I was very excited when I learned that Paula Fredriksen, one of top scholars of early Christianity of our generation, was producing an introduction to the development of Christianity over its first five-hundred years. I frequently get asked by reader where they can go for an competent and readable overview of the major issues, and, well, there simply has not been a single source to suggest. Her book came out a few months ago, and it has lived up to its billing. It’s called Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years, and you can get it most anywhere, including Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/s?k=ancient+christianities&hvadid=714121002617&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9010321&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=2205515189783548255&hvtargid=kwd-1600541642159&hydadcr=19705_13380154&mcid=117a87a2a7e83a35937a5c9f6c18781e&tag=googhydr-20&ref=pd_sl_7g0wq9dtka_e)
I’ve asked Paula to give us some sense of the book, and she has graciously provided three posts on it. Here is the first. As you’ll see, it is intriguing and not what many readers will expect!
**************
People often speak of “the triumph of Christianity” as if “Christianity” were one single, uniform thing from the mission of Jesus on through to the conversion of Constantine – and, indeed, on into our own day. They see Jesus and Paul as its originators. They imagine both ancient Jews and Christians, in contrast to pagan contemporaries, as “monotheists.” They envisage a standing antagonism between “Judaism” and the Christian message – beginning with Jesus, continuing with Paul, and characterizing relations throughout Roman antiquity. They think that Christians were almost continuously “persecuted” by Rome until Constantine’s dramatic change of heart. They conceptualize “religion” as something other than and contrasting to politics.
None of these presuppositions is historically true. In these blogs, I will address each one and show how and why this is so, and suggest alternative interpretations of the evidence. Our overall question will be: How can we better imagine Christian origins?
Such an effort has several different starting points. One is the acknowledgment of an abiding pluriformity, which I tried to capture in my book’s title, Ancient Christianities. The plural noun grates on the eye and the ear: SpellCheck objects every time I type it. But in the documents preserved in the New Testament we can already hear multiple contesting voices. Already by the mid-first century, Paul bitterly refutes the “super-apostles” and the “false brethren” of the Christ movement – Jews like himself, taking a message about Christ, like himself, to pagans. Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew repudiates fellow Christ-followers – people who call Jesus “lord,” who can prophesy, exorcise demons and work miracles in Jesus’s name – as “evildoers” (Mt 7:21-23). This variety, and the noise of energetic argument, only increased as time went on and traditions about Christ mutated in various ways as they penetrated the larger Graeco-Roman world. Second-century Christians begin to revile each other as “heretics.” Contesting communities continue on into the late imperial period, fifth century and beyond. All heatedly claim to be the sole representatives of Christian truth. Battles over the nature of Christ’s divinity, and over the status of the Trinity, consume post-Constantinian churches. At no point in the arc of its first five centuries, in short, does Christian diversity diminish. Ancient Christianities investigates all this diversity, describes how and why it was so, and traces its consequences for late Roman politics and piety.
But a prior question looms over this investigation: Should we locate the origins of Christianities in the lifetimes of Jesus and of Paul at all? Only retrospectively. Arguably, each man stood under the big top of late Second Temple Judaism, which was itself energetically diverse. The Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels – Mark, Matthew, and Luke – goes to synagogues on the Sabbath and to Jerusalem for Passover; in John, he journeys to Jerusalem several times to keep the major holidays and one minor one, the celebration associated with Hanukkah (John 10:22-23). In Mark, he wears Jewish prayer fringes, kraspeda, meant to recall their bearer to the observance of the Law (Mark 6:56); in Matthew, he advises his followers on the size of their tefillin (prayer phylacteries, Mt 23:5), on how to observe extra-biblical fasts (Mt 6:16), and on how to bring offerings to the Temple (Mt 5:23-24). In Luke, he is circumcised (2:21). Whatever his arguments with other Jews, the gospels’ Jesus is indisputably Jewish.
What about Paul? His heated rhetoric against other Christ-following apostles who advocated proselyte circumcision, read by later gentile Christians, were taken to be arguments against all forms of circumcision, despite his own clear statement that Jewish circumcision “is of much value” (Romans 3:1-2), and that it is “the doers of the law who will be justified” (2:13). He boasts in his own eighth-day circumcision, his Jewish descent, and his Pharisaic orientation toward Law observance which, he adds (with no false modesty) was flawless (Phil 3:4-6). He values his knowledge of Christ even more, he says there; but he values these features of his autobiography nonetheless, or he would not use them as comparanda. And he grounds his message in his interpretations of Jewish scriptures.
