the heir of a Christian who had been blessed by the hands of the Son of God. What better pedigree than that? “For, undoubtedly, it preserves what the churches received from the apostles, the apostles from Christ, and Christ from God.”62

  A clinching display of logic, it might have been thought—except that other Christians too could play the same game. Formidable and peerless though the organisation of the self-proclaimed “catholic” Church might be, it was not alone in looking back to the primal origins of the faith to sanction its doctrines. Indeed, there was a sense in which the very efforts of its servants to carve a straight path through all the wilds of potential belief—an “orthodoxy”—served only to open up alternative routes. The existence of a linked network of bishoprics across the span of the known world reflected an understanding of Christ’s teachings that had been shaped, above all, by Paul: an understanding that viewed the Church as a body universal, defined by faith rather than law, and ablaze with “the power of the Holy Spirit.”63 All these presumptions, however, might readily be challenged. Why, for instance, should the Church not remain what it had been back in the very earliest days of its existence: a pure body of the elect, small to be sure, but untainted by the outside world? And how was it, if the Torah were a matter of sublime irrelevance, as Paul had taught, that Christ Himself had so emphatically stated the exact opposite: “till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished”?64

  Even this, however, was not to touch upon the profoundest, the most dizzying, the most perplexing question of all: what precisely was the relationship of the Holy Spirit to Christ, and of Christ, the Son of God, to His Heavenly Father? Once again, it was Tertullian—never one to shirk a challenge—who provided the most wide
ly accepted answer. God, he explained, was Three: Father, Son and Spirit. Likewise, these three aspects of the divinity—the creator, the redeemer and the inspirer—were One. A paradox, of course—but one that Tertullian, who had not been expensively schooled in the subtleties of Greek philosophy for nothing, saw as expressive of the very essence of the divine. God, who was Three in One, and One in Three, was best thought of, he explained, as a Trinitas—a “Trinity.”

  Yet even Tertullian, despite the triumphant swagger with which he had made his case, had been under no illusion that he had proved it: “The mystery stays guarded.”65 Which was putting it mildly. Any number of slippery issues still remained to be pinned down. If God were truly One, for instance, did that mean the Son was not, as His title implied, subordinate to the Father but in every way His equal? The tendency in orthodox circles was increasingly to answer “yes”; but the fact that this implied a Son who was no less eternal than His own parent, an apparent illogicality that had worried Tertullian himself, ensured that there were plenty of Christians who scorned to agree. This, of course, in a Church where there were few means of enforcing a specific orthodoxy other than by exhortation and argument, they were perfectly at liberty to do; and it ensured that the spectrum of Christian beliefs held by the Christian people, rather than narrowing as time went on, came instead to embody a quite bewildering range of shades. It was all very well for the likes of Tertullian to argue that an impregnable mystery lay at the heart of the faith; but there were many Christians who found it difficult to leave the matter simply at that. Too much was at stake. The irreducible message of the Christian faith—that God, through the agency of Jesus, had somehow intruded into the mortal fabric of human flesh—raised as many questions as it answered, not only about the essence of the divine but about who precisely Jesus might have been. Equally God and equally man: such, three hundred years after the crucifixion, had come to be the favoured orthodoxy among the leaders of the Church. But it was not the only one. There were some Christians who argued that Jesus had been completely divine, with not a trace of the human about him. There were others who claimed that his body had provided a mortal shell for the heavenly Spirit, which was presumed to have descended upon him during his baptism, and abandoned him before he died on the cross. There were still others who insisted that Jesus had been the adopted Son of God—flesh and blood, like any other man, but no less the Christ for that. Not a permutation of beliefs, in short, but some group of Christians, somewhere, might choose to subscribe to it.

  And it was precisely this range of opinion—hairesis, in Greek—that drove those who wished to affirm a single orthodoxy to distraction.c Of course, every Christian sect liked to imagine that its own understanding of Christ constituted the way, the truth, the life; but it was the self-proclaimed “catholic” Church, by virtue of its sheer scale, which had the most weight to throw around. The most to lose as well if it did not. Painstakingly, over the course of the centuries, it had set itself to the formidable task of clearing any number of doctrinal booby-traps from the feet of the faithful. Understandably, then, its scholars and leaders had little patience for those who would sabotage such a project. Christians who rejected the Church’s authority were increasingly viewed not as fellow travellers but rather as souls lost upon crooked paths, agents of error who had wilfully chosen to abandon the one, true road of orthodoxy—as “heretics.” Nothing they touched so sacred or so precious, but they would attempt to sabotage it. “For their behaviour is exactly like that of someone who, when an exquisite mosaic of a king has been fashioned by a great artist out of rare stones, takes the mosaic completely to pieces, and rearranges the jewels, and puts them back together to make the image of a dog or a fox—and a poorly executed one at that.”66

