Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 20 April 2012

The First Churches

How did the Gentile Church get to where it was? No one knows how many churches were originally founded besides the Jewish Jerusalem Church led by James the Just. S James, was, L E Elliott-Binns[†]Canon L E Elliott-Binns was an Anglican church historian and theologian, born in Manchestor, England, and educated at Cambridge university, whose works covered a broad range of topics in English and Western church history, as well as the history of the biblical era, and were valued by Christian students and their tutors alike. tells us, “Bishop of Bishops and ruler of ‘the churches everywhere’”, titles that imply the Jerusalem Church was the prime church of Christianity. But it did not last long, and, when it disappeared, left only churches founded elsewhere in the Roman empire. The prominent ones were subsequently associated with one or another apostle, counting Paul as one, including the Roman Church, but most in all truth were founded anonymously. Paul, lauded by Christians for setting up churches all over the eastern empire, was met by Roman Christians when he went to Rome, and evidently visited many churches that he had not set up himself, indeed some that had been set up by people he considered wrong!

So who did start these churches? Elliott-Binns tells us:

We shall not go far wrong in supposing that pilgrims returning from Jerusalem were among the anonymous founders.

Jesus was crucified at the Jewish Passover when many Hellenized Jews were making pilgrimage to Jerusalem. They could hardly have avoided knowing of the events that transpired—the uprising, the takeover of Jerusalem for a few days by the insurrectionists, the return of the Romans, the arrest and crucifixion of Jesus whom the Romans evidently blamed for the rebellion, and the rumor that he had risen from the dead as the Messiah and would soon return as the archangel Michael with the hosts of heaven to cleanse the wicked world.

The Jewish sect that undoubtedly provided hostels for travellers, and prescribed ways in which Jews could safely interact with gentiles were the Essenes. Essenes were Jews equipped to be able to maintain their purity while relating with gentiles. It follows that the overseas “synagogues” referred to in the New Testament were likely to have been specifically Essenian ones. Paul and his companions, then, would have been making use of Essenian hospitality to spread their own message. James 2:2 refers to a Christian assembly as a synagogue, as do others in slightly later accounts.

Early Christians in Jerusalem are said to have “attended” the temple. Essenes considered it as polluted, feeling no allegiance to it in its polluted condition, yet they always paid the minimum of temple tax to meet the law, and it seems unlikely that they would not have attended the temple courts and porticoes to preach and proselytize, and debate with their theological and political enemies, the Sadducees and Pharisees, just as Jesus did, according to Mark. Both Essenes and Christians considered that the true temple was the body of believers not stones and pillars, and both used the word “stone” and “pillar” as titles or metaphors for people in particular important roles.

Originally Christians had no professionals—there were no paid priests, just as any rabbi refused payment for instruction. The apostles and proselytizing disciples had a secular job to provide their income, Paul allegedly being a tentmaker at a time when many if not most eastern countryfolk still lived in tents. Essenes, for example, lived in “camps”. It is plain, though, that Paul collected funds for the Jerusalem Church, and turned out to be a rich tentmaker indeed, rich enough to have bought his Roman citizenship, despite his claim, in Acts 22:28, to have been born a Roman. If he was Roman born and rich, Paul was virtually admitting he was a spy or provocateur, otherwise he was pocketing some of the collection, setting the precedent for modern evangelical demagogues.

Towards the end of the third century, the Christian sect of Novationists had a paid ministry. Other Christians were shocked. Cyprian too, who opposed the Novationists over the readmission of the lapsed, told his presbyters to leave their day jobs and become professional Christians.

There has been no Church since the end of the third century. There have been two bodies, one offering, the other accepting, Christian privileges.

Mendell Creighton, Life and letters of Mendell Creighton

The Roman Attitude to Judaism and Christianity

Gibbon’s comment (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) on the plague of foreign religions in Rome was that the city “became the common temple of her subjects, and the freedom of the city was bestowed on all the gods”. The Roman government was essentially tolerant of all religions, even the foreign ones that came within its boundaries, as long as their worship offered no threats to the Roman state and political institutions—a reason why Christianity was persecuted from time to time, and why the Druids were suppressed. The Romans feared these religions because they saw them as politically antagonistic to Roman rule and culture.

Equally, the adherents of the Roman religions were tolerant and not averse to other gods, other than the one worshipped by Jews, who were not viewed favorably by many, and Christianity was initially seen as a variant of Judaism. Ultimately, when the situation reversed, Christian intolerance of every other religion was to be seen as a virtue by Constantine, who did his best to eliminate dissent, including within the Church!

The persecution of Christians was, at least in part, because some Romans saw them as politically incorrect. Jews were often similar. Julius Caesar favored them, but Tiberius disliked foreign cults, especially the Egyptian ones and the Jews. Claudius also was suspicious of the Jews, and Nero—whom many people believed targeted Christians for allegedly burning Rome, and had them set up as human torches as punishment—was actually picking on messianic Jews, Christiani, from the Greek word meaning “messianists”. Christians may have been among the Christiani, but they believed their messiah had already been, whereas the Jewish Christiani were excitable because they were still awaiting theirs. It seems unlikely that senior officials at Rome knew much, if anything to distinguish Christians from Jews. If Jews were rioting in expectation that the world was about to end, the officials could hardly have cared less whether the messiah sent to bring it on had already been and was returning, or was still expected.

