Christianity
The Gentile Church 2
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated:Saturday, 19 October 2002
Bishops
One reason why the supposedly battered Christians kept advancing was that they had an effective organisation, the basis of which was not the diocese, which was still just a civil administrative division, but the church. The churches kept in contact with one another. The superb Roman communications system made it easy for new faiths to spread. Apart from circularising details of martyrdoms, they also consulted on matters of doctrine and are known to have excommunicated one another. Some churches, either because of size or historical connexion with apostles, had a special status. Rome was the chief one in this category—by the second century communion with the Roman church was one test of orthodoxy. Others of this kind included Antioch and Alexandria where the bishop was called “pope” before that title was in use at Rome.
Unlike the Pagan cults, the Christian groups had accepted the rule of the bishops, single leaders with wide powers to be exercised for the whole of their life—they only left office at death, like the present Pope. The bishops were the “overseers” (“mebaqqers”) of the Essenes. The mebaqqer had to teach, guide, arbitrate, grade, supervise, and guard the sect’s communal property. In all things they were “father and shepherd”. Like the early Christians the Essenes had a temporary expulsion, and an expulsion for life, equating to eternal life! A duty specified for bishops was to look after orphans, another close similarity with the Essenes. Clement says the apostles had appointed bishops and Tertullian repeats it. Nevertheless, the modern churches deny it in their determination to keep the early Church free of any connexion with the Essenes.
In the early days, missionaries had formed churches and appointed their best converts to administer them as bishops. Perhaps evidence that Christians took in Sadducees after the Jewish War ended with the closing of the temple, is that Cyprian took it for granted that Christian bishops were the successors of the scriptural priests of the Jerusalem temple. Jewish priests are even mentioned in the time of Constantine, who granted them certain immunities, so some of them must have retained some functions in the Diaspora even after the temple closed.
At first some churches appear to have had several bishops but by the second century the normal pattern was one bishop for each church. The selection of a bishop rested partly with his own flock, but he had to be accepted and consecrated by neighbouring bishops. The bishop was the father of his people and treated as an object of reverence. He not only presided at worship but also looked after secular affairs, including lawsuits. He should have been first in line for martyrdom but often was not. His principal assistant was his archdeacon, usually a youngish man of promise. Deacons were appointed to run the financial side. Below the bishops appeared a supplementary order of presbyters as episcopal assistants or deputies.
By the middle of the third century, bishops were prominent figures in the general community. To outsiders they could be a nuisance. A well-to-do Pagan with a Christian wife found it irritating to have the bishop, with his tangled beard and shabby clothes, calling at his house to ask for money and to fulminate about chastity. Most bishops were still of low social class, although less uniformly so than at first, but some were men of high ability.
The shabby clothes did not apply when the bishop was officiating in church. While there were no sacred vestments as such, it was becoming customary to keep a special set of smart clothes for the celebrant of the Eucharist. They started as just ordinary clothes but, as fashions changed, they remained the same, although stylised and ornamented. Modern mass vestments are basically the best suit of a low-class citizen of the late Roman Empire.
The main vestment, the chasuble, was the topcoat of the poor man not entitled to wear the upper-class toga. The priest of today in his fourth-century garments, whispering his commemoration of Felicitas and Perpetua, is a memory of the end of the Roman empire.
Bishops had utter power within their Christian group. Origen wrote:
To people who come and ask us to do something for them, we behave as no tyrant even would. We are more savage to petitioners than any civil rulers are.
They “ruled in the place of God”. Ignatius taught the same. The bishop was the image of the Father. To deceive him is to seek to deceive “not the bishop, who is seen, but God, who is invisible”. Christian bishops quickly caught on to the power they had over people’s minds. They had only to suggest that God was offended in some way, and the flocks were desperate to make amends. In the third century, the bishops decided that, even though adultery was a sin, they had the “power of the keys” to forgive it, and most of the human race would indeed flock to them seeking this absolution.
Bishops were in charge of the money paid in and were in charge of distributing alms to widows and orphans. Many bishops had no worries about their own sins, and those who did simply got a brother bishop to absolve them. Cyprians’s letters are explicit, and Origen was critical of the average Christian bishop. Even so soon in Christianity’s history, they were crooks. Yet to question or to oppose them was to question God himself. Added to their notional power was that they were the advocate for the group before God at the Judgement Day, which was, of course, to be soon. So, the laity were keen to keep in the bishops good books. It could not have happened so easily in Paganism where all positions were free or auctioned appointments, and only rarely became hereditary.
By 300, Christians were regularly meeting in built churches. Their destruction is mentioned in three north African towns in the persecution of 303 AD, so there must have been many others.
