‘Ancient Christianities’ And A Look At The Church’s Evolution Over Its First 500 Years
(REVIEW) Christianity’s evolution, we are told in this densely packed, deeply analytical history of the faith’s early centuries, “involves a large cast of characters.” They included “not only theologians, bishops, and emperors, but also gods and demons, angels and magicians, astrologers and charismatic wonder-workers, idiosyncratic ascetics and aristocratic patrons and millennial enthusiasts.”
Given this diversity, it follows — as author Paula Fredriksen, a distinguished American scholar of early Christianity suggests — that competition among various “Christianities” most accurately describes how an obscure sect of Judaism in a backwater province of the Roman Empire ultimately emerged as the official faith of that same world power over the course of some five hundred years.
Fredriksen begins “Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years” (Princeton University Press) at the beginning, though not in the three and a half square miles around Galilee where Jesus conducted most of his ministry, but in the wider Greco-Roman world where diaspora, Greek-speaking Jews lived peaceably in pagan cities from Asia Minor to Alexandria. In such settings, cultural “boundaries were porous.”
The first-century, Roman Jewish historian Josephus observed that some Jewish customs “had spread among pagan populations” while Jewish communities and synagogues in various parts of the Roman Empire were supported by wealthy, high-ranking pagan patrons, from imperial cult priestesses to local town councils. Hellenized Jews, meanwhile, visited pagan gymnasiums to get in shape for athletic competitions dedicated to heathen gods, attended theaters on pagan feast days, and served alongside gentiles in the military and local government. Some even took credit for Greek, classical wisdom, prompting the second century CE Platonist philosopher Numenius to wonder, “What is Plato but Moses speaking Greek?”
So when early evangelists like Saint Paul encountered “Jews in pagan places doing pagan things” as well as pagans in “Jewish places doing Jewish things” they were unprepared for this level of cultural cross pollination. Yet it helps explain, Fredriksen believes, how the teachings of an itinerant rabbi from Nazareth resonated with a non-Jewish audience. The message already had a familiar ring.
Within several generations, Judaism’s role in Christianity notoriously devolved into one of infamy, thanks to damning passages in Scripture such as Matthew’s “chilling malediction ‘His blood be upon us and upon our children!’ (Matthew 27:25).” This and other antisemitic passion narrative verses, all written after the devastating destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in the year 70 C.E., blamed the cataclysmic event on Jews as just punishment for surrendering Jesus to Pilate. By the fourth century, socializing with Jews and taking part in their festivals, as Christianized, Greco-Roman gentiles once had, was not only frowned upon, but also theologically problematic.
“Is it not folly for those who worship the Crucified to celebrate festivals with those who crucified him?” intoned church father John Chrysostom. So entrenched was this position that the “standing intergenerational indictment” of Jews for Christ’s crucifixion remained a matter of Roman Catholic dogma until 1965 when it was finally renounced.
While not completely abandoning its Jewish roots (some early Christians kept the Sabbath on Saturdays and Passover continued to determine the date of Easter), the early church needed to define itself. This required self-examination, discourse and debate. How was it that the person who died on the cross was also God, who is eternal? What was his relation to the god of the Jewish tradition? Was he fully human, fully divine, partially both, or neither during the time he was on Earth? When was the second coming?
With intellectual roots in both Jewish Midrash (exegesis) and classical rhetoric (Platonic inquiry), the early church fathers were well equipped to address these questions, though not always collegially. Defining a belief system sometimes begins with condemning what it is not.
Sorting orthodoxy (“right teaching”) from heresy (hairesis, or “school of thought,” in the original Greek) became an obsession for the likes of Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian and other second century doctors of the church. Their rhetorical targets included “heretics" (loosely translated: Those who think for themselves) such as Valentinus, Marcion, and Montanus — gnostics all, who tended to parse a higher, hidden God, as distinct from the lower, Hebrew God of creation, responsible for the material world and all its evils.
A clever conceit, unless you are striving for “homonoia (concord), and homodoxia (same opinion),” which increasingly inspired most early church debates that occasionally got ugly. The story goes that before being ejected from the first Council of Nicaea in 325, Arius, who dismissed the doctrine of the Trinity, got slapped in the face by the future Saint Nicholas (yes, Santa Claus).
At the same time, lingering paganism and aspects of heresy sometimes resulted in dogma. Celebrations of saintly “feast days” have roots in “raucous” Roman festivals, “marked by dancing and singing as well as eating and drinking.” And it was Marcion, a second-century docetist (one who believed that Christ’s humanity was an illusion), who laid the groundwork for organizing what would become the New Testament by dividing the text into “gospels plus letters.” As Fredriksen points out, it was only “once the idea of a ‘New Testament’ took hold could Jewish writings in Greek become the Christian ‘Old Testament.’”
The thorny questions of who and what to believe about Christ’s divine vs. human nature (what is now called “Christology”) ultimately ended up on the Roman emperor Constantine’s desk after his conversion to the faith in 312. Simply put, orthodoxy “was what the emperor said it was.” Since it was a big empire, stretching from the shores of Britain to the edges of Asia Minor, not everyone got the emperor’s memo about what constituted “right teaching.”
In 325, Constantine summoned the first “ecumenical” (empire wide) council in Nicaea where it was determined that Christ was both fully human and fully divine, sharing the same “essence” (homoousia, in Greek) as God the Father. A heady concept, but necessary. Divisions in the empire not only challenged the emperor’s authority, they were bad for business. Manichaeism, a mystical religion with Persian origins that combined elements of Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Christianity, was not only labeled “maleficia” ( or black magic) by the church, but posed a “Persian threat to the Roman state.”
Nevertheless, the “divisions that arose from these questions shape modern Christian communities to this day,” Fredriksen concludes. As Rome gradually became the center of the Western (Latin) church, Constantinople (modern Istanbul) became the capital of Eastern orthodoxy, with its various, eponymous sub-denominations: Greek, Russian, Armenian et al. By 1054, the split was official, with Pope and Patriarch excommunicating one another, a standoff that lasted until 1965 (a banner year for forgiveness) when both sides mutually lifted the decrees.
Compelling and comprehensive, this book may nonetheless be an uphill climb for lay readers with little more than a basic Sunday school education. Helpful maps, a glossary and a timeline do offer context and reorienting for those who may get lost in the thickets of such esoterica as apocalyptic eschatology (mystical knowledge of the end time) or hypostasis (philosophically, an independent entity; in Christianity, one of the three “persons” of the Trinity). None of this should dissuade the curious who want a deeper understanding of Christianity’s complex, layered early history or an appreciation for how it emerged at the head of the pack of dozens of rivals, all seeking exclusive rights to the franchise.
Tom Verde is a freelance journalist, specializing in religion, culture and history.