In tests of 17 year olds across the world, the US ranked last in algebra, US kids averaging 43% (F) and Japanese kids 78% (B).

The Gentile Church 1.1

The Roman Church
Judaism…Christianity
Vilifying the Pharisees
Hellenized Jews

Abstract

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.

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.

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.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.