Later Christians sought to distinguish themselves from the Jews, whose co-religionists in Judæa persisted in revolting against Rome, and succeeding in holding down several legions of Roman soldiers on occasions. In the climate surrounding the Jews at this time, a lot would have been glad to convert to Christianity as Christians were getting to be seen increasingly as gentile not Jewish. With the suppression of the Bar Kosiba revolt in 135 AD, Christians were broadly accepted as not Jewish and were tolerated, though particular emperors, like Marcus Aurelius remained suspicious of them. Mostly the toleration thereafter extended until the time of Constantine with only a few years of state persecution under a few emperors, and a variable amount of anti-Christian mob violence in the background.

It is noticeable that the best emperors were among the worst persecutors, for the simple reason that they took their duties seriously, and saw already that the Church was a menace.

L E Elliott-Binns DD, The Church in the Ancient World (1938)

Once Christianity was distinguished from Judaism, it became an unlicensed association, and had none of the legal protections of a religion. In particular, such associations could not legally hold property. The Church was especially dangerous to the state in that it refused to accept the emperor as venerable or August, as it was, for Romans, how they showed their patriotism, like Americans honoring the flag, or the British honoring the queen. The empire had taken in many ethnic groups as it annexed country after country, and many of these new subjects felt none of the intense patriotism and loyalty of the Latins.

To weld it together, the empire, as Augustus soon foresaw, needed the help of a single religion. And so the cult of Rome and the emperor was encouraged.

L E Elliott-Binns DD, The Church in the Ancient World (1938)

The impression is often given that the emperors were the actual objects of worship, but although temples to emperors were built, paradoxically in the east where local leaders were keen to gain favor with the conquering Romans, and no emperor was likely to refuse such an honor, few actually took it seriously. The promotion of veneration of the emperor was meant to encourage a loyalty that was no longer simply traditional. Refusal to honor the emperor in this way was considered by the Romans as a deliberate show of disloyalty when it was meant to encourage loyalty in others, especially those in the military. At first, Christians refused to serve there also!

The greatest stumbling block in the eyes of the authorities was obviously the Christian refusal to conform to the worship of the emperor, and the abstention of many of them from the army and the usual activities which marked the citizen. This had to be admitted.

L E Elliott-Binns DD, The Church in the Ancient World, 1938

Christians were also always talking about the coming “kingdom of God”, promised by Jesus, but thought by Romans to be the threat of a rival political state. So, Christians were seen as rebels, or as potential revolutionaries. According to Sir William Ramsey, often cited by Christians as an honest historian, the Church in its early years might could correctly been described as…

…a political party advocating certain ideas which in their growth would have resulted necessarily in social and political reform.

He continues:

The Church proved unfaithful to its trust… and failed to carry out the reform, or rather revolution, which would have naturally resulted from them.

Elliott-Binns adds:

Those who joined the Church did so because they looked for a new age, and a new birth of society, as well as the individual. It is almost certain that among the members of the Church there were wild spirits corresponding to the Jewish Zealots who were prepared to use force to bring in the kingdom.

L E Elliott-Binns DD, The Church in the Ancient World (1938)

Apparently without realizing it, or anyway, without admitting it, Canon Elliott-Binns is saying that Christianity has its roots in the Essenes, called here Jewish zealots. The Essenes were looking forwards to a cosmic war of the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness—Good against Evil. The Essenes became, if they were not already, Zealots, though, when the Jewish war broke out, anyone fighting in it could have been regarded as zealous. They were all zealous enough to think the Romans had no right to be ruling what was God’s.

A few hundred years later, Christianity had been accepted as the state religion of Rome, replacing the veneration of the emperors with veneration of the one true God of the Romans. Of course, once established by Constantine, the Roman Church became profoundly conservative, and none of the later protesting sects were ready to challenge the Roman Church’s, by then, ingrained conservatism. Christian churches remain profoundly conservative.

To gain acceptance in Rome, the apocalypticism of the Christian founders, which derived directly from Persian apocalyptic belief, had to be replaced, or at least disguised, and enmity towards Rome hidden. As the Persians had founded Judaism, there had been a continuous effort since the time of Alexander to remove the Persian roots of the religion. The Ptolemies had rewritten the original Jewish scriptures to make Moses rather than Abraham the founder of the religion—Moses being originally Mazas (Ahura Mazda)—and the country of origin Egypt rather than Babylon, a capital city of Darius II. Christians in Rome then had to do something similar.

Essenes had been Jewish traditionalists, retaining their loyalty to the original Persian Judaism—as Pharisees did too, at first, but then the Pharisees and Essenes had split, leaving the Essenes believing themselves the upholders of tradition. A lingering inclination of Jewish Christians to look favorably on Persia, as many Palestinian Jews did, was a prime source of Roman mistrust of Christians. So, the Christian leadership had to remove or minimize allusions to dislike or suspicion of Rome and Romans, which was pronounced among their poor and slave members, and direct their discontent elsewhere—to the East.

In probably the most ancient book of the New Testament, Revelation, Rome, it is universally agreed, is meant by Babylon! It fits nicely with the Old Testament story of the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadrezzar’s Babylon, but it is also, as far as Romans were concerned, a rejection of Persia which was Babylon by New Testament times. So, the apocalyptic book of the Christians fingered Rome’s principle eastern enemy, it seemed to Romans, while the poor and the slaves among Christians could take it to be a convenient euphemism for their real enemy, Rome still. Gentile suspicions of the Christians were unfounded. It was Babylon in Persia that they hated!