Angels and Helpers
Angels occur freely in Pagan cults of abstract divinities in Asia Minor, strongly influenced by the Persian religion. L Roberts showed that these “angeloi” wre lesser gods who acted as intermediaries between God and man. On Santorini (Thera), inscribed epitaphs, from the third century onwards and assumed to be Christian, honour the angel of the deceased person. Origen was clear that a conflict between good and bad angels continued through every Christian’s life. John Chrysostom published his Homilies on Acts in the second half of the fourth century AD, declaring that it was natural for the apostles to think that an appearance of Peter was only “his” angel for “every man, it is true has an angel”. In the New Testament, the Colossians even worshipped “angels, intruding into those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind” (Col 2:18)!
Worship on earth was an imitation of the practice of the angels in heaven, and indeed angels attended the services of the churches but could not be seen enjoying the readings from scripture because even the most pious Christians were too sinful.
In the second half of the twentieth century, the BVM was making about ten appearances a year that the Church accepted. She even appeared in 1947 in Stockport, crowned with roses. Christians think appearances of saints, angels and the BVM are all holy miracles and proof of the One True God, but similar appearances were even more commonplace in Pagan times, and, just as today, they appeared in spates. Pagans had visions or “epiphanies” of the gods, and Christians took the self-same Greek word to describe the appearances of their own god. A monumental inscription erected by Alexandra, priestess of Demeter in the city of Miletus in the third century AD, and later dumped by the Christians on a hillside outside the city, asked Apollo:
The gods have been appearing in visitations as never before, to the girls and women but also to the men and boys. What does it mean? Is it a sign of something good?
Alexandra seemed to associate the appearances with her tenure as priestess of Demeter, and doubtless hoped for a positive answer. It was not to be. The intolerance of Christianity had already taken a firm grip on the region and in a century the Pagan temples were being razed.
Pagans regarded their favoured gods as divine “helpers” and “fellow workers” who accompanied a believer “always”. Yet the Pagans would discuss with openness and honesty the issue of the supreme God—even farmhands meeting between sowing and harvest. The believed the supreme God was so distant as to be unknowable, and therefore any of the cults could be right in some ways. No one knew whether any of them was right. This is the basis of Pagan toleration of cults and the diametric opposite of Christian intolerance in which all Christians know that they are right.
Pagan theology could extend a peaceful co-existence to any worship which in turn was willing to co-exist in peace.Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians
Modern patriarchal cults of whatever kind have sunk far below this level of toleration. They know everything precisely even though tens of thousands of similar cults believe something different. Each is right. They have replaced a humble uncertainty with an arrogant and divisive certainty, and the world suffers.
The “Buddy Jesus” idea of modern “born-agains” can be traced back in essence to the time of Homer when the gods were considered companions who “stood beside” heroes too as their “evident helpers”. A prayer on an inscription found in Rome was:
May you be kindly, Hercules, since you are always present to me as I pray to you, and always hold your hand above me.
Like Buddy Jesus, these helpers were personal delusions—Odysseus alone could see Athena helping him, and Achilles alone could see Thetis helping him, but the personal attention of gods to heroes was taken for granted. Ordinary people could not easily see through the disguises of the gods, yet crowds would sense a god in the light emerging from a cloud, rather like mass BVM appearances, or in a solitary and slow moving dark cloud hiding the sun.
Again, handsome and helpful people, who lend a hand then simply go with no time for thanks or ado, were taken as manifestaions of gods—today often considered to have been angels. Beautiful women are still today called goddesses and divas, and handsome men are sometimes called a god. Of course, an angel is a minor god, although many Christians fatuously deny it to keep their High God monotheistic when their beliefs are not. The Angel of the Lord of the Jewish scriptures is the Hebrew God. Other clues to divinities passing by were a sweet smell (the Catholic odour of sanctity), tallness, a powerful and authoritative voice and a bright or even dazzling appearance—much more likely in the sunny Mediterranean than in northern Europe or America.
The god often disappeared mysteriously but, in any event, was mysterious because no one knew who it could have been other than a god. The Greeks deduced that gods could only be seen when they wanted to be, and even then only with those pious enough to merit an appearance. Any stranger might turn out to be a god, so Pagans were always courteous and attentive to strangers.
Artemidorus swore that the god Apollo “stood beside” him “very clearly” as he wrote his book about dreams and had inspired what he wrote. Heliodorus explained that an Egyptian wise man had seen Apollo and Artemis at night but while he was yet awake. He knew they were gods because they did not blink but stared with open eyes, and, instead of walking, they glided.
