Abstract

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

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 after the spoiling of Jerusalem in 586 BC, which the Persian administrators imposed upon the original mythology in 417 BC. 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 after the so called “return”. 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 Persia or in Palestine after the Persians set up the temple and later attributed to Moses. 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 pseudepigraphical 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, elaborating the Levitical code to suite themselves. Thus they were essentially the work of dissenters from Hellenization and for the original Persian religion.

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 Hasmonaeans who wanted Yehouah as an exclusive national God. The priesthood under the Greeks continued to consider the religion as universal, much to the annoyance of the Hasmonaeans. Foreign influence strengthened and with it collaboration and Hellenization. Eventually th Hasmonaeans took the priesthood as well as the monarchy, driving their priestly opponents underground.

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 in the first century 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. 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. The concepts were mainly Greek. 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 the “return from exile” with the Persian colonists. The messiah would subjugate the nations which had oppressed Israel and set up a theocracy. The idea of the messiah arose in the Persian propaganda of Cyrus the Persian Shah, who had 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, and did so only out of necessity.

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 of minor importance, and Jesus was central in a mystical way, as an example of the dying and resurrecting god of the east, but 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-Persian 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 whom 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.

New Scriptures

The Christian community preceded its canon and its literature was selected from works which were often conflicting, but the criteria of inclusion were not truth and accuracy but whether they favoured orthodoxy or heresy, and control or expression. Probably the correct translation of the beginning of Luke is that it is a narrative of what is “most surely believed among us” rather than “fulfilled among us”, the “us” being, like Theophilus, the Christian converts. In this translation, the author of Luke frankly declares that the narrative is not history but what the first Christians believed. It was considered too dangerous to allow people to choose on merit the books they would like to read.

Mark was constructed as a series of pericopes or incidents which have been put together to form a narrative. The pericopes are not necessarily in the right order and their meaning has been deliberately changed. Renan remarks on the terrible nature of the miracles in Mark’s gospel, surely a reference to them being only thinly veiled in their violence. But it is not necessary to interpret every pericope correctly for the truth to be revealed. The weight of evidence is not a chain of logic but accumulative.

The pericopes were partially, at least, mixed up, some must be missing and some could be spurious insertions. One can attempt to explain them all but if one goes too far in one instance it does not invalidate the rest as a false link in a chain of argument would. The explanation of the death of John the Baptist could be pure fairy tale but it has features which could be Essene so it is included. If it should prove to be pure fairy tale, the general interpretaion is not thereby invalidated.

A parallel between the despair of the Nazarenes followed by their elation at their realization that the missing body meant the general resurrection had begun with its first fruits occurs in Seneca’s Hercules Oetaeus. At the hero’s death, his mother, Alcmena, at first sorrows but when she realizes that her son had become a god equal to his father, Jupiter, and had ascended to heaven, she is triumphant.

Rome and Christians

Not for the first time men were abandoning hard won democratic rights for authoritarian regimes over which they had little control. The political form of civilization of the West, democracy, had evolved differently from the absolutism and priestly cultures of the east. The Greek city states had developed a rational and humanistic form of government compared with the rigidly hierarchical, religious based systems of the east. There was interplay and overlap but the systems developed differently.

The Roman Republic had furthered the original ideal based on fifth century BC Athens but the statesmen of these later times saw that the system was in decline and tried to delay its end. It was impossible, of course, and men chose the Caesars rather than the Republic which was considered anarchic. And the first form of anarchy the tyrant rids himself of is opposition leaving the worse anarchy of the petulance of power.

Under the early empire the Roman Senate retained some powers, limiting the absolutist tendencies of the Caesars, but Julius Caesar with his typical flair sought to have himself made Pontifex Maximus to utilize religious as well as secular power. Julius Caesar, though thought of as noble, could not tolerate opposition, and his successors were often worse.

Christianity arose shortly after the Roman republic had been overthrown in favour of the emperors. Romans were proud people and could often be relied upon to respond to patriotic calls in the name of the Republic to defend Roman liberty. Under the emperors this liberty was lost for the bulk of the people as emperors became more capricious and civic life and justice fell apart. Though sick of despots, they had no will to return to democracy. Christianity took advantage of this political weariness and ultimately it survived the Caesars and the Roman empire.

