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Qumran caves by the Dead Sea
An anthropological reconstruction
of a
typical man in Galilee at the
time of
Jesus, as opposed
to the
imagination
of artists during
the
Middle Ages.
After Judea lost its independence in 63 BCE, some Jews there turned from hope in a great new Israel ruled by a king such as David and began to look toward individual salvation. Among them were the Essenes. They were offended by the acceptance of foreign ways by their fellow Jews and by the collaboration with Roman rule by aristocrats and their priests, the Sadducees. The Essenes were offended by strife among the Jews. They saw Satan at work, and they denounced the Jewish majority as apostate and described temple worship in Jerusalem as polluted. In likeness to Zoroastrian thought, they described the majority of Jews as the "sons of darkness" and themselves as "the sons of light." They spoke of their hatred for "the sons of darkness," and their love for "the sons of light." They saw themselves as following a strict observance of Jewish law - so rigid that they might let a man drown on the Sabbath rather than make an effort to save him. Disappointed over their expectations about the coming of the Messiah, and wishing to separate themselves from the unholy, the Essenes moved to desert caves that overlooked the Dead Sea. They avoided what they saw as impure food and impure thoughts and acts, including sexual intercourse. They held their property in common, practiced magic, believed everything was in the hands of God and looked forward to Armageddon: God's day of judgment.
In caves overlooking the Dead Sea, where the Essenes are said to have dwelled, scrolls were stored that were to be found in the twentieth century. Thirty-three of the scrolls were in Hebrew, which, in the times of the Essenes, was considered the holy language of Moses. And seventeen of the scrolls were in Aramaic, the language common in Judea.
The scrolls expressed a Judaic expectation of a king, a "messiah," and "a son of god" - the latter a designation for heroes and kings in numerous ancient societies. The scrolls described the Messiah as having the powers of magic, as intending to "uphold the fallen, heal the sick, release the captives" and to resurrect "those asleep in the dust." The Messiah described in the scrolls was to appear in an apocalypse in which there would be a "swallowing of all the uncircumcised." In other words, only God's chosen people, the Jews, were to survive.
Rome reduced Judea's territory and installed the Arab chieftain, Antipater, as its vassal over the whole of Palestine. In 43 BCE, Antipater's son, Herod, succeeded him. Herod became a good friend of Marcus Agrippa, the closest companion of Rome's emperor, Augustus Caesar, and this friendship helped Herod expand his rule. Herod oversaw and profited from copper mines in Cyprus. He built great fortresses and cities. And he was called Herod the Great.
A practicing Jew, Herod observed Jewish laws, and he tried to mollify his many unhappy Jewish subjects. In 20 BCE he began rebuilding Jerusalem's temple. But the bigger landowners continued to prosper more than did small farmers, and some small farmers became impoverished and fell to beggary or brigandage. Common Jews, especially those from rural areas, continued to detest Herod for being a foreigner and for his extravagant palaces and luxurious entertainments, paid for by heavy taxation and bribes. On the other hand, upper class Jews, including the Sadducees, feared disorders by the poor and accepted Herod and the presence of Roman soldiers.
Among those opposed to Herod and to foreign rule were devout Jews called Zealots. The Zealots saw Roman occupiers as greedy and lustful, and they looked forward to the day when God would rescue his people and send them the Messiah. From positions in the wilderness the Zealots resorted to small-scale guerrilla warfare against Herod and the Romans, and the Romans increased the number of their troops in Judea and watched more closely for subversion.
Late in his life, Herod found in his family the scheming and deception that was common among royalty concerned with succession. He executed family members who had plotted against him. He executed Jewish priests who had criticized his lapses from Jewish law, and this turned the Sadducees against him.
Herod died in 4 BCE, twenty-six years into the rule of Augustus Caesar. His death raised the hopes of Jews wishing independence, and, believing they could prevail with the help of Yahweh against the power of Rome, they revolted. Rome was able to restore order, and Augustus divided what had been Herod's domains among three of Herod's sons. Then in the year CE 6, after hearing complaints from Jews about the son of Herod who ruled from Jerusalem, Augustus ruled him incompetent and sent in his place a Roman governor named Pontius Pilate.
John the Baptist had views similar to the Essenes. The New Testament describes him as calling the Pharisees and Sadducees a "brood of vipers," and it describes him as living in the desert, wearing a garment of camel's hair and eating locusts and wild honey (Matthew 3:4-7). Like the Essenes, John saw perversity in Jewish society and he envisioned the coming of an Armageddon that would bring a new Israel under God. But rather than stay separated from others as did the Essenes, John joined various others who traveled about Galilee preaching.
Some of Jerusalem's sophisticates looked down upon Galilee as populated by bumpkins given to erroneous ideas. The people of Galilee, on the other hand, looked down upon outsiders. Recently, two thousand in Galilee had been crucified for rebelling against the Romans. But John had a message other than rebellion for the people of Galilee: he called on them to give up their sinful ways and to repent. All Jews, he claimed, could be forgiven their sins. Using an old religious ritual that held that water washed away one's sins, or cleansed the soul as among Hindus, John the Baptist submerged people into the Jordan River, and he made the ritual a solemn act of conversion that signified membership in his sect.
Among the poor and dissatisfied, John acquired a following and a brotherhood of disciples. Like the Essenes they held their property in common, and they had as their central ritual the eating of a community meal at which they believed the Messiah was spiritually present. John's demise came with his criticism of Rome's local ruler Herod Antipas - the son of Herod the Great. Like the Essenes, John was given to denunciations for any deviation from what he saw as orthodoxy. He denounced the marriage of Herod Antipas to the former wife of his half-brother - a marriage illegal under Judaic law but of little concern to a Hellenized king such as Herod. Such criticism made John appear to Herod as a troublemaker and a subversive, and Herod had John jailed. John's criticism of Herod's marriage angered Herod's new wife, who, according to the New Testament, had her daughter, Salome, ask Herod for John's death in exchange for dancing at Herod's birthday feast. And Herod had John taken from prison and executed.