More generally, Traditional Romans had a list of broad complaints against Christians:

1. They were uneducated and ignorant so their boasting of having answers to problems that philosophers throughout history had been unable to solve was unfounded.
2. Vulgar people cannot comprehend divine things anyway. It requires philosophers.
3. Ordinary people ought to stay with the familiar beliefs and religions of their ancestors because they were supported by culture and tradition.
4. Christians claimed that God had revealed Himself as a carpenter in Judæa, but it was inconceivable that He would have chosen such a remote and obscure place to do it, especially in the shape of someone as hateful as a Jew! He could have chosen any number of civilized and sophisticated cities in the empire thereby having an immediate impact.
5. The Christians pictured God as having appeared as a disreputable fellow, a mere artisan who did magic tricks to impress the crowd like any of the travelling magicians and quack healers that wandered the empire. In the Roman world into which the Church spread, magic was disapproved of as equivalent to treason, the connexion between the two being Persia, Rome’s only great rival for world dominance.
6. Even Jews, albeit an unpleasant people by nature, were better than Christians because they stuck with their own traditional national religion, with its own temple for offering sacrifices and apparently a long history. Christians were the gullible followers of a mountebank.
7. Christianity was diametrically wrong in belittling this life in which they were living, thereby making themselves miserable about the state of the world, and instead favoring an entirely imagined life after their death.
8. Moreover, their hatred of this life led them to take negative and destructive attitudes in respect of the state and its institutions that provide for the security of all civilized people. They welcomed the fall of the empire as a necessary step to the End of the World.

For all the sound reasons there were for Roman officialdom not to trust Christians, they were hardly obsessed with them for over 100 years. Christianity was too insignificant to pose a threat, but Marcus Aurelius was of the old school—a believer in old fashioned Roman virtues, and the number of Christians had grown into a threat to his traditional values. Christians had tended to be mysterious and secret about their business, seeming to have something to hide, and their rejection of Roman gods was seen as bringing about calamities. Whenever some misfortune arose—a plague, a flood, a famine, a drought, an earthquake, the defeat of a legion by barbarians or Persians, Christians had caused it because they had annoyed Rome’s traditional captious divinities.

Doctrine

In those early years of gentile Christianity, the modern reader has to realize that no one had any clear concepts even of what Christianity was. Christians had no doctrine other than simple and inchoate ideas, and judaism. Some of the still extant apocryphal literature illustrates how believers were attempting to build a mythology and a doctrine. Elliott-Binns accepts what many Christians today refuse to consider—that writings were fabricated:

Some were no doubt produced as substitutes for pagan works of fiction. They were the religious novels of their time, and, as such, probably never intended to be taken as exact historical records of the lives and adventures of the persons they portrayed.

Indeed! And now we still do not know. What we know is that similar works in quite different pagan settings could plainly not be considered as Christian, and that among the Christian works some were eventually accepted as genuine and others rejected, and dubbed “apocryphal”. In fact, there was a whole genre of Hellenistic novels, sufficient for there to be scholars devoted to them, but few Christians know of them, nor how similar some of their plots are to the bible stories so that some bible stories sound like Hellenistic novels. Elliott-Binns recognizes the genre and that pagan religions, if no others, made use of it. So too did the Jewish scriptures which are unknown before the Hellenistic era, though they purport to have been ancient already by then. Complete and unblemished stories like Joseph and Samson are Hellenistic novels, Joseph’s tale being a deliberately invented link between the two Jewish origin myths, that of the Persian colonists (Abraham) and that of the Ptolemaic Egyptians (Moses), and therefore later than either.

Lack of doctrine and the need for it led to disagreement among Christian churches as to what was true—led to heresy! The exaltation of spirit over flesh came from the awful sinfulness of this wicked material world, and the desire for a perfect spiritual one. Essenes had seen themselves as junior angels, and, as Jesus also knew, angels had no need of sex, meaning the more perfect state was one in which sex was eschewed. It was a step towards the spiritual angelic state. From the outset, therefore, Christianity valued virginity above the married state. It is one strong reason for rejecting all the wildly conjectural “theories” of Jesus being married to Mary Magdalene, and having a child or children by her.

Pagan rulers like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar liked to say they were demigods—sons of God by a mortal mother. It gave them the authority to rule like a god, or on behalf of the god. After the fall of the Roman empire, the new Germanic rulers of Europe wanted the same authority, but they were Christians. So they invented myths to allow it to happen. If Christianity was an evolution of Essenism, as seems most likely, and Jesus was a zealous Essene leader, it is impossible that he would utterly abandon his hard earned crypto-angelic state by marrying or having sex with a female follower. It is more likely that he would have sex with a man! That was not an act of procreation, and so it was not sex.

Humans in the wicked material world had to procreate to preserve the race. Angels did not need to procreate, and so it was the fact of human procreation that distinguished them from the angels, not the sexual act itself. The sin of procreation was having children, the purpose of marriage. It followed that non-procreative acts were not sinful, and so sexual acts with a man were not sinful. Among the later Christians, self-castration after the fashion of the Galli, the priests of the Great Mother, was far from unknown. They believed themselves Eunuchs for the kingdom (Mt 19:12), though it is unlikely that the Essenes took up any such practice (Dt 23:1). The great Origen was such a Eunuch for God.

