The Foundations of Christianity

By the time of the Edict of Milan (313) Christianity had survived in an empire, which had been at best indifferent to it and at worst actively hostile for nearly three hundred years. Its origins, like so many of the religious beliefs that spread into the Greco-Roman empire after the first century, lay in the east. It was inspired by Jesus, a Jew who lived and preached in Galilee, part of Roman Palestine, before being crucified in Jerusalem in the reign of Tiberius. (Jesus was his given name-Christ, from the Greek Christos, the messiah or anointed one, came to be used when his movement spread into the Greek world.)

The Gospel Evidence

The sources for Jesus' life are, like those for most aspects of the ancient world, inadequate. References to Christianity in contemporary non-Christian sources are very few, just enough to give confirmation that Jesus existed. Of the twenty 'gospels' believed to have been written (the word derives in English from the Anglo-Saxon 'god spell', the Greek original means 'good news'), only four, those of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, have survived since antiquity while another, later, collection of sayings of Jesus (the so-called 'Gnostic' gospel of Thomas) was rediscovered only in 1945, among the documents of the Nag Hammadi library, so called from the Egyptian town near where they were found. (Most of these other gospels were composed in the second century and were rejected as the 'canon' of accepted New Testament writings was consolidated in later centuries.)

As historical (rather than theological) sources the gospels have serious draw­backs. They were first written down two generations after Jesus' death (most scholars date the gospels to between 65 and 100 with John's account traditionally placed much later than the other three), and for local Christian communities distant from Jerusalem and Galilee where the events they describe took place. (Tradition relates that Mark's gospel was written in Rome and Matthew's in Antioch.) They appear to be based on collections of sayings, some of them in the form of parables. With the exception of a few surviving phrases in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, they are written in Greek. Inevitably much of the original meaning of what Jesus said and the context in which he said it must have been lost in the transfer from one culture and language to another.

In any case the gospels were not written primarily as biographies. Their aim was to emphasize the special importance of Jesus so as to distinguish him from the other holy men and cults which pervaded the ancient world. An important preoccupation, therefore, was to establish Jesus' status. This was done through highlighting stories of a virgin birth, of a 'Transfiguration' (the moment when God Himself appears to have recognized Jesus' status), and of his powers as a miracle worker. Jesus' death and his resurrection are also given special prominence, with a focus on his mission as an innocent man, put to death but come to life again to proclaim God's message of salvation. There was also a concern with establishing Jesus as the longed-for messiah (see below). To do this, stories from his life were probably shaped to correspond with prophecies from the Hebrew Scriptures. The first chapters of Matthew, for instance, outline the events of Jesus' birth and early life with constant reference back to earlier prophecies.

The degree to which such needs and pressures shaped the 'facts' presented in the gospels is the subject of immense scholarly dispute. At one extreme there are those who claim that the gospels are historically reliable, even when they describe events as distant and seemingly irrecoverable to the gospel writers as Jesus' conception and birth. At the other, radical theologians such as Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976) have seen the events of the gospels as largely the creation of the gospel writers. 'I do indeed think', Bultmann summed up his researches, 'that we can know now almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus.' Most theologians believe that Bultmann went too far. A main development of recent years, pioneered by such scholars as Emil Schiirer and, more recently, Geza Vermes, has been to seek to accept the historical reality of Jesus but to place him more securely within his Jewish background. This background has been put into sharper focus by the growth of understanding of the Jewish world of the first century, particularly as a result of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls (see below).

The Life of Jesus

Jesus was brought up in Galilee, a northern region of Palestine. Galilee was governed not by the Romans but by a series of client kings, first, at the time of Jesus' birth around 5 bc, Herod and then his son Herod Antipas. It was a reasonably fertile area and not cut off entirely from the outside world. Caravan routes to the east ran through the region and there was some contact with the wealthy trading cities of the coast. As the gospel accounts confirm, it was predominantly a rural area scattered with small towns.

