Christianity
The Gentile Church—Hellenized Jews and Primitive Christianity
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated:Saturday, 19 October 2002
The Roman Church
The first century of Christianity is full of obscurities. The activities of only two Christian missionaries are known, one being Pantaenus in India, between S Paul and Constantine’s acceptance of Christianity in the fourth century. The careers of most of 12 apostles supposedly commissioned by Jesus are legend rather than fact. Christianity began as another Jewish sect, but the new scrolls scholarship shows that Christian doctrine was influenced by sectarian Judaism—the Essenes—rather than, as had previously been supposed, by Greek thought.
The word “apostle” was originally used in Judaism. Jewish apostles carried letters from Jerusalem to the Jews in the Diaspora, collecting contributions, exercising supervisory and disciplinary powers, and keeping up the bond of Jews with Jerusalem. The apostles of the early church in Jerusalem had the same sort of duties as the career of Paul shows, subject to the Jerusalem Council, as he was. So apostles were not only the twelve initial disciples of Jesus. Another is apointed in the bible itself to replace Judas. Tertullian and Origen called the seventy disciples in the Gospels apostles too. Origen and Eusebius knew of female apostles in the second century. In the Acts of Paul a woman, Thecla, was an apostle.
The word Christianity was first used about 50 AD in Antioch (Acts 11:26), a town which had a large Jewish population and must surely have had a substantial Essene community, accesible as it was to the New Covenanters of Parthia as well as those of Palestine. In the move from Palestine into the Roman Empire the Nazarene movement began to mutate into the Christianity we now know, but its foundations in the manuscripts of Qumran seem clear. Christianity grew from a Palestinian mystic cult who knew they were elected by God to fight a holy war against the forces of darkness. Their leader led them into the holy war, they lost it, and the leader was crucified.
Less than 30 years after the crucifixion, the Pauline gentile churches of Italy, Greece and Asia Minor, and the Gnostic churches of Libya and Egypt split from the Nazarene church in Jerusalem. The latter led by James the Just remained under the authority of the Sanhedrin and followed Judaic conventions. Only a few years before the Jewish War, the teachings of Paul had been rejected by James, but the Jerusalem Church lost most of its influence with the destruction of the holy city, and Paul’s heretical teachings suddenly found themselves unopposed. The propagators of Christian beliefs became those who followed Paul and not those who had known Jesus and his original teaching. Indeed the main enemies of Jesus, the Herodians and the froward priests of Jerusalem, probably sought and found a new career after the destruction of the temple in the new Hellenized Judaism that was spreading into the empire. The Church directly associated with Jesus and his followers had so soon been disregarded.
For a long time there was no centre of Christianity at all, each of the churches founded in the world of the gentiles going its own way, but Romans were ready to try out religious novelties and the door was open for a metamorphosis into a new religion of a Jewish sect which revered a failed Jewish pretender. The centre of Christianity could now only be Rome where it developed as a gentile religion.
Views at variance with Paul’s, like the Ebionites’, were declared heretical by the gentile church though originally they had been orthodox. Were the works of the apostles Peter, James and John also suppressed? Why are the twelve apostles almost ignored in the gospels and in Acts, or treated as if they were complete idiots when they are mentioned? James, Jesus’s brother, must have known his brother better than Paul. On the few brief instances when the gospels mention him they imply he thinks Jesus mad, yet he succeeded Jesus as the leader of the Nazarenes after the crucifixion. The church’s answer to this oddity is that he was miraculously converted by the resurrected Jesus. One would have thought that he would therefore have been in great demand as a preacher of the power of the new faith like that other miraculous convert, Paul, but, apart from one epistle which seems to be genuine, his testimony did not suit the Pauline church so he was virtually erased from history.
A third century work, the Recognitions of Clementine, speaks of a tradition that Peter tells followers at Tripolis to believe only those who bring from Jerusalem the testimonial of Jesus’s brother, James. Here it is Peter who warns of false prophets, and false apostles and false teachers, who indeed speak in the name of Christ but do the work of the devil. He could only have meant the Hellenizers who followed Paul.
The Acts of the Apostles is of course really the Acts of the Apostle Paul because other than an initial description of the period just after the crucifixion, and although churches are mentioned, including that at Rome, that were not founded by Paul, there is little account of the work of the other apostles. Nothing is said about the fate of the Jerusalem Church. Indeed nothing is said about the fate of Paul himself, the story being left unfinished with Paul waiting for an Imperial decision.
The subsequent history of the Jerusalem Church is given by Eusebius quoting Hegesippus, the second century historian. Jesus was followed as leader by James, then Simeon (Jesus’s cousin by Mary and Clopas), and finally by two grandsons of Jude, Jesus’s brother, until the dispersion of the Jerusalem Church by Hadrian in 135 AD. Hegesippus tells how the Emperor Domitian, concerned about possible pretenders to the Jewish throne, questioned the grandsons of Jude about their Davidic descent. Their poverty and their starving, calloused bodies convinced the Emperor they were no threat and they were released.
By the year 100 AD, when the last people who had met Jesus were dying out, gentile Christianity was already a growing force. The crucifixion was as remote as World War II is now, but the myth of Jesus was getting stronger.
Memories about Jesus, collections of stories about Jesus’s life, memoirs of the Apostles, and the Lord’s sayings, words allegedly spoken by Jesus, were passed among believers. They were called Gospels at an early date, forming the basis of the New Testament. The Lord’s sayings had particular authority in Christian communities, before the New Testament. About ninety sayings, thought then to have been by Jesus, are not in the New Testament. Papias wrote a five volume work, Sayings of the Lord Explained, by the middle of the second century. His sources were people who said they knew the apostles or others who had heard Jesus.
The apostles did not heal with herbs or drugs but through faith in God. Apostles thought their authority to forgive sins depended on the gift of the Holy Spirit. With the laying on of hands, the apostle proclaimed the healing Christ. Clement of Alexandria (Eclogae propheticae) calls apostles “savers of mankind”. Plainly, the healing was a spiritual affair, not physical healing, even though confidence in a cure can often help physical healing as we now know through the well described placebo effect. The healing miracles in the gospels, and even in the early accounts of apostolic activity were metaphors. The healing was spiritual, a conversion experience, and they were miracles when the converts were considered unlikely!
John, the Beloved Apostle, adored in Christian legend because he had had a particularly close relationship with Jesus, had retired to Ephesus and was now too weak to walk. Believers carried him to the Sunday meetings, and the old man, in his dementia, preached over and again the simplest possible sermon in one sentence:
Little children, love one another. Little children, love one another.
