Origins of Christianity 1
The Christianity of the first century was, and yet was not, the Christianity of the fourth century. The Christianity of fourth century was, and yet was not, the Christianity of the feudal Europe. The Christianity of feudal Europe died at the Reformation, and was born again in Protestant Christianity.Prof J A Froude, Short Studies: Origen and Celsus
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, January 12, 2000
Abstract
Judaism and the Jewish Scriptures
Judaism differs from the tribal cult which preceded it. Its inspiration is the Babylonian and Persian monotheism brought from Mesopotamia from 586 BC which the Persian administrators imposed upon the original mythology. Monotheism was at first esoteric but became popular through the efforts of Zoroaster in Persia and from there it influenced the civilizations of the two rivers and the religion of the Jews in exile. A tribal god, Ormuzd in Persia and Yehouah in Palestine, was declared the God of all and a class of priests was formed to administer the new religion. These were bold moves and in justification they ascribed the changes to a traditional law giver, respectively Zoroaster and Moses.
Deuteronomy is certainly late because a sect of Egyptian Jews at Elephantine on the Nile did not know of Deuteronomy in the fifth century BC. It could not therefore have been written by Moses some seven hundred years before. It was written either in Babylonia or in Palestine after the Persians set up the temple and attributed to Moses to give it authority. Such books, not really written by their supposed authors, are called pseudepigraphs and are common in the Judaeo-Christian tradition—indeed in eastern tradition generally.
The Jewish priesthood at this time were really inventing Judaism under the protection of the Persian kings who had sponsored them to set up a theocracy provided they gave service to Persia. The Persian kings at the request of the Jewish priests issued edicts to all Jews subject to Persia. They laid down the rules of the new religion with its temple and priesthood established in Jerusalem. Thus Judaism was set up by the Persian kings.
A school of priests led by Ezra rewrote the legends of the old Hebrew cult, adding the extensive codes of law needed by a centralized priest-led religion. The prophetic works were later pseudepigraphs critical of the acceptance of cultural incursions by Greeks from the time of Alexander, not Chaldaeans or Assyrians, though they drew upon Jewish legend. These pseudepigraphs were illuminating problems of the day from the third century BC not in the eighth century BC.
Apart from plainly late books like Daniel and Ecclesiastes, the Hebrew bible is improbably uniform philologically for a library supposedly covering several thousand years. Its linguistic and stylistic uniformity suggest it was not written over thousands of years but merely a few hundred. The books of Isaiah, Ezekiel and Jeremiah were written or adapted from earlier works by schools of prophets, possibly Essene or Hasidic, from the third century BC. Like most of the Jewish scriptures, they contain fragments of old history, legend and myth, not all Jewish, but have been essentially rewritten with problems of the day in mind.
The enemies of Israel described in them stood for the Seleucid Greeks of Mesopotamia and Syria though not in any direct way, the books being moralistic romances rather than precise allegories. Their messages were directed not merely at the people but also at the official priesthood who were being Hellenized, at least in part, despite the elaborations of the Levitical code. Thus they were essentially the work of dissenters.
The Yehouah set up by the Persians was the god, not merely of the Jews but of the whole world, he was the Almighty God who rewarded righteousness, punished iniquity and did not require sacrifice, apparently defying the whole raison d'etre of the Jerusalem temple and its priesthood, according to dissenting sects that came to see Yehouah as an exclusive God. The priesthood under the Greeks continued the universalisation of the religion, much to the annoyance of the dissidents. Foreign influence strengthened and with it collaboration and Hellenization.
Pseudepigraphy was not merely a disguise but was meant to strengthen the message by having it uttered by a great man of the past. Their authors were based on scriptural figures like Samuel, Elijah and Elisha and would have been familiar as larger versions of the village hasid.
They had little immediate effect but pious Jews like the Essenes revered them, accepting the books as true history, modelled themselves on them and took it upon themselves to continue the tradition in a formal way, sending out men like John the Baptist and then Jesus as righteous leaders to bring the people back to the ways of their fathers. They also knew they had a message relevant to their own time and spent much effort treating the books as allegorical—containing coded messages from God. Later the writing of prophecy was superseded by the writing of apocalypses.
