FIVE

CREATING THE
JESUS OF FAITH

Modern Christian illustrations depict the popular image of Jesus wandering around ancient Israel—the sun gilding his blond hair yet never burning his fair skin. They portray him as a Christian missionary accompanied by his disciples, some of whom were already scribbling down their Gospels in order to record the sacred words of a living god.

We have already pointed out the obvious flaw in this picture: Jesus was a Jew. He was a dark Palestinian, not a fair northern European. But there is another profound error in this image, one equally significant but less well known: there was no such thing as a gospel at the time, let alone a “New Testament”; there was no “Christianity.” The sacred books that Jesus and his disciples used were those of Judaism—as is immediately apparent to anyone who reads the New Testament and notes how familiar Jesus was with the Judaic scriptures, the ease with which he quoted from them, and the assumption of familiarity on the part of his audience—presuming, of course, that the events depicted in the Gospels actually happened.

Because we’ve always been told with such confidence that the various Gospels had been written by the latter part of the first century A.D., it is a surprise to discover that there wasn’t a New Testament in existence at the beginning of the second century A.D. Or even by the end of that century, although by that time some theologians, nervous about what they considered to be the “truth,” were attempting to create one. Despite these theologians’ best efforts, Christians had to wait almost two more centuries for an agreed-upon text. So what was it that they were really waiting for?

This delay in arriving at an official collection of Christian texts calls into serious question the widespread Christian belief over the last 1,500 years that every word in the New Testament is a faithful transmission from God himself. To an independent observer, it seems more likely not only that the New Testament was deliberately imposed upon a god who was actually quite happy with a wide expression of teachings, but that it was deliberately imposed by a group of people who wished to control the divine expression for their own profit and power.

The delay, as it happens, occurred while the theology was catching up with the demand for a centralized orthodoxy. Until key decisions were made with regard to the divinity of Jesus, the leaders of the Church lacked the officially sanctioned criteria by which to choose the texts designed to represent their newly created religion.

Even more crucially, many people today consider the New Testament texts sacrosanct. They believe them to be the divine words of God written as the only means by which we might be saved, words that cannot be changed or taken in any other way than literally. No one has ever told them that this was not the intention of the early compilers of the traditions about Jesus that make up the collection. In fact, for the first 150 years of the Christian tradition the only authoritative writings were those books now called the “Old Testament.”1

A good example of the early attitude toward scripture is given by the second-century Christian writer Justin Martyr. For him our so-called Gospels were simply memoirs of the various apostles that could be read in church and used in support of the faith but were never considered as “Holy Scripture.” The term “Holy Scripture” was reserved for the books of the law and the prophets—that is, the Old Testament. Bluntly, Justin Martyr “never considers the ‘Gospels’ or the ‘Memoirs of the Apostles’ as inspired writings.”2 Justin reached the pinnacle of sainthood, but his position would be considered radical if held by any member of the Christian Church today.

It is certainly true, however, that during the later first century and the entire second century A.D., traditions about Jesus began to be recorded. Sayings and stories about the events of his life were collected, but none were deemed the official or authorized collection at that time. It is also true that the texts that now appear in our New Testament were written in that span. During the late first and second centuries A.D., the whole concept of “Christianity” crystallized out of messianic Judaism, and this leads us immediately to a number of logistical challenges, some of them quite radical.

A curious phenomenon began in the second century B.C.: the Aramaic word meshiha—messiah—which is otherwise devoid of any explanation, began to be used as the name of the true ruler of Israel. In particular, it denoted the expected king of the royal Line of David.³ A general hope that a descendant of King David would arrive found expression in the books of the prophets in the Old Testament. Thus, the Christian use of the term christos, or “Christ,” a Greek translation of the Aramaic meshiha, along with the transliteration into Greek Messias—now “messiah”—came from a Jewish context and usage that was already well understood by Jesus’s day.⁴

The most radical logistical challenge is answering a charge that has regularly been made, particularly over the last 150 years: that Jesus didn’t exist at all and the stories about him are simply tales of various messianic leaders that were later gathered together in order to justify, first a Pauline position, and later, a Roman-centered tradition wherein the Jewish messiah was turned into a deified imperial figure, a kind of royal angel. William Horbury, reader in Jewish and Early Christian Studies at Cambridge University, recently noted, “A cult of angels…accompanied the development of the cult of Christ.”5

 

CAN WE REALLY BE sure that Jesus existed? Is there any proof of his reality beyond the New Testament? If not, if the New Testament was put together long after his time, how do we know that the whole concept of Jesus Christ is not just an ancient myth given a new spin? Perhaps it was some rewriting of the Adonis myth or the Osiris myth or the Mithras myth: all three were born of a virgin and raised from the dead—a familiar story to Christians.