Through suspicion of political parties, rather than demanding liberty, Romans condemned themselves to the dual tyranny of the Chi and the Kappa, the absolutism of religion and monarchy, no doubt feeling in their ignorance and superstition that somehow God would curb the excesses of the emperors. Out of Kappa, Chi expresses the modelling of Christ’s institution on that of the Kaisar (Caesar). Christianity’s reflexion of the organization of the empire in its own set up encouraged the idea and the perpetuity of the “divine right of kings”. Its ethos supported authority against freedom. The Caesars were respected against those who would defy them.

So, absolutism returned first, as monarchy, with the Caesars and then, as theocracy, with the triumph of Christianity. Not that theocracy had been eliminated in the west for the Celtic kings and chiefs had been supported by the powerful theocracy of the Druids, but a thoughtful and generally logical system had mainly prevailed before giving way to the forces of absolutism radiating from the east.

The frightful tyranny of Domitian stimulated in the Senate a revival of interest in the Republic and the principles of liberty and the emperors of the second century temporarily reverted to republican ideals. Marcus Aurelius repudiated Caesarism and a vision of a monarchy, republican in spirit, prevailed into the third century AD. Thus, most emperors were not absolute rulers in the eastern sense, having to work according to the law and the common good.

Curiously the liberal emperors’ only real blot was their treatment of the Christians even though Christians were the most sycophantically obsequious to the Roman authorities in all respects except worship. Despite the persecutions of the emperors, philosophic opinion remained critical of it and even when Julian later attempted to revive Paganism he forbade violence from Pagans or Christians.

Religion in Rome

In religion, the Roman idea was to try to absorb foreign cults into the framework of the existing civic religion. Human sacrifices had been abolished and as long as a foreign cult was otherwise respectable it was allowed to practise, though many educated Romans considered them as superstitions. Such practically minded men knew the predilection of the common people for fanaticism and religious frenzy.

Civic religion had been tamed and brought within the confines of the state system. Pageants and parades were controlled and served to release tension and enhance a life that would otherwise be dull and empty for many. State officials would have been suspicious of eastern cults, one of which was Christianity, and would try initially to suppress them, and then to control them.

When Tacitus, writing about 120 AD, describes the Christians murdered by Nero after the great fire of 64 AD, he accuses them of “hatred of the human race” which should be sufficient to show that these were not Christians at all but messianic Jews, probably Essenes. Tacitus knew the Christians of his own time and their own explanation of their origin in the crucifixion of a holy man in the time of Pontius Pilate the cruel prefect of Judaea. He was not confirming the truth of it but merely stating it by way of explanation of who this sect were.

Tacitus might have disliked them but could hardly have described them as hating the human race. The Essenes however regarded it as virtuous to remain apart from gentiles except for necessary commerce which they undertook only according to strict rules and under the eye of a mebaqqer, or guardian. Since Essenes felt that even their fellow Jews were sinners and backsliders, let alone the gentile races, they could fairly be described as hating the human race.

Since Christianity stemmed from Essenism and the early Christians would have sought friendship in their mother sect, there is a vestige of truth in Tacitus. But the word Christian was used about the Essenes because they were messianists, and Christ is simply the Greek for messiah. If the troubles which led to Nero’s excessive reaction were disputes between messianic Jews, Essenes, and other Jews then it would be easy to suppose the instigator had been a man called messiah or Christ.

This is the error made by Suetonius wrting about messianic disturbances in the time of Claudius which led to the expulsion of Jews from Rome which is found in the New Testament. Tacitus makes essentially the same mistake writing about the events of twenty years later. For messianic Jews like the Essenes, the arrival of the messiah and purging of the world was imminent. Plainly they were excitable and would react to rumours that the messiah had arisen, rumours that were not infrequent as we know from the Acts of the Apostles.

Rome was a large city with a majority of foreigners in its population, many of whom were Jews, some skeptical of and some believers in the messiah. In the seething tenaments of the Roman slums rumours were rife and trouble could flare up easily. Thus, the persecution of Christians meaning followers of Jesus, by Nero is almost entirely false, the bulk of the people suffering being Jews. Indeed from Juvenal, Nero used the opportunity to rid himself of enemies whatever their religious or national origins.