Among the contemporaries of John the Baptist was a young man named Joshua, a name translated into Greek as Jesus. Jesus left no writings, and known written descriptions of his life and what he said came decades after his death. These were to become known as the Gospels - a part of Christianity's New Testament - traditionally believed to have been written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Some scholars believe the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke were written between the years 70 and 100 and the Gospel of John between 90 and 110. As written in Wikipedia, some others speculate that the Gospels may have originated as late as the year 140 and that "many scholars agree none of the Gospels' true authors can be identified at all."
Matthew describes Jesus as having been born before the death of Herod the Great, which came in 4 BCE. Luke's account has Jesus born during or after the year CE 6. According to the Gospels, Jesus was born in Bethlehem - a village ten miles south of Jerusalem - a claim that might have been made to match Jesus with a prophesy in the book of Micah (5:2), where it was said that from Bethlehem one would go forth to become a ruler of Israel. Instead, Jesus may have been born in Galilee, in a village called Nazareth, where Jesus is said to have lived as a youth.
Jesus appears to have been born into humble circumstances. As a young man he worked at what was then considered a humble occupation: carpentry. The educated around him spoke Greek, while Jesus spoke Aramaic. The Gospel of John, describes Jesus as beginning his own ministry before the imprisonment of John the Baptist. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke describe Jesus as beginning his ministry after John the Baptist's imprisonment. According to the Gospels, the neighbors of Jesus and his brother John saw Jesus' attempt to fill in for the loss of John the Baptist as presumptuous, and they rejected him. At any rate, from among John the Baptist's followers Jesus was able to attract a following of his own. And according to the Book of Matthew, rather than see himself as the predestined leader of John's movement, Jesus denied that he was equal to John. He said that "among those born of women there has not yet arisen anyone greater than John the Baptist." (Matthew 11:11) [ reader comment ]
The Gospels describe Jesus as preaching in rural towns and villages for three years, and they describe his message as close to that of the Essenes. Jesus denounced spiritual corruption that pervaded Jewish society. Similar to the Essenes and John the Baptist, Jesus disliked the ways of the well-to-do, and he disliked prevailing commerce. According to the Gospels he advocated the sharing of possessions. If a man asks for your shirt, he is reported to have said, give your shirt and your coat too. He warned against serving two masters: God and mammon. He preached against the wearing of soft clothing, and he called upon his disciples to follow an ascetic life, to refrain from acquiring gold and silver for their money belts, a bag for their journey, sandals or a staff. "Woe to you who are rich," he said, "for you are receiving your comfort in full. Woe to you who are well fed, for you shall be hungry."
Like the Essenes and John the Baptist, Jesus was a devout Jew. He claimed that he had come to fulfill Judaic law and the word of the prophets, and he preached in Synagogues. Like the Essenes and John the Baptist, he spoke of a kingdom of heaven that was at hand. And like the Essenes he described his generation as evil and adulterous. He admonished his listeners to refrain from divorce and said that for a man to marry a divorced woman was to make that woman commit adultery. He commanded his listeners to follow the commandments of God. And, like the old prophets, he preached that foreign ways were evil and warned his listeners not to go the way of foreigners (gentiles).
Judaic law was complex, and some of Judaism's rituals were expensive, and, being bold enough to condemn the rest of society as corrupt, Jesus was also bold enough to ignore those laws that he thought impractical. According to the Gospels (written when Christians were themselves diverging from some Judaic laws) Jesus criticized the Pharisees for their impractical attempt at exactitude. Jesus, according to the Gospels, saw absurdity in their selecting to refrain from certain works on the Sabbath and not other works. Of those who criticized him for healing on the Sabbath he asked, "Does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the stall and lead him away to water him?" (Luke13:15)
According to the Gospels, Jesus defended the common Jew's belief in resurrection- in contrast to the Sadducees, who rejected resurrection. A Sadducee pointed out to Jesus that under Judaic law widows married their late husband's brother and that with resurrection would come confusion when the husband returned from the dead. Jesus replied that after resurrection there would be no marriage because people would be like angels in heaven. (Matthew 22:30)
The Gospels describe Jesus as claiming that his mission empowered him to forgive sins, a claim the Pharisees would have seen as a blasphemous usurpation of God's divine authority and an infringement upon monotheism. The Gospels also describe Jesus as healing people by casting out demons from within them and turning five loaves of bread into enough bread to feed and satisfy five thousand - a performance that should have convinced any Pharisee or other observer that Jesus had divine powers.
According to the Gospels, when Jesus heard the news that John the Baptist had been executed he became angered. This came with the approach of the annual pilgrimage to Judaism's holy city, Jerusalem. The focus of the pilgrimage was Jerusalem's temple, the "House of the Lord." It was a pilgrimage that celebrated the Passover holiday commemorating liberation of Jews from Egyptian slavery. Jesus and his followers joined perhaps as many as a hundred thousand pilgrims who had poured into Jerusalem from nearby and from outside Judea - doubling the number of people in the city. Jesus may or may not have gone to Jerusalem with confrontation on his mind, but in Jerusalem he created a disturbance. Jesus found that at the "House of the Lord," the merchants who sold the animals and birds that were accepted as suitable for temple sacrifices - Jerusalem's temple being the only place where sacrifices were allowed. And among the merchants were money changers who made it possible for people from the different areas to acquire the necessary coins to buy these creatures. Jesus, according to the Book of Matthew (21:13), accused the merchants and money changers as having turned the temple from a "House of Prayer" into a "robber's den," and he made a whip out of cords he had gathered and driving the merchants and drove the money changers from the temple grounds.
The gathering crowds in Jerusalem for the Passover always heightened the spirit of nationalism there. On such occasions, joy was in the air and an increased tension, and those who made street corner speeches found audiences for their passionate denunciations, including denunciations of Jerusalem's priestly city fathers, the Sadducees. The rebellious outbursts upset the Sadducees, and they must have been offended by the disturbance that Jesus had created.
After his revolt at the temple, Jesus sensed that he was in danger, but rather than go into hiding he let himself be arrested, and the Gospels describe him as being arrested like a lestes, a Greek word meaning common criminal or undesirable troublemaker. His followers, however, were less brazen: they deserted Jesus, including one called Peter who denied to authorities that he knew Jesus.