There is considerable reason, according to Horbury, for seeing, within early Christianity, “a cult of Christ, comparable with the cults of Graeco-Roman heroes, sovereigns and divinities.”⁶ And as mentioned earlier, this cult was accompanied by a cult of angels. Horbury explains that it appears likely that the title given to Jesus, “Son of man,” linked him with “an angel-like messiah.”⁷ In fact, “Christ, precisely in his capacity as messiah, could be considered an angelic spirit…. It seems likely that messianism formed the principal medium through which angelology impinged on nascent Christology, and that Christ, precisely as messiah, was envisaged as an angel-like spiritual being.”⁸ So are we dealing solely with an ancient myth revisited for the purposes of Christianity?

We have seen that the word “Jesus” derives simply from the Aramaic Yeshua, which can mean Joshua but also can mean “the deliverer,” the “savior.” Therefore, it could just be a title. We’ve also noted that “Christ” comes from christos, the Greek translation of the Aramaic meshiha, meaning “the anointed one.” So we are dealing with a double title: “The deliverer (or savior), the anointed one.” In that case, what was his name? We really don’t know—someone “ben David” we would assume, but that is all we can glean.

We cannot appeal to the New Testament for evidence because we have no idea how much history and how much fantasy is incorporated into the texts. And in any case, the earliest fragments we have are from the second century A.D.—around A.D. 125. for some pieces of John’s Gospel. But what about the letters of Paul? After all, they were written before the first war against the Romans. The earliest—Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians—was written while he was resident in Corinth from the winter of A.D. 50 to the summer of 52.9 The rest of his letters were written between A.D. 56 and 60, perhaps even later when he was in Rome and supposedly executed around A.D. 65—although no one knows the truth about this since the Book of Acts, our only source for details of Paul’s travels, breaks off with him under house arrest in Rome.

Unfortunately, we cannot be sure about the authenticity of all Paul’s letters within the New Testament either, since the earliest copies we have date from the early third century.¹⁰ In the letters written in A.D. 115 by Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, on his way to Rome, he quotes from various letters of Paul, so we know that some were in existence by this time, but we do not know whether they might have been edited, before or after. In any case, Paul did not know Jesus, and unlike the Gospels, he did not show any great concern about what Jesus may have said or done. We get no information about Jesus from Paul, whose letters proclaim the gospel of, well, Paul: that the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus marked the beginning of a new age in the history of the world, the most immediate practical effect being the end of the Jewish law—quite a different stance to that taken by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill” (Matthew 5:17).

 

NO RECORDS FROM PILATE have survived either; there are also no records from Herod, and no records from the Roman military or other administrative bodies. But this is not surprising, as the records office of the Herodian kings in Jerusalem was burned during the war. The official Roman records would have been in their administrative capital, Caesarea, and it too was caught up in the fighting. Copies and reports would have gone back to Rome, but even if they survived the various destructions by later emperors like Domitian, they would have been lost in the sack of Rome by the Goths in A.D. 405, when so many official archives were destroyed—those that had not been taken to Constantinople. Of course, by that time Rome was Christian, and so we can be certain that any documents that compromised the developing story of Christ would have already been extracted and destroyed. And there is good reason to think that Pilate’s reports would have been among such documents.

But all is not lost: Josephus certainly had access to Roman records, and if Jesus had been mentioned, he would have been able to read of him. In fact, Josephus does mention Jesus, but in such a manner as to lead everyone who has looked at the text to consider it a later Christian insertion, although there is probably a kernel of truth in his discussion somewhere. But Josephus cannot help us entirely, for he has proven to be an unreliable witness and chronicler. Our other Jewish chronicler and philosopher, Philo of Alexandria, who died around A.D. 50, does not even mention Jesus. This is a curiosity for which there is no good explanation beyond taking it as evidence either for the lack of Jesus’s reality or for his irrelevance to the lives of educated Jewish Alexandrians.