The one characteristic of the Christians of the time which was certainly true was that they were not interested in social or political opposition. They were disliked for their exclusive stand on religious worship but always took to heart the rule of rendering to Caesar what was his, though it was a call to defy Caesar when Jesus first uttered it in Palestine.

Tacitus records that, before the fall of Jerusalem, a supernatural voice was heard in the temple proclaiming the departure of the gods (not God)! Few found this alarming because it was widely believed that the scriptures prophesied that the east would be strong and men from Judaea would possess the world. Jews in the diaspora continued to believe this, only slightly discouraged by the events of the Jewish War, and continued to proselytize in the empire for many more years through two further Jewish revolutions until the third, that of Bar Kosiba, led to such severe reprisals that Jews withdrew into that social exclusiveness from which they have yet to return.

Juvenal writing before this did not mention Christians at all implying only Judaism to have been prolselytized. Later it was only the Christians. So, for about half a century after the Jewish war, Jews remained optimistic that their destiny was to possess the world. Among the expatriot Jews were those of the Essene sect who were ever excitable about the prospect of a messiah emerging.

The Christians had an almost identical view, the difference only being that they were expecting the return or parousia of their messiah to cleanse and judge the world. As an explanation of the scriptural references to a suffering messiah, it perhaps offered advantages to many messianic Jews and the godfearers who admired them. There was nothing unbelievable in Pilate crucifying a man, he was remembered as cruel, and yet it was not difficult in gullible times to dissociate Jesus from the true stories about him which some travellers brought back with them. For over a normal lifetime the Romans had crucified many Jewish rebels, none of whom had any but the most incidental success, and the gentile bishops became masters at denying and distorting the true accounts of Jesus’s unsuccessful revolution when it suited them, or blaming explicit outrages on other messianic failures. The Acts of the Apostles even mentions some of these.

Fraternities for the sharing of certain mysteries were widely accepted in the empire. Even the Jews joined in fraternities to celebrate the Seder in Jerusalem, just as the apostles were reported to have done, and variant sects like the Essenes habitually met to share a sacred meal. Such collegia were common among the devotees of the eastern religions like those of Dionysos and they could become politically powerful. The Roman authorities were therefore suspicious of such circles as being bands of conspirators and demanded that they be registered. Those that were were collegia licita, legal gatherings, and those that were not remained illegal—collegia illicita.

Curiously at this time the Romans were so tolerant of sectarianism that, once they had discovered and investigated an illegal gathering, provided that it was not involved in clandestine activity, it was tolerated even though it was illicit. Though the collegia were supposed to be authorized, if innocent they were not treated as illegal, even if they did not register. The Jewish religion was licit.

Even Christian collegia were never declared explicitly and solely illicit though they were sometimes persecuted under more general rules. Each new college had to obtain authorization by proving to the authorities that it had no political objectives. Only in its earliest days would the church have been able to do this. Once it had grown beyond a certain size, its administration and organisation declared it a reflexion of the Roman secular state. That could only be interpreted in political terms.

Persecution

At Antioch the converts to the new sect called themselves followers of “The Way” using the expression used by the Essenes of themselves in the scrolls. Legend has it that Peter was their first bishop, the word bishop being the Greek translation of the Aramaic word also used by the Essenes for their community leaders. Keen to gain respectibility the new sect promoted its ethical monotheism and the purity of its morals as conducive to the obedience of Roman law.

The fable that Tiberius wanted to deify Jesus officially but was stopped by the Senate was typical of the Christians’ appeal to the absolute authority above the democratic one. It labels the Senate as the enemy of Christianity while the despot was its friend. The Christians buttress tyrants with the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings and eventually, in the Middle Ages, both the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor could be called “God on Earth”.

Opposition to Christianity was based on Romans educated in the free schools, the last bastions against Christian totalitarianism in Greece in the sixth century AD, as was the Senate earlier in Rome. The fairness of the second century emperors is shown by Marcus Aurelius who was philosophically a Stoic but who endowed chairs in all the schools of philosophy without favour to those he preferred himself.