While Pagans had felt or often seen gods standing by them helping or inspiring them, Christian stories told of precisely the same phenomena. The difference was simply that Christians called these figures angels not gods. Saints throughout the centuries mention the “presence” of Christ. Some who have had the “born again” experience of an encounter with Jesus, wonder what it actually was if the experience was not real. Plainly this is a cross cultural phenomenon in which the imaginary figures change according to the belief of the observers. People who experience the presence of Jesus are having the same feeling as the ancient classical Pagans, so it cannot be attributed to either of their own peculiar beliefs.
It is really a question for psychology, not a religious question. The religious answer is never an answer. Religion gives supernatural answers that actually answer nothing, and have led to darkness and confusion for centuries. In natural terms, it will be an evolutionary adaption to reduce the fear of the unknown. Our brains often supply the context of what we see when it is absent or ambiguous—the basis of optical illusions. Humans are social animals, so when we find ourselves frighteningly alone or taxing our abilities, our brains perhaps supply us with the illusion of a companion. The feeling of companionship must be reassuring in facing up to difficulties in solitude and creative struggle.
Fasting was a feature of the inducement of visions in Jewish apocalyptic works and appears again in Christian works, like the visions described in the Shepherd of Hermas. Fasting was also a feature of Pagan oracles. Prolonged fasting makes the subject irritable and apathetic, less interested in sex, emotionally unstable and introverted.
Christians fasted weekly every wednesday and Friday, and then, in the west, on Saturday too. Zealous Christians making a show of piety would extend the fast to each of the abutting nights too. Initiates had to fast before baptism and all penance was accompanied by fasting. Until the third century, Christians fasted from Good Friday until Easter morning, the period when Jesus was in the tomb, but then overzealous Christians began to fast for the whole of Holy Week, and later still, the clergy introduced a forty day fast throughout Lent. The longer Christians fasted, the more pious they were considered.
The Trend to Monotheism
Pagans had a large number of gods, described by Christians as “bewildering”, but there is no evidence that Pagans were bewildered or complained about the choice. Each person favoured the god of their own choice but would attend the shrines of others for special reasons without feeling any guilt or disloyalty. If they felt a misfortune was caused by their neglecting a god and making them angry, then they would pay attention, burn a little incense, offer a libation, or whatever, to reverse the ill-fortune.
Even before the Christian triumph, Hellenistic papyri and charms invoked the “One”, often alongside other gods, suggesting that he was not really the “One”! The “One” was obviously not alone among gods but stood alone at the highest rank of them. So, the “One” god is the highest god. This title stems from the first century AD and is associated particularly with the god, Serapis. Not much later, Hadrian was convinced that Serapis was the God of the Christians.
The Christians certainly made use of the the trend towards the worship of the single highest ranked god, whom they pronounced as their own, and the title, the “One”, so they were effectively claiming Serapis as Yehouah as Hadrian believed. By demonizing all the other gods—who were known collectively as as “daimones”—the Christians pronounced them all imposters and devils and finished up with the lonely God they now adore.
Pagan society knew of no “Devil” with whom individuals could make a pact, and thus no torture and persecutiuons of “false” prophets and prophetesses. These features were a consequence of Christianity.Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians
From the sensible Antonine age, irrationality was on the rise. Indeed, the Antonine age was an untypical temporal oasis in a slowly advancing desert of decay into superstition to which the spread of the oriental mystery religions and the Greek magical papyri testify. Christianity was the culminating desiccation of learning in this advance of unreason. Ramsey MacMullen (Paganism in the Roman Empire ) found that, after the third century AD:
Oracular sayings circulated more widely, prophets spoke more openly in the marketplace, magical feats were more credulously studied and imitated and the restraints of common reason came a little less common, decade by decade, even among the highly educated.
Robin Lane Fox concluded:
It was Christianity’s good fortune that it coincided with a time in which people would believe anything.
As far back as the third century BC, Pagans had developed a personal sense of god for individuals. Personal piety was not a cult matter. In the early years of the Roman empire, the Hermetists, the followers of Hermes Trismegistus, The Thrice Great Hermes, met in quiet rooms to study the writings they thought the Thrice Great Hermes had left them. They dealt with the different ways people could come to God. They could look inwards to “know themselves” or look outwards to the wonders of the natural world and the cosmos. Both were considered as proofs of God, just as Christians still do, but this was in the pre-Christian age when all philosophic people shared the same basic ideas. Christians were no different in that they used the same principles, not having any of their own, but they twisted them into their own philosophy of ignorance.