However, there are surviving works of two Roman historians who both enjoyed access to Roman records and who had occasion to investigate the Christians long before any orthodoxy developed in the Church. Their testimony is therefore very important. Based on their accounts, the fact that official reports mentioning the Christians existed in the Roman archives cannot be denied. The first of these historians was the early church writer Tertullian (c. A.D. 160–225), who wrote of these records as an acknowledged fact, although it does not seem that he had access to any.11

The historian Tacitus (c. A.D. 55–120) was a Roman senator during the time of Domitian and was later governor of western Anatolia in Turkey; in the latter capacity, he had ample opportunity to interrogate Christians—called Chrestiani—who were hauled into his courtrooms. Writing of the burning of Rome during the reign of Nero, he explains:

Nero fabricated scapegoats—and punished with every refinement the notoriously depraved Christians (as they were popularly called). Their originator, Christ, had been executed in Tiberius’ reign by the governor of Judaea, Pontius Pilate. But in spite of this temporary setback the deadly superstition had broken out afresh, not only in Judaea (where the mischief had started) but even in Rome.

Because, he adds in a sarcastic aside, “All degraded and shameful practices collect and flourish in the capital.”¹²

Tacitus’s friend and student, Pliny the Younger, also mentions the Christians. He had occasion to interrogate a number of them formally and reported back to Rome that they sang hymns to “Christus” as if he were a god.¹³

The second-century pagan writers Lucian and Celsus portray Jesus as a sorcerer and a “fomenter of rebellion”¹⁴—both of which activities were crimes under Roman law and carried the death penalty. We have also the later quote, which we have already noted, from the historian Suetonius, who, writing around 117–38, explains that during the rule of Claudius the Jews rioted in Rome at the instigation of “Chrestus.”15

There is then little doubt that Jesus Christos—the messiah—existed, since these Roman writers are rather matter of fact about it. Not only that, but these Roman writers all concur that the records showed this messiah was tried and “executed” for political actions.

But we mustn’t be too confident: what specifically is it that the writers know? Who is it they are speaking of? They may be speaking of “Christos” or “Chrestos”—that is, the “messiah”—but we still do not know his name. We can only be certain that Pontius Pilate, during the time of Tiberius, executed a Jewish “messiah” who was a political rebel against Rome and thus merited the sentence of crucifixion. From this “messiah” a movement grew that, by the end of the century at least, was called “Christian.”

 

TRY AS WE MIGHT, we cannot get away from the importance of the second century A.D. for the beginning of the recording of the cult of Jesus. The earliest fragment of any part of the New Testament we have is part of the Gospel of John written about A.D. 125 in Egypt (now held in the John Rylands Library in Manchester, England), but the text or tradition from which it was written clearly dates back to an even earlier time. By the end of the century, we have hundreds of documents representing many different texts, from Gospels to various Acts. Harvard University’s Professor Helmut Koester analyzes quite a few of these works in his book Ancient Christian Gospels. There are a surprisingly large number of them—the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas, the Secret Gospel of Mark, the Gospel according to the Egyptians, then the letters of Clement, Bishop of Rome, others of Peter, and documents such as the Apocryphon of James, the Dialogue of the Savior, the unknown texts recorded in the Egerton Papyrus No. 2 in the British Museum, and a number of infancy stories. All were current in the second century A.D., and all have a very good chance of carrying some original and valid information about Jesus deriving from either the oral record or various very early compilations of “sayings.”

With such a wide range of “Jesus memoirs” having been recorded, it is not surprising that some very different approaches had developed. Furthermore, it is also not surprising that one particular strain attempted to dominate: that based upon the work of Paul, which was supported by those Christians with a pagan, rather than a Jewish, background.

Paul’s letters in the New Testament are very different from the Gospels. For one thing, Paul does not provide any Jesus stories. Paul provides only Paul stories. Paul did not know Jesus personally—so far as we know—and his teaching was aimed at those potential pagan converts, the Gentiles. It is significant that the Jewish Christian leadership in Jerusalem under the guidance of James, the brother of Jesus, managed to get Paul out of Israel, sending him away, up the coast to Antioch and elsewhere. They must have known that he was not on their side. James and the others were very concerned about the maintenance of Jewish law, while Paul suggested that the law had little relevance at that point—that Gentiles could become Christians without buying into the totality of the law. This idea was anathema to James, as his letter says: “For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all” (James 2:10).