Judaism…Christianity
In the Roman Empire, people were in spiritual and moral turmoil. Rationalism was losing its appeal. The supernatural had become real, and people sought protection from unseen spirits and demons that brought misfortune. Astrology, mysticism, spiritualism and visionary experiences became the source of new faiths and sects. Yet Greek philosophy had conceived an ultimate high God who had created and governed the universe. Platonists, Cynics, Stoics, Epicureans and oriental holy men and wonder workers offered novel ways of coping with fate and the troubles of life—ethical living, consolation, salvation or spirituality. They taught of the remote God, beyond the highest sphere of the cosmos, and the ethical life he required.
But as God got more lofty and more perfect, he also became more transcendent. Any form of contact with the inferior world of matter was deemed inappropriate and indeed impossible, and so the idea arose that any relationship between God and the world had to take place through some form of intercessor. So, God spawned emanations some of which became saviours who died for mankind. People turned to personal revelation through the intercessor to know God and achieve salvation.
The idea had begun beyond the Roman Empire in the countries of the Middle East—Oriental gods were seen as particularly wise and magical. Marduk or Tammuz, the Babylonian God, was to come to earth as a saviour. Saoshyant was the similar saviour of the Persian religion and Khrishna had the same role. The Egyptians expected a saviour described as the Shepherd of his People who would gather together his scattered flocks and in whom there was no sin. The dying god became common in the East of the Roman Empire then the need for the god to suffer to ensure redemption spread west to become popular throughout the Empire. Attis, Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, Dionysus, Hercules and Prometheus all were worshipped as divine victims whose resurrection offered salvation for their mourning followers.
Devout Romans did not believe that their chosen god was the only one, even though for them it was the best—they respected other people’s. There was little conflict between the religions of the Empire. Imperial policy used them to draw the Empire together in a spirit of tolerance. But one religion stood out, offering a marked contrast—the Jewish religion.
Jews were everywhere in the Empire. They supposedly came from a small country but really they were the inheritors of the religion of the Persians, deliberately introduced into the Persian Satrapy of Abarnahara, and elsewhere where foreign gods had to be civilised. The bulk of the people of Abarnahara were the Phoenicians or Canaanites, later called Syrians by the Romans and noted for their commercial acumen. These commercial and manufacturing skills had led to their dispersion over the Empire long before the Diaspora of 70 AD. These were the Jews. The importance of Jews in the Roman Empire was akin to their importance in the USA today.
The Dead Sea scrolls show that Judaism then was not so monolithic as it later became. Foolish people still think that Judaism then was the same as modern liberal American Judaism, when it was a turmoil of bizarre sects competing and arguing with one another, many of them based upon individuals claiming special revelations. Variations were comparable to those between Catholicism and Mormonism. The unifyng link between the Jewish sects was their belief in a single, invisible God who had made known the correct laws for human conduct. This was the God presented to the fifth century Jewish colonizers of the Persian temple state of Yehud.
The Jews resolutely refused to worship any but their God, Yehouah, who had chosen Israel as his people in the mythology devised by the Persians. Thus, the Jews of Alexandria rose in rebellion in 38 AD in protest at the imposition of the cult of the Emperor, even though it allowed established religions, including Judaism, to practice as before. The Roman authorities considerately responded by considering it sufficient if Jews prayed to their own God for the Emperor rather than requiring them to pray to the Emperor or his genius. Many Romans objected to this concession but some found the Jewish God strongly attractive, just as others were attracted to different eastern religions.
The attractions of the Jewish religion were several. Judaism was seen as a monotheistic religion with refined moral standards. Jews possessed an unparalleled collection of sacred writings—a long and well documented history written down in the Scriptures that told about God and his plan to save mankind. Proselytes were hugely impressed by the sense of purpose through time shown by Yehouah in choosing his people then attempting to effect his will through them. This pageant started in antiquity and was not yet consummated so the future beckoned, offering fulfilment of God’s purpose. The will of God would be done when evil was conquered and the kingdom of God on earth would be instituted with the Chosen People the leaders. That was a third attraction—to be at the top of the pile at Judgement Day.
Thus Romans attached themselves to the congregations of Jews as associate members known as godfearers. Many would have become full converts were it not for the stringent requirements made by the Laws of Moses. In particular Roman males were highly reluctant to undergo circumcision. If this requirement had been relaxed Judaism might well have grown into a mass religion like the other Oriental religions. But it did not—a few adjustments were necessary first and Christianity provided them and in so doing became Judaism for gentiles.
The Jewssh synagogues of the eastern part of the Roman Empire, were the scene of the original Christian propaganda. Using the roads and shipping routes maintained by the Roman administration, missionaries travelled from synagogue to synagogue to announce the new revelation of Jesus.
Christianity was born within Judaism, whose basic theological tenet was “God is One.” It was blasphemy for a Jew to say a man was God. Yet Christians apparently turned a crucified rebel into God’s equal—a divine saviour of mankind, the “Son of God,” with the attributes of God himself. He too was divine and pre-existent: with God in heaven before the world was made—a cosmic being. This seems a remarkable change, but the time was right.
For Greeks and Romans, gods like Mithras were considered as cosmic beings. If they had ever appeared on earth, it was in ancient days not in historic times. The best known of the Christian missionaries was Paul of Tarsus, who himself had never seen Jesus, save in a vision. Paul’s Christ was born in a society which sought saviour gods, like those of the mystery religions. Personal salvation was in the air.
Paul’s fervour pierces the centuries. His letters were carefully preserved and through them his fanatical personality is clear, his boiling down of Jewish law and custom, of all religious speculation, into faith in the person of Jesus. Paul believed in an entirely divine and spiritual Son, akin to other cosmic beings—saviour gods like Mithras. Jesus might have been crucified on earth but Christ was a spiritual son, an intermediary between the world of men and the utmost God—Yehouah, the Hebrew God.
The ravishing of Judaea in 70 AD left the followers of Paul able to recover the ground lost when he had been humiliated by the leaders of the Church in Jerusalem barely ten years before in 58 AD. With the dispersion of the Jerusalem Nazarenes and the Jewish Christians of the Empire becoming apostates, the heresies of Paul had no one to oppose them and they became the mainstream. The propagators of Christian beliefs became those who followed Paul and not those who had known Barabbas and his original claims. Christianity was now centred on Rome where it developed as a gentile religion. Paul assured gentile men that circumcision was no longer necessary, and so the male godfearers of Judaism converted to Christianity. The many women proselytes of Judaism, like ripe fruits, dropped into the Christian basket.