The repression of Christianity is largely Christian myth and, to the extent that it occurred at all, its basis remains unclear. Cases described as Christian persecution seem to be simply punishment of illegal acts. The justice of the punishment can be argued but mostly Christians were not persecuted for being Christian but for breaking the law. Significantly such persecution as did occur tempered as the absolutism of the emperors increased—from the time of Commodus on.

Gibbon showed conclusively that Christians experienced no serious persecution before Diocletian and this was a last splutter of a weak candle. The Chi of Christ was ultimately victorious with the Kappa of the emperor Constantine and the oriental court favoured by Diocletian was permanently adopted by the latter. Absolutism was on the march even in its birthplace, the east. The Greek influenced dynasty of the Parthian Arsacids gave way to the intolerant despotism of the Sassanids.

Paulinism

Paul, who was not a Palestinian Jew if he was a son of Abraham at all, saw the opportunities offered by the death of the popular rebel and began to tout it as a new religion combining the various elements mentioned above.

Paul is remembered better than the other apostles precisely because of his self-imposed task of evangelizing the gentiles. The original branch of the Nazarenes was to die out, pushed by the Jewish War into the desert where it influenced Mohammed before succumbing to his revolution. Paul travelled west and became well-known in the Roman empire, the victor in the Jewish War.

Most of the other apostles, the ones who had known Jesus in life and possibly greater men than those we know of, remained in Palestine and were destroyed without trace with the Jerusalem Church. None of the other apostles, other than Peter has any substance, and we know much, much less about Peter than we do about Paul. It is possible that some of Peter’s experiences have been transferred to Paul in the Acts of the Apostles to boost the apostle to the gentiles, Paul’s trial before Annas, for example.

Paul himself seems to have evolved from having an apocalyptic outlook to being gnostic. 2 Thessalonians 1:7-8 is purely apocalyptic, the apocalypse however being postponed until after the parousia. In Acts 3:27, we read:

Every soul that will not hear the new prophet shall be destroyed.

He seems to have consistently denigrated the Jews, preached abrogation of the law and propagated the saving power of belief in the dying and resurrected god. He therefore became the hero of those gentile Christians who by the turn of the second century were departing from the Essenic beliefs of their founders.

Paul was not an associate of Jesus and it appears he had little contact with the chosen Apostles. Yet his writing is littered with words and expressions favoured by the Essenes, more so than any other New Testament writer. It seems he must have been an Essene or so closely associated with them that he could pick up their argot. Having done so he used it ostentatiously perhaps aware that it gave his speech a prophetic quality and gave him a suitable gravitas.

Paul demanded that converts have “faith” that Jesus had come as “Christ”, died and been resurrected. He announced that God had given men “grace” to believe. These three key words, faith, Christ and grace, are all favourites of the Essenes, though Paul gives them a new meaning.

The faith of the Essene was that God would gather the righteous into His holy kingdom under the leadership of His messiah. Faith for Paul was that the messiah had come in the person of Jesus. For the Essene the messiah was a noble leader supported by God but, for Paul, Christ, the Greek word meaning messiah, was a new form of the god who died and in three days was resurrected to save believers—a god like Tammuz and Attis.

Grace for Essenes was holiness or piety which had to be practised without let by the righteous aspiring to the kingdom of God. The judgement was with God but Essenes trusted God not to be capricious in His judgements and so a life of righteousness and good works could be expected to be acceptable to Him. In Paul’s outlook the decision of God seems much more whimsical. God decides whether faith has been true enough but no one knows what the criteria are. Faith is necessary but not sufficient for salvation, the final judgement being God’s, but seeming to be arbitrary.

The original Jesus myth required Jesus to be resurrected because that was Essene belief—the righteous dead were resurrected into this life in renewed bodies which were incorruptible because earth had now been joined to heaven. Jesus was the first of the righteous so to rise and thus proved that the kingdom of God was beginning.

Paul it seems had his doubts about this. He had been brought up in a Greek city not a Jewish one, and was probably a Jewish proselyte or first generation Jew rather than of the seed of Abraham as he claimed. Paul seems to have served the three years required of an Essene novice but never to have completed the novitiate. His training and upbringing had made him familiar with Greek thought, eastern mystery religions and Jewish apocalypticism.