The idea of punishment of the soul after death was also ancient. Plato considers it in the Republic, and 500 years later Celsus, still a Platonist, told the Christians that their idea of eternal punishments was common among the priests of the mystery religions. They were, for example, the terrors of the mysteries of Dionysos. Plutarch confirms, in consoling his dying wife, that the mysteries of Dionysos knew of an afterlife. Plutarch even thought of the afterlife rather like the modern Spiritual one held by most modern Christains—that you wake up from death to find all your dead relatives and friends waiting to greet you. T Freke and P Gandy have argued at length that these Dionysian mysteries were the precursor of the Jesus mysteries that became Christianity (The Jesus Mysteries ). Classic authors, however, say that the rites of Eleusis, Mithras, and Isis all also had the idea of an afterlife. Even Marcus Aurelius struggled to maintain his Stoic denial of life after death in his Meditations.
The oracle of Apollo at Didyma named the highest god as Aion (Endless Time or Eternity). In another oracle, the supreme God was described as living in such isolation that even Apollo knew little about him, and that little, he was not willing to reveal. This is curiously reminiscent of Ahuramazda and Mithras, and the origins of these ideas can reasonably be surmised as Persian. In the imperial period of Rome, a great festival came to be held in Alexandria celebrating the birth of the god Aion and the revelation of the maiden goddess Kore. It was held on 5-6 January, the time chosen originally as the date of the birth of Christ, later the epiphany.
It is interesting that the oracle of Apollo at Claros explained that the god Iao (Yehouah) was Hades in the winter, Zeus in the spring, Apollo in the summer and Iacchus (Dionysos) in the autumn. Iao is therefore the god of the year or the annual cycle. The Jews and Persians certainly had annual celebrations of the New Year and it seems possible that these might have linked to the concept of Aion because the annual celebrations symbolized the passage of time from creation to eschaton. Julian the Apostate was consoled as he died by an oracle from Helios or Apollo, on the fate of his soul, promising him a place in the “ethereal light” of the court of his heavenly father.
Plutarch’s teacher, Ammonius, is said to have gone to Athens from Egypt. He taught that Apollo was the supreme God and was hgher than the sun although many people confused them. He was properly addressed as “Thou art”, and his chief commandment to humanity was “Know Thyself”—by which he meant human morality and frailties. The gods below him are graded in ranks and one of these lesser ranks is the god of this world. Such teaching was indeed familiar in Philo’s Alexandria.
At Antioch in Syria was a magnificent statue of Apollo by the master sculpteur, Bryoxis. It was a collossal image of gold with jewels for eyes. The god stood upright in a long pleated robe with a bowl in his right hand, and a lyre in his left. It was burnt in 362 AD.
The Holy Spirit
Pagan inscriptions testify to the worship of an abstract divinity in Asia at this time, but no one seems curious about it. A sect of the “Most High God” was known in Asia Minor. The epitaph is known of a man called Zosimus in the highlands of Phrygia. he was of good birth and is described as one of the “Most High People”. He was a seer who used lots to divine the answers to wise questions from “inspired scriptures and Homeric verses”, which he wrote on a folded tablet. Zosimus might have been a Christian because Christian “prophets” were known to have been active in the same area, but the use of lots and Homer count against it. The “Most High People” seem more likely to have been another splinter from Zoroastrianism, the remnants of which in Asia Minor made it a fruitful ground for Christian proselytizing. These might have been Juddin of the Persian religion, who apparently became the worldwide basis of Judaism when the Maccabees set up an independent Jewish state.
The imagined spiritual battle broke out again in the revival movement called Montanism. Originating in Phrygia, it affected most of regions that were Christian, Asia Minor, Gaul and Africa. Some church leaders moved into the country with their congregations, where they lived together and cared for each other, filled with the expectation of the kingdom. Montanist prophets eagerly awaited God soon to transform the world.
Montanus (c 160 AD) was perhaps another of these, converted to an unusual form of “Christianity” in which the “Holy Spirit” spoke through him. Justification of Montanus was the promise of the “paraclete” in John’s gospel—the Holy Spirit updating the Word! A critic of Montanus claims he had been a eunuch priest in a Pagan ecstatic cult in Phrygia. He is considered a “millennial” prophet and millennial teaching is seen as a Phrygian oddity, but the idea of “millennia” (a thousand years) came from Zoroastrian theology where the course of time was divided into twelve millennia corresponding to each of the constellations in the zodiac and the months of the year, so that the whole of history corresponded to the annual journey of the sun through the heavens and could be celebrated when each year was renewed at the Spring or Autumn equinoxes. Jews and Christians therefore already had many of their ideas implanted in the native religion of the region passed to them hundreds of years before by the Persian conquerors.
Montanus was one of the worshippers of angels. The figure he described as Christ was possibly Mithras—the chief angel of Ahuramazda—the two figures were identified as the same early on in Asia Minor. The Montanists gave honour to women as “participants”, admired Eve as the source of all knowledge, and praised Moses’s sister, Miriam. Montanist meetings were introduced by seven virgins entering wearing white robes and bearing torches. They wept and urged the congregation to repentance.