Jewish religion, spawned by Persian religion, had some beliefs of the mystery religions. The Wisdom literature of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha—Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Ecclesiasticus and the Wisdom of Solomon—show their influence. Yehouah is the Lord of the whole earth not merely the Jews, mankind is divided into the Wise and the Foolish rather than Jews and gentiles, and piety is valued more than obedience of the Laws of Moses. The absolute god was Ain Soph—literally “The Absolute”—who was reflected in ranks of angels who represented various aspects of him. The topmost level was the Divine Wisdom or the Logos representing reason and order. The Jewish seven branched candlestick or Menorah represents the sun and the six planets, the higher planes to which the soul aspires. The “Spirit of the Lord” or the “Holy Spirit” is the guiding spirit.
Religious sects, like the Essenes, found views like these acceptable and formed secret brotherhoods to conduct mystical rites assuring initiates of eternal life. The Essenes revered a Messiah who apparently had taken the role of the Pagan gods who suffered and died. But the Jewish Messiah was expected to come in the future in glory. Thus the Messiah must have descended to earth to suffer and die in the past but in the future would rise again and return in triumph. The Essenes’ leader in the first century BC, the Teacher of Righteousness, a messianic figure, had been persecuted and had been put to death around 63 BC but was expected to return at the end of time, which they felt was imminent. Barabbas, the leader of the Nazarenes, called, by Paul, Jesus Christ, was regarded in just the same way by gentile converts to Christianity. With their Pagan background they saw Jesus as one of the dying and resurrected gods with which they were familiar.
The final victory over the angels was expected at the god’s imminent second coming. In these early days details of Jesus’s life or indeed of his death were unimportant to converts because his return was the more important business. In one of the earliest New Testament books, Revelations, there is only the slightest hint at the manner of the Messiah’s death and that is likely to have been a later interpolation. That the sacrifice of the god had occurred was sufficient knowledge of the past. Full of anticipation of the return, they waited joyful day by day—but nothing happened! When it failed to happen year after year Jewish Christians reverted to Judaism—the second letter attributed to Peter addresses this problem. The gentile faithful, accepting that the time of the second coming depended upon God, began to think less about the prospects of an immediate return of the Christ and more about the god’s tribulations on earth at his earlier incarnation. If their god was not to return soon they wanted to know more about him.
Moreover critics of Christianity denied that Christ had ever lived in the flesh. To answer criticisms and persuade believers, more needed to be known about the god’s earthly sojourn, his suffering and the manner of his death. The mystery religions had their stories complete but what was known about the Christian god? Before long enough to fill several books!
- To start there were the letters of Paul.
- Oral tradition about Barabbas was uncovered.
- Biblical messianic prophecies were used to add details to his life and death.
- Essene writings provided a wealth of wise sayings, hymns, testimonia and parallels between Barabbas and The Teacher of Righteousness.
- Later wholesale importations from the Pagan gods were used.
The identification of a wise and humble god who died and was resurrected with an unsuccessful messianic pretender in Pilate’s prefecture was almost complete.
With Israel a hotbed of revolution and anti-Roman feeling, these gentile Christians in the wider Empire sought to distance themselves from the Jews and to prove that they had always been a peace loving order. They rewrote history, the oral tradition of the Nazarenes, as gospels to persuade the doubtful, to absolve Romans of the crime of murdering the Son of God and to blame instead Barabbas’s own countrymen, the Jews.
From the Maccabees to the intertestamental period two powerful, opposing forces wrenched Judaism—Hellenization and Apocalypticism. The future for the Hellenizers was in the Graeco-Roman world but the future for the Apocalypticists was in the day of judgement and the kingdom of God. Hellenization was loosening the ties of the Laws of Moses to permit Jews more freedom within the Empire whereas Apocalyticism was cleaving rigidly to the Jewish Law, separating from the gentiles and the unholy, and preparing for the coming kingdom.
Vilifying the Pharisees
The pragmatic Pharisees restricted the spread of Hellenization within the Jewish community leading to modern Rabbinic Judaism. Apocalyptic Jews meanwhile prepared for the kingdom, fighting and dying until the Romans felt they had to destroy the temple and with it the priestly parties to punish their rebellious clients. The outcome was paradoxical. The converts of one apocalyptic sect—the Nazarenes—was to factionalize, break loose from the bounds of Judaism, adapt to the Hellenistic culture and eventually form a new world religion based on Jewish tradition and using the Jewish Holy Books. All of this was done in the name of Jesus, the Prince of the Nazarenes, a man who thought he would see perfectly holy and sincerely repentant Jews ruling the world in the kingdom of God. Instead Jews were sidelined and persecuted as deicides, while Christianity—Judaism for gentiles—was to conquer, and through wanton destruction of ancient knowledge, inaugurate a thousand year dark age which still leaves its shadow.
The Jewish wars sealed the schism between the gentile Christians who believed what their bishops told them, and the Jewish Christians who were probably messianic Essenes, whose leaders, at least, knew the truth about their own crucified leader. The latter struggled against the disapprobation of the gentile Christians and Jews alike until they were absorbed in the Islamic revolution. What became rabbinic Judaism rejected messianic sects, after the failure of nationalist risings in Palestine in 66 and 132 AD, doctrinally drew in upon themselves, ceasing to proselytize but spreading throughout the world having been forbidden to live in their spritual centre.
With the demise of the Jerusalem Church, Mark wrote the first and most factual gospel aimed at the godfearers to provide a new authority. The gospel writers invented the betrayal by Judas to put more guilt on the Jews. It makes no sense at all in the context of a loving God unravelling his plan unless he were part of God’s plan, in which case he should be a saint not the eponymous traitor. The story is clearly allegorical. Judas is the Greek for Judah, the Jews, and he, like the Jews, betrayed the Christian God. Judas is the Christian’s personification of perfidious Jewishness.
When it came to writing Acts, Paul’s argument with James was depicted as Paul’s victory not the defeat it was. No clear mention is made in the books of the New Testament to the Jewish War and its consequences, the destruction of the Temple and the destruction of the Jerusalem Church. That is deliberate. The gospel writers did not want to give away clues to the true circumstances in which Christianity was founded. The Christian editors of the gospels made changes to the stories of Jesus to suit the developing theology of the growing Church.