Apocryphal books condemn other practices besides sex, suggesting they were pre-Christian, possibly Essenic, practices—eating meat, drinking wine—as well as condemning marriage for the most pious. Heresies were evidently appealing, for they apparently had a considerable following, so it is foolish to disregard their attraction at the time, however objectionable the modern christian might think they were. It is a truism that the victors write the history of a conflict, and mainstream Christians were not so good or filled with the Holy Ghost to write objectively about their heretical opponents. Heretical leaders were denigrated and their beliefs misrepresented, their literature was burnt, and copying it was forbidden, so hidden copies used surreptiously eventually wore out and could not be replaced. In these ways, texts objectionable to Christians, whether heretical or pagan, were “lost”. Their “loss” was no accident.

Some of these heretics expounded doctrines amounting to “Do what thou wilt”, the world being wicked, attempting to be good within it was futile, so there was no point in pretending otherwise. Nevertheless, scholars saw most Gnostic heretics as accepting the same or equivalent standards as those of the later mainstream Church. Discoveries of Gnostic writings show that most Gnostics lived strictly moral and ascetic lives as proof to God that they were able to resist the temptations of wickedness in the world. The same is seen in the Cathar Perfects of the early second millennium AD, suggesting that Gnosticism had never died out, but had survived as primitive Christianity under the radar of Catholicism and Orthodoxy to emerge morally superior to the mainstream churches. The reaction of the Churches “properly” adjusted to the wickedness of the world was to suppress the upstart with utter brutality.

The followers of the Gnostic, Valentinus, believed people were predestined to be saved or damned, a heresy that found its way into Protestantism. Valentinians traced themselves to Theodas, a disciple of S Paul, while another Gnostic sect, the Basilides, derived themselves from Glaucias, said to have been a disciple of S Peter. So far as each sect was concerned, they were just Christians. Another heresy was Montanism, but, in many ways, it was ultra orthodox. They retained a central belief that the End of the world was nigh—it would arrive “soon”! That being the case they placed emphasis on the promise in John of a Paraclete. The Christian scholar, H M Gwatkin, said of Montanism that it was Christianity perverted by the fear of learning. On that criterion, fundamentalist Christians in the USA today are Montanists, horrified by the modern world of science and discovery.

Practice and Sacraments

At first the Church had baptism and the messianic meal as its only sacraments. Baptism began as a sort of formal initiation done once and for all to admit any convert into Christianity. No formal tuition preceded it for the simple reason that the End was expected at any time soon, but without warning, like a “thief in the night”. Essenes normally required any convert to serve a three year period as a novice before admittance, but Jesus had believed the End was so imminent that it was sure to happen within the initiation period. Anyone taken in as a novice could not therefore become a full member before the End of the world, and so could not enter God’s kingdom. As a matter of expediency, the once and for all immersion had alone to suffice if converts were to be saved at the End.

In a while after the crucifixion, the expectation of an immediate parousia had faded, and the novitiate was introduced again, novices being called “catechumens” and subject to the long period of preparation. In this period, Christianity had many characteristics of an eastern mystery religion.

The mysteries had much in common—salvation and immortality were offered to those partaking in (sic) certain rites…

L E Elliott-Binns DD, The Church in the Ancient World (1938)

They revolved around the myth of some divine or quasi-divine hero to whom the mystai would in some sense ultimately be united, thus gaining immortality. No one of a moral character was excluded from being nominated, though poverty and slavery were not considered as inducive of good moral character, whereas wealth was so regarded. The initiation ceremonies symbolizing death and rebirth were, however, difficult and scary, especially for a superstitious people and required courage and self control. Any initiation by baptism is a symbolic raising from death, and mass baptisms were arranged by local bishops at fixed times like Easter and Whitsuntide, rather like the mass rituals and immersion of the mystai at Eleusis. Another aim—like a mystery—was the revelation of certain objects and facts, and the chance thereafter to participate fully in the messianic meal or agapé, thereby assuring oneself of a place in the kingdom of God.

An order of Christian prophets existed then, “prophet” being an Essene word for themselves, and they offered prayers, gave thanks and read scripture. Essentially, the ritual was a Jewish temple service in miniature, shorn of all sacrifices, but still consisting of an exhortation, a hymn and prayers.

Since Paul, Christians have had a ready excuse for not actually being committed to any serious change in their moral outlook and behavior. Paul made Christianity into a pure mystery by emphasizing belief in Christ as saviour, and minimizing Christ’s moral demands of his disciples. The epistle of James is a direct refutation of Paul, pleading that faith without works is empty. whose author.

A book popular in the second century that failed to be admitted to the Christian canon was The Shepherd of Hermas. Its author taught that Jesus became divine precisely because of his emphasis on works of lovingkindness, and in contrast that many Roman Christians by the first half of the second century were far from admirable in character, including the clergy. He refers to worldly, proud and self seeking presbyters and to crooked deacons. Many others, of course, did create a favorable impression, but already only a century after the crucifixion, being a Christian was no guarantee of goodness.