Montanus employed prophets and, unusually in supposed Christianity, prophetesses—he had two. A Montanist prophetess is said to have seen Christ appear as a woman, and prophesied that the New Jerusalem would descend at Pepuza, an unknown place, presumably in Phrygia, to begin the reign of the saints for a millennium. This miracle was proclaimed within forty years. Needless to say, they passed with no New Jerusalem descending or millennium arriving. Origen in about 240 AD, declared ecstatic forms of prophecy as inadmissable, and insisted that women could not be prophets, but Montanism continued for another 500 years.
Montanus himself was excommunicated about 180 AD. So only five generations after the Holy Spirit had descended upon the apostles, the Church was declaring Christians whom it spoke through to be heretics! Montanus seems to have believed that the Holy Spirit could truly descend on individual Christians to act as its intermediary, as its Paraclete, but the Church did not like the idea of any such independent Holy Spirit. Since then, every church created as a splinter group of Christianity has believed the same as Montanus. The Holy Spirit spoke through them, but all of them took the view of the Roman Church—it spoke only through them.
Nowadays, Montanism is accepted by the Church under certain rules. Blessed Virgins are seen and are said to issue oracles, but they are automatically proved to be false when the criticize the Church or its hierarchy. When the BVMs criticize the Church’s enemies, like communists, they are proved to be speaking truly. A Holy Spirit that makes declarations that flatter the Church and denigrate its enemies must always be true. The children of Medjugorge said their BVM had criticized the local bishop’s treatment of the Franciscans, putting the Roman hierarchy in a quandary. But when it suits them, they declare that the Devil can appear as an “angel of light” (2 Cor 11:14). Few Christians are even intelligent enough to consider that a devil that can do this can imitate a saviour, or a son of God and can institute a church. We therefore must judge it, not by its self-professed origins but by its actual history.
From Apocalytic to Institution
The first Christians believed the world was led by a spiritual ruler, Satan, who works to destroy humankind, using sickness, corruption and moral turpitude to destroy the soul. Modern theologians of most Christian churches cannot see that God would allow an evil spirit to rule the world, and are adamant that the God’s creation is good. But many other Christians, especially fundamentalists still think God has a worthy opponent in Satan:
Our time is indeed ruled by the power of the evil one. He is the god of this world, the spirit controlling men.Eberhard Arnold
Christians then were expecting the End, soon! Many are still. The resurrection of Christ heralded the End:
The son of God became man to destroy the demons.Justin, Second Apology
Christians have continued to think the same for 2000 years. Paul compared the world with a pregnant woman expecting the birth pangs at any moment, but not knowing when. The world was pregnant with its own destruction, and Paul’s Thessalonian converts thought their own persecution was the beginning of the birth pangs.
By roughly 180 AD, when the good emperor, Marcus Aurelius, died, Christianity was becoming a mass religion. Unlike the earlier group, expecting the apocalypse at any time soon, the new generations tended not to be so sure. Even in the 90s of the first century, some Christians were skeptical:
We have heard these things in the days of our fathers, and, look, we have grown old and none of them has happened to us.
The bishops and theologians were desperate for excuses. About 130 AD, Justin Martyr, in his Apology to the emperor Pius Antoninus, explained that God had delayed the End to allow Christianity to spread over the whole world. Curious how the omniscient God keeps getting blind spots. By 200 AD, Tertullian admitted that living Christians were no longer looking forward to the End, but were praying it would not happen while they lived—showing that they still thought it might, indeed. In the mid-third century, Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, put a new spin on it. Two many Christians were crooks and “lapses”—Cyprian took this to be a sign of the imminent End. So, all the world converting to Christianity is a sign of the End, and all the Christians being unprincipled rogues and confidence tricksters is a sign of it. No doubt when all the world has converted and they are all unprincipled rogues, then the End will come. We shall deserve it.
The theologians turned to the Jewish scriptures for prophecy, just as the Essenes had done. Every day was to God like a thousand years, according to Psalms, so the fullness of Creation was 6000 years followed by a millennium of rest for the saints. When were the 6000 years going to be up? The prophets and theologians looked at their scriptures more closely and announced 202 AD. The date passed, and the prophets turned again to their scriptures. 500 AD, they announced. So, the third century Christians who believed this had no need to pray that the End would not come. They were not expecting it for a few hundred more years. They were safe enough because it never came at the appointed time again. Jesus had himself expected the End in his own day. He had been wrong and the first Christian theologians—who were actually Essenes—extended it for forty years. They too were wrong.