Among the first distortions of the gospels was the vilification of the Pharisees who were to go on to preserve Judaism, Christianity’s rival, after the destruction of the Temple. But, because the changes were made piecemeal, they were not consistent and these inconsistencies offer scholars the chance to work out the truth. As usual, we use the rule that when events occur that go against the general message of the gospels or that contradict Christian doctrine, an editor has not been totally diligent—the inconsistent story is an old version that has escaped the editor’s blue pen!
An example of inconsistency occurs in Luke 13:31 where Pharisees warn Jesus that Herod was intent on killing him. Pharisees warning Jesus? Christian scholars have had to try to explain this anomaly: they say the warning was a false one aimed at getting Jesus to leave Galilee to go to Judaea where they would have more chance of getting him themselves. But if the Pharisees were plainly Jesus’s enemies, why should he trust them, and why did the editor not make their underhand intentions clear? The event was surely genuine and has escaped the notice of later editors.
Sometimes changes made in one gospel were not made in others. For example, compare Mark 12:28-34 with Matthew 22:34-40 where a lawyer, a student of the Jewish Law of Moses, a Pharisee, asks Jesus what the greatest commandment was. In Mark, the earliest gospel, the exchange is friendly; the lawyer commends Jesus on his wise answer, based on Deuteronomy, while Jesus tells the lawyer he is not far from the kingdom of God. This expression, used here by Jesus, was in common use at a time of messianic expectation: “Repent, for the kingdom of God is nigh”. The Pharisees would have been quite familiar with it. In Matthew the exchange is much more gladiatorial with the lawyers seemingly trying to catch Jesus out and being routed by his counter-question to them. Since the anti-Pharisee bent increases in successively written gospels, one assumes that pro-Pharisee passages are early.
A clue to the distortion of the truth in the gospel of Mark is that the Pharisees allegedly plotted with the “partisans of Herod.” Now since Herod was the collaborationist ruler imposed by the Romans and hated by ordinary Jews and their teachers, the Pharisees, it seems unlikely that the rabbis in the gospel story would ally with such a hated enemy. The real allies of the Herodians were the Sadducees whose leader, the High Priest, was also appointed by Rome. It was not the Pharisees but the Sadducees who, being fundamentalists, were stricter on the observance of the Sabbath than the Pharisees, allowing no exception. Nor did Sadducees accept resurrection though the Pharisees did, as was well known even among non-Jews at the time. In Mark 12:18-27 Jesus answers the Sadducees just as a Pharisee would, sounding as if he were a Pharisee. Essenes also hated Sadducees. Clearly an editor has replaced Sadducee in many places in the original by Pharisee in the amended version expecting that none of his gentile readership would know the difference—nor, in general, would they. Even when the gospels were written the Sadducees had disappeared from history so it was easy to make the substitution.
The story of the adulterous woman in John 8:1-11, charming not just for its denouement but for the way it depicts Jesus’s embarrassment, is another example of gospel deception intended to blacken the Pharisees. Pharisees bring to Jesus in the Temple a woman found committing adultery, the punishment for which is death by stoning, and ask his guidance. Jesus averts his face to hide his embarrassment by doodling in the dust with his finger, but then replies: “Let the one among you who is free of sin throw the first stone”. None feeling able to, the Pharisees disperse muttering. When they had gone Jesus asks the woman, “Has no one condemned you?” Since none had, Jesus commands her to go her way and to never sin again.
The story is a blatant interpolation. It cannot be a genuine story about Jesus because, in fact, by that time the Sanhedrin had abolished stoning as a punishment for an adulterous woman. Even before then stoning was not common because of the strict requirements of the Sanhedrin and Jesus’s answer expressed the Pharisaic view handed down by Hillel. If the basic story is genuine it must have occurred beyond the administration of the Sanhedrin, possibly Samaria, not in Jerusalem or it might have been a mob not a group of Pharisees. Otherwise it shows that Jesus had given the answer the Pharisees expected—he had passed their test!. Pharisees undoubtedly disliked Jesus’s religious nonconformity and might well have enjoyed trying to embarrass him. In principle they would have allied with him against the Sadducees and the foreigner and, though in practice they would have stood back, there is no convincing evidence of a Pharisaic plot against him. As an Essene Jesus would have had contempt for the ultra-cautious political stance of the Pharisees but many of the theological differences between them would to us have seemed like nitpicking. Certainly much of it in the gospels is unconvincing.
The motives for some of the first changes made to the gospel stories were to discredit the chief religious authorities of the Jews, the Pharisees, and to retain the credibility of the Sadducees, the allies of the Romans. If Christianity was to spread in the wider Roman Empire, the feathers of the Roman ruling class could not be ruffled lest they decided to repress the new religion—not for religious reasons, the Romans were generally tolerant of religious differences, but political ones, as opponents of Rome’s political allies. After the fall of the Temple there could be only one Jewish enemy—the Pharisees.
Hellenized Jews
In Miletus, third century panels have been found in theatres and inscriptions on seating dedicated by “Jews who are devout worshippers.” The assumption always is that these are diaspora Jews from Judaea, but no one ever stops to wonder how they came to be everywhere in such great numbers, but especially in former Persian controlled places. Some of the panels invoke seven archangels to “protect the city of the Milesians and those who live in it.” Though there is no other hint of Judaism, no one questions who these “Jews” are. The habit of praying for the commonweal rather than selfishly is a Persian one. The Persians had the seven archangels first.
It seems unarguable that the places with the most Christian bishops in the third century were the places where there had been the most Jews earlier, or, in the case of north Africa, where there had been a strong Canaanite presence.
It is quite clear that Christian preaching began by attracting sympathies from the Jews own synagogues.Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians
This suggests that many of the north African Canaanites, the Phoenicians of Carthage, became Jews when Carthage fell to the Romans about 150 BC, and the native religions were expunged. The centres of active Christianity thus became Palestine, Syria, Egypt, Asia Minor, Campania in Italy, Numidia north Africa (modern Tunisia) and Baetica in southern Spain. All had been Persian or Phoenician colonies except the region of Rome itself. Even in western and northern European countries, the bishops were associated with trading cities where Jews, Syrians and Carthaginian Phoenicians did much of the trading.
What is interesting, once the idea that all Jews in the west were not native Palestinians, is that “diaspora” Jews were probably never orthodox in any proper sense. They were always Hellenized, as their synagogues show, because they had become Jews in a largely Greek environment, and had had no experience of a Puritanical movement like the Maccabees to restore a spurious golden age. It is these westernized and Hellenized Jews who became Christians. The real diaspora Jews would not have converted to Christianity and would have been the ones most vehemently opposed to Paul and his syncretic mission. After the defeat of Bar Kosiba, in 135 AD, the Romans could unequivocally distinguish Christianity from Rabbinic Judaism, and the Rabbinic Jews were fully aware of the Christian mission. Christians therefore gave up proselytising these Jews, but held out salvation to the large number of non-Rabbinic, Hellenized Jews who largely accepted it and converted to Christianity.