Paul’s approach, by contrast, was “circumcision of the heart, not of the flesh” (Romans 2:29). He held to a flexibility with regard to the Jewish law. “A man is justified by faith,” wrote Paul, “without the deeds of the law.” He asked, “Do we then make void the law through faith?” Then he answered his rhetorical question: “God forbid;…we establish the law” (Romans 3:28–31).

This brings us to the basic fault line that separated two strong traditions as Christianity moved into the second century A.D.: on the one side were those who sought knowledge, and on the other were those who were content with belief. It is important that we distinguish between the two since this fault line is one of the primary forces that ultimately crystallized the orthodox Christian position.

“Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” So wrote Paul in his Letter to the Hebrews (11:1). But faith is a lesser thing than knowledge. I have always regarded that as self-evident, but let me explain with an example.

One can be afraid of fire because one believes that by placing a hand in the flames, it will be burned and pain will be the result. One can have faith that this is true. But until this is actually done—until one’s hand is actually placed in the flames and the pain from burning is caused—one cannot truly know what such pain is like. This experiential knowledge—different from knowing, for example, that two plus two is four—is called gnosis in Greek. For this very reason, members of the mystical groups within Christianity who wished to experience God for themselves called themselves Gnostics. It is not known when this idea began within Christianity, but such a mystical approach based upon profound personal experience had long been common in the pagan religions. The second century A.D. saw this approach rapidly increase in popularity throughout the Christian Church.

The Gnostics, despite the complexity of much of their literature, were concerned less about the facts about Jesus and God, less concerned about faith in the various scriptures and memoirs, than they were concerned about knowing, directly, for themselves, through experience, what God was. They were concerned less about faith in Jesus’s words and more about becoming just like him and, like him, about knowing God. As one of the Gnostic texts found at Nag Hammadi, the Gospel of Thomas, expresses it: “When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living Father.”16

 

IT CANNOT BE STRESSED enough that the material used to support any of the myriad emerging viewpoints was selected by using theological criteria: someone, some group, sat down and decided—from their perspective and understanding—that this book should be considered “authentic” and that book should be considered “false,” that is, as “orthodox” or as “heretical.” That theological grounds were used does not, of course, automatically justify the decisions made despite all the appeals to divine guidance that were put forth. Very human decisions were made, based upon very human priorities—mostly concerning control and power. As Koester writes, “In the earliest period of Christianity, the epithets ‘heretical’ and ‘orthodox’ are meaningless.”¹⁷ What is even greater nonsense is to think that the books we have in our New Testament are the only authentic traditions about Jesus. Once again, Koester’s comment is blunt: “Only dogmatic prejudice can assert that the canonical writings have an exclusive claim to apostolic origin and thus to historical priority.”¹⁸ In fact, our New Testament was not settled until the Councils of Hippo and Carthage in A.D. 393 and 397—over 360 years after the events they refer to.

 

AROUND A.D. 140, a wealthy shipowner and convert to Christianity, Marcion, traveled from his home of Pontus and went to Rome, where he formed his own community and from which he established communities all over the Roman empire. All of his writings have been lost, but according to his critics, he claimed that only Paul knew the truth: he regarded the other disciples as too influenced by Judaism. He rejected the “Old Testament” totally and used only certain of the Pauline letters together with an edited version of Luke, which he referred to as a “gospel.” He was, it appears, the earliest person to use this term in relation to a written text. His organization was the first Christian church to have its own sacred scripture.19 For him, Christianity had to irrevocably replace everything deriving from the Jewish “Old Testament” tradition, including the books of the prophets. He was perhaps the greatest danger to the Church in the mid to latter first century, and in A.D. 144 he was formally excommunicated from the Church at Rome.

But the effect of Marcion’s use of the texts was to force the growing Christian tradition to leave behind the oral tradition and begin a written tradition based upon “gospels” whose authorship was attributed to various apostles in order to establish an acceptable official canon of sacred “New Testament” literature. This desire to formulate an official list of texts was first put into form by Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, the capital of Roman Gaul.

He and his fellow guardians of orthodoxy would have no part of any deviation from what they held to be “the truth.” They were not impressed with the obsessive Paulism of Marcion; neither did they carry any affection whatsoever for the Gnostics, who held that direct knowledge of the Divine was superior to any faith or belief. Taking the lead against this position, Irenaeus, about A.D. 180, wrote a monumental work in five books attacking the Gnostics, his famous Against Heresies.