Since the renewal expected from God was not as soon as they had thought, they wondered how to preserve and promote Christianity in this world. The emergent institutional church marked the beginning of heresy and its pursuit, “so characteristically Christian, yet so completely unChristlike”, as Eberhard Arnold calls it. The institutional church proceeded by establishing the dogma of the creeds, and the canon of new Christian writings, the New Testament, in the second half of the second century, then consolidating the power of bishops. Bishops declared themselves the successors to the apostolate and the prophetic spirit was restricted to their office, a myth to promote episcopal supremacy. Irenaeus regarded every bishop as appointed by the apostles through the successive laying on of hands.
After the death of the first apostles, the weakness of the second generation apostles was obvious through the weakening of their power to work miracles. As a result, they voluntarily renounced their leadership, transferring part of their authority to church overseers, who became provincial bishops.Theodore of Mopsuestia
The free spirit was replaced by the material church of the bishops. The organization of the bishops as local rulers in the church, issuing synodal decrees, and the ultimate imperialism of the Pope preserved the catholic world. In 190 AD, Victor, Bishop of Rome, excluded from the church all those who refused to accept the Roman Easter practice, thus beginning the empire of the Bishop of Rome, known now as the pope. Tertullian thought all apostolic sees were equal in 200 AD, but by 220 AD, he had to denounce the rising solitary authority of the Bishop of Rome. The authority to forgive sins belonged to those who had the holy spirit and became the basis for the ecclesiastical law of the bishops, a fact clearly recognizable as late as 375 AD. Infant baptism can be traced to the time immediately following, supplanting the baptism of immersion, which had been so significant until then. With infant baptism, Christian names came into use;
From the beginning, the Eucharist, with the overseer blessing bread and wine, was the main Christian ritual. It was the initiation of the “love feast” in which Christians ate an ordinary meal—the Christian version of the Essenic messianic meal. So, the two rites were not distinguished from each other but, by the middle of the second century, it was becoming customary to have the “love feast” on a Saturday night and the Eucharist on a Sunday morning. As late as 170 AD, Celsus noted that the Christians had no altars, but by 200 AD, the table of the Agape had become the altar. The Lord’s Supper, suitable for small, intimate groups of devoted people, began to lose its significance when Christianity grew to a mass religion. At the end of the century, it had become the mass offered by the priest, but it was 500 years before the “love feast” proper went extinct. A simple sharing of food in fellowship, based on the Essene idea of the messianic meal in heaven, had become a pagan ritual with its mystery and sacraments. The expectation of the kingdom of God was essentially extinct. Believers found spiritual sustenance now in their belief in heaven.
Institutional Christianity until about 250 AD involved itself in pagan learning and literature, absorbing contemporary culture and Greek philosophy. The foundation of theology accompanied the fading of the expectation of the kingdom, soon. Exposing and resisting the trend were men like Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Tertullian, and Origen already wanting a return to a basic purity. Professions of punishing by being a judge, and Killing by being a soldier had been impossible for the pious Christian, but in 314 AD, deserters from the army were punished by excommunication. The third canon of the Synod of Arles states that “those who throw away their weapons in times of peace shall be excluded from communion”. The Emperor Constantine (Vita Constantini) had not long before granted soldiers “freedom and peace” if they chose to profess their Christianity rather than their military careers.
From the third century, the holy sacrament of penance provided the church with a revived weapon used originally for the monastic Essene communities. By recasting Christianity, the Catholic Church became a world power with a dominant role in European history. The arrival of the institutional church identified with contemporary Roman society meant, as Eberhard Arnold put it:
One had Christianity without being Christian, and that one did not have Christianity although one was called Christian.
Christians could no longer be called “saints” as a whole, as they had been since the time of the Essenes who aimed to be perfect as God was. Instead, Christian aims and objects were singled out and called holy. The truth is that the original Christianity, if it is taken to mean the beliefs of Jesus called Christ himself, was Essenism. If it is taken to be the beliefs of the immediate disciples of this Jesus then it was Essenism modified by the belief that Jesus was himself a god—the archangel Michael who would reurn to restore God’s original good creation. The later Christianity was neither of these things having been changed by various opportunists like Paul, and the sheer incomprehension and gullibility of the later followers.
The death of Marcus Aurelius, in 180 AD, was when the church began to be socially acceptable. Christians exerted their power and influence in politics and public affairs, no longer generally seen as criminals, though still occasionally persecuted by traditionalists. Already before Constantine, the primitive Church was distinguished from the institutional church, and “puritans” were calling for a return to basics.
From the third century on, more and more high ranking civil servants and army officers, traders in luxury goods, wealthy wholesalers, and owners of large estates belonged to the churches. Economic differences and class distinctions were now questioned so little that soon the episcopal church herself owned slaves and became richer and richer. The theory of total love and surrender of all goods continued to be upheld, but it could not prevent Christian’s attitude to property from becoming indistinguishable from that of non Christians.
