Lynn Hunt, Thomas R. Martin, Barbara H. Rosenwein, R. Po-chia Hsia
Bedford/St. Martin's, Oct 3, 2002 - 609 pages
The Emergence of Christianity
Christianity began as a splinter group within Judaism in Judaea, where, as elsewhere under Roman rule, Jews were allowed to practice their ancestral religion. The new faith did not soon attract many converts; three centuries after the death of Jesus, Christians remained a small minority. Christianity grew, if only gradually, because it had an appeal based in the charismatic career of Jesus, its message of salvation, its believers' sense of mission, and the strong bonds of community it inspired. Ultimately, the emergence of Christianity proved the most significant and enduring development during the Roman Empire.
Jesus of Nazareth and the Spread of His Teachings
The new religion sprang form the life and teachings of Jesus (c. 4 B.C.-A.D. 30; see “The B.C./A.D. System for Dates” at the beginning of this book for an explanation of the apparent anomaly of the date of Jesus' birth “before Christ”). Its context, however, belonged to Jewish history. By the time of Jesus' boyhood, some Jews in Judaea were agitating for independence from Roman rule, making provincial authorities anxious about rebellion. Jesus' career, therefore, developed in an unsettled environment. His execution reflected Roman readiness to eliminate perceived threats to peace and social order. In the two decades after his crucifixion, his devoted followers, particularly Paul of Tarsus, developed a new religion—Christianity--stretching beyond the Jewish community of Palestine.
Christianity offered an answer to a difficult question about divine justice that the Jews' long history of defeat and exile raised: how could a just God allow the wicked to prosper and the righteous to suffer? The question had become pressing some two centuries before Jesus' birth, when the persecution by the Seleucid king Antiochus IV (r. 175-164 B.C.) had provoked the Jews into a bloody revolt. This protracted struggle gave birth to a complex of ideas called apocalypticism (from the Greek fro “revealing what is hidden”). According to this worldview, evil powers, divine and human, controlled the present world. Their regime would soon end, however, when God and his agents revealed their plan to conquer the forces of evil by sending an “anointed one” (Hebrew, Mashia or Messiah; Greek, Christ) to win the great battle. A final judgment would follow, to bestow eternal punishment on the wicked and eternal reward on the righteous. Apocalypticism proved compelling, especially among many Jews living in Judaea under Roman rule. Eventually, it inspired not only Jews but Christians and Muslims.
Apocalyptic doctrines gained special appeal around the time of Jesus' birth because most Judaean Jews were angry about Rome's control but disagreed about what form Judaism should take in such troubled times. Some favored accommodation with their overlords, while others preached rejection of the non-Jewish world and its spiritual corruption. Their local ruler, installed by the Romans, was Herod the Great (r. 37-4 B.C.). His flamboyantly Greek style of life flouted Jewish law, making him unpopular with his subjects despite his magnificent rebuilding of the holiest Jewish shrine, the great temple in Jerusalem. When a decade of unrest followed his death, Augustus responded to local petitions for help by installing a provincial government to deal with squabbling dynasts and competing religious factions. Jesus' homeland thus turned into a powder keg during his lifetime.
Born in Nazereth, Jesus began his career as a teacher and healer in his native Galilee, the northern region of Palestine, during the reign of Tiberius. The books that would later become the Gospels, or the first four books of the Christian New Testament, offer the earliest accounts of his life and teachings, yet they were composed between about 70 and 90, decades after Jesus' death. Jesus himself wrote nothing down, and others' accounts of his words and deeds are varied and controversial. He taught largely not by direct instruction but by telling parables, stories with a moral or religious message, that challenged his followers to ponder what he meant.
All of the Gospels begin the narrative of his public ministry with his baptism by John the Baptist, who preached a message of repentance before the approaching final judgment. John was executed by the Jewish ruler Herod Antipas, a son of Herod the Great whom the Romans supported; Herod feared that John's apocalyptic preaching might instigate riots. After John's death, Jesus continued his mission by traveling around Judaea's countryside proclaiming the imminence of Gods' kingdom and the need to prepare spiritually for its coming. Many saw Jesus as the Messiah, but his complex apocalypticism did not preach immediate revolt against the Romans. Instead, he taught that God's true kingdom was to be sought not on earth but in heaven. He stressed that this kingdom was open to believers regardless of their social status or apparent sinfulness. His emphasis on God's love for humanity and people's overriding responsibility to love one another reflected Jewish religious teachings, as in the first-century scholar Hillel's interpretation of the Hebrew Bible
An educated Jew who probably new Greek as well as Aramaic, the local language, Jesus realized that he had to reach the urban crowds to make an impact. Therefore, leaving the Galilean villages where he had started, he took his message to the Jewish population of Jerusalem, the region's main city. His miraculous healings and exorcisms and his powerful preaching created a sensation. His popularity attracted the attention of the Jewish authorities, who automatically assumed he aspired to political power. Fearing he might ignite a Jewish revolt, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate (r. 26-36) ordered his crucifixion, the usual punishment for rebellion, in Jerusalem in 30.