Irenaeus was clearly having considerable trouble from the Gnostics. They were, he says, leading away members of his flock “under a pretence of superior knowledge.”20 He complains about their attacking him with arguments, parables, and tendentious questions.²¹ After reading some of their literature and speaking with various Gnostics about their beliefs, he resolved to find a way to attack and disprove their teachings, which he truly abhorred.²² During the course of his long assault in Against Heresies he gives much information about them and about the beliefs of the emerging orthodoxy in the late second century A.D.

He is aware of the Gnostics’ claim to be privy to some secret information: they declare, he says, “that Jesus spoke in a mystery to his disciples and apostles privately.”²³ He also points out that this suggestion of an esoteric understanding passed down from the previous century is somehow connected with the resurrection of the dead. The Gnostics, Irenaeus explains, do not take the resurrection literally; in fact, they see much in the scriptures, especially the parables, as symbolic—as stories that need interpretation in order to glean the underlying message.²⁴ For them, the resurrection from the dead is a symbolic means of presenting someone who has experienced the “Truth” taught by Gnosticism.²⁵

Curiously, Irenaeus uses this as one of his points to refute the Gnostics: raising from the dead in the Church had been performed both in the past and during his own day. He mentions in two places at least one incident of a dead man being brought back to life that seems to have been personally known by him. On this occasion the dead man remained alive for many years afterwards. It’s a fascinating story, sadly not developed further, but serves as evidence that Irenaeus had somewhat missed the point.²⁶

But whether he missed the point or not, Irenaeus was the torchbearer for orthodoxy during those tricky times when Gnosticism could have taken over the Church. He made it clear which gospels were to be used and which were to be rejected. He first drew together the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. In effect, he created the identification of the one Divine God Jesus, both Son and eternal Creator.27 He also made it clear that the central unified organization of the Church was a measure of its universal appeal, nature, and truth. Thus, centralization and orthodoxy were established as proofs of validity and rectitude: physical power was one of the proofs of God’s support. Conversely, decentralization was a proof of error. As there was one God, so too there could be only one Church and one truth. A simple but specious argument, it nevertheless convinced many. And even today it has its supporters in the Vatican, one, of course, being the pope.

 

WHILE THEOLOGIANS WERE attempting to create a centralized orthodoxy of faith and belief, others were trying to centralize the physical structure of the Church, maintaining that it was better to rule from a position of centralized power. Political concerns—fueled, of course, by the persecutions, which we cannot forget—were as important as theological concerns in shaping the emerging Christianity.

About the same time as Irenaeus was arguing his version of Christianity, the way that the Church ruled itself was changing. Previously, local churches had been governed by a group of men—presbyter-bishops—but these governing structures were gradually centralized. The group was being replaced by a single bishop who represented the power in each diocese. This process seems to have begun in Rome in the mid-second century and was completed by the early third century. Of course—and we should not be surprised—the bishop of Rome was clear that he was the most important of all these bishops. He wished to be recognized as the supreme ruler of the Church on earth as the representative of the messiah. Pope Stephen I (254–57) was the first bishop of Rome to justify this claim of preeminence among all bishops from his succession to the apostle Peter. He based his claim upon the Gospel of Matthew (16:18): “Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church.” It was further claimed that Peter came to Rome and, around the late second century he was identified as the first Christian bishop in the city.28

However, in 258, Emperor Valerian ordered the immediate execution of all Christian bishops, priests, and deacons. Many were executed, but many survived. The advantages of centralized power would have been very apparent to the leaders of the Christian Church, who must have felt that should they ever get the opportunity, they would take such power for themselves.

Their first opportunity came during the reign of Constantine. Although he was not baptized a Christian until he was on his deathbed, at least under his rule Christianity was allowed to flourish. Constantine wanted unity; he called the Council of Nicaea to oppose the ideas of the heretic Arius. The aim was to get support for the idea that Jesus Christ was “of one being” with God the Father, a claim that Arius and others disputed; for them, Jesus was not divine. As Princeton’s Professor Elaine Pagels dryly observes, “Those who opposed this phrase pointed out that it occurs neither in the Scriptures nor in Christian tradition.”²⁹ But the objections proved of no consequence to the politically ruthless theologians who traveled to Nicaea with a set agenda in mind.