The communism of love was not yet abandoned. John Chrysostom exemplified it as late as 400 AD. It was preserved in the original monasticism of the Essene saints, brought anew from Egypt into the empire. Monasticism resored, albeit within the church alone, a semblence of the original thing. The monks were responsible to God alone, began trying to keep apostolic poverty which was Essenic poverty, and tried to live lives of perfect devotion. As in the original, private property was overcome by the communism of love, property being shared in the monastic club.
The holy altar developed only in the course of the third century. Before that time, therefore, there was no church in the sense of a consecrated building. Tertullian, at the beginning of the third century, was among the first to mention buildings set aside for worship.
Morality
We know from Artemidorus, expressed by Robin Lane Fox:
It is quite untrue that Pagans lived in unfettered sexuality before Christianity.
The Pagan upper classes had high senses of honour and shame, and of infringing them through “hubris” (insolence) and maintaining them through modesty (“aidos”). Adultery was a crime, and a study of women’s epitaphs shows almost as many widows were buried as “univera” (“a one man woman”) as those who married again. Early psychiatrists like Artemidorus spoke of the shame felt by men who had to resort to prostitutes. Where then does the myth of Pagan sexual profligacy and debauchery come from? No prizes for the answer. It is Christian propaganda, spread at a time when no one knew any better. Many of the Pagan Stoics—from whom Christians took many of their morals—urged abstinence from sex except to procreate children. Like Buddhists, they considered desire the cause of suffering, and even Epictetus, who was quite liberal, told his followers:
Stay pure before marriage. Confine yourself to what is lawful. Do not be a nuisance or reproach those who do indulge. Do not brag about your own abstinence.
Plutarch warned men, tempted to be adulterous, not to upset their wives so much “for such a tiny pleasure”. Athletes believed that abstinence from sex was necessary to improve their results, and Roman soldiers on active service were not allowed to take wives. Just as modern romantic novelists, like Barbara Cartland, put great emphasis on the virginity of their heroines, so too did Greek romances. The physicians Galen and Rufus, however, urged sex as good for health. Christians, though, were not interested in a modicum of sex as a practical matter of good physical or mental health. For them, sex was sinful, and it was the fear of punishment by God that impelled them to stop it except within Christian marriage. Even then, the bishops valued virginity in males and females because they would then pass on their wealth to the Church.
The continuation of the Jewish condemnation of male homosexuality by the Christians was linked to the exposure of infants to let heads of families keep them small enough to avoid destitution. More baby girls were exposed than baby boys, so there were more male adults than female ones. Females were expected to be virgins for their husbands, but, as in Judaism, girls were considered old enough to marry at thriteen. They often married older men who died before them leaving them with a legacy. They could then re-marry, although the bishops frowned upon Christian women re-marrying. They were more useful donating their wealth and serving to attract men into Christianity.
Men, lacking enough women, practised “Greek love” often with slaves or with foreigners, since Romans were not keen on taking the passive role in these homosexual relationships. Young children who had been exposed, not unusually were saved by a passer by and raised to adulthood to be sold as slaves. Such slaves were often not thought of as being any good, and were called “kopreus”, perhaps reflecting the use for which they were considered fittest, while good slaves were called “Chrestus”, a word meaning “good” but mistaken for Christus, and so erroneaously linked to Christianity.
Tertullian’s tracts against remarriage rested on the deceits observed by C Rambaux—tendentious translation of the Greek New Testament into Latin, distortions of proof texts of S Paul, and mistaken and non-existent citations in the Jewish scriptures. Tertullian is close to decrying marriage all together, but S Paul had never even declared remarriage as unforgiveably wrong. He thought it necessary for some, so Tertullian had to alter his plain meaning to suit his own argument. Christians have done it throughout their history. They are inexorable citers of texts, but they rarely cite the whole of it or consider the full context, and when a text does not suit them they find an unsuitable context even if it is from another biblical book.
To avoid following the plain and simple gospel texts against wealth and in favour of poverty as spiritually beneficial, the gentile Christians guiltily compensated for them by putting an excessive importance on sexual abstinence. The angels were non-sexual and the Essene saints had always aimed for the same ideal. They could therefore persuade themselves that this was more important than the Ebionite vow of poverty. The shame of sex came through Judaism—which has no explanation for it—from the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism, where sexuality was a result of the wicked creation, and so all matters concerning sex were unclean—all fluids and discharges required purification rituals. The Essene and subsequent Christian demand for purity to enter heaven became a fad for chastity and celibacy.
