The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason

by Charles Freeman

  10

  “A CROWD THAT LURKS IN CORNERS, SHUNNING THE LIGHT” The First Christian Communities

  The author of the Acts of the Apostles may never have met Paul, but he knew the Greco-Roman world well and had no inhibitions about making Paul part of it. He describes how on one of their journeys among “the Galatians” Paul and Barnabas reached the city of Lystra, in the south of the Roman province of Galatia. Here they came across a man who had been crippled since birth. Paul cured him, and the man, for the first time in his life, began to walk. The crowds shouted out in amazement: “These people are gods who have come down to us disguised as men.” Barnabas was assumed to be Zeus and Paul Hermes, the Greek messenger god.1 The priests were bringing up garlanded oxen for sacrifice when Paul and Barnabas persuaded them that they believed in another “living God” (Acts 14). Many continued to believe that they were gods, but the fantasy was soon shattered when Jewish opponents of Paul appeared and drove him from the city, even leaving him for dead. The story survives as a reminder that in the Greco-Roman world, unlike the world of Judaism, human beings could appear to cross the boundary between human and divine. While Peter and Paul had implied that Jesus became someone “exalted” by God only on his death, it was now possible, in this very different spiritual setting, to assume that he might always have been divine. The interplay between the memories of Jesus and the spiritually fertile culture of the Greek world was to be an immensely creative one, and its legacy survives in interpretations of Jesus still held today.

  It is within this new cultural context that we can view the Gospel of John (which is usually dated to about A.D. 100). The background of its author is unknown and the subject of much speculation (the earliest tradition, which holds that it was written by John the Apostle, now has little scholarly support), including the suggestion that an original narrative was reworked over time by later contributors. The different emphases on the relationship between Christ and God, mentioned below, suggest two distinct conceptions of the divinity of Christ. Unlike in Matthew, there is little emphasis in the Gospel on the church as an institution, and it is assumed that John, who may well have been Jewish himself, was writing for a marginal Christian community, possibly Jewish in origin but now separate from and antagonistic to mainstream Judaism. It appears to have been uncertain of itself and riven by internal conflict. Yet it was these tensions that provided a springboard for John’s creative theological thinking. John has to provide a clear image of Jesus that will unite and heal. He does this not by reproducing any specific ethical commands (there is no equivalent of the Sermon on the Mount, for instance) but by making general exhortations “to love one another.” Jesus becomes divine (which, of course, effectively separates him from the world of Judaism) and strongly associated with symbols of unity and care, the vine and its branches, the shepherd and his flock.

  John may have drawn on one of Jesus’ own disciples as a witness (“the beloved disciple” who is mentioned in the Gospel but never identified), and so, despite its late date in comparison to the Synoptic Gospels, his Gospel may contain some historical detail—about Jesus’ trial, for instance—not known from elsewhere. Some of the places around Jerusalem John mentions were completely unknown until recent excavations have shown they really did exist. It has even been suggested that John’s community lived in Palestine, and another possibility is Ephesus. Yet while John may contain “new” details about Jesus’ life that are historically accurate, his overall narrative is not. John writes for theological effect and adapts the sequence of events accordingly. Jesus’ entry into the Temple, realistically placed in the Synoptic Gospels just before his arrest, comes, in John, at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry (2:13–22) and may have been placed there to symbolize Jesus’ transcendence over traditional Jewish religious practice. This rearrangement is typical of John’s approach; his Gospel is structured to highlight a number of signs in Jesus’ ministry that proclaim his status as the Son of God to those who can recognize them. The first, of seven, is the miracle at Cana, and the last, and perhaps best known, is the moving appearance to Thomas after the resurrection (20:24–29). Thomas doubts. Jesus appears and asks Thomas to place his hand in his wound. Thomas believes. 2

  In the famous prologue to the Gospel, “the Word [logos ] was made flesh.” It is not known how John absorbed Hellenistic philosophy, but he seems either to have been aware of assertions (of Philo, for instance) that God acted directly or indirectly through logos, the force of reason, or to have drawn on the concept of Wisdom as developed in Proverbs and other Jewish sources. According to John, “the Word” (the established English translation of logos but one which fails to bring out the complexity of the concept; the Latin verbum has the same problem) is described as being with God from the beginning but now is incarnated in Jesus. Platonic philosophy never countenanced the possibility of a Form becoming human, and the entry of logos into time and space as “flesh” was a bold innovation of John’s—the Incarnation, later to be such a central concept in Christian doctrine, is mentioned nowhere else in the New Testament. It opened up a rich seam in speculative theology that was to be fully exploited by the more philosophical of the Church Fathers. Logos, as we have seen, was always associated with rational truth; by equating Jesus with logos, John was assuming that what could be said about him might have the force of certainty. This was to be one of the founding stones of church authority. Furthermore, if Jesus is the logos and the logos has been with God from the beginning, then Jesus must be in some way divine. What this actually means is not always clear. Some passages of the Gospel assume that Jesus is part of the Godhead (“To have seen me is to have seen the Father” [14:9]; “I and the Father are one” [10:27–30]), others that Jesus is subordinate (“. . . for the Father is greater than I” [14:28]). At times the text comes close to asserting that Jesus even in his human form is above humanity, as in, for example, his foreknowledge of what is to happen to him. If we accept that John’s Gospel was reworked by several authors with different conceptions of Jesus’ relationship with God the Father, such inconsistencies are not surprising, but it should also be remembered that John was feeling his way into new theological territory and cannot be expected to address issues that arose only in later centuries. As in the case of Paul, John may never have imagined that his writings would be heard by anyone outside the community for which they were written.