The first was the Book of Daniel written in 164 BC when Hellenism tried to subdue Judaism. In the third century, the prophets had attacked in a veiled way the pervading influence of Greece, called Babylon or Assyria, and its pantheon of strange Greek gods, called idols, but the attack at the time of the author of Daniel was more direct, Antiochus Epiphanes, the king of the Syrian Greeks putting a statue of Zeus in the Jerusalem temple—the abomination of desolation. Daniel was a protest and a call to action against this forcible Hellenization, though the real problem was the voluntary Hellenization that had been proceeding apace.
The author pretended he was a seer, Daniel, in exile in Babylonia 400 years before. It became the model apocalypse. Its real nature as history disguised as prophecy, as a pseudepigraph, was realized by a polemicist against Christianity, Pophyry, whose works are typically ”lost”. As Renan observed, the Book of Daniel offers an early philosophy of history. The Jews stood in the way of all the great empires of the first millennium BC and were trampled by them in turn. They were ideally situated to note their rises and falls, fearing their rises and gloating over their falls.
Daniel observes this and notes that the purpose of it was ultimately a world theocracy, a kingdom of god led by Israel, God's Children as its priests and princes. The kingdom would be brought about by a messiah, a son of David, who would triumph over all for God. The messiah was necessarily a triumphant figure but after the death of the Christian God in particular, scriptural passages which seemed to point to a suffering messiah were highlighted and the Rabbis conceived of a messiah ben Joseph who would suffer to account for them and wrote him into the Talmud.
In fact, they were nearly all personifications of Israel itself as a suffering people, though some might have been historical references to the Essene Righteous Teacher who was evidently murdered around 100 BC and added subsequently to the scriptures as annotations. Otherwise there is no mention of a messiah ben Joseph in the Qumran sectarian literature.
The prophetic writers seemed to have no concept of immortality, national and individual justice being meted in fleshly life. Early Hebrew religious ideas reflected in Genesis had the notion of soul as the breath of life which, after death became the shadow of the man meandering aimlessly through Sheol, the Jewish Hades, unaware of God. God was the god of the living not the god of the dead and the zenith of prophetic writing concerned itself with life not after-life.
Not that fears or superstitions of “ghosts”, the shade of the personality, lingering on earth before departing were not held in the popular imagination. But this was merely a shadow—it was no life. Perhaps it was the root from which the idea of a future life arose but the future life was conceived as a life on earth, a purified and renewed earth but an earth no less. God rewarded the righteous by renewing their earthly body into an everlasting heavenly world.
First, God sent His messiah to judge and purify the world. He and his saints would subjugate all the nations and submit them to the universal theocracy based on Jerusalem. The wicked among the dead are ignored or raised and punished. The wicked among the living which included most gentiles, were punished by fire, the agent of the process of purification which only the righteous would endure.
Alexandrine Judaism
An important link between Judaism and Christianity was Alexandrine Judaism which was formulated in the cosmopolis of Alexandria where Jewish and Greek ideas came into intimate contact in the 200 years preceding the present era. Philo expressed the product of the interaction around the time when Christianity was founded, but even books in the scriptures—the Wisom literature—seem to show Greek influence.
Personalized abstractions like Wisdom, Spirit and Word were conceived as the means by which God acted on the material world, and Philo attempted to elaborate them. Jews in Alexandria were able to avoid offence and participate in the debate with the Greeks by supposing that some elements of God's revelation to the Jews had passed into the Greek world through the Greeks' long-time interest in Eastern religions. Some Greeks had therefore been able to arrive at a philosophic monotheism apparently through reason but really because the idea had come to them indirectly from God's revelation to the Jews. Jewish thinkers were able thus to retain their conviction that they remained the people chosen for God's revelation when the Greeks had actually come to monotheistic views independently—or perhaps both had a common source in Persia.
This conviction was sufficient to allow worldly Jews to proselytize among the gentiles and seek ways of subsuming their world view to the Jewish. Western people then, as they do still, saw the East as the source of religious mystery and the Jews could feel they were fulfilling their destiny as the light of the world. The Sibylline Oracles were composed in Greek identifying the universal God with the Hebrew God, assuming the superiority of Judaism and the falseness of other gods, and expressing the basis of messianism. The connexion was strong enough for Celsus to call the Christians, the Sibyllists.
