Desire of the Everlasting Hills

by Thomas Cahill

  when suddenly there came from heaven a sound like the violent rushing of wind, which filled the whole house where they were sitting. And they saw what seemed to be tongues of fire, which divided and came to rest on each of them. They were all filled with the holy Spirit and began to speak in tongues other than their own, as the Spirit enabled them.

  They tumbled out into the street, where an immense crowd of foreign pilgrims had collected, drawn by the strange noises emanating from the house. According to Luke, the disciples, speaking in different languages, were able to make themselves understood to the bystanders “each in his own tongue.” But not everyone was impressed. The disciples, windblown, seized by the Spirit, and no doubt traumatized once more, presented an excited and disheveled spectacle to the nosy pilgrims. Some scoffed: “They’ve been slurping up the May wine, that’s all!”

  Peter, he of the large shoulders and lungs, needed no megaphone but stepped forward and addressed the pilgrims in his deep voice:

  Brother Jews and all you who live in Jerusalem, make no mistake about this but listen carefully to my words: these men are not drunk, as you suppose. It’s only nine in the morning [and the grog shops are not yet open]! Rather, you are witnessing the fulfillment of Joel’s prophecy:

  In the last days—the Lord declares—

  I shall pour out my Spirit on all humanity.

  Your sons and daughters shall prophesy,

  your young people shall see visions,

  your old people dream dreams.

  Even on the slaves, men and women,

  shall I pour out my Spirit.…

  Peter goes on to give a sermon latticed with very Jewish reasoning, declaring that Jesus, risen—“to which we are all witnesses”—and now “raised to the heights by God’s right hand, has received from the Father the holy Spirit, who was promised, and what you see and hear is the outpouring of that Spirit.”

  Where did Peter, the cowering, semiliterate fisherman, get up the nerve to address this cosmopolitan crowd in such a confident fashion? Luke would have us understand that it is the outpouring of the Spirit on Peter that has made all the difference. Repeatedly in the text of Acts, the Spirit surges through assemblies and individuals, giving them the courage to do things that would ordinarily be impossible for them. Jesus, risen, has returned to his Father, as he told his disciples he must, but he has not left them orphans. He has sent them the Father’s Spirit, which is also his Spirit. “Indeed,” cries Peter, “the whole House of Israel can be certain that the Lord [of the Universe] and Messiah [promised through the prophets] whom God has made is this Jesus whom you crucified.” Jesus, the obedient Adam (and, therefore, perfect human being), has been raised to “God’s right hand,” which means that God has given him permanent Lordship over the cosmos. In this way, mortal Time has been able to intersect with Eternity—so the Age of the Spirit, prophesied by Joel, is now under way.

  It has always been a bit difficult to get a grasp on who or what this Spirit is. The Greek New Testament’s word for spirit, pneuma, has precisely the same root meaning as the Hebrew word, ruach: breath or wind. In the prophecy of Joel, as throughout the Hebrew Bible, the Spirit is God’s Spirit, which, like a mother’s breath on her newborn, “broods over the waters” at the Creation and, like wind, which cannot be controlled and is invisible except in its effects, “blows where it will.” But the Feast of Weeks, which was called in this period the Feast of the Assembly because it called the diaspora Jews back to Jerusalem, was a celebration of the Covenant between God and the Jews; and Jesus’s Twelve now confront the Twelve Tribes of Israel, symbolically assembled in the street, to announce the fulfillment of the Covenant in the very event of Jesus’s exaltation and sending of his Spirit upon the new Assembly, the Church.

  What are the effects of this Spirit? What did the disciples, imbued with new courage, actually succeed in doing?