After Jesus' death, his followers reported that they had seen him in person. They proclaimed that God had miraculously raised him from the dead, and they set about convincing other Jews that he was the promised savior and would soon return to judge the world and impose God's kingdom. His closest disciples, twelve Apostles (Greek for “messengers”), still considered themselves faithful Jews and continued to follow the commandments of Jewish law.
A radical change took place with the conversion of Paul of Tarsus (c. 10-65), a pious Jew of the Diaspora and a Roman citizen who had violently opposed those who accepted Jesus as the Messiah. Around three years after Jesus' death, a spiritual vision on the road to Damascus in Syria, which Paul interpreted as a divine revelation, inspired him to become a follower of Jesus as the Messiah or Christ—a Christian, as members of the movement came to be known. Paul taught that accepting Jesus as divine and his crucifixion as the ultimate sacrifice for the sins of humanity was the only way of becoming righteous in the eyes of God In this way alone, Paul said, could one expect to attain salvation in the world to come.
Seeking to win converts outside Judaea, in about 46 Paul began to travel to preach to Jews of the Diaspora and to Gentiles (non-Jews) who had adopted some Jewish practices in Syria, Asia Minor, and Greece (see Map 5.3). Although he stressed the necessity of ethical behavior along traditional Jewish lines, especially the rejection of sexual immorality and polytheism, he also taught that converts need not keep all the provisions of Jewish law. To make conversion easier, Paul did not require the males who entered the movement to undergo the Jewish initiation rite of circumcision. This tenet and his teachings that his congregations did not have to observe Jewish dietary restrictions or festivals led to tensions with Jewish authorities in Jerusalem as well as with the followers of Jesus living there, who still believed that Christians had to follow Jewish law. Roman authorities then arrested Paul as a criminal troublemakers; he was executed in about 65.
Paul's mission was only one part of the turmoil afflicting the Jewish community in this period; hatred of Roman rule in Palestine finally provoked the Jews to revolt in 66, with disastrous results. After defeating the revels in 70, Titus destroyed the Jerusalem temple and sold most of the city's population into slavery. In the aftermath of this catastrophe, the Jewish community lost its religious center, and the distancing of Christianity from Judaism begun by Paul gained momentum, giving birth to a separate religion. Paul's impact on the movement can be gauged by the number of letters—thirteen--attributed to him in the twenty-seven Christian writings brought together as the New Testament by around 200. Followers of Jesus came to regard the New Testament as having equal authority with the Hebrew Bible, which they then called the Old Testament. Because teachers like Paul preached mainly in the cities to reach large crowds, congregations of Christians mostly sprang up in urban areas. Women could sometimes be leaders in the movement, but not without arousing controversy; many people believed that men should teach and women only listen. Still, early Christianity was diverse enough that the first head of a congregation named in the New Testament was a woman.
Growth of a New Religion
Christianity faced serious obstacles in developing as a new religion separate from Judaism. Roman officials, suspecting it of being politically subversive, sporadically persecuted its adherents, such as Perpetua, as traitors, especially for refusing to participate in the imperial cult. Christian leaders had to build an organization from scratch to administer their growing congregations. Also, they had to address the controversial question of the leadership role of women in the movement.
Most Romans found early Christians baffling and irritating. First, in contrast to Jews, Christians espoused a novel faith rather than a traditional religion handed down from their ancestors; they therefore enjoyed no special treatment under Roman law. Next, people feared that tolerating Christians would offend the gods of official religion; their denial of the old gods and of the emperor's divine associations seemed sure to provoke natural catastrophes. Christians furthermore aroused contempt because they proclaimed as their divine king a man whom the imperial government had crucified as a criminal. Finally, their secret rituals led to accusations of cannibalism amid sexual promiscuity because they symbolically ate the body and drank the blood of Jesus during communal dinners called “Love Feats,” which men and women attended together. In short, Christians seemed a threat to social order and peace with the gods.