The Galileans had the reputation of being a tough and rather unsophisticated people, looked down upon by the more highly educated Jews of Jerusalem to the south. They had their own pride, and several of Jesus' recorded sayings stress his own distrust of outsiders. Straightforward and direct, he had little in common with the devout Jewish sectarians such as the Pharisees who laid immense emphasis on rigid adherence to Jewish law, the Torah. He was more in the tradition of the Hasid, the holy man, an individual who has the power to cure ill­nesses, exorcise devils, and heal the sins which Jewish teaching believed was their root cause. He had no inclination to distance himself from ordinary people and moved freely among the local outcasts. His god, too, was more immediate than the traditional one of the Jewish world. His coming was promised soon, his king­dom might even be already on the way, and he would have special care for the poor and rejected. The news of Jesus' healing powers and his message spread quickly and crowds gathered to listen to him.

The world in which Jesus moved was a tense one. Judaea to the south had now become part of the Roman Empire with a Roman governor, Pontius Pilate. As in any colonial situation the Jewish people were divided in their response to the foreigners. At one extreme the Sadducees, a wealthy and aristocratic group, with conservative religious and social ideas, were prepared to tolerate Roman rule as offering the best chance of their survival as an elite. They dominated the councils of Jerusalem. At the other extreme the Zealots were actually prepared to countenance armed rebellion against the Romans, and although Jesus appears never to have openly supported their cause many Zealots may have sympathized with him as a genuinely popular leader. In between these extremes other sects such as the Pharisees concentrated on maintaining their religious principles intact without offering any open opposition to Roman rule.

When Jesus moved his ministry out of Galilee to Jerusalem, the centre of conservative Jewry and, during festivals, of the Roman administration, in about ad 30, the risks were high. Neither Sadducees nor Romans could afford to allow a popular leader to upset the delicate political situation. The resulting crucifixion, the punishment meted out to thousands of rebels before Jesus, was probably collaboration between the authorities to keep the peace after Jesus' dramatic entry into the Temple. Jesus, with no institutional power-base in the Jewish world, was an easy victim. When given the choice the crowds of Jerusalem roared for the freeing of the local Barabbas, not for a Galilean they did not know.

Jesus' followers were shattered by his death, in particular by its humiliating form. (It was to be three hundred years before Christians could bring themselves to represent Christ hanging on the cross, although there may have been other cultural reasons for this inhibition.) However, early on stories circulated that, though taken down dead from his cross and buried, he had come to life again and had been seen by a favoured few before ascending into heaven. The belief in this 'resurrection' persisted to become a central doctrine of Christian belief. Meanwhile Jesus' closest disciples remained in Jerusalem and struggled to keep their community intact. An early leader was the former fisherman Peter, who, according to Matthew's account, had been picked out by Jesus as the first leader of his movement. By ad 40, however, the dominant figure in the community appears to have been Jesus' brother, James. (The earliest traditions, the Gospel of Mark and the Acts of the Apostles, for instance, record Jesus as having brothers and sisters but these traditions were later obscured by the belief that his mother, Mary, remained perpetually virgin in her marriage.) The preoccupation of the small community at this time was to wait together until the coming of God, predicted by Jesus, took place.

Another role for Jesus emerged in these early years, that of messiah. The coming of a messiah, 'the anointed one' who would deliver the Jews from bondage, had long been part of Jewish belief but the Jewish messiah had always been seen as a powerful king coming in triumph. Jesus' life and death could hardly give him this status but he could be seen in a different sense, as a messiah who redeemed (freed humans from the consequences of their own sins) through his own suffering. (Several of the Psalms of David provide precedents for a suffering messiah.) In this sense Jesus marked a fresh beginning in God's plan for mankind. Christians now talked of a 'new' covenant between God and his people to replace the traditional one of the Hebrew scriptures. (These different conceptions of messiah were to be one of the issues that helped maintain a division between Christians and Jews.)