This early Christian writer also made little or no distinction between the Son and the Holy Spirit. In the Persian religion, Ahuramazda has seven archangelic spirits, one of which is the Holy Spirit (or the Holiest Spirit, all angels being holy), and, so far as we can tell, this Holy Spirit was in practice identified with Mithras. Mithras served as the “Face of God” or the “accessible aspect of God”, the role that Jesus has taken in Christianity. God’s accessible form in Judaism is most commonly called the Angel of the Lord, who is the angel of the Jews, the Archangel Michael, leader of the apocalyptic hosts of heaven. The Essenes certainly thought the apocalypse meant the hosts of heaven would arrive to purify the world of all wickeness by way of a cleft in the Mount of Olives, the event Jesus was expecting when he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Michael was therefore the active “Face of God”, the Jewish Mithras. When Jesus was unexpectedly crucified, his followers believed he would still return, the task of world purification having now fallen to him. In Zoroastrianism, every human has a corresponding angel, and it seems the angel of the Messiah was Michael. Michael therefore is Jesus at his parousia when he returns with the heavenly host. So, Persian Saoshyant, Jewish Messiah, Archangel Michael, the God Mithras, the Holy Spirit, seem to be equivalents in various presentations of the same apocalyptic myths. The early Christians had a strong tradition supporting their identification of the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Elliott-Binns describes the effect Paul had on Christ’s teaching:

Among the early Christians, there was surprisingly little emphasis on the actual teaching of Jesus. To be a Christian meant the acceptance of Jesus, not so much as instructor, but as Lord. He is from the first, the object of the religion, not its prophet, and what he was rather than what he said or even accomplished stood foremost in the consciousness of the believer.

It is the attitude still of most Christians, especially in the USA where hardly anybody has any notion of what Christ taught, of Christ’s morality! But Elliott-Binns must be wrong in writing it was so “from the first”. Christ’s apostles and comtemporary disciples lived with him and saw and heard him often. They could hardly have mistaken the importance he placed on his moral teaching. Paul may not have been the only follower to teach a different message, but he is the one Christians remembered and canonized, even though his message barely overlapped with that of Christ. As Paul preached his own gospel, that of magical salvation through mere belief, and within only a few years of Christ’s crucifixion, Christ’s original teaching was quickly suborned. But all this was not “from the first”, and from time to time throughout Christian history, a few have tried to remind their fellow Christians of Christ’s own message—the teaching presented in the synoptic gospels.

Regrettably, the disciples of the Antichrist, by whom can be meant no one other than Paul, have carried the day, and now rule the Christian roost, whatever denomination people profess. Pauline “Christianity” can no longer be dislodged in this world of exaltation of greed and selfishness.

The Persecuting Emperors

Nero is down in the lists of the apologists as the first terrible persecutor, blaming the Great Fire of Rome (66 AD) on Christians. Those he caught, he set up in his gardens as human torches, burning them alive, a torture Christians were to remember for their own corrective punishments in a later age. These Neronian victims, though, were christiani or messianists—Jews driven by a messianic fervor. Less than 40 years after the received year of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion, there could not have been many Christians in Rome. If there were many, it is all the more likely they had indeed gone there purposely, with the intention of destroying “Babylon”, in which case Nero’s charge against them of setting the fires could well have been true. Otherwise the christiani were those Jews who were as yet still expecting their messiah at any time, but rejected Jesus as being him. Plainly there were many more of them than there could have been of innocent Christians.

This messianic fervor among the Jews had been burning for some time—Christianity being an earlier product of it—and was to burn for some time longer. And it affected Jews throughout the world, let alone the Roman empire. It is quite possible that Christians expecting then—as they do still—the “return” or parousia of their own messiah, he having made a preliminary curtain call, were caught up in the general enthusiasm, and so some at least of the christiani torched might have been Christians in fact, but most would have been non-Christian Jews careless of their fate because they thought it was prescribed by their messianic expectations being immediately realized.

The Roman historian, Tacitus, described the perpetrators of the arson as having the “hatred of the human race”, phrased somewhat ambiguously, but inviting the natural conclusion that the victims hated the human race, as messianic Jews did, their coming messiah bringing the end of the wicked world—the expectation being that the wicked ones would be consumed by a ferocious global fire—most of the wicked in the world being gentiles (Romans), and sinning and collaborating Jews who failed to repent in time. It seems far from unlikely that some of the christiani thought they would have been virtuous in helping God by setting significant fires in the heart of Rome, the harlot Babylon. Tacitus blames the fire on to Nero, unless the post-Constantine Christians had redacted the work of Tacitus to leave them innocent. Much work of Tacitus has been totally lost once left under the sole stewardship of the victorious Christians.

Only about 40 years later Trajan (98-117 AD) set out for Pliny the rule that he ought not to pursue Christians, and that anonymous accusations against them should also be ignored as likely to have been malicious. Compare that with today. Then the Christians had been suspected of being what we call terrorists, but Trajan refused to allow allegations or mere suspicions that these people were wrongdoers. Now in the Christian western world, merely to be suspected—not proven in a court of law, just thought by some informer or supposed spy—can get anyone incarcerated for the remainder of their lives. Already many such people have served over ten years without knowing what the charges are against them, and given no access to the law and justice. It seems Roman pagans were more civilized than modern Christians who consider themselves destined for heaven!

Hadrian (117-138 AD) noticed Christians among his subjects, and wrote a letter while he was in Egypt which says:

The votaries of Serapis are Christians, and those who name themselves the bishops of Christ are devoted to the worship of Serapis.

