5

Why Jesus Never Talked about Farming

“MIKE … MIKE … MIKE! Wake up,” said my wife Diane.

“Whaaa … I … I’m not sleeping. Just thinking with my eyes closed.”

“Looked like sleeping to me.”

“Well, maybe I sort of was.” In fact, I didn’t have a thought in my mind. But a mood, yes, definitely a mood—a mood of peace and goodness, as I sat alone in one of the front pews of Notre Dame des Doms, the twelfth-century cathedral that stands beside the Palais des Papes, on the shoulder of the highest hill in Avignon, France, where we’d been living the past two months during a sabbatical. I rubbed my neck. A touch stiff. Maybe I really had nodded off. But it felt like I’d been pulled out of some special zone of consciousness, not sleep exactly. A gentle place between all other states of mind is the best I can describe it.

“Come on. The kids are outside. We’ve been waiting there for five minutes at least. We thought you’d gone out already.”

“Oh, sorry, sorry. Okay. I’m coming now.”

I stood up and stretched. My eye fastened momentarily on the small golden cross in front. The Avignon cathedral is rather small, as cathedrals go, so it seemed appropriate that the cross is not a large one. It’s rather dark inside, too, but the cross’s gold seemed to glow with its own light out of the gloom.

We emerged from the cathedral, blinking, into full sunlight blazing from the blue. Sam and Eleanor were chatting away, soaking each other up like the sunlight, enjoying Sam’s visit from the United States, where he continued in graduate school while we were living in Avignon. They were standing beside the huge statue of Jesus’s crucifixion that stands just outside the Notre Dame des Doms’s front door, dark iron spikes poking through his white marble hands and feet, an iron rendition of the crown of thorns on his marble head.

“Hey, where were you? We looked all over.”

“Oh, just sitting inside, thinking. But I guess the thinking turned into a bit of sleep-sitting!”

They laughed, and went back to their conversation, Diane joining in with them now. I was still feeling a bit dazed and retreated into my own thoughts. I looked up at Jesus, hanging here. It’s a powerful statue, especially viewed from its base, tracing with your eye the marble’s reach into a high sky. I took out my camera and clicked off several pictures, trying to get the best angle. But I couldn’t get the whole statue into the frame from where we stood. I tried several different positions and then abandoned the effort. It just wouldn’t fit. Plus my neck was getting stiff again, this time from stretching up instead of down.

It’s not easy to fit Jesus into any frame. His story is profound, as profound as any. So are its contradictions. So are ours.

Dick Thompson was one of the most impressive people that I, and many others, have ever met.1 Over the years, some ten thousand or so people came to visit him and his family on their cattle and grain farm just outside Boone, Iowa. (At least that’s how many signed the farm’s visitors books.) They came to see and hear about the remarkable transformation that he and his wife Sharon Thompson undertook on their three hundred acres—a small place by the standards of central Iowa, where one- to two-thousand-acre farms are more the norm for grain production. In 1968, they abandoned the big-chemical, big-iron way of farming that focuses on yields, yields, and yields, with little regard for any other consequence. They adopted and concocted other techniques for ensuring weed control, nutrient availability, and soil that didn’t pour off the farm and into the creek—techniques like long crop rotations, cover crops, integrated animal and crop agriculture, and a little-used form of cultivation called ridge tilling.

Though lots of other farmers have since picked up on these ideas and developed them further, few people used them then. Dick and Sharon never held back what they had learned. Rather, they worked with other farmers to do their own comparative research on how to perfect these and many other techniques. At the time, what Dick and Sharon came up with didn’t really have a name. Today we call approaches like this “sustainable agriculture,” “agroecology,” and “organic agriculture.” Actually, Dick and Sharon deliberately never certified their farm as organic, believing that a farmer should be able to use chemicals as an occasional tool if things get out of hand. (After 1968, that happened only once on Dick and Sharon’s farm.) Plus they felt that they should be able to make a good living on three hundred acres without the price bump that comes from being certified organic—and without farm subsidies, which they refused to accept. And they did make a good living, maintaining a modest, tidy, comfortable home. They liked to call their approach “practical agriculture” and, in 1985, they helped set up an organization of like-minded farmers called Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI). Dick was the first president. With twenty-five hundred members, PFI is still going strong.

