But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.Jesus on reward for kindness, Matthew 6:15
The Gentile Church 1.2
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated:Saturday, 19 October 2002
Abstract
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 mollester, 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 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. Thought 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 persued 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 the office of a judge only 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 of 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 one 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 les 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 monsth 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 spostles 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.
Moses and Exodus