Many of the Christians in Dura-Europis had Greek names, but that cannot be taken to mean that they were Greeks and not Jews. Hundreds of years before, the Jerusalem priesthood had been taking Greek names, and had been stopped in the civil war of the Maccabees. Even in the New Testament, many of the Jews who were among the first Nazarenes had Greek names, and a famous division happened between the “Greeks” and the “Hebrews.” Admittedly, the synagogue at Dura-Europis was more classically decorated than the Christian church, but by the third century, the Christians had more markedly rejected classical Paganism than the “diaspora” Jews had. Fragments of Christian scripture were in Greek not Syriac, but again, by then Christians, whatever their origins, need not have spoken Syriac or Hebrew because they were Hellenized Jews. Christianity was not, by then, proselytizing orthodox Jews. It had become a gentile church but was still claiming to be the natural home of Hellenized Jews—not Rabbinic Jews.
It should be remembered too that not all Christians were at all orthodox, especially in countries outside of the Roman sphere. In northern Mesopotamia was a community of Elchesites, founded by Elchesai, who flourished about 105 AD. This sect venerated Jesus but remained recognizably Jewish. Elchesites practised baptism and were possibly originally Ebionites or Nazarenes. The Church of Rome was never happy with them and when it got the chance declared them heretical.
The chief Magus of the Parthian empire about 290 AD, in an inscription, told how the demonic teachings of the “Nazareans and Christians” had been destroyed. The two groups were considered equivalent, but were distinguished from each other. The Nazareans cannot have been simple Christians and were either followers of S John the Baptist, or they were Ebionites, probably the descendents of the Essene subsect that Jesus and John the Baptist both were members of originally—possibly the Jerusalem Church. Christians, however, will have been emigrants from the Hellenized faction that had established itself in the Roman empire in Syria and Asia Minor.
Porphyry in the third century was speaking of the oracle of Apollo saying the Chaldaeans were wise, and the Hebrews “enviable” for they worshipped a single god in a pure manner and knew of seven zones in heaven. Were the Babylonians, long since absorbed into the various forms of the Persian empire, still called Chaldaeans? Were they linked with the Hebrews for any particular reason? Porphyry added that Apollo praised Christ as a wise man who did miracles and died a “bitter” death, but his followers were wrong in supposing a mortal man torn by nails was a god. God would not appear as a man.
Primitive Christianity
Eberhard Arnold, who founded the Bruderhof Christian Brotherhood and for long the secretary of the German Student Christian Movement between the wars, was a scholarly man who made interesting explorations of early Christianity, the sort he wanted his communes of brothers and sisters to emulate. He was not therefore utterly romantic about what the early Christians were and what they wanted to do, as most modern “born agains” are. He formed a brotherhood because the early Christians were indeed “brothers” and “sisters”, and we know now why—because they were an outgrowth of the Essene brotherhood in the Judaism contemporary with Jesus. Arnold justified it thus:
Just as man’s alienation from God is common to all, so the Spirit bestows his divine gift equally and totally on all. Those gripped by God see all inequality as a powerful incentive to become brothers and sisters in perfect love.
Early Christians were equal in God’s grace and so too in poverty. All of them were united in the “koinonia” of the one spirit. The equal distribution of the gift of the spirit was why the Essenes and the early Christians were practical communists—The Poor. Christians considered wealth as dangerous to the wellbeing of the soul. It had to be given away or preferably put to the service of the church. Material goods were seen as common property, just like light, air, water, soil and other natural necessities. Everyone was poor in fact because no one owned anything, everything being owned in common by the church. Churches were clubs not corporations! Following the Essene practice, they were all known as the saints and the elect because they were the ones who tried to follow God’s commandment in Leviticus to be perfect.
The Didache was a vade mecum for new converts, taught as part of their baptismal instruction. It told the earliest Christians about the two ways leading to life and to death, about love to enemies, about the surrender of all possessions, and about living according to the Sermon on the Mount. In Contra Celsus, Origen wrote:
Individuals are taught as hearers, and only when they have given ample proof that they want to lead a good life are they introduced into the community. Some of the Christians are appointed to watch over the lives and appraise the conduct of those who want to join them. They refuse to receive into the community those who have become guilty of evil deeds, while they receive the others with great joy, making them better from day to day.
This early Christian scholar, later branded an heretic himself, is showing us clearly that there were two levels of Christianity in the primitive church, effectively the watchers and the hearers, akin to the Perfects and the Hearers of the Cathars.
Prophets were meant to let God be “heard”, and they announced the fact by calling out “Listen!”, or “Hear ye”, in older English. There were orders of prophets in the early church. Celsus tells of many Christian prophets in his time who prophesied in holy places and traveled about. Gripped in ecstasy, the Word spoke through them:
I am God, I am God’s son, I am the spirit of God. I have come because the destruction of the world is at hand. From this I will save you. Soon you shall see me returning again in heavenly power when the fire of judgment descends on city and land.
They spoke as Christ! Through the prophet, the spirit of Christ took on a body. The body of the prophet contained the soul of Christ, the perfect soul. Christians considered the body of Christ as the God given reality, and here were men who spoke as Christ. Those who listened to them and believed were “Hearers”. Here then is the origin of the two grades of Cathar membership. The initial flood of Christian prophecy ebbed away until, by the end of the second century, its force was spent. Even in 200 AD, Serapion of Antioch spoke of living in a prophetic order. Melito of Sardis was among the last prophets.
Poverty and Baptism
The ritual of baptism became their initiation ceremony. At the beginning there was no infant baptism:
Only he who is convinced and has given his assent is to be baptized.Justin, First Apology
Men are made, not born Christians.Tertullian, Apology
The Christian soul is always made, never naturally born.Tertullian, On the Testimony of the Soul
By the time of Hippolytus (217–235 AD), infant baptism was taken for granted. Critics of Christianity, like Porphyry, were astonished that merely washing could be imagined to purify criminals and the habitually wicked:
All they have to do is to believe and be baptized.