Jesus was taken before a political council called the Sanhedrin, presided over by Jerusalem's High Priest, Caiaphas. The punishment for intending to foment rebellion or for committing blasphemy could be death, and executions for these offenses were routine in Judea. Each of the four Gospels describes the Sanhedrin as having accused Jesus of claiming to be the "king of the Jews," and John (4:26) describes Jesus as claiming that he was the Messiah. This would have been grounds for the charge of blasphemy. The usual method of execution for blasphemy was stoning, and the usual method of execution for treason or insurrection was crucifixion. According to the Gospels, crucifixion was chosen for Jesus, which fits with Jesus not having claimed to be a god or the Messiah. It was also a sentence that would be better than stoning for artistic depictions of martyrdom.
The Gospels describe Jesus as having been placed on a cross between two thieves who tossed insults at him. According to the Gospels, a crowd mocked Jesus while he was on the cross, and a priest joked that Jesus had claimed to save others but apparently could not save himself. Among the followers of Jesus who were present no one dared expose himself as such. And, according to Matthew 27:46, Jesus did not yet understand the reason for his death, for, while dying in the dark, Jesus asked aloud the same cry that appears in Psalm 22:1: "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?"
The Gospels describe the body of Jesus as disappearing from its tomb, and they describe Jesus as descending from heaven and appearing before a select few of his followers on a mountain in Galilee. Only a few days before he had asked why God had forsaken him. Now, according to Matthew 28:19, he told his followers to go and "teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost."
Jesus had died, his followers are reported to have held, so that they would be unburdened in the eyes of God regarding their sins. They explained his death using that which had been common among religions in ancient times: sacrifice.
When Jesus was arrested and executed, his followers scattered to their homes, but soon they gathered again in Jerusalem. As Jews they continued to worship at Jerusalem's temple, "the House of the Lord," and they began living quietly and at peace with Jerusalem's authorities. They saw themselves as a group favored by Yahweh within Judaism. According to the New Testament they called themselves "The Poor" and "The Saints." They looked forward to a second coming of Jesus since his resurrection and to his bringing with him the new order that Jews had been expecting with the Messiah.
The Saints grew slowly in number, and among the new converts were Jews from outside Judea - people referred to in Acts 6 of the New Testament as "Hellenists" perhaps because they spoke Greek. Coming from outside Judea, they were not as attuned to local attitudes as others, and they were more inclined to offend when discussing their views with other Jews.
One among those from outside Judea was a man called Stephen, whom the New Testament describes as "full of grace and power" and "performing great wonders and signs among the people." In his preaching, Stephen offended some who, according to the New Testament, "were unable to cope with the wisdom and the Spirit with which he was speaking." Stephen was reported to the authorities for having spoken "blasphemous words against Moses and against God." (Acts 6:8-11) Stephen was hauled before the Sanhedrim and convicted of blasphemy, and in keeping with that charge he was stoned to death. Others who belonged to Stephen's group - including the former disciple of Jesus, Peter - were driven from the city.
Exiling the "Hellenist" followers of Jesus from Jerusalem helped spread Christianity. Peter and his group traveled from one Jewish community to another in cities along the coast of the eastern Mediterranean Sea. They proselytized with greater zeal than did the Jews in Jerusalem. They experienced hostility from their fellow Jews, and occasionally violence, but in the Jewish communities of these cities the number of believers in Jesus as the Messiah grew.
One of these cities was Damascus, a cosmopolitan city where a few non-Jews in search of spiritual sustenance heard the story of Jesus and were allowed to join the followers of Jesus without first converting to Judaism. According to Acts 11:26, however, it was in Antioch that the followers of Jesus were first called "Christians," a term spoken with contempt and not to be used by the followers of Jesus until the next century. Meanwhile, among those followers of Jesus who spoke Greek, Jesus was becoming known as "Christ," which is Greek for King - kingship remaining the accepted form of supreme leadership.
Judaic authorities in Jerusalem were concerned about the obedience of Jews everywhere, and they saw the followers of Jesus outside of Palestine as a threat to Judaism. They sent agents to check on the movement. One of their agents was a man named Saul, the son of a Jewish Roman citizen from the city of Tarsus, on the coast of Cilicia, a man to be known by his Christian name: Paul. Paul had studied Judaic law in Jerusalem. He had become a Pharisee and devoted to the pharisaic belief in a Jewish nation being made holy by its people's strict observance of God's laws. The Pharisees sent Paul from Jerusalem to Damascus to observe the followers of Jesus there. According to the New Testament (Acts 9:3-4), on his way he was blinded by light and had a vision of Jesus asking him "Why persecutest thou me?" Paul arrived in Damascus still blinded. A follower of Jesus found him, converted him, and Paul's eyesight returned. [note] Then Paul spent thirteen years studying the teachings of Jesus, and some of these years he spent in a desert retreat with other followers.
In the year 47, Paul joined others in spreading their good news about Jesus Christ - that Armageddon and the second coming of Christ was approaching. By now more than two-thirds of the roughly seven million Jews in the Roman empire lived outside of Judea, and it was to Jews in cities outside of Judea that Paul and his fellow evangelists went, where Jews spoke their language - Greek - and could understand them. In the coming thirteen years they traveled to Cyprus, Palestine and Syria; they traveled to the great cities of western Asia Minor, along the coast of the Aegean Sea, through Macedonia, south to Corinth in Peloponnesia, to the city of Syracuse on the island of Sicily; and they traveled to a community of Greek speaking Jews in Rome - where Jews had settled as early as 150 BCE. The peace and security for travel that had been created by Augustus Caesar added to the ability of Paul and the other Hellenized evangelists to spread their word about Jesus. And as a Roman citizen, Paul was protected by Roman law from attacks by outraged Jews.