More to the point, Paul urges the exclusive worship of the god of Israel on his pagan (or, as he hopes, ex-pagan) auditors, and insists that they cease worshiping before cult images of their own gods (“idols”): these are the first two mandates of the 10 Commandments, which Paul elsewhere sums up by referring to Leviticus 19:18, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” These are ethnically specific, Jewish teachings. And the whole point of his ex-pagan gentiles’ receiving holy pneuma, “spirit,” is so that they can “fulfill the law.” Paul, in short, does not champion a “Law-free gospel.” He promotes a Judaizing gospel, enjoining his ex-pagan followers to start acting more or less like Jews.
And finally, Paul teaches his listeners that a Jewishly conceived end of history – a coming messiah; a final judgment; the ingathering of all Israel; the resurrection of the dead – is just around the corner, within the lifetime of his own generation (1 Cor 7:29 the appointed time has grown very short; 10:11 the ends of the ages have come; Rom 13:11 the hour is late; salvation is near). Paul, like Jesus, was not starting a new religion. Jesus and Paul are authors of Christianity only in the way that John Locke (1632-1704) is an author of the US Constitution (1787) – which is to say, retrospectively.
Another surprising aspect of Paul’s gospel is its acknowledgement of the power and the agency of pagan gods. “Indeed, there are many gods and many lords” he tells his Corinthian audience (1 Cor 8:5: “lords” is another word for “gods”). These gods are daimonia, lesser gods compared with the god of Israel. But they are gods nonetheless, who partner with the humans who sacrifice before their images (1 Cor 10:20). Their spheres of influence represent cosmic powers, which the returning Christ will defeat (1 Cor 15:24). “The god of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers” Paul complains elsewhere (2 Cor 4:4). These pagan godlings are by nature not-gods, he teaches the Galatians, though powerful enough to have formerly enslaved them (Gal 4:8). Once Christ returns, all of these superhuman cosmic beings – whether above the earth or upon the earth or below the earth – will themselves kneel in acknowledgement of Israel’s god (Phil 2:10-11). Pagan gods, in short, play a key role in Paul’s mission, and in his vision of the approaching End. Paul thought that his god should be the sole object of human worship – he was a monolatrist – but he well knew that other gods existed, too. Paul was not a “monotheist.”
This should not surprise us. God was never the only god, not even in his own book. When Moses fights the Egyptians, God judges the Egyptian gods (Exod 12:12); when God holds court in heaven, he is surrounded by divine courtiers (“All the gods bow down to him,” Ps 97:7). The Jewish scriptures in Greek advised Jews of the western Diaspora, to “not revile the gods” (Exodus 22:28; the Hebrew had taught, “do not revile God”). In Hebrew, these gods were ridiculed as man-made images. In Greek, they received an upgrade, from “idols” to actual divine (though lesser) powers, daimonia (Ps 96:5 Hebrew; Ps 95:5 OG). Graeco-Roman gods were acknowledged in Jewish inscriptions, manifesting in dreams to Moschos Ioudaios, called upon to witness synagogue manumissions by Pothos son of Strabo. They supervised the gymnasium education of Jesus son of Antiphilos and Eleazar son of Eleazar. They were honored by dedicated games sponsored by Herod the Great and by Niketas of Jerusalem. Jews in general avoided paying cult to foreign gods – irritated pagan observers complained about this – but clearly, they worked out civil relations with pagans both human and divine. Again, ancient Jews were not modern monotheists.
Biblical condemnations of the worship of foreign gods are directed first of all to Jews, whose covenant with their god had specified exclusive worship. Foreign worship even by non Jews was not to be tolerated in the land of Israel. But the non-Jewish nations, according to Deuteronomy 32.8, had each been allotted its own presiding (if inferior) divine power, an angelos according to the Septuagint, a “son of God” according to the Hebrew of this passage found at Qumran. Diaspora synagogues accommodated, perhaps even encouraged, the involvement of sympathetic pagans, also known as “God-fearers,” in their communities. For most Jews most of the time, the paganism of pagans was simply normal. It was apocalyptic expectation, with its conviction that the god of Israel was about to become the sole recipient of humanity’s worship, that polarized what was otherwise a level of comfortable, and pragmatic, accommodation.
So: there never was a single entity called “Christianity.” Post-Jewish forms of the message of Jesus evolved only eventually, as time left the first generations behind. And however we configure the relation of Judaism – thus, again eventually, of Christianity – to majority Mediterranean culture, it was not a confrontation of “monotheism” versus “polytheism.” How, then, are we to understand the religious history of this period? Perhaps by grappling with antiquity’s idea of what “religion” itself meant.