He had difficulty in accepting that putrified flesh could be renewed. His epistles show him to be inclined towards “docetism”, the belief that the risen Jesus was a phantasm that only seemed real. He could not wholeheartedly accept the notion of a resurrection of the flesh and compromised with a tendency towards docetism that was later picked up by the gnostics in their philosophical mythology.

Of course, the original believers accepted the resurrection as just that because they were Jews and that was the earliest tradition. The orthodox Church took this to be the proper tradition and they opposed docetism. This has been written into the gospels, the apostles being depicted as doing absurd and revolting things to prove that Jesus was indeed flesh and blood and not a ghost.

The Jews of Alexandria knew of a personified creative reason called the Logos or the Word which was a mediator between God and man. In John’s gospel we find essentially the same concept as a pre-existent Logos, an emanation of God that was God, which the gospel immeditely identifies with Jesus Christ who was also the Son of God. Thus the Father and the Son were united in the Logos yielding two thirds of the Trinity.

Philosophical speculators of the time liked trinities and they had a respectable ancestry in trinities of Gods like the Egyptian trinity of Osiris, Isis and Horus. Always syncretic, Christianity could not allow such an attractive prospect to pass by. Paul had virtually invented the divine trinity, the third aspect of which was the Holy Ghost.

The Church’s investment in Jewish tradition and monotheism was too strong to allow the Hebrew God to spalate into three fragments, and instead the theologians worked overtime on some nifty verbal dance-steps to allow Christians to enjoy three gods and one, at the same time! They composed the Nicene Creed.

Regrettably, the female principle was lost in this because the Holy Ghost was conceived of as masculine or neutral in sex, whereas the female gender of the Hebrew word suggested the femininity of the idea. The Fathers of the Church had succeeded in excluding women but they left a void into which popular devotion eventually placed the Virgin Mary who began to take on the attributes of a goddess.

Both the orthodox Church and the gnostics wanted to appropriate Paul but his inclination towards docetism led to his adoption as the Father of Christian Gnosticism. The use made of him by the gnostics led to his being derided in the second century by some as the “Apostle of the Heretics”. Basilides and Marcion, hoping to rid Christianity of its Jewishness, rejected all the chosen apostles. For them there was only one apostle, “the Apostle”, Paul. Was Paul known not to be a true Jew? That he was favoured by those who hated Jews might help confirm our suspicion that he was no son of Abraham.

The objectives of the Catholic church and the gnostics were always quite different. The gnostics were seeking a philosophic religion allowing for great variety and putting emphasis on personal revelation. The Catholic church set out to become the Holy Roman Empire—not the German Bund invented later to replace the lost Western Empire but a religious Roman empire in parallel with the secular empire of the Caesars. The importance to success of having clear objectives is illustrated by the triumph of Catholicism. The practical minds of the church office holders enabled them to fulfil, in a sense, age old prophecy and rule the world as a modified Jewish priesthood.

Soon heresy and schism were to be denounced as crimes to be punished not by God in judgement but by men with torture. The ideas of enlightened minds that had conceived of freedom and emancipation were quashed; slavery was endorsed; tyranny was upheld; women were subjugated; pie in the sky was promised in compensation to the oppressed provided that they suffer silently on earth.

The unforgiveable sin against the Holy Ghost of Jesus and the Essenes became defiance of church authority. This was the system that succeeded in the fourth century in becoming the only religion of the empire—the culmination of the syncretism of the emperors. Perhaps nothing would have been substantially different if the winner had been the church of Mithras or Isis because the political objective had been to bring them all together as a mighty state religion.

The fact remains that the Christian Church nominally came out on top and it did because it had set out to do so as the partner of the secular power. In the west, dual political systems arose with the secular and spiritual arms of kings and bishops. In the east, the system was that of absolute theocracies of unshakeable internal strength.

It was not until 1917 that an eastern theocracy was overturned by rebellion rather than by an external enemy. And what was achieved? The philosophy of personal servility to the almighty state which the Bolsheviks introduced was merely more of the same.