The impulses that led to the acceptance of Jesus as the messiah were not unique to Christianity. On the north-western shore of the Dead Sea to the east of Jerusalem in 1947 some shepherd boys stumbled upon a cache of leather and papyrus manuscripts hidden in caves around Qumran, the first of the celebrated Dead Sea Scrolls. More manuscripts were discovered and gradually the life of a Jewish community, members of the Essene sect, was revealed. The Essenes rejected worship in Jerusalem and lived as small communities in monastic seclusion in the wilderness, rigidly observing Jewish law. They shared their property, may have practised celibacy, and identified themselves strongly with the poor. They saw themselves as a privileged group, God's elect, who were waiting for a messiah who would usher in the kingdom of God. Meanwhile they studied the scriptures assiduously for prophecies of his coming (a vast amount has been learned about the formation of the Hebrew scriptures, the Christian Old Testament, from the surviving Scrolls). No direct links have been traced between the Qumran community and Christianity but the parallels are many and show that the Christian community was not alone in its sense of being a privileged people waiting for the coming of their god.

The Early Christian Community and the Missions of Paul

The small Christian community of Jerusalem must have felt isolated. Many traditional Jews viewed it with suspicion, particularly when early Christians such as Stephen argued that the new covenant brought by Christ was needed because Jews had failed to adhere to the old. Its converts were mainly among Greek-speaking Jews, and soon small congregations appeared outside Jerusalem in the Jewish communities of large cities such as Damascus and Antioch, the capital of Syria and third city of the empire. (The term Christian appears to have been first used in Antioch.) The synagogues in these large cosmopolitan cities traditionally attracted gentiles (non-Jews) to their services and it must have been in this way that the story of Jesus first leaked out into the gentile world.

At first it had little impact. The Jerusalem leaders, Peter and James, wedded to their Jewish background, insisted that Jesus was only for those who were cir­cumcised and who obeyed Jewish dietary laws. Uncircumcised gentiles could not be admitted to the sect. It took one of the most remarkable figures of early Christianity to break this taboo. This was Paul, a Greek-speaking Jew from Tarsus in Cilicia and a citizen of the empire. Paul was a Pharisee who had come to Jerusalem to train as a rabbi. At first he had shared the Pharisees' distrust of Jesus and joined in persecution of Christians but then, on the road north from Jerusalem to Damascus, he had a vision of Jesus and became a believer.

Interestingly it was some time, at least three years, before Paul made contact with the Christian community in Jerusalem. He was probably much younger than its leaders (he may have been born as late as ad 10) and, unlike them, had never known Jesus. In his letters to the early Christian communities, the earliest surviving documents of Christianity, he makes almost no reference to Jesus as a historical person. However, Paul had few doubts as to who Jesus was and what his message meant. He was the Christ who had come to redeem those, Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female alike, who showed faith in him. Those who put their trust in Jesus would be saved. Paul's emphasis is thus on faith rather than rigid adherence to Jewish law. Many of Paul's letters (those to the Corinthians in particular) are concerned with the problems, which arise when believers are freed from the rigid constraints of a moral code and have to define a new code of behaviour, which is compatible with their faith in Jesus.

Paul insisted that uncircumcised gentiles could become Christians and he argued his case against the restrictive attitudes of the Jerusalem community with vigour. He only got his way when he agreed that his gentile churches would col­lect money for the church in Jerusalem. There followed broad agreement that the Jerusalem leaders would continue to preach to Jews while Paul would be leader of the mission to the gentiles. Nevertheless, the relationship between the two missions was a tense one. Paul later told the Galatian Christians of a public row he had had with Peter in Antioch. Peter had been prepared at first to eat with gentiles but when joined by fellow Jewish Christians from Jerusalem withdrew from doing so. His behaviour infuriated Paul, who felt in the circumstances that Peter had no right to make gentiles follow Jewish ways.