Not surprisingly, then, Romans were quick to blame Christians for disasters. When a large portion of Rome burned in 64, Nero punished them for arson. As Tacitus reports, the emperor had innocent Christians “covered with the skins of wild animals and mauled to death by dogs, or fastened to crosses and set on fire to provide light at night.” The cruelty of their arbitrary punishment reportedly earned Christians some sympathy from Rome's population. After Nero, the government persecuted Christians only intermittently. No law specifically forbade their religion, but they made easy prey for officials, who were prepared to punish them to maintain public order.
In response to persecution, defenders of Christianity, such as Tertullian (c. 160-240) and Justin (c. 100-165), argued that Romans had nothing to fear from Christianity. Far from spreading immorality and subversion, these writers insisted, their faith taught an elevated moral code and respect for authority. It was not a foreign superstition but the truth philosophy that combined the best features of Judaism and Greek through and was thus a fitting religion for their diverse world. Tertullian pointed out that, although Christians could not worship the emperors, they did “pray to the true God for their [the emperors] safety. We pray for a fortunate life for them, a secure rule,...a courageous army, a loyal Senate, a virtuous people, a world of peace.”
Persecution did not stop Christianity. Tertullian indeed proclaimed that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” “Christians like Perpetua regarded public trials and executions as an opportunity to become witnesses (martyrs in Greek) to their faith and thus to strengthen Christians' sense of identity. Their firm conviction that their deaths would lead directly to heavenly bliss allowed them to face excuciating tortures with courage; some even sought martyrdom. Ignatius (c. 35-107), bishop of Antioch begged Rome's congregation, which was becoming the most prominent Christian group, not to ask the emperor to show him mercy after his arrest: “Let me be food for the wild animals [in the arena] through whom I can reach God,” he pleaded. “I am God's wheat, to be ground up by the teeth of beasts so that I may be found pure bread of Christ.” Most Christians tried their best to avoid becoming martyrs by keeping a low profile, but stories recounting the martyrs' courage helped shape the identity of this new religion as a creed that gave its believers the spiritual strength to overcome great suffering.
Many first-century Christians expected their troubles would cease during their lifetime because Jesus would return to pass judgment on the world and hence overturn the Roman Empire. When this hope was not met, believers began transforming their faith from an apocalyptic Jewish sect predicting the immediate end of the world into a religion organized to survive indefinitely. Most important, they tried to achieve unity int heir beliefs and to create a hierarchical organization to impose order on congregations.
Unity proved an elusive goal because early Christians constantly and fiercely disagreed about what they should believe, how they should live, and who had the authority to decide these questions. Some insisted that is was necessary to withdraw from the everyday world to escape its evil, even abandoning their families and shunning sex and reproduction. Others believed they could observe Christ's teachings while retraining their jobs and ordinary lives. Many Christians questions whether they could serve in the army without betraying their religion because soldiers worshiped in the imperial cult. Controversy over such matters raged in the many congregations that arouse in the early empire around the Mediterranean, from Gaul to Africa to the Near East (Map 5.3).
The emergence of bishops with authority to define doctrine and conduct became the most important institutional development to counter Christian disunity in the later first and second centuries. Bishops received their positions through the principle later called apostolic succession, which declares that Jesus' Apostles appointed the first bishops as their successors, granting these new officials the powers Jesus had originally given to the Apostles. Those men designated bishops by the Aposltes in turn appointed their own successors, and so on. Bishops had the authority to ordain priests with the holy power to administer the sacraments, above all baptism and communion, which believers regarded as necessary for achieving eternal life. Bishops also controlled their congregations ' memberships and finances (the money financing early churches came from members' gifts).
The bishops held the authority to define what was true doctrine (orthodoxy) and what was not (heresy), but they had limited success in combating the splintering effect of the differing versions of the new religion. For all practical purposes, the meetings of the bishops of different cities constituted the church's organizations. Today it is common to refer to this loose organization as the early Catholic (“universal”) church; but bishops regularly disagreed among themselves on what beliefs were proper.
A particularly bitter disagreement concerned women's roles in the church. In the first congregations, women sometimes held leadership positions. When bishops were established atop the hierarchy, however, women usually were relegated to inferior posts. This demotion reflected the view that in Christianity, as in Roman imperial society in general, women should be subordinate to men. Some congregations took a long time to accept this change, however, and women still occasionally commanded positions of authority during the second and third centuries.