The Later Church

In the sixth century AD, the intolerance of Christianity had its ultimate triumph over the long standing classical quest for knowledge of the Pagan schools. Against the power of the autocrats the Pagan schools ahd been unable to disseminate knowledge and had remained exclusive. The mob were ignorant and hostile to learning and, though mostly they were also not interested in Christianity, the other-worldly threats and promises of its creed impressed their superstitious minds. Combined with the Church’s readiness to administer sustained torment to dissenters in God’s name assured it of victory against more critical minds.

Imperial contenders were offered support in return for which the church hierarchy demanded favourable treatment for the orthodox and persecution for opponents. Old Roman laws against witchcraft and magic were invoked against devotees of rival religions whose gods were called devils. In the epistle 2 Peter 1:20, the evangelist forbids any novice to interpret scripture himself. Believers had to believe what they were told, not what they themselves read. To make your own interpretation might have been heresy, a “treason against God.” For Christians, conscience was not “the most exacting confessor and it only can forgive your sins” as Kant was later to say.

To expose any such heresy legitimate proof could be had by torture—no person was safe, of whatever class or status, the Christian concession to democracy! In Greece, Justinian closed the Pagan schools and stole their endowments. In Alexandria, the library was burnt to a toast. Freethinking was proscribed. The gnostics had also lost out and those compelled to join the universal church had to curse their former affiliations, saying:

I anathematize those who say that Zoroaster and Buddha and Christ and Manichaeus and the Sun are one and the same.

The Manichaeans followed the earlier gnostics in following Paul. Even after the victory of the church, groups called Paulicians after some unknown leader called Paul but glad to be associated with the “Apostle to the Heretics” survived in pockets and had their effect in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The Paulician heresy was stamped out with brutality and atrocity for they held gnostic beliefs.

Plotinus in the third century founded the last of the great Pagan schools in the midst of the growth of Christianity, and its philosophy became known as neo-Platonism. We know of no books of Plotinus that attack the church, although gnosticism is attacked. Perhaps Plotinus saw the church merely as deceivers with no intellectual substance but saw the gnostics as having intellectual pretensions. Plotinus saw no merit in the gnostics regarding everyone other than themselves as having no divine spark, indeed possessed by devils, but saw in them Platonic elements.

The new philosophy seems to have been favoured by intelligent Christians for whom the barbarism of ritual and creed were unsatisfactory. They enrolled in the schools and learnt about Platonism and Stoicism from them before they were eventually closed down, and thus profoundly were to affect Christianity at its incipient intellectual growth points. Since then much that passes for Christianity is really Platonism or Stoicism.

However the neo-Platonists stayed starkly divided from Christianity in believing that the allegorical adventures of gods and heroes were never real. They distinguished myths from history and science. Myths were useful in illustrating a point, but the point should never be lost in the myth. Primitive people were perhaps unable to express themselves in abstractions, because the words for them did not exist or because such language was too arcane for popular consumption. They therefore illustrated their important truths with myths. In many scriptural myths it is not hard to educe the moral, and one is faced then with the decision about whether the moral was the original purpose. If it was, the story is not true as history or science.

Though Christians like Marcion would have liked to have been shot of the Jewish tradition, others saw it as a valuable asset and sought a philosophical framework to support the mythology. Only the Greek schools had the erudition to supply it—neo-Platonism supplied the theory of the immaterial soul. The plain and simple reasoning of mere men with their gift for thought had to supply the rational and moral basis for the assertions of the revealed religion.

What though was to be the higher, rational philosophy or the superstitions of a popular religion? The answer was superstition and rational thought was relegated for a millennium to the footstool of a religion which revered images of a human sacrifice suffering torture nailed on a cross.

In 1 Corinthians 3:18-19 Paul writes:

If any man thinketh he is wise among you in this world let him become a fool, that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.

Whether Paul, if it is not an anti-gnostic insertion, meant this literally or metaphorically, it was taken literally by Christians. In the sixth century, a Christian expounded a treatise on this text saying:

Philosophers set forth opinions without harmony or congruence.