  Jesus has been sent by the Father as “the Son.” This creation of Jesus as “the Son” with a particular mission through which God the Father is revealed is another of John’s innovations, although it reflects Platonic philosophy in that it equates to a Form, here the logos, being generated by “the Good.” There is a loving God who has sent his Son “so that everyone who believes in him may not be lost but have eternal life” (3:16).3 In other words, Jesus as the Son/logos has the purpose of linking men back to God and offering them salvation. His role is a wholly positive one. “The Son is sent into the world not to condemn the world [sic] but so that through him the world might be saved” (3:17). So in John we have moved away from the “angry” day of judgment made so much of by Paul, and Jesus is presented as light, and as an essentially nourishing force, “the bread of life.” John goes further in his theological innovations. While Jesus may have returned to the Father, his message lives on in the Holy Spirit. John elevates the power and importance of the Spirit, and in doing so creates the possibility of the concept of the Trinity, although it was to be a further 300 years before the doctrine was elaborated. John, late as he is in the sequence of Gospel writing, and writing, apparently, for a small group on the edges of institutional Christianity, provides fertile soil for the seedlings of Christian doctrine.

  However, making Jesus divine or part of the Godhead, as John does, also fostered one of the less happy developments in Christian theology. If the Jews (as a whole, rather than one faction of them, the Temple elite, which appears to have been historically the case) were responsible for Jesus’ death, then they were guilty of the murder n
ot just of a holy man but of God himself, in other words, of deicide. John is clearly aware of this implication, as we can see when he introduces sayings of Jesus in which Jesus rejects the Jews and foresees their role as his killers: “I know that you are descended from Abraham but in spite of that you want to kill me because nothing I say has penetrated into you”; “The devil is your father and you prefer to do what your father wants” (chapter 8). Whether John himself is attempting to distance the community he is addressing from Judaism (by the time he was writing Christians themselves were increasingly excluded from Jewish synagogues) or whether he believed this is what his Jesus would have actually said, his Gospel is clear in its rejection of Judaism.

  This trend was consolidated through another force that made hostility to Judaism an integral part of early Christianity, and that was its appropriation of the Hebrew scriptures. In the early years of Christianity, when the movement was an offshoot of Judaism, it was natural for Christians to use the Hebrew scriptures, as Jesus himself (from the original Hebrew) and Paul (from the Greek translation) had done, and they were now reinterpreted as foretelling the coming of Christ. Matthew had already done this in his Gospel, and the presentation of Jesus as “the suffering Messiah” drew heavily on the prophet Isaiah. However, as the Christian communities developed their own identity in the Greco-Roman world, they were forced to find further justification for their use of the texts of a religion from which they were now increasingly separate. It was perhaps inevitable that the argument would be made that the Jews had proved themselves not worthy of their own sacred texts. The fiery north African theologian Tertullian (c. 160–c. 240), the first Christian theologian to write in Latin (a reminder that for its first centuries the churches were overwhelmingly Greek-speaking), wove Paul’s views on circumcision into the argument: God had shown that circumcision was unnecessary by creating an “intact” Adam. He wrote: “And so truly in Christ are all things recalled to their beginning, so that faith has turned away from circumcision back to the integrity of the flesh as it was in the beginning.”

  He wrote in another work: “Accordingly . . . we who were not the people of God previously, have been made [sic] His people, by accepting the new law, and the new circumcision before foretold.” So, it followed, the Jews, by insisting on circumcision, were living in a state that was somehow spiritually and morally inferior to that of Christians, an idea that understandably outraged Jews, for whom circumcision was a mark of their commitment to God. The nature of the “inferiority” was elaborated by the Church Fathers. Justin Martyr (c. 100–c. 165) argued that God had had to provide the Law for the Jews “on account of their stubbornness and insubordination.” They had shown their insubordination by openly rejecting the Messiah, even though his coming had been prophesied in the scriptures and he had lived among them. Cyprian, bishop of Carthage (d. 258), preached: “We Christians, when we pray, say Our Father; because He has begun to be ours, and has ceased to be the Father of the Jews who have forsaken him.” No wonder, Christians argued, the Jews had suffered so badly at the hands of the Romans, their sacred city and Temple destroyed (A.D. 70) and a later revolt crushed by Hadrian (A.D. 132–35). Origen said: “They suffered because they were very ignoble people: and although they committed many sins they did not suffer from them any comparable calamities to those caused by what they had dared to commit against our Jesus.” 4