Among the Jews in various cities around the Mediterranean were gentiles who were attracted to the unique Jewish meeting places - the synagogue. Those spreading the news about Jesus were gathering followers not only among their fellow Jews but also among these gentiles, and this presented a problem for the followers of Jesus. The gentiles were uncircumcised, and they did not follow Judaism's dietary laws. The question arose among the followers of Jesus whether they ought to share meals with the gentiles and whether uncircumcised men could become followers of Jesus.
In letters Paul wrote (which would appear as a part of the New Testament) there were no references to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Paul and his fellow evangelists did not have the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John to appeal to for authority. And, as with any group of people, the early followers of Jesus had their disagreements - as when followers of Jesus from Jerusalem visited brethren in Antioch. Those from Jerusalem insisted that unless a follower of Jesus were circumcised according to the custom of Moses - as practiced in Jerusalem - he could not be "saved." In the year 50, concerned followers of Jesus met again, this time in Jerusalem, to promote a greater unity, and at this meeting they addressed the question whether non-Jews should be required to be circumcised when accepting Jesus as their savior. Paul was among those invited to the meeting, and there he joined the pragmatists who wanted it easier to admit gentiles to their number. Paul argued that the core of their beliefs was not Judaic law but the sacrifice of Jesus and their faith in Jesus. The conference reached a compromise: circumcision would not be required for membership in their communities, but all those who wished to be recognized as followers would be required to follow other Judaic laws.
Predictably, there were those among the followers of Jesus who rejected compromise, complaining that compromise was not an appropriate basis for religious belief. For years this faction would badger their fellow Christians, trying to make them see their error in abandoning absolute obedience to all Judaic law. And like others who resist compromise or change, they would fade away, while Christianity grew. Compromising had strengthened their movement. Paul and like-minded followers had taken the first step in preventing Christianity from remaining a Jewish sect, which might have doomed it to extinction.
Those who had sided with compromise continued to proclaim that Jesus was the Messiah, that Jesus was a caring martyr, that Jesus would return either in their lifetime or soon after, and that with his next appearance would come everlasting life, relieving them of their hardships and sufferings. It was a joyful message of love, hope and equality for the poor, and it had more appeal than asking one to worship the distant gods of Greek or Roman mythology or the bull god of Mithraism.
It was mainly among the urban poor that the evangelists found their recruits. The movement's evangelists told the poor that they did not need what they did not have: riches and education. "Do not love the world nor the thing of the world" wrote the apostle John. Great possessions, he said were obstacles to entry into heaven. Paul, in a letter to the evangelist Timothy, supported this view, claiming that "...love of money is a root of all sorts of evil." (Timothy 6:10) Paul proclaimed that the wisdom of the world was made foolish by God. He told his listeners merely to feel, to have faith, to surrender themselves to Jesus.
In keeping with what was believed to be the teachings of Jesus, converts were asked to surrender their property to a common fund and to live communally. The congregations of various communities took care of followers arriving from other areas, and they were instructed to look after the widows, orphans, sick and disabled among them. "We who are strong" said Paul, "ought to bear the weaknesses of those without strength and not just please ourselves."
Paul's message was compatible with Stoic concepts of asceticism, harmony, the brotherhood of man and humility, ideas he had grown up with in his hometown of Tarsus. In keeping with Stoic values, Paul proclaimed that the followers of Jesus should be honest, free of double dealing and falsehood. In keeping with Judaic law, Paul and his colleagues proclaimed that sex outside of marriage was forbidden. There had been criticism and rumors of wanton behavior of the Christians, and Paul said "By doing right you silence the ignorance of foolish men." He said, "Let us behave properly as in the day, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual promiscuity and sensuality, not in strife and jealousy." (Romans 13:13) Paul advised his fellow Christians to obey state law, and, despite its bloody origins and oppressions, he spoke of the Roman Empire as having been the work of God. "Let every person," he wrote, "be in subjection to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God." (Romans 13:1) In this he was supported by the apostle Peter, who wrote: "Submit yourself to every institution."
Paul and his fellow Christians believed that with the approach of the Second Coming of Jesus and a new world there was no need to change the institutions of the present world, and their accommodation with these institutions included an accommodation with slavery. The Christians saw recourse for slaves in Jesus and impending Armageddon. They saw slaves as equal to freemen. And Paul said, "Slaves, in all things obey those who are your masters on earth, with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord." According to Paul, a slave who accepted Jesus became "the Lord's freedman" and a free man who accepted Christ became "the Lord's slave."
Just as slaves were to obey their masters, women were to obey their husbands. "Wives," said Paul, "be subject to your husbands as is fitting in the Lord." (Ephesians 5:22) To the apostle Timothy, Paul wrote: "I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet." (Timothy 2:12)
During Paul's time, some Christians argued that Jesus advocated celibacy. Why else, they asked, would Jesus have praised women whose wombs never bore or praised men who made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven? Paul and his colleagues opposed self-castration. But, believing that Jesus was coming soon, Paul did advocate celibacy for some Christians. To his brothers in Corinth he wrote, "the time has been shortened, so that from now on those who have wives live as they had none," (1 Corinthians 7:29). He also promoted sex in marriage - in order to avoid the sexual frustration that he thought might lead to Satan's temptations. He warned married Christians to stop depriving each other: "The wife," he wrote, "does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; and likewise, the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does." (1 Corinthians 7:4)
The early followers of Jesus saw Satan not as not as an instrument of Yahweh as had early worshipers of Yahweh. Their view of Satan was that of the Jews who saw Satan as an independent and evil force. According to the apostle John, Jesus described the devil as a murderer, a liar (John 8:44) and as the "ruler of the world." (John 14:30) Paul wrote of the "schemes of the devil" and of "the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places." (Ephesians 6:11-12) He described the devil as "the God of this world." He blamed the devil for the failure of people to accept Jesus. The devil, he stated, "blinded the minds of the unbelieving, that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ..." (2 Corinthians 4:4) Peter joined Paul and warned people to "Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls about like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour." (1 Peter 3:8)
Roman authorities viewed the spread of Judaism as a threat to Rome. Jewish businessmen aroused the resentment of their non-Jewish competitors. Jews were scorned for refusing to burn incense before the emperor's statue - worse than Americans refusing to salute their flag. Jews, including the followers of Jesus, aroused suspicion by their inclination to keep to themselves. They appeared to others as haters of the world outside their own circle. They were disliked for their quarrelsome denunciations of gods other than Yahweh, and they were often the targets of mockery and violence. The emperor Claudius (who ruled in the years 41 to 54) moved to curtail the spread of Judaism in Rome. He denied Jews there the right to meet outside of their synagogues. And in 49, following a disturbance involving Jews, Claudius (as described in Acts 18:2 in the New Testament) expelled Jews from the city. But elsewhere in the empire, Claudius defended the rights and privileges that had been conferred upon Jews and other minorities, except for Druids, who were viewed as subversives, performers of human sacrifices and a threat to the empire's well-being. Druidism had also been spreading, despite its having been declared a crime, and it was being punished by death.