  According to Luke, their lively and convincing preaching of the risen Jesus brought many into their ranks. By the end of the day on which Peter preached his maiden sermon, “three thousand were added to their number.” As with Jesus, it is not so much the words as the deeds of the disciples that draw fresh adherents. Peter and John, on their way into the Temple for evening sacrifice, pass a man in his forties, “crippled from birth,” who has been begging at the gate for many years. The scene, as described by Luke, starts off with all the elements of the typical nonencounter between beggars and their prospective donors. The cripple puts out his hand in the usual automatic gesture, expecting Peter and John either to pass him by or, with carefully averted gaze, to drop a small coin into his hand. They do neither, but stop completely and insist that the man “look at” them, which he does, amazed and now hoping for a considerable gift.

  “I have neither silver nor gold, but what I have I give you,” says Peter, taking the man by the right hand and pulling him up. “In the name of Jesus-Messiah the Nazarene, walk.” The man, wide-eyed, stands on his feet, stock still for a moment as he feels warm life surge into his feet and ankles, then tries out his legs, walking around in increasingly excited circles, then accompanies Peter and John into the Temple, walking between them, refusing to let go of their arms, praising God at the top of his lungs, and leaping into the air all at once. Definitely a cripple to be played by Roberto Benigni in the film version.

  Reading this story of the beggar with newfound strength in his legs always makes me a little weak in the knees. It seems to knead all the meaning of the gospels into a new and unexpected loaf. Bumbling Peter, who once seemed permanently puzzled, has become the Good Samaritan: though Jesus is gone from their midst, the disciples now continue his work of healing and helping whoever falls across their paths, which they do in his supremely personal way, gazing forthrightly into the eyes of the other, speaking the truth, taking the other’s hand. The strength they are able to communicate has nothing to do with worldly power, for they have “neither silver nor gold.” But because these ex-fishermen have set aside their own egos and identities (and all worldly pretensions), they no longer present—as they once did—an obstacle to the Spirit, which can now flow through them to others as through an open channel. With the image of the jumping beggar before them, thousands more attach themselves to the apostles.

  It is not long before Peter and John are hauled before the Sanhedrin for nothing more than “an act of kindness to a cripple,” as Peter points out. The “rulers, elders, and scribes” of this high council, “astonished at the fearlessness shown by Peter and John, considering that they were uneducated laymen,” let them go with a warning, but we can already see, looming on the horizon, the harassments, arrests, and even executions that await this fast-growing band of men and women, who call one another “brother” and “sister” and think of themselves collectively as the people of “the Way.”

  The first martyr is Stephen, one of seven “deacons” (or ministers) appointed by a democratic vote of the Church to distribute food to the poor. Luke tells us that Stephen was “full of faith and of the holy Spirit,” a worker of miracles and a champion debater, who bests many of those who attempt to discredit the new faith. Brought before the Sanhedrin on charges of attacking Judaism, he gives a defense of himself that is actually an eloquent and orthodox summation of Jewish salvation history—till he ends with the shocking assertion that “I can see heaven thrown open and the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of God.” Convicted of blasphemy and dragged outside the city walls, he is stoned to death, while uttering as his final, Christ-like words “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” Before his executioners begin the stoning, however, they strip off their cloaks for greater maneuverability, laying these at the feet of the apparent ringleader, “a young man named Saul.” Within this scene, therefore, Luke sketches for us not only the theological tensions of Jerusalem in the 30s, but the as-yet-unknown force that will become the surprising mainspring of Christian expansion.

  LUKE HAS BEEN DISMISSED for writing derivative Hellenistic “aretalogy,” a conventional f
orm of Greco-Roman biography in which the lives of good men of the past are inventively dramatized and held up as flawless and godlike models for men of the present. There can be no doubt that Luke is influenced by this format, as well as by his profound reverence for the memory of the apostles and other disciples, who had passed from the scene by the time he wrote his histories; and some of his dramatizations (such as the Pentecost “Spirit” experience) could well be imaginative Lucan reconstructions of plainer and less chronologically precise Palestinian recollections. But Luke, though he certainly sees the founders of the Jerusalem Church through the flattering filter of time, gives a basically factual, if polished, account of events he would surely much rather not report, such as the conflict between Paul and Peter over imposing the Law on the gentiles. Luke’s recounting has a cordiality and even courtliness to it that is certainly absent from Paul’s tirade against Peter and his inconsistencies. But it would be hard to stay angry for the forty years that elapsed from the time of these events to Luke’s writing about them. Luke shows himself as revering Peter but siding with Paul, whose references to their arguments in his own letters are a confirmation of Luke’s essential accuracy.