Serapis was a high god invented by the Ptolemies to unite Greeks and Egyptians, whose characteristics and manner of worship must have been much like those of the Christian concept of God.

Minucius Fundanus was Proconsul of Asia (Asia Minor, Turkey, to us). In response to an inquiry from a predecessor, he echoed Trajan in writing that accusations against Christians must be dealt with in due legal form, but that clamor and malicious or false charges should be discouraged. Innocent people must have been falsely accused and probably blackmailed. The Catholic medieval Inquisition made the most of false accusations, as did McCarthyism (“naming names”) in more modern times. It is back again in our treatment of people suspected of terrorism—to be suspected of it is to be guilty of it. Few white Christians bother about it because most suspects are Moslem and Asian, but once bad practices are accepted for some unpopular minority, no principle can exclude them from being used against anyone. Speaking of how Hitler’s Nazis gradually eliminated one group after another, with the Church standing by uncomplainingly, Pastor Martin Niemöller wrote his succinct little poem, which should be inscribed on the heart of everyone still free:

First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

It could happen to anyone who annoyed a neighbor. It was common in the Inquisition. Such a case happened under the emperor Antoninus Pius (138-161 AD). A Christian was denounced by the husband of a woman whom he had converted. Much of the so-called persecution of Christians under the Antonine emperors were simply individual cases like this one, disgusting but not deliberately organized by the state. The Bishop of Smyrna was also martyred under the Antoninius in 156 AD, but the details are so fantastic, they are unbelievable.

Marcus Aurelius (161-180 AD) was a famous Stoic with a human and kind outlook, a model Platonian “philosopher king”, yet he seems to have persecuted Christians throughout his empire. How intense the persecution was is unknown, but it was widespread. Marcus Aurelius seems to have regarded Christians as criminally opposed to Roman tradition to such an extent that they disregarded the welfare of the empire itself, even wanting to see its downfall. It does not seem at all impossible or unlikely because plenty of Christians, to this day, believe “the end is nigh”, and, like the messianists in the time of Nero, some might still have had ideas of helping God in bringing it about. In any event, Marcus Aurelius and his officials feared for the effect of Christians on Roman youth, and notably on their sense of duty towards Rome.

Minucius Felix, the Christian apologist, blames the emperor’s attitude on the tuition of Fronto, whose views are attributed to the pagan in Felix’s apolology for Christianity. If Fronto had imbued Marcus Aurelius with the traditional culture of the Roman Republic, which the Antonines valued, then his antagonism to those constantly preaching the End of everything, not least the empire, should be understandable to anyone.

Aurelius’s delinquent son, Commodus (180-192 AD), had a different attitude to his father. He had no ideals of his own other than self admiration, but was influenced by Marcia, his mistress—a Christian!

With the last of the honorable emperors, the Roman empire had begun its decline—curiously just as Christianity grew to significance. Marcus Aurelius had spent time in Germany, holding off the barbarians, but, with his death, the threats mounted. Christians were interpreting the growing Germanic incursions as signs of the coming End. It helped to undermine Roman resolve, just as Marcus Aurelius had foreseen. Morale was collapsing within the empire just when the pride and determination of old was needed. In the face of this, the emperors of the third century AD did little. Syrian emperors even favored Christianity, but a few felt the same as Marcus Aurelius, believing it necessary to suppress those looking forward to the end of empire.

Alexander Severus was influenced by his Christian mother, Julia Mamæa, a friend of Origen, but he preferred to hedge his bets with all the most popular gods of his subjects. He had statues of Abraham, Orpheus, and Apollonius of Tyana in his private chapel, as well as Christ. If these statues were not of the gods themselves, they were of the human reprsentatives of the gods on earth, so he seems to have regarded Abraham as the founder of the Jewish religion, rather than Moses, and perhaps the god of the Jews.

In mid-century, Decius (249-251 AD) tried to revive the spirit of ancient Rome, but, according to Elliott-Binns, the spirit of the Church “was so obviously un-Roman” that so long as it operated unhindered it would be impossible to restore “public virtue, ancient principles and manners, and the oppressed majesty of the law”. Decius revived the defunct office of Censor, ordering too that everyone had to offer public sacrifice by a certain date. When people refused, some officials tortured them, but few were killed. Magistrates that had to apply the edict were as often lenient. The refusenik Christians, for example, were begged by some magistrates merely to burn a little incense, an act rather like a Catholic lighting a candle. When they refused even to do that, the exasperated magistrates had no choice left but to punish them as disloyal. Some even connived in registering compliance with the law even though a Christian had persistently refused to comply. The more fanatical Christians called those who accepted certificates of compliance apostates.

The authorities were not inclined to be so lenient with the clergy, particularly bishops, the reasoning being that without leaders the Church would collapse. Some bishops were determined to be martyred and were. Others offered sacrifice and received their certificate of compliance. Yet others did a runner, Cyprian of Carthage among them. Decius meanwhile was doing his duty of defending the empire against the barbarian Gothic incursions and died on active service in 251 AD. So the persecution lasted only about one year.

Valerian (253-260 AD) a couple of years later had the same fears for the decline in Roman standards of commitment and courage as Decius, issuing edicts against Christianity in 257 and 258 AD. The aim was again to restore traditional Roman culture and virtues, particularly the sense of duty to Rome. Pursuing that duty himself by facing the Persian threat in the east in 260 AD, Valerian was captured by the enemy.