  Such bitterness was hardly surprising. The efforts made by generations of Christian scholars to establish the truth of what Christ might have said and done had indeed been as punctilious as those of any master-mosaicist. Only the most finely calibrated measuring-rod—a canon, in Greek—had been deployed for the purpose. Just as was required by the most exacting standards of the historians of the day, no gospel had been passed as “canonical” that could not be shown, to the satisfaction of catholic scholars, to derive from the authentic evidence of eyewitnesses to the events described.67 Increasingly, only four such gospels—two attributed to disciples of Jesus; one to a disciple of Simon Peter, the chief of the apostles; and one to an associate of Paul—had come to be regarded as measuring up. Yet still, a hundred, two hundred, even three hundred years after the crucifixion, biographies of Christ continued to be cranked out. Of course, gospels such as these, composed at such a remove of time, could hardly have any great claims to biographical accuracy; but biographical accuracy, to those who composed them, was hardly the point. For many writers, the motivation might be as simple as a desire to entertain, by telling fabulous stories, and filling in some obvious gaps. What kind of games, for instance, had the infant Saviour enjoyed while playing with His friends? A host of gospels had not hesitated to provide the answer.68 Christ’s favourite stunt as a child, so it was revealed, had been to make clay birds, breathe on the sculptures, and then bring them to life. Not, perhaps, quite as edifying an anecdote as those to be found in the four canonical gospels—but innocent enough, certainly. Other adjustments to Christ’s biography, however, might be altogether more momentous in their implications. Some, indeed, might strike directly at the heart of Christian orthodoxy.

  When, for instance, a Christian named Basilides wished to demonstrate that Jesus had not died upon the cross, he made good the complete lack of evidence for this novel theory in the canonical gospels through a simple expedient: he wrote a whole new gospel of his own.69 The story of the crucifixion, in Basilides’s reworking of it, contained a hitherto unsuspected twist. Christ, as He was carrying His cross through the streets of Jerusalem, had magically swapped bodies with Simon of Cyrene, a man who had come to His assistance. As a result, it was the unfortunate Simon who had been crucified. Christ Himself, meanwhile, watching from a safe distance, had stood “roaring with laughter.”70

  But how precisely had Basilides come by this startling revelation? No less than his adversaries, he had perfectly appreciated the vital importance of pedigree. A gospel was nothing unless it could be traced back to a heavyweight informant. This was why, in offering to the world his account of the crucifixion, Basilides had made sure to attribute it to the classiest, the most impeccable source he could find: Simon Peter himself. Critics of Basilides, however, snorted at this claim as grotesque. Any notion that details of Christ’s life and teachings might have been kept secret from his mass of followers and passed down only among a privileged few, was dismissed by them out of hand. The claims of Basilides to a privileged gnosis, or “knowledge”—one supposedly denied to less enlightened Christians—was dismissed by his orthodox opponents as the merest braggadocio. After all, as they never tired of pointing out, he was only one of a swarming, buzzing crowd. There were any number of “Gnostics,” all with their own pretensions, all with their own scriptures. “The Church has four gospels, but the heretics have many.”71 That being so, how could any of them be trusted? All were clearly fabrications. None could plausibly be attributed to an apostle. Certainly, Basilides’s laughable insistence that his gospel derived from a succession of whispered reminiscences, passed down from generation to generation and never even once put into writing, was precisely what served to brand it a fraud: “For it is evident that the perfect truth of the Church derives from its high antiquity; and that all these many heresies, being more recent in time, and subsequent to the truth, are nothing but recent concoctions, manufactured from the truth.”72

  Except, of course, that any rabbi, contemplating the pretensions of the Gentile Church, might well have made an identical point. The Tanakh, after all, long pre-dated even the earliest gospel. Christian thinkers, as they struggled to establish the parameters of their faith, were often rendered profoundly uncomfortable by this reflecti
on. So much so, in fact, that one of them, a bishop’s son by the name of Marcion, was brought by it to take the ultimate step, and deny that he owed anything to the Jews at all. Rather than acknowledge the umbilical cord that linked the gospels to the Old Testament, he simply cut right through it. Christ, so he taught, shared nothing, absolutely nothing, with the Jewish god. One preached love and mercy and occupied the upper storeys of heaven; the other issued endless laws, punished all those who did not obey them, and smouldered away in the lower reaches of the sky. Some Christians, struck by the awful logic of this, were sufficiently convinced by Marcion’s teaching to establish a whole new church; others, the majority, shrank from it in horror. All of them, though, as they wrestled with the question of who or what Christ might have been, were wrestling as well with the issue of what their relationship to the Jewish past should properly be. If Jesus were truly the Messiah, then the failure of God’s Chosen People to recognise that fact could rank only as a monstrous embarrassment. Self-evidently, however, the blame for such a scandal had to lie not with Christ but with the Jews themselves. Increasingly, then, the claim of the Gentile Church to embody the fulfilment of the Jewish scriptures required it to scorn the rival claims of the synagogues as thunderously as possible: “For I declare that they of the seed of Abraham who follow the Law, and do not come to believe in Christ before they die, will not be saved.”73 The Torah was a dung-heap; its students pickers after trash; all its great array of dictates a mere monument to desiccation. Never before had there been an attempt at disinheritance on quite so audacious a scale.