Another factor was the translation in Alexandria of the Hebrew bible into Greek as the Septuagint. Hebrew was dead in everyday use even in Palestine although its persistence in Judaea as a religious language still made its mark in common speech which was Aramaic. But diaspora Jews in the Roman empire spoke Greek and it was for them that the Jews of Alexandria translated the scriptures into Greek.
Naturally that was a boon to proselytizing Jewish teachers for they could direct their admirers to the sacred books, saying that they, and not the mystery religions of Phrygia or Egypt, contained the true revelation of God. These popular religions of the time, brought from the east were those in which a god suffered, died and were mourned by their devotees before being resurrected.
The concentration of sacerdotal energy at the Jerusalem temple was another obstacle to the spread of Judaism in the empire, both in the insistence on the sacrificial ritual and its complexity and in the exclusivity of Jerusalem depriving others of the reassurance of a ritual contact with God. The Essenes had started the movement away from the temple ritual that the Christians completed. But the real victory could only come with the destruction of the temple as a ritual centre after the Jewish war in 70 AD. This was no loss to the Essenes and their progeny, the Christians, who were to assume the authority of the Jerusalem Church and add their own sacred books to the scriptures.
Christianity
A common stratum of the religions of the middle-east was that of the dying and resurrected god who manifested himself in several forms—Attis, Adonis, Osiris, Tammuz, Mithras. Judaism officially had no such god or hero but Christianity was to provide it. Though the new religion of the Persian “returners” frowned on the reverencing of Tammuz and actively tried to suppress it, it did not entirely succeed and the emotional power of the dying god might have persisted as an undercurrent even at the height of temple worship.
This emotional appeal was particularly strong to women, as Christianity has proved, and it is unlikely that the idea did not penetrate into Israel. The wailing of the women of Jerusalem for the dead god Tammuz at the city's gates, mentioned in Ezekiel 8:14 is proof that it did.
The Jews also had the idea of a saviour king, another concept brought in from “exile.” The messiah would subjugate the nations which had oppressed Israel and set up a theocracy. The idea of the messiah arose in exile when the people were despairing and then seemed to be realized when Cyrus the Persian destroyed the Babylonian oppressor of the Jews and allowed them to set up the theocracy they desired. In the scriptures Cyrus is regarded as a messiah.
Christianity arose by a merging of the two ideas, triggered by the crucifixion of a revered apocalyptic leader who believed himself to be the messiah but died knowing that he was not. Jesus was a profoundly religious Jewish leader who made a deep impression on his faithful followers who were mainly apostate Jews who had adopted a largely Greek culture, collaborated with the gentiles or were plain sinners and wanted to be saved because they sincerely thought, as did Jesus, that the end of the sinful world was nigh.
He meant to lead them to a kingdom of God through a revolution against the Roman enemy which he was certain would prove to God that His children preferred Him to the usurper. Jesus was a defender of Judaism but not of the temple hierarchy and a rebel against the foreigners whose alien culture he abhored. In trying to create the conditions that he felt God needed to prove Israel worthy of His intervention, he had to lead his followers in rebellion against the foreigner and the Jewish sycophants who pandered to them.
As irregular soldiers they could not always follow the strict requirements of the law and Jesus taught them not to fear God's annoyance in such circumstances because purity of spirit was more important than ritual purity. In short, he held strictly to the Essene interpretation of the law but also showed his followers that, when circumstances prevented strict application of the law, it could be abrogated as a temporary measure as long as the man was pure of heart.
This temporary lifting of legal requirements, for practical reasons in revolutionary circumstances, as long as the devotee was of pure intention, was extended by the Christians into a permanent abrogation of the law. After Jesus's crucifixion, his followers expected a long period of strife before the kingdom came, and it was not hard for some of them, not used to the strictest adherence to the law to use the continuing battle as an excuse justified by Jesus to backslide. These temporary circumstances were extended until the original qualification on the suspension of the law was forgotten. After about half a century Jesus's concessions to the needs of the hour had crystallized into a firm abrogation of the law for all. This combined with the Essene rejection of sacrifice and the temple ritual in favour of sweet scents and prayer amounted to the reforms desired by gentile godfearers.
Jesus, a strict Jew, will have been surprised to find that he had become a reformer of the law, and the reforms allowed gentiles free access to the Jewish God. Quite different was the teaching of Paul for whom the law was unimportant and Jesus an example of the dying and resurrecting god of the east whose teachings were irrelevant.