When leadership roles were closed off to them, many women chose a life of celibacy to demonstrate their devotion to Christ. Their commitment to chastity gave them power to control their own bodies by removing their sexuality from the domination of men. Women with a special closeness to God were judged holy and socially superior by other Christians. By rejecting the traditional functions of wife and mother in favor of spiritual excellence, celibate Christian women achieved an independence and authority denied them in the outside world.
Parallel Belief Systems
Three centuries after Jesus' death, the overwhelming majority of the population still practiced traditional polytheism. Polytheists never sought a unity of beliefs (as the modern term paganism, under which diverse cults are often grouped, might suggest). They did agree, however, that the old gods favored and protected them and that the imperial cult added to their safety; the success and prosperity of the principate was the proof. Even those who found a more intellectually satisfying understanding the world in philosophies, such as Stoicism, respected the traditional cults for this reason.
Polytheistic worship therefore had as its goal gaining the favor of all the divinities who could affect human life. Its deities ranged from the stalwarts of the state cults, such as Jupiter and Minerva, to spirits traditionally thought to inhabit local groves and springs. Famous old cults, such as the initiation rituals of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis outside Athens, remained popular; the emperor Hadrian was initiated at Eleusis in 125.
The Hellenized cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis reveals how polytheism could provide believers with a religious experience arousing strong personal emotions and demanding a moral way of life. Her cult had already attracted Romans by the time of Augustus. He tried to suppress it because it was Cleopatra's religion, but Isis's reputation as a kind, compassionate goddess who alleviated her followers' suffering made her cult too popular to crush. The Egyptians believed that her tears for famished humans caused the Nile to flood every year and bring them good harvests. Her image was that of a loving mother, and in art she is often shown nursing her son. A central doctrine of her cult concerned the death and resurrection of her husband, Osiris; Isis promised her followers a similar hope for life after death.
Isis required her adherents to behave righteously. Inscriptions put up for all to read declared her standards by referring to her own civilizing accomplishments: “I broke down the rule of tyrants; I put an end to murders; I caused what is right to be mightier than gold and silver.” The dissolute hero of Apuleius's novel The Golden Ass, whom Isis rescues from torturous enchantment, expresses his intense joy after being spiritually reborn: “O holy and eternal guardian of the human race, who always cherishes mortals and blesses them, you care for the troubles of miserable humans with a sweet mother's love. Neither day nor night, nor any moment of time, ever passes y without your blessings.” Other cults also required their adherents to lead ethically upright lives. Inscriptions from remote villages in Asia Minor, for example, record the confessions of peasants to sins such as sexual transgressions for which their local god had imposed severe penance.
Many upper-class Romans found ethical guidance in philosophy. Stoicism, derived from the teachings of the Greek Zeno (335-263 B.C.), was the most popular. Stoics believed in self-discipline above all, and their code of personal ethics left no room for riotous conduct. As the philosopher Seneca (4 B.C.-A.D. 65) explained, “It is ever to prevent harmful emotions from entering the soul than it is to control them once they have entered.” Stoicism taught that the universe is directed by a single creative force incorporating reason, nature, and divinity. Humans share in the essence of this universal force and find happiness and patience by living in accordance with it and always doing their duty. The emperor Marcus Aurelius, in his memoirs entitled Meditations, emphasized the Stoic belief that people exist for each other: “Either make them better, or just put up with them,” he advised.
Christian and polytheistic intellectuals energetically debated Christianity's relationship to traditional Greek philosophy. The theologian Origen (c. 185-255), for example, argued that Christianity was both true and superior to Hellenic philosophical doctrines as a guide to correct living. At about the same time, however, philosophic belief achieved its most intellectual formulation in the works of Plotinus (c. 205-270). Plotinus's spiritual philosophy, called Neo-Platonism because it developed new doctrines based on Plato's philosophy, influence many educated Christians as well as polytheists. Its religious ideas focused on a human longing to return to the universal Good from which human existence derives. By turning away from the life of the body through the intellectual pursuit of philosophy, individual souls could ascend to the level of the universal soul, becoming the whole of what as individuals they formed a potential part. This mystical union with what the Christians would call God could be achieved only through strenuous self-discipline in personal morality as well as intellectual life. Neo-Platonism's stress on spiritual purity gave it a powerful appeal to Christian intellectuals. Like the cult of Isis or Stoicism, Neo-platonism provided guidance, comfort, and hope through good times or bad.
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