The Council was clearly loaded against the views of Arius, but the presence of his supporters made for stormy meetings and heated discussions. In fact, it appears possible that during one angry exchange the bishop of Myra physically assaulted the emaciated and ascetic Arius, as depicted in traditional pictures of the proceedings. The arguments spilled out of the Council and into the streets of Nicaea: parodies of the disputes were played for laughs in the public theaters, and everywhere about the city the disputes were argued by the market traders, the shopkeepers, the money-changers. “Inquire the price of bread, and you are told, ‘The Son is subordinate to the Father.’ Ask if the bath is ready, and you are told, ‘The Son arose out of nothing.’”30

In the end, a vote was taken. The exact numbers are disputed, but it is known that Arius and two of his colleagues voted against the decree; the accepted figure is that the proposition was carried by a vote of 217 to 3. Arius and his two colleagues were exiled to the Danube area.

In a curious, even bizarre, appendix to this episode, when, on his deathbed, Constantine was baptized, the ceremony was performed by a member of the heretical Arian church. This reveals that for Constantine details of theology were less important than adopting any idea that best served unity, which, for him, was stability, and that was his overriding concern.

By this decision, the Council of Nicaea created the literally fantastic Jesus of faith and adopted the pretense that this was a historically accurate rendering. Its actions also established the criteria by which the New Testament books would later be chosen. The Council of Nicaea produced a world of Christianity where a code of belief was held in common. Anything different was to be deemed heresy and to be rejected and, if possible, exterminated.

We are still suffering from this today. In an unusual move for an academic, Pagels, an expert on the Gnostic texts, introduces a personal note in her book Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. The note addresses a crucial point with far-reaching consequences: what she cannot love in the Church, she explained, is “the tendency to identify Christianity with a single authorized set of beliefs…coupled with the conviction that Christian belief alone offers access to God.”

Realizing the high cost of failure, subsequent bishops of Rome consolidated power—and none more so than Pope Damasus I (366–84), who hired a group of killers to spend three days massacring his opponents. When Damasus had seized back control, he termed Rome “the apostolic see”—in other words, the only place in the entire Church that might claim a continuous succession from the apostles, thereby maintaining and acting as heir to their authority and function. Of course, this claim left Jerusalem out of the loop. Any Zealot follower of Jesus would have found this claim preposterous and self-evidently untrue.

Ignoring any such implications, Damasus claimed to be the true and direct successor to Peter and so rightfully inherited the Church that Christ had founded upon him. As ultimate authority on earth, Damasus also established the principle that the true measure of any creed to be considered orthodox was whether it received papal endorsement. In such a blatant manner was the claim of apostolic succession enforced.

The next pope, Siricius (384–99), imitated the imperial chancery by issuing decrees—commands that were considered beyond discussion, commands that were to be immediately obeyed. Under his dogmatic authority, the canon of the New Testament was finally settled at the Council of Hippo in A.D. 393 and the Council of Carthage in A.D. 397.

This overt process of taking and centralizing power continued: Pope Innocent I (401–17) presented the claim, now inevitable, that as the apostolic see, Rome represented supreme authority in the Christian Church. But the greatest of the power-taking popes was Leo I (440–61). He established finally, without compromise, the claim that persists today: that Christ gave supreme authority over the Church to Peter; that this authority was transmitted from Peter to each succeeding bishop of Rome; and that the bishop of Rome, the pope, was “the primate of all the bishops” in the Church and acted as the “mystical embodiment” of Peter. It remained only for his successor, Pope Gelasius I (492–521), to enunciate the most arrogant of all statements: he wrote to the emperor explaining that the world was governed by two great powers—the spiritual authority vested in the pope and the temporal authority vested in the emperor. Of the two, he explained, the pope’s authority was superior because it “provided for the salvation of the temporal.” At the synod held in Rome on 13 May 495, Gelasius was the first pope to be called “Vicar of Christ.”

At the same time as theological dominance was being coveted and seized, in a psychologically astute move the Church began taking physical possession of pagan sites and festivals—that of the Birth of Mithras on 25 December being just one that is still with us today. The Church’s reasoning was clearly expressed by Pope Gregory I (590–604) in A.D. 601 in his instructions to an abbot about to depart for Britain. “We have come to the conclusion,” the pope wrote,

that the temples of the idols among that people should on no account be destroyed. The idols are to be destroyed, but the temples themselves are to be aspersed with holy water, altars set up in them, and relics deposited there. For if these temples are well-built, they must be purified from the worship of demons and dedicated to the service of the true god. In this way, we hope that the people, seeing that their temples are not destroyed, may abandon their error and, flocking more readily to their accustomed resorts, may come to know and adore the true god. And since they have a custom of sacrificing many oxen to demons, let some other solemnity be substituted in its place, such as a day of Dedication or the Festivals of the holy martyrs whose relics are enshrined there.31

Although the Church, in support of the growing orthodoxy, may have left the altars intact, they certainly did not shy away from the destruction or forging of documents. So just how did the people feel about this?