Persecution of followers of Jesus came with a Great Fire in Rome in the year 64, a fire that raged for many days, that almost destroyed the entire city and was horrendous enough to seem like Armageddon had arrived. Historians do not know how the fire started. The Roman historian Tacitus, years later when Nero was dead did not mind accusing Nero for the fire, although he had no hard evidence that Nero had.
The fire may have been an accident - the overturning of one of the barbecue-like stoves (a brazier) that people used inside their homes, or by an oil lamp. But one historian, Gerhard Baudy, by the year 2002 had put together observations with which to speculate that a few Christians may have started the fire. There were in Nero's time, Christians who equated Rome with evil and would have believed they were doing the Lord's work by setting fire to Rome. Baudy knows of vengeful texts circulated in the poor districts of Rome predicting Rome being burned to the ground by a raging inferno. A constant theme among these Christians in Rome, according to Baudy, was that such a fire was prophesied. And Baudy speaks of some of the Christians willing to help the prophesy along by doing the Lord's work. Rome's great fire started on a prophetic day for these Christians: July 19, 64 CE, the day that the dog star, Sirius rises. If the Christians did not start the fire, Baudy speculates, they may have lit additional fires to add to the conflagration to help the prophesies.
With Christians seeing the Great Fire as the beginning of the fulfillment of their expectations that the world would be destroyed by fire, reports of their joyous dancing, looks of glee and shouts of hallelujahs would have attracted suspicion. And Christians were an easy target because they were still thought of as Jews. Suspicions of arson arose, not because evidence of arson had been found but because people were inclined to believe that disaster was the work of some kind of malevolence. An official investigation concluded that the fire had been started by Jewish fanatics. This put the Jewish community in Rome in danger, and Jewish leaders in Rome may have tried to avert this danger by describing to authorities the difference between themselves and the Christians. The leaders of Jews in Rome could reach the emperor, Nero, through his new wife, Sabina Poppaea. Nero learned of the separate identity of those Jews who were followers of Jesus, and he put blame on them for the fire.
Nero had some Christians executed in the usual way of executing criminals: putting them in the arena against gladiators or wild animals, or as was commonly done to those convicted of arson, having them burned to death. It was around this time that the apostles Peter and Paul vanished. According to the historian Tacitus, who wrote decades later, many Romans remained suspicious of Nero. Many believed the rumor that Nero had started the fire to make space for his new great mansion, and they pitied the Christians, believing that instead of being sacrificed for the welfare of the state, the Christians were being sacrificed as Nero's scapegoats.
Rioting and killing broke out between Jews and non-Jews in the port city of Caesarea, about eighty-five kilometers north of Jerusalem. Fighting between Jews and non-Jews spread from Caesarea to cities outside of Palestine, including Alexandria, where the Jewish section was left in ruins. And, in the year 66, rebellion spread to Jerusalem, which had been receiving impoverished migrants from elsewhere in Judea, where peasants had been experiencing grinding poverty and hunger. This was the rebellion that Judea's aristocracy had feared, with good reason: the rebels burned their homes and murdered those aristocrats they could get their hands on. And with whatever weapons the Judeans could find they attacked the Romans. Roman troops in Judea were hopelessly outnumbered, and the Jewish rebels killed many of them.
The view of Jewish aristocrats was expressed by one of their number, a man named Josephus, who would describe the war. Josephus had been around and knew of Rome's might compared to that of the rebels. He would describe the revolt as sedition and an insanity by desperate men. Indeed, Rome crushed the rebellion. It sent to Judea an army that was allowed to plunder, massacre and burn. A Roman blockade of Jerusalem created famine among its inhabitants. Calls for help from Yahweh went unanswered. Roman soldiers poured into the city, and, according to Josephus, they raped and massacred thousands. They left the inner city destroyed and Yahweh's temple burned ruins.
The Roman army swept through the rest of Judea. Remnants of the rebel force retreated, and it took months for the Roman army to eradicate pockets of resistance. The last of these was on a mountaintop plateau in the desert above the Dead Sea - a place called Masada. According to Josephus, as the Romans closed in on the plateau all but two women and five children chose suicide.
The Romans executed some Jews they had taken prisoner. Some they sent to Rome for punishment in the arena, and some they sold into slavery, condemned to work in mines. Rome stationed an army permanently in Jerusalem and forbade the Jews to rebuild their temple. Rome abolished Jerusalem's High Priesthood and Council of Elders. It forbade the Jews from proselytizing anywhere in the empire. According to Rome there was no longer a Jewish nation. Several million Jews remained in and around Judea, but Rome allowed non-Jews to settle in place of the Jews who had died or had been taken away as slaves. Followers of Jesus saw the defeat of the Jews in the tradition of Yahwism: as God's punishment. Orthodox Jews responded to this by putting into their synagogue liturgy an anathema against the followers of Jesus.
In 115, the emperor Trajan moved against the Parthians and overran Mesopotamia. Jews in Mesopotamia preferred Parthian rule to Roman rule, and military plans by the Parthian Empire against Rome included sending discontented Jews from Mesopotamia to encourage revolt by Jewish communities within the Roman Empire. And it worked: numerous Jewish communities rose against the Romans. In Cyprus and Cyrene, Jews massacred gentiles in great numbers. Trajan ended his war against Parthia and brought the great weight of Rome's military might down upon the rebellions. Rome let local majorities have their revenge, which resulted in massacres against the Jews. In Cyprus every known Jew was killed and a law was passed forbidding any Jew, even from a shipwreck, to set foot on the island.