Social Effects

Regarding the civil law, S Paul told Christians not to turn to the civil courts, but to settle disputes among themselves. Essenes had the same principle, and it was the likely reason why Jesus would not co-operate at his trial with Pilate’s court of Roman justice. Christians were to confess their sins publicly before their peers and show contrition—to repent publicly. They would then be forgiven. In the course of the evolution of Christianity after the fall of Rome, that changed to its opposite—private confession directly to God… in the shape of the priest!

The Roman system of family planning is one that was common in non-Christian countries until the modern age of empire—exposure. Any Roman father had the right to return a child to the gods by leaving it out in the cold winter to die of exposure or by being eaten by wolves. It stopped families from degenerating into utter poverty when children kept coming. Christians eventually forbade it, but not immediately!

Nor did Christians improve the situation of women. Roman women were getting more and more respect and independence, but despite Christianity appealing particularly to women, its effect was to keep women subordinate. Essenes had a disdainful attitude to women, believing them to be a distraction from men’s attempts to practise holiness. Nevertheless, it seems that there were female Essenes, and that women had important roles in the sect. Certainly, if the gospels are a reliable account of the role of women in the ministries of Jesus, they were not unimportant to the Nazarenes, albeit in peripheral ways, and Nazarenes seem to have been Essenes or a variety of them—perhaps new converts not properly initiated. From the gospels, one can infer that women ran the Essenian hostels, and perhaps safe houses in times of strife. To judge by the popularity of Mary and its cognates like Martha as women’s names, they had the honorable title of Lady or Mistress, matching the men’s titles of Lord and Master, and their title has been misunderstood as a women’s forename.

Of value to the growth of Christianity was its organization, which it inherited from the Essenes. Christians were a fellowship, they were brothers and sisters, as indeed some other popular religions were, from at least the time of Pythagoras. They were also hospitable to each other, entertaining travelling Christians, and they were attentive and caring to the sick and elderly, two more Essenic characteristics passed on to their successors. As a fellowship, like the later Christians, they seem to have had a system of titles pertaining to family, brother, sister, father, mother, son of a father (barabbas), and so on. So while women had important jobs, they did not have leadership positions, a policy the church has maintained since.

Christian heresies sometimes differed, allowing women to have senior positions. Women are prominent in the Gnostic work, Pistis Sophia, and the Montanists took it that sex was only important to material beings, but could not be in the spirit world which had to be nonsexual, so women were entitled to be leaders because spiritually they could be no different from men. Montanist prophetesses did everything that a male priest could do, including baptizing and celebrating the eucharist. In the apocryphal Paul and Thecla, the lovestruck Thecla stalked Paul everywhere doing just what he did, preaching and baptizing. In Acts of the Apostles, “women of honor” are mentioned in the Asian church districts, a phrase curiously reminiscent of the Essene “men of renown”, another possible reference to Essenian “Ladies”, bearing in mind that there could have been a greater proportion of Essenic Jews in the dispersion than in Judæa.

After Constantine took the Church into the state, he had to make it uniform across the empire for it to be any use as a tool of government, so everything was standardized—the purpose of the synods.

Establishment of the Church

Christians became conscious of their victory over their rivals for the honor of being the Roman state religion with the Edict of Milan issued in March 313 AD. It freed the Church of all fear of persecution and interference. Well, persecution, but not interference, for in reality Constantine had nationalized the Church by taking it under his own protection, meaning in practice that, as emperor, he owned it. The Church was already effectively established but it took Theodosius, whom Christians surnamed the Great, at the end of the fourth century to do it formally.

Attempts to unite the people of the empire by veneration of the emperor had been less than successful, so Constantine aimed to unite the several solar religions of the empire under the auspices of the best organized—Christianity. Solar religions for long had been popular, and Christianity was one of them, or was seen by Romans as being one of them, because of its many solar allusions. Moreover, Christians had favored Constantine, and theirs was an urban religion, so would help to keep the towns in control, as they were always the centers of sedition.

The attempt to promote veneration of the emperor had ultimately helped Christianity because it aimed to create an empire-wide, a universal religion.

The belief that God is one demands a world wide acknowledgement, and those who hold it are bound to seek disciples of all nations. A God who is claimed to be universal cannot be confined to a single race, much less to a single territory. If God is all sovereign, the world must be brought to serve Him.

L E Elliott-Binns DD, The Church in the Ancient World (1938)

Imperial titles like Son of God were echoed in Christianity, so crowning Christ as the notional king, the Son of God Himself, with the emperor as His agent on earth was a more sophisticated extension of what had gone before. The strategy was similar to that used by the Persian shahs in setting up Judaism seven centuries earlier. With the establishment of the Church, membership carried some political value, and more people joined for reasons of opportunity rather than principle. It had become a means of political advancement.

Christians today place huge credence on the miracles of Jesus and other Christians, but in those early days miracles persuaded few other than the gullible crowds in the market squares. That indeed was the reason—they were too common. All religions had miracle workers. All market places had miracle working magians—magicians—the reason why such conjuring is called magic still. In that respect, Christianity was no different, and had no advantage by it. It simply had to match the others to avoid any prejudice that it, among all religions, had no one able to perform them. Celsus never argued that Christian miracles were fake, because he was happy to accept them on a par with the rest. They certainly could not be offered as proof that the Christian God was uniquely good. Even demons could do magic tricks. Few questioned the supernatural, and demons were just as supernatural as gods.