 

LET US TURN OUR attention to Eunapius to find out. Eunapius was a Greek teacher of rhetoric who lived from around 345 until around A.D. 420. Rhetoric is the art of persuasive and impressive expression, either in writing or via speech. Our modern spin doctor is an heir to techniques perfected by the ancients. At the age of sixteen, Eunapius went to study in Athens. While there, he was initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries, becoming a priest of the College of Eumolpidae just outside Athens. The Eumolpidae were one of the “families” of priests who experienced and taught the Mysteries of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis to the select few—both men and women—who had proven ready to learn these mysteries. These few were referred to as initiates.

After five years in Athens, Eunapius returned to his hometown of Sardis in Turkey and fell in with a local group of Platonic philosophers, learning medicine and theurgy—a very practical working with the divine powers by means of ritual, dance, and music.32 He was alive when the emperor Theodosius banned all pagan religions in A.D. 391, but despite the dangers, Eunapius fiercely criticized Christianity in his writings.

Eunapius wrote biographical histories of contemporary philosophers. He also delved into general history, writing a supplement to a published history by another writer. Eunapius added details to this book covering the years A.D. 270 to 404. He finished around A.D. 414. Unfortunately, only small pieces of this history have survived. But there is a mystery about this loss.

Emperor Constantine reigned from A.D. 306 to 337, and it was during his time that the Council of Nicaea was convened to proclaim Jesus to be “God.” It was during his time that Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire—against the wishes of many. With his interest in unifying the empire, Constantine seems to have taken a solely political view of the religion. Indeed, as we have seen, he was only converted to Christianity himself on his deathbed.

Eunapius, as a believer in what was perceived by Christians to be a pagan religion, can be relied upon to dislike these changes in general and Christianity in particular. We can be certain that his history of the reign of Constantine was treated very critically, with hostility, perhaps even with anger in his supplement to the published history of the time. This would have been very damaging for the emerging Christian orthodoxy of the early fifth century. Eunapius, as a follower of theurgy, would also have had some interesting things to say on the subject of the emperor Julian (A.D. 361–63), who was also a devotee of the ritual technique and who tried to return the empire to paganism, specifically to the Platonic thought of one of the greatest and most underrated philosophers of late classical times, the teacher of theurgy, Iamblichus of Apamea (c. A.D. 240–c. 325).

Eunapius’s history would be a very interesting text to have today. Sadly, we would have had a copy were it not for the Vatican and its relentless need to protect its fraudulent picture of Christ and Christianity, for a copy of Eunapius’s book existed in the all too often impenetrable Vatican library as late as the sixteenth century.

This was reported by the classical scholar Marc-Antoine de Muret, who in 1563 was lecturing at the University in Rome. There he saw a copy of Eunapius’s History in the Vatican library. He found it so interesting that he asked Cardinal Sirlet, one of the leading scholars at the Vatican, to arrange for a copy to be made. But Sirlet declined and, with the pope’s support, stated that this book of Eunapius’s was “impious and wicked.” Once attention had been drawn to this work, the authorities sought a solution to the problem. It was very simple: a learned Jesuit scholar later reported that Eunapius’s History “had perished by an act of Divine providence.”33 Undoubtedly providence acted through the less than divine agency of men.

The Vatican has a history of obtaining—and destroying—writings that run counter to the myth it is promulgating as true history. How much else has been destroyed over the years? And how much else is out there that might have escaped the Vatican’s relentless and single-minded pursuit of the heretical? No one can be certain.

 

BY THE FIFTH CENTURY A.D., the victory of the Jesus of faith over the Jesus of history was, in all practical matters, complete. The myth that the two are the same became theologically justified and as such an accepted truth. However, the protectors of orthodoxy could not rest, of course, because, like corrosion and decay, heresy, in their minds, never sleeps. They ruthlessly protected the faith by doing to other Christians what the pagan emperors had done previously. In A.D. 386 they executed Priscillian, bishop of Ávila, on the grounds of heresy. This was the first execution ordered by the Church in order to defend its position.