  Luke is also sometimes accused of what might best be labeled “creeping Catholicism,” a tendency to present the early Church as much more structured and hierarchical than the freewheeling, intuitive Church we read of in Paul’s letters. This second objection is more easily met. Paul, even in the undoubtedly authentic letters, speaks of positions of defined responsibility within the Church, such as the apostles, prophets, and teachers of First Corinthians and the “bishops and deacons” whom he addresses at the outset of his Letter to the Philippians. We do not need to suppose that the Philippians already had “bishops” in our elaborate sense to recognize that Paul is speaking of something more august than building superintendents. And Luke, in his account of the inchoate Church, leaves room for Pauline “freedom,” in fact complements and expands on Paul’s exhortations so that we may see more clearly how this freedom operated in practice.

  Luke describes the growing Church as “remain[ing] faithful to the teaching of the apostles, to the brotherhood, to the breaking of the bread, and to the prayers,” which he sees as the four constitutive elements of the new Assembly. In the 80s, when Luke wrote, the authentic teaching of Jesus was being compromised by people whom Luke would have viewed as false teachers, not only the Judaizers and proto-Gnostics with whom Paul had tangled but all the inventive revisionists who inevitably attach themselves to any movement. For Luke, the yardstick of orthodoxy was the “teaching of the apostles,” the original envoys whom Jesus had commissioned to preach his message, and this is why he devotes so much of his narrative to the sermons of primitive Christianity’s major figures. But since doctrinal orthodoxy would hardly have been at issue in the immediate aftermath of the Pentecost outpouring, we can gain a clearer picture of the Jerusalem Church by examining Luke’s other three elements.

  “The prayers” is a reference to the common prayer of the Jews in Temple and synagogue, which the Messianists attended as often as possible, many of them daily. The centerpiece of synagogue prayer was the reading from the sacred scrolls of scripture, which the Messianists heard as now-obvious prophecies of their Christ, so that this prayer branched out for them in two directions, confirming both their Jewish identity and their new insight into its previously hidden meaning. “The breaking of the bread,” adumbrated in the common meal at Emmaus, is Luke’s formula for the rite of the Eucharist, which the Messianists celebrated in private homes. This “communion” was symbolic of the very thing they could not share with the mass of their fellow Jews in prayer: their incorporation into Christ and, thereby, their spiritual “brotherhood” with one another. When Christians were finally expelled from synagogue services in the 90s, they would appropriate the Jewish prayer service and make it into the prelude to the Eucharist, thus creating the Liturgy (or Mass or Lord’s Supper) as we know it today.

  “Brotherhood,” the usual translation of the Greek koinonia, has unfortunate sexist overtones, which some attempt to alleviate by translating koinonia as “fellowship,” marginally more serviceable perhaps but lacking the intimacy of “brotherhood.” Koinonia, however, implies intimacy without sexism; it is the noun that stems from the adjective koine, meaning “common,” and would best be translated into English as “common-ness,” “community,” or even “commonalty,” did not those words have connotations that can take us even farther afield. “In-common-ness” or “sense of community” might serve, were these not too unwieldy to insert into most sentences. “Kinship” is close to being an English equivalent to koinonia, if we could erase its primary meaning of physical relatedness; and the slightly awkward “kindred-ness” probably comes closest.