The Christians, as Cyprian put it, had to “hold themselves free for God and Christ”. The idea that human potential should be limited to an unnatural devotion to hypothetical constructs is disgusting, and has proved to be immensely damaging:
It denied men’s capacity for living in complexity, for pursuing desirable ends which might not be mutually consistent, for enlarging his sympathies and own understanding by engaging in several pursuits at once. To return to a child-like paradise was to exclude almost everything and understand next to nothing: “single-mindedness” is a dangerous enfeebling myth.Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians
In Rome, only about 50 years after Constantine made Christianity official, there were grand houses whose residents, women with a few men, lived in chastity and in prolonged and rigorous fasting. They wore coarse, squalid garments, neglected their personal appearance and did not bathe. They set the tone of practical Christianity for a thousand years.
Though Christian virginity was justified in terms of it being an angelic characteristic, its real practical purpose was first to make people concentrate their attention, and particularly money, on the church, and, second, it was the corollary of the Christian ban on exposing unwanted children. Sensible people who did not want to be tied to bringing up children and to the poverty it brought, and also, in the case of women, risk death, opted to be virgins. It also provided a psychological substitute for the abrogated Jewish law—it was a convenient lifelong discipline, indeed hardship, that made the pious seem as though they were seriously trying to be holy.
Unless they were wealthy, the committed female virgins needed to be supported and they were taken into Christian households as housekeepers—even the households of bishops and deacons. They slept chastely in the same beds as these clerics! The exclamation mark expresses disbelief. No one believed it, and midwives were even brought in to verify the intactness of those virgins who refused to accept the jibes. Eventually scandals forced the Church to stop the practice. The practice is mentioned in the New Testament where, in his letters, (1 Cor 7:36-38), S Paul warns Christians to marry, or to marry off, his virgin when he begins to desire her. Paul’s message of sexual restraint here was because, like Jesus and the Essenes, he still thought “the End was Nigh”.
The letters and orders of church leaders make it clear that these voluntary virgins were often self-congratulatory and smug, common failings of Christian piety. Christianity, the religion of the humble, always has found room for personal conceit. It is a shame it is always for something utterly pointless. Conceit over some accomplishment that has been useful might be forgiveable, but little in Christian piety is useful, and what is, is ignored.
As for divorce, once married, the Christians took the interpretation of Jesus based on Genesis as absolute. Its parabolic meaning was utterly or deliberately forgotten. The Jews, and particularly Essenes, were fond of the simile of Israel as the bride of God. The cleavage of male and female in the parabolic marriage stood for the indivisible marriage of God and Israel that merely required the bride to cast off her false husband, Rome, to be restored as she was before she was illegally ravaged by the foreigner. The parable was a call to rebellion. Christians always ignore this.
To hide it, they took it as literally true obviously enough, but also changed the basis of it from the marriage of Israel and God to the marriage of the virgin church to Christ. Christians took, from their Essene forbears, the idea that they were the new or true Israel. There is not the slightest doubt about this. The Essenes regarded themselves as the true Israel, just as the Christians did. Moreover, the Christians elevated the Essene martyr into a God, equivalent to the Hebrew God incarnated on earth. Thus a marriage of God and Israel, in the Jewish scriptures was read as Jesus being the bridegroom of the Christian Church—they too were God and Israel. The change effected here is logical and even strong evidence of the source of Christianity in the Essene sect.
Jesus also was fond of using a wedding as a parable of the kingdom of God. It was re-establishing the proper relationship of God and Israel in a hierogamos that constituted the coming of the kingdom. Christians took it that he was literally talking about himself as the bridegroom of this wedding, and subsequently, the female virgins who committed themself to Christ were encouraged to think that to break it was as if they had broken their wedding vow to Christ, foreseen by the God himself in his parables about weddings and virgins.
There is no escaping Nature. Deprived of natural sexuality, virgins of both sexes found they were having erotic dreams. When female virgins had erotic dreams, the bishops at confession let them think that Jesus himself had visited them by night, fulfilling his own duty to them. For ordinary women to confess it was to be told they had yielded to a visitation by a night demon called an incubus—the males by a female demon called a succubus. The bishops tried to suppress the erotic dreams by making the virgins fast. It seemed not to work too well, if John Chrysostrom, at the end of the fourth century is anything to go by. He told his congregation in a sermon:
Women have the manners of the brothels and men are no better than maddened stallions.
The heretical sects of Marcionites and Montanists genuinely held women in high regard. They allowed women to baptize, exorcize, teach and to hold office, whereas the Roman Church would not allow women to do any of these things, and only in recent Protestantism have they been allowed to do them, though why they would want to is baffling. In Catholicism, women had to be content with being virgins and scrubbing the vestry.
