Christians used to think, with Professor C A Coulson, that God’s intention is that His children should grow up not running from evil but overcoming it with goodness. The God of the US fundamentalists has a new idea. Overcome evil with greater evil!

Origins of Christianity 3

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

Paulinism
The Later Church
The Constant Church

Abstract

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.

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.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.