Dick did most of the talking when people came to visit the farm. Sharon was a bit shy. Dick was the public figure. And he would say to anyone who asked—he usually didn’t offer this up without a direction question—that it was not him and Sharon who were behind these remarkable changes. It was, they felt, Jesus.

Rates of religiosity are quite high among America’s farmers, almost all of whom are Christians. With few exceptions, America’s true pagans—that is to say, America’s country people—are no longer pagans. But not many have as powerful a story as Dick of what I’ll be arguing is a fundamentally urban, bourgeois conception of the divine. In the estimation of believers, that conception centers on a god of the good—a god who provides a difference conscience, a natural conscience, a conscience beyond desire and its conflicts and politics. In the late 1990s, I heard of the impact of this conscience while sitting in Dick and Sharon’s machine shed with about another seventy-five people, come to hear the story of their farm’s transformation.

Dick had just given us a half-hour overview of their farming techniques, including a few handmade charts and a visit to the ridge-till planter at the far end of the barn, his handheld microphone snaking over there on a long cable. Now we were back in our plastic folding chairs. Q and A time. Someone asked how it was that he and Sharon came to change their farm practices, especially given that all their neighbors were continuing their big, bigger, biggest ways.

“Now this is something that is hard to be explained,” Dick said, his voice dropping and his microphone lowering. “I’ve never done this before at a field day.”2

We in the crowd exchanged looks. Where was Dick going with this?

“In January of 1968, while chopping stalks in field number six, going north, I was—” Dick’s voice trailed off. Then he looked up, raising microphone and voice. “I’d had it. All the work. The pigs were sick. My cattle were sick. I hollered ‘help.’ That’s about the only way I know how to explain this. But some things started to happen.”

He paused again. This was hard.

“And a lot of things that happened seem to happen early in the morning. That thoughts come into my mind that I know that are not mine.”

Dick later told me about this in more detail, one on one, when I didn’t have a recorder with me. One early morning in 1968, out in the pasture, he said he heard one of his cows talking to him, without sound, straight into his mind. He could only understand it as being the voice of the divine. But he didn’t mention the soundless voice of the cow to the crowd in the shed. Too much.

“So I want to share this,” he continued to the crowd. “The creator wants to put a receiver, a still small voice, way down deep inside each one of us, for communication. It’s our choice. It’s not forced on us. If you want it, you can have it. If man can send pictures through the air to our TV, in our houses, and if man can send voices through the air from one cell phone to another, it shouldn’t be too hard to understand how the maker of mankind can do the same, and much more. A personal communication. No hackers. No one to hone in. There’s much that’s new about the Internet and the World Wide Web, and all this information. That’s good. It can be confusing. But I want you to remember that the Internet is a tool, not the toolbox. It’s not the source. Don’t let WWW be a substitute for the still, small voice.”

Dick and Sharon used to put out a two-hundred-page report about their farm, which they would update every year. They called it Alternatives in Agriculture. Right in the first chapter they explained their experience of the still, small voice this way:

The real change started taking place in 1967, when we began learning about the Holy Spirit. This is when Dick realized that he was caught up with things, building a kingdom with sheds, silos, cement floors and more land. Enough was never enough. We were to the place where we were looking for something better. The livestock were always sick with one disease or another. Sickness was the rule and health was the exception. A word came to us in a supernatural way, through the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the word being that God was going to teach us how to farm.3

Caught up in things. Enough was never enough. Sickness, and most fundamentally a sickness of craving more and more. God was going to teach them another way to farm, a way that was unforced, unhacked, and unhooked from the treadmills of desire.

But Jesus, the Good Shepherd, never talked about farming.

There seems little reason to doubt that Jesus was a historical figure.4 We have a couple of independent Roman accounts—the works of the early historians Josephus and Tacitus—from a half century or so after he likely lived. They give just short, offhand mentions, not the panegyrics of advocates (although part of Josephus’s discussion was clearly later supplemented by an overeager Christian scribe).⁵ Josephus and Tacitus mention Jesus without fanfare, and move on. Maybe they thought Jesus unimportant, at least in those still-early years of the growth of Christianity. Maybe they were worried by Jesus’s followers and didn’t want to give the movement much credit. (Tacitus’s writings make it plain that he was not a fan of Christians.) Nonetheless, they seem to have felt obligated, as historians, to at least note in passing “Jesus, who was called Christ,” in the words of Josephus.⁶