All roads may have led to Rome, but over the succeeding centuries, so did an increasing number of rivulets of blood. The price of theological unity was paid not just in gold—although that would always find a welcome home in the hands of the Church—but in lives as well.

Priscillian’s death was a tragic precedent. Sadly, it was to be oft repeated—all in the name of a Jewish messiah who preached peace.

JUDAEA, JESUS, AND CHRISTIANITY
Before 4 B.C.	Birth of Jesus, according to Matthew’s Gospel (2:1).
4 B.C.	Death of Herod the Great.
A.D. 6	Birth of Jesus, according to Luke’s Gospel (2:1–7). Census of Quirinius, Governor of Syria.
A.D. 27–28	Baptism of Jesus (traditional date) in the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius (Luke 3:1–23).
A.D. 30	Crucifixion of Jesus, according to Catholic scholarship.
c. A.D. 35	Following the marriage of Herod Antipas and Herodias in c. A.D. 34, John the Baptist is executed, following the evidence in Josephus.
A.D. 36	Passover—crucifixion of Jesus, according to Matthew’s timetable.
A.D. 36–37	Conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus.
c. A.D. 44	Execution of James, the brother of Jesus.
A.D. 50–52	Paul in Corinth. Writes his first letter (to the Thessalonians).
A.D. 61	Paul in Rome under house arrest.
c. A.D. 65	Paul supposedly executed.
A.D. 66–73	War in Judaea. The Roman army under Vespasian invades Judaea.
c. A.D. 55–120	Life of Tacitus, Roman historian and senator, who mentions Christ.
c. A.D. 61–c. 114	Life of Pliny the Younger, who mentions Christ.
c. A.D. 115	Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, quotes from letters of Paul.
c. A.D. 117–138	Suetonius, Roman historian, mentions “Chrestus.”
c. A.D. 125	Earliest known example of a Christian gospel, John 18: 31–33, Rylands Papyrus, found in Egypt.
c. A.D. 200——	Oldest known fragment of Paul’s letters, Chester Beatty Papyrus, found in Egypt.
c. A.D. 200——	Oldest virtually complete gospel (John’s), Bodmer Papyrus, found in Egypt.
A.D. 325	Council of Nicaea is convened by the Roman emperor Constantine. The divinity of Jesus is made official dogma by a vote of 217 to 3.
A.D. 393–397	Council of Hippo, formalizing the New Testament, is finalized at Council of Carthage.

 

THE THIRD TO FIFTH CENTURIES
A.D. 250	Christians are persecuted under the Roman emperor Decius, beginning with the execution of Bishop Fabian of Rome.
A.D. 254–257	Reign of Pope Stephen I, the first bishop of Rome to claim Rome’s primacy over all other Christian bishops owing to the succession from the apostle Peter.
A.D. 258	The Roman emperor Valerian orders the execution of all Christian clergy.
A.D. 303	The beginning of the persecution of Christians by the Roman emperor Diocletian will be followed by widespread deaths and destruction.
A.D. 313	Edict of Milan by the Roman emperor Constantine declares religious freedom for all Christians.
A.D. 324	Emperor Constantine makes Constantinople (now Istanbul) the capital of the Roman empire. All administrative records are based there.
A.D. 337	Emperor Constantine dies.
A.D. 366–384	Pope Damasus I terms Rome “the apostolic see”—the only place that can claim a continuous descent from the apostles. Orders his secretary, Jerome, to revise the text of the Bible.
A.D. 367	Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, declares that all “noncanonical” books in Egypt be destroyed.
A.D. 386	Priscillian, bishop of Ávila, Spain, is executed for heresy, the first such execution ordered because of heresy against Church doctrine.
A.D. 390	An army of Gauls lays siege to and destroys much of Rome.
A.D. 401–417	Pope Innocent I establishes the claim that Rome has supreme authority in the Christian Church.
A.D. 410	The Visigoths sack and destroy Rome.
A.D. 440–461	Pope Leo I formally establishes the primacy of Rome on the basis of the inherited authority of the apostle Peter and the concept of the pope as the “mystical embodiment” of Peter.

How far had the faith fallen into the hands of the self-proclaimed heirs of Christ? The popes of Rome later took it upon themselves to ritually anoint the emperors into their exalted office as part of the ceremony of coronation, as if a pope should have the power to create a messiah. As if they alone had a monopoly over the pathway to truth.