Thus, a strict upholder of the law became a liberalizer of strict Judaism for his gentile or Hellenized followers, the early Christians. Christians then began to maintain that Jesus had been a reformer all along. He was transformed from a strictly Jewish revolutionary into a reforming universal ethical teacher. And the myth has stuck.
Christians believe that Jesus was an ethical teacher, a reformer of Judaism, who was cruelly treated and slain by the old guard, jealous of their tradition. Ethically there was little in it that did not exist in classical philosophy but it brought with it the features of the oriental mysteries that were already popular in the empire and in particular the Jewish scriptures which impressed the Greeks with the sense of purpose shown by the oriental God over an apparently long period of time.
Christianity was never an ethical movement in its origins in the sense that Christians like to think it was—a movement to reform Judaism led by a charismatic ethical teacher who came to be seen as an aspect of God himself. The ethics of Christianity began with the ethics of post-exilic Judaism, particularly that of the sect of the Essenes, then adopted an outlook that subjugated freedom and personality to the state, initially the mighty Roman empire, in return for protection.
In ethical teaching, Jesus differed from the mainstream only in the sense that Essenes differed from them. He abhored the corruption and Hellenization of the temple, accepting that God preferred prayer to sacrifice according to the prophets. Otherwise he was an apocalyptic Jew, expecting the kingdom of God imminently, and his followers accepted that the kingdom remained imminent even after his death.
Such teaching of Jesus that we have is not original but, as we might expect of a strict Jew, comes from Hebrew sources in the scriptures. Jesus's sayings are essentially scriptural though Christians like to claim that they have been given a freshness. Often it is the omission of the scriptural reference and the retention of the context that makes them seem new. The sentiments of most of it were not even original to a Greek as Celsus pointed out. The Golden Rule is not exclusively Christian but exists in all major religions, whether in its positive form or not, even so far away as China. It was found among the Greek writers and was noted in its negative form by the famous liberal rabbi Hillel a hundred years before the crucifixion.
Nor was the ascetic side of Christianity distinctive until it degenerated into fakirism. It came from the ideals of the monastic Essenes but had its equals among the Pagans who it must have seemed to have been imitating. The Essenes were likened by the classical writers to the Pythagoreans who did not drink wine or eat flesh and remained chaste. These were ideals adopted by the Orphists who were strictly vegetarian out of compassion for animals, a compassion not found in Christianity until Francis of Assisi a thousand years later despite Jesus's expression of God's concern for sparrows. Indeed, Paul sneered, with a possible reference to the Persian religion:
Does God take care of oxen? (1 Cor 9:9)
Nevertheless, converts were not required to accept the teaching, at least in the orthodox branch of the church, but to believe in the miraculous resurrection of the saviour. The earlier stage, that of the Essene sectaries required devotees to live according to their peculiar interpretation of the Mosaic law and their own additional precepts, but the peculiarities of the transmission of Christianity from Essenism lost this history and made it seem as if Christianity sprang from the incarnation of one man.
The discovery of the scrolls has allowed the connexion of the Essenes and the Christians to be pieced together, the link being the band of converts of backsliding and Hellenized Jews known apparently as Nazarenes. The faith of the early Christians was a confession that a certain Jesus, of which stories spread from Palestine, was the messiah—the Christ. The gentile converts of Syria and Asia Minor could not check the stories, and can they have been expected to?—they had converted because of their faith!
The evangelists converting them persuaded them that belief without proof was a virtue. Indeed, it was proof itself of the strength of their faith! Faith in this belief of the Jewish messiah's appearance, as promised by God in the scriptures, guaranteed eternal life in a mystical kingdom of God. Unbelief meant destruction or even eternal torture. These were simply the beliefs of the Essenes transferred to a messiah which had appeared rather than one which was expected.
The Essenes expected the kingdom of God to appear on earth but it was always a mystical kingdom because it was uncorruptible and free of sin—it was heaven on earth. This was soon moved to an entirely other dimensional world when the messiah did not return on cue. The original messengers, the Jews, were soon rejected as murderers of a god, and before long S Augustine was advocating persecution of those who were unwilling to join the Church because the servants of the Lord must:
Compel them to come in.
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Moses and Exodus