  Almost all the early Church Fathers wrote a work entitled Against the Jews (the second quotation from Tertullian above comes from one of them). It seems to have become part of an assertion of Christian identity, almost a ritual which had to be gone through to claim credentials as a Christian theologian. This does not mean that in this early period Christians were able to make any impact on Jewish communities, other than in the negative sense of breaking off any contact with them. They were simply too isolated and vulnerable themselves. It was only much later, when Christianity achieved political power, that hostility to Jews was to become an openly destructive force. The turning point is usually seen as the moment in 388 when Ambrose of Milan persuaded the emperor not to rebuild a synagogue that had been burned down by a Christian mob.

  The key to understanding the early Christian communities is their relative isolation and the desperate search for a distinct identity within a world whose gods and culture Paul had told them they must despise. To become a Christian was a conversion in the full sense of the word, a turning away from one belief system towards another, in this case one that was alien to and openly hostile to the Greco-Roman world. The consequence of the failure of the second coming was to leave Christians who followed Paul in a form of limbo. Jesus had rooted his teaching within his own religious tradition; in contrast, Gentile Christians withdrew from theirs. They focused on salvation in the next world rather than personal fulfillment or status in this one. We can assume that it was precisely this shared sense of knowing that they would be saved that provided the early Christian communities with their commitment and vigour.

  Yet to survive within a culture they defined as evil, Christians had necessarily to be secretive. One Christian of c. A.D. 200 described his coreligionists as “a crowd that lurks in hiding places, shunning the light; they are speechless in public but gabble away in corners.” 5 We have almost no evidence subsequent to the days of the Apostles of Christians preaching openly.6 Celsus, one of their early critics, accused them instead of infiltrating private houses and spreading their beliefs particularly among women and children, trying in the process to break up the household’s social structure.7 Christian isolation and caution is suggested in a text possibly from mid-third-century Syria: “We should shun evil in all respects, lest we give away what is holy to the dogs or cast pearls before swine . . . When pagans are assembled we do not sing psalms nor read scriptures lest we appear like musical entertainers.” 8

  This deliberate seclusion makes the understanding of early Christian history, particularly in its psychological and sociological dimensions, extremely difficult. The evidence is very limited. Documentary evidence does confirm that Christians met in the houses of their richer brethren and that Christians were able to construct their own underground burial places, the catacombs, in the lava rock around Rome. Nevertheless, only one Christian meeting place dating from before the fourth century has been found, at Dura-Europus in Syria. In contrast over 400 Mithraic meeting places have been discovered. One reason for the comparative lack of evidence may have been Christian teaching (Acts 17:24) that “the God who made the world and everything in it, being the Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by man.” This secretiveness also meant that what was known about Christians by contemporaries was both limited and vulnerable to distortion. The “eating of Christ’s body” and “drinking of his blood” at the Eucharist could easily be presented as some kind of cannibalism, and the stress on Christian love could be mistaken for free sexual love, always a concern to traditionalists because it threatened the breakdown of social order.9

  One of the many accusations made against Christians by their more sophisticated opponents was that they were of low social status. In the late second century Celsus, in the first survey of Christianity by an outsider to survive, complained that Christian communities were made up, among others, of wool-workers, cobblers and laundry workers, and that Christianity was suitable only for the most ignorant, slaves, women and children.10 This seems to be as much a reflection of Celsus’ snobbery as anything, since wealthier Christians are in fact known by name. An early example is one Lydia from Philippi, who was in the lucrative purple dye trade. Her conversion led to that of her whole household (Acts 16:13–16). Christianity drew converts from across the social spectrum, but specific groups were particularly welcomed. The ascetic element of early Christianity, with its particular distrust of sexuality, gave women who had renounced marriage or who were widows a haven often denied to them in traditional society. But there were disagreements over the roles that these women could play. The limited evidence suggests that while in Pau
l’s communities women were known and mentioned by name, over the next 200 years they were to be relegated to more subordinate roles in the church, a relegation justified by the sexual threat they were seen to pose, but surely reflecting as well the power of traditional Greco-Roman social attitudes to women. There is the story of a group of girls from Tertullian’s congregation in Carthage who renounced marriage and were then encouraged by the rest of the congregation to throw off their veils as they no longer needed to maintain their modesty. The conservative Tertullian disagreed. Sexual desire could not be overcome so easily—all women carry the stigma of Eve’s sin with them and are by their very nature temptresses. It was only in the fourth century that women who proclaimed perpetual virginity were given a status of their own by their fellow Christians, greater, in fact, than they would have enjoyed in pagan society. (It helped if they renounced their wealth as well.)