Fourteen years later, Trajan's successor, Hadrian, visited Jerusalem and ordered it rebuilt as a Roman city, to be called Aelia Capitolina. And while he was in the East, Jews planned yet another rebellion. The revolt's leader was Simeon ben Kosiba, known by his admirers as Bar Kokhba (Son of a Star). The foremost rabbi and Judaic scholar, Akiva, hailed Simeon as another King David the Conqueror, sent by God - in other words, that Simeon ben Kosiba is the Messiah.
After Hadrian had returned to Rome, the revolt began. The Roman legion on the outskirts of Jerusalem was caught by surprise and was driven from its encampments. All fighting was directed against the Romans, and Simeon ben Kosiba was able to establish a government in Jerusalem. He laid plans for rebuilding Solomon's temple, and a new coin was issued describing Simeon ben Kosiba as the president of a redeemed Israel. But Rome could not maintain its empire if it did not demonstrate to others that it could hold on to a province such as Judea, and Hadrian sent new armies into Palestine. Lacking allies, or not being part of a greater war against Rome, this latest rebellion proved as hopeless as those before it. In two years the rebellion was crushed. Perhaps as many as 580,000 Jews died fighting, including Simeon ben Kosiba. It was the last of the Jewish rebellions. The Romans again glutted the slave markets with Jewish captives. Jerusalem was rebuilt as Aelia Capitolina and colonized with non-Jews, and the penalty for Jews entering the city was death. Judea was removed from the map. The prohibition against circumcision was renewed and celebration of the Jewish festivals, observance of the Sabbath, study of the Torah and possession of a scroll of Jewish Law became punishable by death. Judaism was outlawed in the hope that it would cause Jewish survivors elsewhere in the empire to fall away from what Hadrian saw as a troublesome creed.
Soon these laws would be rescinded, including prohibition of circumcision for Jews. Missionary activity to spread Judaism did not revive, but intellectual work did. Babylon, rather than Jerusalem, became the center for the preservation of Jewish tradition. The Talmud produced there was more detailed than previous versions, and regarded as authoritative, and in the coming centuries it became the main source of instruction for Jews outside of Palestine.
During the first century, the followers of Jesus saw themselves as righteous members of God's chosen people of Israel. The gentile who authored the Gospels of Luke was among these followers, declaring that the followers of Jesus had inherited Israel's legacy as God's chosen people. But it was mostly among gentiles that Christianity was winning its converts, and by the end of the first century most followers of Jesus were gentiles. They were struggling with their identity as the people of Israel while abandoning not only circumcision but also the kosher diet and laws about the Sabbath. With the revolt of the Jews led by Simeon ben Kosiba, the break by Christians with Judaism became more pronounced. The followers of Jesus, seen as Jews, were asked by the followers of ben Kosiba to join the revolt. The followers of Jesus could not accept the claim that Kosiba was the Messiah. Unlike Rabbi Akiva and others, they did not believe that Kosiba's uprising was God's kingdom, and they refused to join the revolt. Bitter verbal attacks between the two groups ensued, and the Christians felt more estranged from their Jewish origins.
To Roman authorities, Christianity remained an outlaw faith, and being a Christian remained an offense punishable by death, but it was a law largely ignored. Ordinary Romans continued to view the Christians with suspicion. The Christians were conducting their meetings at night, which convinced their non-Christian neighbors that they had something to hide. Rumors had spread that Christian rituals included the eating of flesh and the drinking of blood - a distortion of the ritual of eating bread and drinking wine as representations of Jesus' body and blood. Christians were seen as odd too for denying themselves enjoyment, for refusing to wear perfume or adorn their heads with flowers. And Romans asked what would happen if everyone refused their civic duty to appeal to Rome's gods. The emperor Trajan (99-117) received reports about Christians from local authorities, and he held that the Christians could believe whatever god or gods they wished so long as they obeyed the law by showing reverence for Roman deities, including the deified Caesars. Trajan was aware that Christianity was growing, but he was concerned about harassment and false accusations. He wrote that anonymous accusations created "the worst sort of precedent," and he decreed that local authorities were to make no search for Christians and that Christians were to be arrested only if complaints or disturbances brought them to the attention of authorities. He declared that the accused were to receive a proper trial in which they were able to face their accusers. He declared that those charged with being Christian should have the opportunity to renounce their belief or to prove they were not Christian by their offering prayers to Rome's gods. Then, if found guilty of being Christians, they were to be executed.
Christians had been organizing themselves in the manner of synagogues: a leader presiding over a group of elders. They called their local leaders bishops, a Greek word meaning overseer. They called their elders presbyters, and assistants to their bishops they called deacons. Bishops of different Christian congregations tried to keep in contact with each other, and they tried to coordinate their beliefs. With this contact, bishops from the greater cities - like Antioch, Alexandria and Rome - had greater prestige than did those from lesser cities.
The bishop of Rome benefited from the prestige of heading the Christian community in the empire's capital. The Christian community in Rome attracted Christians from around the empire. Having more wealth than other congregations in the west, it was able to give assistance to other congregations in that part of the empire. The first Bishop of Rome, Clement, who lived to around the year 97, supported his authority by linking God with Rome. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Clement described a hierarchy of authority that began with God, then went to Jesus, then to the apostles, and finally to bishops such as he, and he added that God had granted Rome "the authority of empire," glory, and honor.
The authority of the bishops was challenged by various Christians, adding to the diversity among the Christians. Among those who struggled with this diversity was the bishop of the Antioch's congregation of Christians, Ignatius, who wrote letters championing the belief in the virgin birth of Jesus and the Trinity: God as the father, God as Jesus, and God as the spirit in all things. Ignatius is the first Christian known to have referred to Christian congregations as catholic, a Greek word meaning universal. In a letter to the Christians of Smyrna he supported the authority of the bishops, declaring that baptisms were not permitted without the bishop and that "he who does anything without the knowledge of the bishop is serving the devil."