Justinian, who always wanted money like most Christians since Christ, accepted that the philosophical schools were useless and closed them down, pocketing their funds, as you do. Simplicius, a philosopher of the neo-Platonist school of Athens fled to Persia hoping to continue the Pagan tradition. Highlighting the ignorance of Christians, he said they understood nothing of what they had read, and hypocritically ignored their own innumerable divisions about subjects of such practical importance as how the godhead was to be understood.

Science was lost and absurd arguments on angels and needles replaced them for the duration of the Dark Ages. Even today long into a scientific revival, scientists feel obliged to make self-conscious references to God or to biblical myths of no scientific relevance, purely, apparently, out of a need not to ignore religion. A surprising number of scientists remain Christian, renewing for themselves the verbal gymnastics of earlier times. It shows the astonishing power that the shaman has over society.

The Constant Church

Elizabeth Maclaren (The Nature of Belief, Sheldon, 1976) shows how Christian faith has altered over the centuries. Jesus who has the message in the gospels became Jesus who was the message in Paul. Ever since, Christians have ignored whatever messages Jesus seemed to have had in favour of Paul’s message. First century Christianity was based on the Jewish scriptures. In short, it was primarily Jewish. The gospels were written later in the first century and were not in general circulation until the second, so Christians learnt about Christ mainly from whatever the first Christians deemed were prophecies of him in the scriptures. Matthew’s gospel was a modification of the basic collection of stories about the historical Jesus in Mark to highlight scriptural prophecy.

First century Christianity was Judaism for gentiles except that the appearance of the messiah in the form of Jesus heralded the kingdom of God. Four centuries later, God existed as the Trinity, the second part of which, the Logos, had incarnated on earth as the Son or Christ, living and dying as a man called Jesus—meaning Saviour—whose presence on earth united humanity with God, offering them the benefit of immortality. By the twelfth century, the doctrine was that humanity had sinned against God in arrogant pride and ought to have had the treatment experienced by the generation of Noah. Instead, God sent his son to die for man’s sins. Thus divine justice is done and Satan is foiled as long as people accept the sacramants of the Church!

In the twentieth century, for the Western liberal Christian, God is the focus of life and hope, which Jesus expressed in the mythology of his time in a message of love and liberation that transcended his death and continues to be interpreted today. God does not intervene by miracle—nothing is supernatural—but Jesus exemplifies love and the purpose of life.

Christianity has changed continuously in the last 2000 years as culture has changed, and now exists in as many varieties as there are believers. There are around 30,000 denominations of Christianity, and it seems fair to ask with Ninian Smart (The Phenomenon of Christianity, Collins 1979) what the Amish of Pennsylvania have in common with the Zulu Zion. Jesus has become everyone’s personal Good Luck Charm. Once they look beyond the rabbit’s foot, they meet problems:

• The Inquisition, once the organ of the Christian God’s divine providence, is considered by most modern Christians as barbaric.
• Crusades were once considered the Christian armies out to save the world from the infidel, but few people today can see them as anything other than bands of savage xenophobic robbers off to the east to plunder Christian and infidel alike.
• Many modern Christians can see only intolerance of the cultures of others in the Christian doctrine of considering other religions as heathen and false, and imposing the need to send out missionaries to “save” them.
• Slavery was once approved by Christianity but now is not.
• Sexual freedom was always decried by Christians but today few see much harm in it.
• Christ was the putative Prince of Peace, and, though liberal Christians are pacific, most priests and bishops will happily serve as military chaplains and bless armies and battleships.
• Christianity began with communistic ideas of property ownership, yet, under Protestantism, has promoted capitalism and the exploitation of the earth.

Traditional Christianity, so far as its claims to truth are concerned, to those looking at it from outside, is in the same boat as Marxism, Straussism, fascism, or any other ideology used by a narrow elite. Some of the parallels between it and them become dangerously close. Christianity too has re-written history to suit itself. Christianity too has murdered opponents in large numbers. Can its justification be any different, or is any crime acceptable in the interests of the Christian God?

These examples illustrate that Christianity amounts to believing anything! To be able to believe anything is to believe nothing. Christianity is meaningless and it is time, after 2000 years, that people found something worth believing.

Further Reading

• More on religious origins
• More on Judaism
• More on the death of God and secular Christianity
• More on secular Christianity

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