Christians today look upon modern martyrs as insane religious fanatics. Apparently forgetting that early Christians were no less fanatical, they tell their children of the many Christian martyrs in these early days. Marcus Aurelius, we have seen, was a man of noble virtue as historians admit, even many Christian ones, but he could see nothing noble in the martyrdom of the Christians. To him they were precisely obstinate and ignorant fanatics whose conduct and motives consisted purely of superstition to no good purpose. Elliott-Binns wrote…

…their deaths… were clear cases of suicide. They were mere vulgar fanatics such as are found in all religions, whose inspiring motive was bravado rather than real faith… martyrs of this type become a distinct embarrassment, not only to the [Roman] magistrate but to the Church, and indeed the title was at length denied to those who deliberately sought death…

Most of them! Like Moslem martyrs looking forward to the seventy houris in the martyrs’ heaven, these Christians, unlike most today, actually believed they would wake up in heaven. Many even killed themselves immediately after baptism in the belief that their sins had been washed away, and they would die sinless if they died immediately, and so fly at once to heaven. S Augustine stopped it by declaring the opposite to be true it was a mortal sin, so would suffer the second and permanent death in hellfire.

Before Christianity, many, particularly poorer people, felt alienated from God. Society neglected and demeaned them, something that no society hoping for stability should do, for it leaves the underclass with no stake in society, and every reason to see it destroyed. Their aim then is to change things at all costs on the grounds that nothing could be worse. They have nothing to lose. Yet we see our leaders doing it right now. What was offered then was Jesus Christ, a mediator with the highest God, who had himself started poor and had suffered and so knew what poverty and oppression were like. He was therefore close to people, approachable and knowable, yet above man, a transcendent Son of God and divine—a personal God. Mystery religions like Mithraism offered a saviour, but essentially a mystical or cosmic one. Though in fact the Christian Messiah was no different, the associated myth said he had appeared as a human being here on earth, and recently!

The ability of the Church to adapt, one might say “evolve”, was a key aspect of its surviving:

Paganism was largely conquered by being absorbed, and much of it reappeared in Christian guise.

L E Elliott-Binns DD, The Church in the Ancient World (1938)

Modern day fundamentalists argue furiously that Christianity is far too holy ever to have been influenced by its neighbors. In fact, as soon as it was established as a national religion, the emperors wanted it to have a broad appeal and a universal look. Syncretism was common among the empire’s religions, and Christians adopted rather obvious practices from other Roman religions, not least being the winter holiday, Christmas, and the Mithraic head dresses of bishops and popes.

Christianity spread into a pagan world—its converts were pagans. In terms of ideas, those pagans could not eliminate their whole pagan upbringing simply by converting to Christianity, so it was impossible to prevent those ideas from filtering into the beliefs of the Church. Intellectuals among the upper classes had turned to the philosophical systems, like Stoicism and Neoplatonism. These Greek philosophical religions, more lifestyles perhaps, gave much to Christian theology and doctrine. Others calling themselves Cynics acted rather as Jesus did, teaching crowds in market places. Their purpose was to persuade them they could be virtuous and moral to everybody’s benefit in this difficult world, leading some New Testament scholars to conclude the gospel writers meant their readers to see Jesus as a Cynic.

Not all the ideas that filtered into Christianity were acceptable. Some came to be considered as heresies. They do show, though, that such “unchristian ideas” were influencing Christianity, even if some were rejected.

While Christianity with its Trinity of divine persons, its God made man, its pantheon of divinized men and women, is opem to the superficial charge of being a reversion to the pagan polytheistic type, it is rather to be regarded as taking up into a higher synthesis those advantages of a too abstract and soul starving monotheism.

Fr Tyrrell, Lex Orandi, cited by Elliott-Binns

All you can say in response is “Ha! Ha!”. Polytheism within Christianity is a “higher synthesis”, while elsewhere it is the work of the Devil. Moreover, monotheism is not itself good free of polytheism. It is “too abstract and soul starving”. It is risible indeed that Christians can argue that black is white and the reverse with equal conviction. Risible too is the extended ritual that came out of the Roman state religion, the pomp and display, the gilding, monumental building, and accumulation of wealth, none of which were recommended by Christ, yet are now indispensible in all but the lowest of low Protestantism.

Constantine, meanwhile retained the title of Pontifex Maximus, the highest priest of the Roman civil religion which Christianity had become. It made the emperor the supreme head of all religions, Christianity no less. Yet the notion of a universal religion would not be received in Syria and Egypt where religion was, like Judaism, closely associated with their own national pride. Both were Christian, but both refused to have any centralized dogma of the substance and nature of Christ forced onto them, and endless disputation and strife was the centuries long outcome. Constantine gave the Christian clergy the same privileges as pagan priests, accentuating the separation of clergy and lay people.

Nor was Christianity in the least tolerant of pagan religions once it got its feet under the establishment table. Initially, pagan temples were sacked by Christian mobs egged on by monks, but then edicts were issued banning paganism. It survived underground for a surprisingly long time, but eventually seems to have disappeared for good, unless Margaret Murray is correct that it is witchcraft, which seems unlikely. Christians seemed to think that the temples were too magnificent for pagans, and so deserved to be vandalized or stolen and rededicated as Christian, suggesting that Christian intolerance is indistinguishable from fascism.

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