Among the diversity within Christianity was a view of the world known as Gnosticism, a belief that reality was divided between spirit and matter, with spirit being good and matter being evil - similar to Zoroastrianism. Seeing matter as evil led these Christians to reject the Judaic story of the creation of the universe: that God had created matter and then called it good. Gnostic Christians rejected Jewish scripture in general, and, seeing matter as evil, they saw Jesus as having lived but not as a physical being. They believed that one acquired salvation by rejecting everything material, including one's own body. Although food is matter, some Gnostics divided foods between those that were good and those that were evil, and they attempted to avoid that was evil. The Gnostics did not know that light was a part of the material world. Common knowledge was not that advanced. They saw light as good, and darkness they saw as evil.
Like many others, Gnostic Christians believed that they acquired knowledge through revelations from God - not from sense experience coupled with mental processes. They believed that God distributed revelations without considering rank among the Christians and that bishops might be among those who had been denied revelation. Some bishops saw this view as a threat to their authority, and to address the issue they met in the year 172 and together denounced Gnosticism.
The fight against Gnosticism was led by the Bishop of Leon, Irenaeus, who became bishop of Rome after Bishop Clement was executed by Roman authorities. Irenaeus tried to consolidate Christianity under the authority of the bishops. He argued that God had created everything, including soul and the material body. He added that with this common origin, soul and body could not be separated into good and evil. He argued that evil was not a substance but a result of human choice and that salvation was not a triumph over matter but the fulfillment of God's creation. Irenaeus argued for belief that conformed to the teachings of the Apostles. He claimed that knowledge was "a gift of love" from God, and he denounced Gnosticism as having come from "evil self-will," "vainglory" and "blindness."
Writings in these days were copied by hand, imperfectly. No two ancient manuscripts have been found to be exactly the same. (Exact similarity came with versions created by the printing press.) There were a variety of writings, with various anecdotes and sayings and various descriptions of the life of Jesus and his teachings. These included calls to seek direct access to God without the benefit of priests and opposition to any form of authority among the Christians. Among these writings were those of Mary Magdalene. The Gospel of Mary Magdalene describes her as one of Jesus's most beloved disciples. And it describes her defending herself against the doubts of Peter, with Mary asking Peter if he really thought that she would be "lying about the Lord." Among the gospels was also that of Thomas, who described Jesus as advocating finding the Kingdom of God within oneself. And there was the gospel of Philip with the same message. Here were calls to self-discovery and becoming an authority unto oneself in conflict with the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, which describe Christians receiving salvation by accepting baptism and the forgiveness of their sins.
Irenaeus was certain about which gospels were authentic. He described the other gospels as blasphemous and madness and proclaimed that there were only four gospels just as there were only four winds, four corners of the universe and four pillars holding up the sky. It was during the last twenty or so years of Irenaeus's life – around the years 180 to 200 – that the collection of books called the New Testament were formed. Other gospels were destroyed. Some were buried, to be discovered on papyrus fragments preserved by the dry climate in southern Egypt.
In attempting to define Christianity, Bishop Irenaeus found heresy in the beliefs of a Christian named Marcion. Marcion was from West Asia and had become affiliated with the Christian congregation in Rome. He found conflict between putting one's faith in Jesus as described by the apostle Paul and following laws described in Judaism's sacred writings. He described the Jews as having believed in a barbarian god and Judaism as the work of the devil. Marcion believed that God had sent Jesus to humanity. Like the Gnostics he believed that Jesus had always been spirit and never a material human. He believed that Jesus had sprung from the mind of God, and he reasoned that Jesus's death had been symbolic, that Jesus had not suffered and had not died because a spirit could not suffer or die.
Marcion believed in the literal truth of what was spoken by Jesus and the apostles. He drew from Luke 20:35, which states that "those who are considered worthy to attain to that age and the resurrection of the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage." And so Marcion and his followers endeavored to practice complete sexual abstinence. Marcion inspired a following across numerous Christian communities. Then the bishops excommunicated him, and his movement survived into the fifth century, despite its devotion to sexual abstinence.
Another group of Christians was led by Montanus, who encouraged celibacy and a literal interpretation of scripture. The Montanists believed, as had Paul, that procreation was unnecessary because Armageddon, the Second Coming of Jesus and the New Jerusalem were near. The Montanists found no support in the New Testament scripture for a systematic order and hierarchy in the worship of Jesus Christ, and they saw the rise of authority and hierarchy within the Church as drift into worldliness. Not believing in authority within the Church, they believed that any one of them could acquire a special knowledge or inspiration from God.
The bishops chose to keep the Montanists within the Church, but they countered Montanist arguments, claiming that revealed truth no longer came to Christians who did not hold positions of authority within the Church. The bishops announced that the age of the prophets had ended.
A man named Tertullian, born in Carthage and trained in rhetoric and law, lost his respect for education and fled from a world of rival ideas into Christian certainty, converting to Christianity around the year 190. Tertullian agreed with Paul that the wisdom of "this world" was foolish. He went further and described the worldly wisdom of the educated as gloss and the creation of demons. That this was so, he argued, was obvious in the fact that as a group the so-called educated held a multitude of conflicting ideas.
Tertullian was well read in philosophy, but he had come to see philosophy as the enemy of religion. In his comment that Athens had nothing to do with Jerusalem he meant that philosophy and religion should remain disconnected. In describing an agreement he had with the Stoics, he stated that his belief in reason was the Reason of God, a reason that manifested itself in an interconnectedness of things. Tertullian was an acrobatic thinker who did not accept the foundation of Aristotle's logic: the rejection of contradiction. Like the early Taoists he enjoyed what he saw as paradoxes, believing for example that the "incarnation of Jesus Christ" was certain because it was impossible.
Tertullian opposed any association between the Christian Church and the Roman state, because Rome was pagan and therefore demonic. Christians, he stated, should not serve in the army or any other state institution. But he approved of Christians praying for emperors and the well being of their empire. "We pray," he wrote, "that they may have a long life and quiet government, that their palaces be peaceful, their armies strong, their advisors loyal, and their subjects true." (Apologeticus, c. 30:4.)