Whether a thief, a drunkard, a child molester, a swindler or a murderer, they could be baptized in the name of Christ, and be completely freed of guilt and culpability with less pain than squeezing a pimple. Moreover, Cyprian (Letters) explained how Christians were pained by the imprisonment of other Christians because, in the “duty of faith”, it was their own imprisonment—they saw “Christ himself” in every suffering brother. So they would try to bail any Christian prisoners. They were among the reasons why low life were keen to convert. That and the hand-outs that Christians organized early on on the basis of their communal communism—destitute people had something material to gain by joining—their daily bread!
Not all those who joined could be penniless, the destitute and slaves. Once recruited, Christians were taught the motto:
An idler can never be a believer.
Even then, the early Roman churches needed wealthier members than the broad masses of the urban poor. Though the appeal, in the first century, was to the destitute, Christians were also recruited from the lower middle class and the working class of freed slaves, with a small number of rich wealthy women, doubtless former admirers of the Jewish religion called “godfearers”. From the end of the first century the numbers of the rich taking baptism gradually began to increase. Hermas said that the wealthy could fit into the church only by stripping themselves of their wealth for the sake of their poorer brothers and sisters. Through baptism, these wealthier Christians found themselves in conflict with their familes and friends. Households split apart, engagements were annulled, when young women became enamoured with the silky tongues of the apostles. Marriages similarly were destroyed and Christian preachers were pursued by angry husbands portrayed as persecuters. The romance of Paul and Thecla is an example.
Is it surprising that Christians were “hated by all the world”. Celsus criticized the Christian artisans, the weavers, cobblers and tanners, who waited until the master of the house was absent then confronted the children and women remaining alone in the house. He said they would try to turn the women and children against their guardians and parents to be taught Christianity. They were perceived then just as sects like the Moonies were only a few years ago, now apparently respectable.
Social rank based on property or profession was incompatible with Christian fellowship and repugnant to them. They would not serve in any high position in the state or the military where they might have to judge or even kill others. Tertullian (On Idolatry) thought Christians could only accept the office of a judge if they “did not condemn or penalize anyone, or cause anyone to be put into chains, thrown into prison, or tortured”. Origen agrees that no Christian could exercise the power of the sword against anyone. Trades and professions connected with idolatry were also inconceivable. Christian converts sometimes had to give up their jobs. Tertullian, On Idolatry said, “Faith fears not hunger”
Early Christians lived a communistic life based on the spiritual equality and mutual love of them all. Early believers thought the whole world must adopt the communism of love. Each Christian was equally called, equally respected and equally judged, and so they expected, and had, in the early years, equality and brotherhood in everything—the same rights, the same obligation to work, and the same opportunities. Even the leaders of the church could expect only the same portions and food as poor converts. God’s perfect love would be universal, answering material needs as well as spiritual ones. Original sin had brought about private ownership of property, so everything belonged to the poor, and the Christians were the poor because they owned nothing personally.
The practical concerns of the poor were also the concerns of the church, because by offering destitute people alms they could recruit them to the cause of God. Every convert was expected to go, street by street, looking for the poorest dwellings. It supported bereft women and children, the sick, and the destitute. They were following the same path as the earlier Essenes, and we know that the Essenes took in orphans. The result was a communal life and rejection of private property. Christian women of rank gave away their property and became beggars.
The church at Rome allegedly supported fifteen hundred distressed people in 250 AD. Even in the smallest church community, the overseer (the Mebaqqer of the Essenes, who became the Christian bishop) had to be a friend of the poor, and at least one widow, day and night, had to see that no sick or needy person was neglected. The deacon had to find and help the poor and impress on the rich the need for them to join, then serve up the gifts they had obtained at the table.
Women and Slaves
The early Christians belonged exclusively to the lower walks of life, and the earliest Church authorities, with few exceptions, were by no means cultured or highly educated persons.Paul Carus, The History of the Devil
Christianity was initially a lower-class growth, a faith for slaves and freedmen, who had little or no stake in society. Many of the early bishops of Rome were of this class. The Empire had displaced and unsettled millions of people who had to live in the slums of large cities. They sought the love of a god who promised riches in heaven as a reward for enduring Hell on earth while punishing in hell their oppressors who enjoyed riches on earth. If a god had been or become a man, had suffered and died and then been reborn and returned to heaven, he would personally understand what suffering was.
But, despite its vaunted egalitarianism, Christians did not challenge the slave system, the corruption and privilege, or the harsh Roman notion of justice. At the Council of Gangra, the bishops declared an anathema—condemning them, in the Christian notion, to hell fire—on any Christian who encouraged slaves to disobey their masters. Christians had no thoughts of challenging society. They expected the world to end, so reform was pointless, and they were content with offering charity to the poor and ensuring a route to Heaven for their souls. For the lowest members of society, Christianity offered a sense of moral value and pie in the sky—but so did its main rivals!
Slaves were, of course, widely mistreated by their owners, but Christianity had made a point of recruiting them. Yet again the church showed no inclination to favour its own membership—women and slaves. The Council of Elvira in Spain decided that rich Christian women who beat their bondmaidens to death were to be punished. They would be denied holy communion for a period! Christians talk of the Holy Spirit and being baptized by it giving them Christian love. The Council of Elvira proves to us that it knew nothing of all this. For a rich Christian matron to be denied holy communion was considered worse than the death of a young woman of the lowest class. So much for the message of the Cross.
Christians did give alms and aid to the poor, and to widows and orphans—but only to Christian poor, not the poor in general. They were interested in recruiting poor people and the alms were the practical bribe that they offered in addition to the prospect of becoming a god!
Minucius Felix, about 200 years after the crucifixion, makes it clear that the early gentile Christians were mainly from the poorest classes. Minucius’s hero Octavian, a Christian, admits, in the Octavia, that “most of us are considered to be poor”. He is replying to his Pagan critic Caecilius, who complains that the Christians are made up of the “lowest dregs of society” and “credulous women who are easy prey”. In the Acts of Peter and the Twelve Apostles, Jesus is sneered at by rich people and he sends off his apostles, ordering them to show no favour to the seemingly rich. The Christian voice admitted that “not even a stupid man would praise the poor indiscriminatingly—most of them have very bad characters”.
Another leading characteristic of Christianity was its appeal to women. One of the points that strikes the reader of early Christian records and martyrologies is the number of stories about women. Mystery religions provided initiates with the prospects of salvation and immortality, and Christianity was the latest and last of them. Christianity and Mithraism both accepted all ranks of society but Mithraism excluded women. Paul had taught that in Jesus there was neither male nor female. It would not have been uncommon for the men of a third century Roman household to have been worshipping Mithras while the women worshipped Christ. Women too had souls to be saved.