The doings of Paul and the early Christian community are well documented in the Acts of the Apostles, composed, probably in the 6os ad, as sequel to his gospel, by Luke. An educated Greek, he was writing within the historical tradi­tions established by Thucydides and he may have been present at some of the events he records. He probably had no written sources and it is believed that the speeches he places in the mouths of his main characters are, like those of Thucydides, shaped to the personality of the speaker and the occasion on which he was speaking. Luke has a wider message. He attempts to place the Christian story within the context of world history and, more than any other gospel writer, he shows a detailed knowledge of the Roman world. His account of Paul's ship­wreck on the way to Rome, for instance, is a valuable piece of historical evidence in its own right. It was to be 250 years before another such detailed work of church history was to be composed.

Paul is the central character in Acts and it was his energy and beliefs which transformed the young Christian communities. He moved on his missionary journeys through Galatia, Asia, Macedonia, Greece, and even as far west as Rome, inspiring the first Christians and struggling tirelessly to achieve some coherence and unity in their beliefs. He was so successful that the Jerusalem Christian community was soon eclipsed. It had no real future within the Jewish world and in the revolt against Rome of ad 66 it was accused by traditional Jews of being unpatriotic. The break between church and synagogue was complete by about ad 85 although scattered and isolated communities of Christian Jews con­tinued to exist in Syria and elsewhere for some time.

By the second century, therefore, the gentile communities represented main­stream Christianity. However, Judaism provided an enduring influence. Christians believed, like Jews, that there was only one god, who deserved exclus­ive worship, and that those who believed were a people set apart. It is hard to imagine the later success of Christianity without this cohesion and sense of exclusiveness. There was a shared ethical tradition. Jews valued chastity and the stability of family life. They visited the sick, and supported the poor. Sometimes, as with the Qumran community, they held property in common. This was echoed by early Christian behaviour. 'We Christians hold everything in common except our wives,' said the second-century Tertullian. Christians retained the Hebrew scriptures, valuing them for what were seen as references - in Isaiah, for instance - to the coming of Jesus. The Old Testament remained an integral part of the body of Christian scripture, even if the god of the Old Testament, with his exclusive relationship with one people and a heavy emphasis on the destruction of his enemies, sits ill at ease with the more gentle and approachable god preached by Jesus. (In the i4os one Marcion, the son of a bishop from Pontus, did in fact argue that the Gods of the Old and New Testament were distinct, with the God of the New Testament altogether a superior entity to that of the Old. Marcion, who had come to live in Rome, was excommunicated from the Christian community there in 144, but his ideas continued to be highly influen­tial. They were eventually declared heretical.)

Christianity within the Spiritual Life of the Empire

The spiritual life of the empire at this time was one of unbelievable variety. Traditional Roman religion remained highly ritualistic with the emphasis on the propitiation of the gods through ceremonies which had to be carried out with absolute precision. This approach was reinforced through the rise of the imper­ial cult, which took different forms in different reigns according to the demands of the ruling emperor and the degree to which he was prepared to foster the wor­ship of his predecessors. In Africa, dedications to emperors were inscribed on temples alongside those to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. As Augustine was to point out in The City of God, these traditional religious activities were primarily con­cerned with the maintenance of the glory of the state.

A mass of temples, oracles, centres of healing, and remote shrines also sur­vived alongside the official religion of the state. In Egypt animal worship per­sisted. At Didyma on the coast of Asia a great temple to Apollo remained crowded with worshippers seeking the advice of the oracle there. (The continu­ing popularity of oracles sustained the belief that the will of a god could be known and that there were gifted individuals who might be able to proclaim it, an approach which was to have his own influence on Christians.) Judaism remained strong, despite the impact of diaspora and Hellenization. In Syria peo­ple honoured a Holy and Just Divinity, who was portrayed with attendant angels. In the Celtic world water and river gods remained popular. Roman cults either coexisted with or were superimposed on these beliefs. The Romans were pre­pared to identify foreign gods with their own, Jupiter with Zeus, Venus with Aphrodite, in the east, for instance. In the west Celtic gods were also incorp­orated within the Roman pantheon. The major Celtic deity Lug became associ­ated with Mercury and in the city of Aquae Sulis (modern Bath) the local water goddess Sulis was identified with Minerva. Individuals could participate in a variety of different cults without any sense of impropriety.