Tertullian was the first Christian of note to write in Latin, and he gave the Church its Latin vocabulary in theology, and some say its first theology. He was a supporter of the Trinity, which he described as one divine substance in three distinct persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
Having fled from the diversity of belief in the pagan world, Tertullian found himself amid a diversity of belief within Christianity. He complained that the Christian Church was seeking peaceful coexistence with the pagan world around it at the expense of Christian values. Like the Montanist Christians, he believed that the Church was becoming too much of a political organization, and like the Montanists he thought that ordinary, or lay, Christians did not need a priest to intercede between them and God. He wrote that wherever three Christians gathered there was a church. Each man, he wrote, lives by his own faith.
Tertullian joined the Montanists, and he described the orthodoxy of the bishops as morally lax. He wrote works entitled On Women's Apparel, on the Veiling of Virgins, On Monogamy, On the Exhortation to Chastity, and On Fasting. And the bishops declared him a heretic.
The earliest leaders of Christianity had asked the followers of Jesus to avoid reading pagan books, but the Christians, like Hebrews and others before them, became influenced by the culture around them. They were influenced by discussing their views with non-Christians, by creating a reasoned defense of their views and a reasoned refutation of opposing ideas. An increase in devotion to reason among Christians drew them closer to Hellenism, and conversions brought into Christianity some, like Tertullian, who were already Hellenized.
Among the Hellenized who converted to Christianity was a Greek student and scholar of philosophy named Clement, who lived in Alexandria. He was one of a few men of wealth and property who joined the Christians. Unlike Tertullian, Clement maintained a respect for scholarship. He was an admirer of Plato's philosophy, and he was the first to attempt to synthesize Christianity and Plato. He accepted Plato's description of God as infinite and eternal, transcendent and independent. He saw the universe as God's perfection, and he saw Jesus as God's ultimate revelation and as humanity's guide and instructor.
Clement became an intellectual leader of Alexandria's Christian community and the head of a school for Christians. He advised his fellow Christians to seek other than a literal interpretation of scripture, suggesting that they interpret some scripture symbolically and as messages for the heart. To Clement, the message in Matthew about a camel passing through the eye of a needle more easily than the rich entering the kingdom of heaven was obviously a message of symbolism, and he interpreted it not as a command to give up one's possessions but as inspiration to banish from one's mind excess desires for property or worries about property that interfered with spirituality. Clement claimed that poverty was not in itself worthwhile. Having property, he said, frees one from the effort and distress of acquisition and enables one to practice charity. We must not renounce the wealth which "benefits our neighbors... as well as ourselves," he wrote. Wealth, he added, "is furnished by God for the welfare of man."
Clement also spoke against the belief that sex was sinful and that Adam and Eve had sinned by engaging in it. He described sex as necessary in procreation and a part of god's creation. But he claimed that it had to be regulated by obedience to what was good and decent.
Clement's views remained acceptable to the bishops, fitting as it did with the successful growth of the Church, with the Church's hierarchical order and with its belief in charity and acceptance of donations. Clement would come to be considered one of the Church's early "fathers" and one of the leaders in forming early Christian theology.
One of the teachers at the Christian school headed by Clement was a young Greek named Origen. In the year 203, Origen succeeded Clement as the leader of the school in Alexandria. Then Origen moved to the provincial capital of Palestine, Caesarea, where he translated and wrote until his death in 255.
Origen's writings filled around six thousand rolls, which kept busy a staff of seven slave secretaries, provided by a wealthy Christian named Ambrose. Origen wrote a huge work on St. John in order to refute a Gnostic named Heracleon. In a related debate within the Church he rebuked those Christians who saw humanity as helpless against Satan. Origen argued that those touched by the devil had the power to choose repentance, that even the devil, who had chosen to become a fallen angel, could apply his will and repent. In Origen's greatest work, called Hexapla (which took him fifteen years to complete) he attempted to interpret the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint.
Origen joined other Christian thinkers in describing the Romans as not responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. Instead, he described the crucifixion as the work of God for the benefit of Christianity. Origen was another of those who saw God in the creation of the Roman Empire. He wrote that the birth of Jesus was timed in accord with the unity that Rome had brought to the world, that otherwise a divided world, "a plurality of kingdoms," would have been an obstacle to the spread of Christianity.
Origen wrote eight books in response to the published criticisms of Christianity by a scholar named Celsus. Believing in both faith and reason, he attempted to improve upon previous efforts to combine Greek philosophy and the wisdom of the Old Testament. He followed Clement in supporting Plato's view of God, and he accepted Plato's belief that the stars were rational beings with God-given souls.
Origen also followed Clement in accepting Christians choosing which scriptures to take literally and which to take allegorically. He attempted a plausible explanation of the Old Testament's story of The Creation, and he tried to explain the contradiction between God having ordained everything in advance and his answering the wishes that humans made through prayers. Trying to make faith, belief in miracles, and reason compatible he claimed that with the tools of reason that were a part of Greek philosophy one could arrive at truths found in scripture, that reason could lead one to truths demonstrated by miracles and the coming to pass of prophesies. As to why God had not made it all easier to understand, Origen claimed that the apostles had left some matters untouched and that God had created obstacles so that people would use their minds in attaining faith.
During his life, Origen was often attacked by fellow Christians who believed he was altering the gospels with pagan philosophy, but he acquired a reputation among Christians as a wise and learned man and was in great demand as a preacher. And after he died, Christians freely plagiarized much of his writings.
Recommended Books
Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine, by Peter Garnsey, 1997
From Alexander to Constantine: passages and documents illustrating the history of social and political ideas, 336 BC - AD 337, compiled by Sir Ernest Barker
The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered, by Robert Eisenman and Michael Wise
Pagan Rome and the Early Christians, by Stephen Benko, 1984
Rebecca's Children, by Alan F. Segal, 1986
Religions of the Ancient Near East by Helmer Ringgren, 1973
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