Religions have been predominantly male affairs and Christianity is no different, but, from the beginning, most Christians were female. Though it accepted both sexes, in practice, Christianity appealed mainly to Hellenized housewives, especially those who were already Jewish proselytes. Right up to the fourth century when Christianity triumphed, it was primarily a religion of girls and housewives—perhaps 80 to 90 percent of congregations were women. The gospel writers and editors played up to this by inserting many incidental but flattering references to women such as the plea of Pilate’s wife (Mt 27:19) and many instances in Luke.
The original Essene ideal of maintaining ritual purity ready for the impending day of judgement led to Christians being extremely puritanical about sex. Influenced by Paul, the idea that chastity was in itself godly remained even when the day of judgement receded into the future. No doubt this left some Roman husbands happy that their wives were safe at church while they were out with the boys.
The popularity of Christianity among women did not surprise educated Pagans who said that strange teachings appealed particularly to well-to-do women who had, in the words of Robin Lane Fox, “just enough culture to admire it and not enough education to exclude it”. Strabo said, around the start of the era:
It was not possible for a philosopher to influence a group of women by using reason, nor to exhort them to piety or faith. For this he needs to use superstition too.
Celsus argued that the resurrection myth rested solely on the tales of hysterical women. Modern women will object to these observations, but they should consider too their own psychology which the clerics have understood to their disadvantage. Women have always been the backbone of the church yet have been always the ones most exploited by it. Few Christian women, even in these enlightened times, will admit that they have been psychological slaves to the patriarchal churchmen, and most remain the same.
For long, Christian clerics had wheedled their way into the confidence of wealthy Roman women and particularly widows. Their habit was to hang about their houses hoping to get them to make bequests to the church. Only too often they did, presumably in return for other-worldly promises such as that they would return to the arms of their dead husband, and certainly would be saved from death themselves. They finished up leaving their dependents destitute or provided for only inadequately.
The Church knew it, as 2 Timothy 3:6-7 shows, though it never thought it paramount to apply biblical injunctions and warnings to itself!
Of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts, ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.
The Church was warning others of taking the advantage of women that Christians had patented. The Church was particularly worried by heretical Christians, some of whom, doubtless, used the same wheedling methods. They warned their captive women that heretical leaders were promiscuous. They only wanted them for sex! One wonders to what extent the clerics were projecting their own failings here, as they frequently do. Anyway, the Church itself plainly considered women as emotional and irrational, and they feared that they were susceptible, through these frailties, to persuasion by heretics.
The clergy also encouraged young prosperous young heiressses to remain virgins knowing that their money passed to them from their fathers or guardians would soon be in the hands of the church.
After the Christian success over the state, the emperor Valentinian, in 370 AD, had to ask the Pope to stop these practices. Twenty years later, Valentinian’s brother was still deploring the clergy as “despoilers of the weaker sex,” yet he had to admit that nothing reasonable could be done to stop the clergy from ingratiating themselves with women. It was a practice too deeply established to be stopped. This is historical proof that Christianity started out as a scam, and it simply cannot be denied. Christians do deny it, proving them to be liars.
Callistus, a Pope around 210 AD, is particularly well known as a man who had once been a slave. Less known, for a religion that puts excessive store on sexual morality, is that he urged women to live as if married in “just concubinage” with Christian men. Not only were there far more women who were Christians than men who were, there were also a lot more high born women than high born men. Most Christians were from the lower classes still. The first church council in Spain had to address the same issue of the excess of women in the church.
In Roman law, the noble class of patricians were not allowed to marry below their status. Patricians were the ruling caste in Rome and to marry out of it was to lose the ststus of patrician and its legal privileges to become a plebeian. The Pope thought this was a reason that overwhelmed supposed Christian morality and allowed Roman noblewomen to take on board an officially approved Christian stud. Whatever the God and son of God, Jesus, had had to say on these matters was cast aside for the sake of expediency.
Women had charge of the children, and the stories often emphasise the role of the Christian mother married to a Pagan husband in making sure the children were reared as Christians. In about 180 AD, the Pagan, Celsus, wrote of the Christians:
We can see them in their own homes, woolworkers and shoemakers and fullers—men devoid of all culture—who will not dare utter a syllable in the presence of their masters, men of gravity and insight. But when they get hold of the children privately, they recount all sorts of marvellous things. They tell them to pay no heed to their father or their teachers, but to obey them, that the former talk idle tales, that they alone can teach them how to live and the secret of happiness.
Moreover, the clergy had the utmost contempt for women, doubtless following the example of the Essene ascetics. Despite its dependence on women, especially rich ones, all of them had to stand at the back of the church, and any woman passing by would not be let in unless she was known, and had been vetted for heresy, and sexual respectability. All of this is known in a supposed apostolic letter, prescribing acceptable behaviour. Women could not use make-up, and even men were forbidden to have long hair. Mixed bathing in the Roman bath houses, practiced for centuries, was forbidden.
Gregory, Bishop of Pontus from about 220-270 AD, had to rule on Christian women who had been raped by Goths from over the Bosphorus. Local Christians had used the raids for gain and had even helped the raiders, so that they could grab the property of murdered and abducted Pagan landowners. Gregory decided that Christ had declared that nothing could corrupt that went in, so the Goths had committed no crime, but what came out corrupted, so the women had corrupted their assaulters through their looks and glances! All petty and flirtatious women were therefore to be sought and punished—an early witch hunt, around 252 AD. The bishop then turned to the Christians who had acquired the property of Pagans or had looted items, or even held Pagans as captive to be sold as slaves, and declared all of it was the property of God’s church. Thus the church saved some people from sin, and got richer itself.
The two strains, of female and of lower-class appeal, are epitomised in the story of the slave-girl Felicitas and the aristocratic Perpetua, their very names being a give away—their names are recited to this day every time a Roman Catholic priest says mass. As Christians, they were friends on equal terms. Persecution arose and Perpetua, despite the appeals of her family, refused to abjure. Rich girl and slave went happily side by side to be killed by the wild beasts.
Clement wrote a pamphlet entitled Whether a Rich Man can be Saved. In it the traditional and plain, but now embarassing, interpretation of the camel and the eye of a needle was declared allegorical, allowing a clever camel to get through the allegorical needle without too much trouble, and his rich owner therefore able to enter the kingdom of heaven. Clement, therefore urged his rich Christians not to give all their money away to the poor, but instead to employ—with some of it—a Christian clergyman as a chaplain in his household to teach his family Christianity. Thus rich Romans stopped giving their money to the poor, as the Christian God had commanded to those who wanted to enter God’s kingdom, and instead employed personal theologians. To ensure that they were not disadvantaged in this deal, the poor, for whom salvation was assured, would pray for the rich!