Then there were the mystery cults appealing to those who sought a more per­sonal salvation. These cults shared common features which may be traced back in the Greek world, for instance, to the ceremonies involved in the worship of Demeter at Eleusis. Typically, initiates had to go through rit­ual purification. There was the promise of some form of personal communion with the god or goddess on earth and of a reward after death. In Apuleius' Golden Ass the rites of initiation to the cult of Isis are described in detail. The initiation itself included a ritual bath, the transmission of secrets, and ten days of fasting before the ceremony. The climax for Apuleius (it is assumed his account is autobiographical) was one of intense mystical experience. 'I approached the borders of death, I was borne along through all the elements and then I returned. At midnight I saw the sun blazing with bright light, I came into the presence of the gods who dwell above the earth and those who dwell below.'

The gods and goddesses who were worshipped in these mystery cults tended to come from outside the Greek world. The cult of Isis spread from Egypt and vied with the long-established cult of Cybele (whose origins were in Anatolia) for those, not necessarily women, who wanted the protection of a mother god­dess. Mithraism, a popular cult among soldiers and men of business, had its ori­gins with a Persian god, Mithras. Evidence of Mithraism is found in army camps throughout the Roman world. The intensely personal nature of the relationship between worshipper and god acted to elevate the favoured deity above the other gods. Isis tells Apuleius, 'I am Nature, the universal mother, mistress of all the elements, sovereign of all things spiritual, queen of the dead, queen also of the immortals, the single manifestation of all gods and goddess that are' (transla­tion. Robert Graves). By the second and third centuries ad this elevation of one god or goddess above all others was a common feature of religious belief.

The early Christians were both in this world and outside it. Much of the imagery of the New Testament - light and darkness, faith compared to flourishing crops - is similar to that found in mystery religions. The 'facts' of Jesus' life were presented in a format which was not unique to him. Humans had been con­ceived by gods in both the Egyptian and Greek world. It was said that Mithras had been incarnated and been visited by shepherds after his birth in a cave. Stories of miraculous healings, shared meals of believers, and even resurrections (in the legends surrounding Cybele, her beloved Attis, a shepherd, is mutilated, dies, but is reborn to be reunited with the goddess) and the promise of an after­life for the initiated would have been commonplace to anyone who had contact with mystery religions. The development of the cult of Mary, the mother of Jesus, acquires a new richness when placed in parallel with the worship of other mother figures in these religions (although the most influential development was to be the cult of Mary's perpetual virginity). Many of the procedures of the mystery religions (initiation into the cult, for instance) were to act as important influences on Christian practice.

Yet there were major differences. While belief in one mystery religion did not preclude involvement in another, Christianity did require rejection of other gods and an exclusive relationship with Christ and his God. Another problem, and one which lasted until Constantine's acceptance of Christianity, lay in the rela­tionship between Christianity and the state. The Romans were traditionally sus­picious of religious activities which took place in private. It is interesting that in Apuleius' description of the worship of Isis the ceremonies begin with public prayers to the emperor and senate. This was doubtless a precautionary measure to ward off suspicion. The Christians made no such compromises and their wor­ship of a man who had claimed to be a king aroused instant distrust. 'These men all act against the edicts of Caesar, saying there is another king, Jesus,' shout hos­tile crowds in Thessalonica in the first century ad (Acts of the Apostles 17:7). The isolation of the Christian communities and garbled accounts of their activities