  These people, who called each other “brother” and “sister,” cherished a lively sense of their mutual “kindred-ness”—which may sound as hollow as a press release, till one examines how they went about it. Because of the “signs and wonders” that the apostles and other disciples (like Stephen) were able to work through Jesus’s name, “a feeling of awe” enveloped them all, Luke tells us; and this feeling prompted them to spend time in the enjoyment of one another’s company and even to hold “all things in common: they would sell their property and their goods in order to give to anyone who was in need. They met together daily in the Temple courts, broke bread at home [that is, often dined together for the sake of fellowship], and ate with glad and generous hearts.”

  Tucked away in all this glad generosity is the awesome information that the first Christians, because they “held all things in common,” were also the world’s first communists. Theirs was not, of course, state communism, but it was an associative communism that they took most seriously. When two of their number, Ananias and his wife, Sapphira, make the grand gesture of “sell[ing] one of their properties” for the Church’s benefit but hold back the lion’s share for their own private benefit, they are both struck dead; and though it is difficult to tell whether their deaths are due to their own guilt or to the condemnation of the apostles, Peter makes clear that their wealth was always theirs “to do with as [they] liked”: they were under no obligation to liquidate anything. Their sin was their pretense, their attempt to “lie to the holy Spirit,” the animator of the Assembly.

  So these first Christians were not obliged to dissolve their fortunes for the sake of the poor: the community of goods was purely voluntary. But what freedom—from want, from worry, from the endless burdens of management and accounting, from brinksmanship—it must have afforded those who participated “with glad and generous hearts,” whether they were the once-poor or the once-rich. At the threshold to the third millennium, at the golden gate to a new age of untrammeled global capitalism and its consequent winners and losers, we can only wish that such a society existed still.

  Despite this radical innovation, the brothers and sisters were very much people of their time and place, Jewish inhabitants of the Greco-Roman world. It seems, for instance, never to have crossed their minds to question outright the patriarchal household code of the dominant culture, in which wives were expected to obey their husbands, children their parents (especially their fathers), and slaves their masters. To do otherwise would be to overturn the natural order of things. Even Paul, whose democratic insight was more penetrating than any of the other apostles’, wrote out a version of this conventional household code in his Letter to the Church at Colossae:

  Wives, be subject to your husbands, as you should in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them. Children, obey your parents always, for this is what pleases the Lord. Fathers, do not carp at your children, lest they lose heart. Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything, not only when their eye is on you, as if you had only to please human beings, but wholeheartedly, out of respect for the Master. Whatever you do, put your heart into it as done for the Lord and not for men, knowing that the Lord will repay you by making you his heirs
. It is Christ the Lord you are serving. Anyone who does wrong will be repaid in kind. For there is no favoritism. Masters, make sure that your slaves are given what is right and fair, knowing that you too have a Master in heaven.

  Quite a mouthful from the apostle of freedom and equality. Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza is one of a growing number of scholars who claim that this is so contradictory to Paul’s central assertions that he could not have written it, that it was composed after his death by one of his disciples and should be dated to the last third of the first century. Murphy-O’Connor limits himself to commenting that “if [Paul] were true to himself, he should never have employed [this code].” Despite my admiration for the man, I tend to the opinion that Paul could have written this.

  For one thing, no one’s thinking is so well wrought as to be without its contradictions.1 But Paul may also, as in his advice to the Corinthians about liturgical exhibitionism, have seen himself under an obligation to “keep the lid on” the Church, so that it would not draw more unwonted attention from the larger society than it was already drawing on account of its (absolutely necessary) theological and social positions.

  Paul and his fellow Christians were already fighting a war on three cultural-political fronts: against Jews who accused them of the capital crime of blasphemy, against Greeks who found the Jewish notion of physical resurrection hilarious, and against Romans who were eager to round up “troublemakers,” especially ones who prayed to a “god” that the Romans themselves had executed. In their monotheism, Christians were accused of atheism, in their Messianism, of heresy. In their communism, they appeared an obvious threat to the economics of class; in their joyous inner freedom and their comprehension of the essential equality of all human beings before God, they stood an outrageous challenge to the whole socio-political order of the Roman empire. How many more fronts could they fight on?