Paganism
Robin Lane Fox in Pagans and Christians, following E Lofstedt, Late Latin, confirms that “pagani” meant those who had not joined the army of Christ through baptism to become a soldier in the war against Satan. It was a military term of disdain for civilians, drawn from a word for countryfolk roughly equivalent to “yokels” in English. The word is commonly used about the same time that Constantine imposed Christianity, but its militaristic implications sound more Mithraic, many Mithraists being Roman soldiers. Constantine’s father was a believer in the “One Supreme God,” sounding Christian but probably being Sol Invictus who was also Mithras, and evidently identified with the Christian God as a solar deity. Constantine put the Christian bishops in charge of the Solar religions of Rome, effecting the Christian triumph.
The Romans had no weeks and no sabbath but the calendar was prescribed by months and the days in each one when festivals to the Pagan gods were held. The frequent holy days for the different cults broke up the months and provided days of rest and merriment. The easter processions in southern Spanish cities give a feel of the Pagan festivals. A festival was, of course, a feast, the time when many people got their chance each month to eat meat—that of the animal sacrificed to the god. It was this meat sacrificed to idols that Christians forbade. Modern Christians think they are superior to Pagans because they do not sacrifice animals. Instead they herd vast numbers of them on millions acres of destroyed forest or grassland, and slaughter them out of sight in abbatoirs, so that they do not have to see the original owner of a joint being killed, and need not think of it as once being living.
Pagan priestly office could be bought and either held temporarily or passed on by inheritance. This was the practice from at least the third century BC to the second century AD, and is reflected in the history of the Jewish priesthood, supposedly inherited, but, in the earliest historic instances, it was being sold to the highest bidder. The myth of the ancient line of Zadokites going back to the tenth century is invented in or after the Persian period. A Pagan priesthood entitled the priest to an income from the cult, and gave him the right to dispense the cult’s funds in “voluntary generosity.” Christian bishops soon were doing the same.
Pagan cults specified certain necessary behaviour to their followers, mostly prohibitions like the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic law. Particularly during rituals, specific people and foods were proscribed from the temples and so were alcoholic drink and sex.
Intelligent and educated people in classical times rationalized their myths to allow them to keep a core of truth as an allegory with a hidden meaning, but no one doubted that the gods, like the Hebrew god, were jealous, often angry and petulant. Instances of disasters averted or minimized by a suitable show of piety to a god were believed and often cited. This was an important reason why Pagans disliked Christians—they saw Christians hating the gods and risking their justified anger. The anger would be unlikely to be a well aimed thunderbolt, but a famine or a plague. Christians and Moslems today are neurotic when anyone denigrates their own gods or prophets, but for Pagans, it was not just a matter of bad taste but potentially of mass death by some god-sent disaster. The Jewish scriptures show that the Canaanitish inhabitants of Palestine before the Persians set up the Jerusalem temple state were the same. They feared the anger of their god, and the Persians encouraged the Jews to feel the same way.
Hippolytus, in Refutatio, is among the Christian writers who tell us about the special effects that were used in Pagan temples to impress believers. Worshippers of Mithras supposedly liked these tricks particularly. They were surely the same sort of performance as those effected by the Persian colonists on the temple mount that led to the legend of the epiphany of Moses and was written back in time to give it antiquity. Hero of Alexandria was another writer about these special effects and he explained how some of them were done—automatic doors, optical effects and moving statues. Clever plumbing effected the miracle of turning water into wine at temples of Dionysos. Pagans actually experienced it, but Christians have just to believe their own version. Even so, they attributed the Pagan engineering to demons!
What the classical Pagans accepted from Hesiod and Homer, the Christians accepted similarly from the gospels. Only the terms used differed. Pagans used the word mythology, meaning the basis of ritual, but the Christians called it “revelation.”
As early as 190 AD, the Church was set against the Greek philosophical schools, even though they later cherry picked from what remained of them to give Christianity a philosophy.
In the 250s, Pagans were still scared of the anger Christians might provoke in the gods, causing natural calamities. Cyprian again confirms this in chosing to deny that Christians caused any such calamities. At the end of the century, Christians were still denying it, but soon the Pagans were to be plagued with an unnatural calamity—Christianity!
Between about 250 and 285 AD, the empire was beset by barbarian raids, plague and price inflation. The threats led to people feeling anxious and insecure. Statues grew in size to colossal proportions, and city benefactors ceased to feel generous. Dated monumental inscriptions and dedicated buildings almost stopped being built by the Pagan benefactors who had erected them previously. The Pagan nobility seemed to be losing faith in the Pagan gods, and single supreme gods in the forms of Sol Invictus, Mithras and Christ were growing in popularity. The Pagan oracular shrines continued much later but were less reported and seemed therefore less popular, and verses in honour of the miracles and epiphanies of the gods were still written, but seemed less convincing.
Despite this several major cities instituted new games, possibly aided by grants from the imperial treasury. Even invasions from Goths and Persian did not stop these games being instituted in vulnerable places like asia Minor. Perhaps they were intended as morale boosters. Despite the slow down in the dedication of insciptions, some have been found, and they show that the “religiosi” (faithful) of the Pagan religions of Cybele and Saturn were funding new statues into the 280s. Even as late as 311 AD, two benefactors, a brother and sister who were descended from priests paid for a month of processions and festivities to Zeus at Panamara in Asia Minor. In this case, the emperor Maximin’s army was nearby rooting out “brigands,” a description that seems to have included Christians.
Ineffective emperors came and went rapidly until Diocletian introduced stability again. He reorganized the army and introduced better systems of taxation, innovations that Constantine was to benefit from. Diocletian grouped provinces into “dioceses” and introduced deputy goverors called “vicars.”
Pagans were retreating but were not yet defeated, and in the 270s Porphyry wrote a treatise Against the Christians in 15 volumes, suggesting that the Christians had a lot to answer for, even then. He had noted that Peter and Paul had seriously quarrelled, even before baby Christianity’s umbilical cord had been cut, thus casting deep shadows over the supposed guiding genius called the Holy Spirit. It meant the apostles could not have been infallible, and he also argued the absurdity of eternal punishment, an argument that some churches are only now beginning to recognize. The Church’s use of prophecy was also phony and its revelation could not be accept to anyone fair let alone a just God because it was particular and not universal. When Christians took universal control about 50 years later, they immediately banned Porphyry’s book.