Rather more far-fetched evidence are several ossuaries—stone boxes for the bones of the dead, typical of Jewish burials during the first century CE—inscribed with “Jesus son of Joseph,” “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus,” and “Judah son of Jesus.” The ossuaries seem real enough, but debate shouts about whether recent forgers chiseled in new inscriptions and whether Jesus could have had a son.⁷ Others question whether we can find much significance here even if the inscriptions are as old as the ossuaries, given how common all these names were. Jesus is a variant of Joshua—or, more accurately, Yeshua is a variant of Yehoshua, which is how Jesus and Joshua would have been pronounced at the time. Lots of people back then had these names.

To the sociologist and historian, the authenticity of the ossuaries and the brevity of Josephus and Tacitus hardly matters. We have more solid evidence from the plain fact that accounts of a man named Jesus (or Yeshua) spurred a vast and varied religious literature. At the core of that literature stands the New Testament of the Christian Bible.⁸ But we also have many early religious writings about Jesus that didn’t make it into the Christian canon. (I’ll discuss some of them in the next chapter.) This corpus is filled with inconsistencies and disagreements, to the puzzlement of many a Christian and to the delight of many a Christian detractor.⁹ Many of the details seem messy and awkward, like Mary becoming pregnant with Jesus before marrying her husband Joseph.¹⁰ It just doesn’t read like a carefully crafted setup job. It reads like somebody named Jesus, with a real history of circumstance and happenstance, had a big impact on his contemporaries.

But evidently his impact was not due to what he said about farming and the challenges of rural life. At least, those aren’t the bits of his life and sayings that anyone at the time took much notice of, or anyone later bothered to write down, if he indeed spoke about them. Take the four books of the Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Jesus basically never discusses farming, neither its ecological challenges nor its social and economic rhythms. The word “farmer” doesn’t even appear in the Gospels.11

Jesus does, however, draw extensively on agricultural themes as a source of metaphors—as a source of earthy truths that his audience would readily understand. For example, Jesus often uses the metaphor of shepherd and flock. The word “shepherd” occurs seventeen times in the Gospels, as when Jesus proclaims in John that “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”¹² Also in John, Jesus declares that “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower.”¹³ Many of Jesus’s parables, like the Parable of the Sower, use agricultural metaphors.¹⁴ The Gospels also sometimes combine agricultural metaphors, as in this passage in Matthew that moves quickly from Jesus as shepherd to the work of the church as harvesting:

When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”¹⁵

These are beautiful lines, but they do not discuss agriculture and sustenance needs themselves. The Gospels proclaim that Jesus has a mission to change things that aren’t right. But that mission does not include a reformulation of agriculture and its social and ecological relations. He proposes no new agricultural festivals. He does not lament mistreatment of animals. He offers no explanation for the great agrarian questions of why the rains have not come and pests and diseases have. He does not critique Judeans for insufficient attention to stewardship of the land. He does not comment on the shmita, and he does not seem to regard Passover—a central event in his life, for the Last Supper was a Passover feast—as an agricultural holiday. He often quotes the Old Testament, but not the agricultural and ecological passages, and he offers no new grand agricultural and ecological stories, like the Garden of Eden or Noah’s flood.

Indeed, Jesus even advises people to abandon farming and follow him instead. “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back,” Jesus tells a man he meets on the road between villages, “is fit for the kingdom of God.”16 Abandon the fields, Jesus proclaims.¹⁷ Believe in me and you will be fed, for “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”¹⁸ As he tells his disciples, “do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing.… Instead, strive for [God’s] kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well.”¹⁹

Be fed by faith. That would be hard advice for a peasant to swallow, if I may put it that way, at least without a radical and difficult reconfiguration of his or her life.

A radical and difficult reconfiguration of life is exactly what Jesus was asking for. Jesus’s message was not merely spiritual. It was also social and political. Although widely revered as standing apart from the social and political, Jesus demanded a reordering of human interaction and the institutions that pattern it, proclaiming that spiritual fulfillment was not possible without major change in how people get along. What made such change difficult was exactly the principle source of the troubles: the Roman Empire and the motivations that fueled it.

The scholar trying to understand the context of Christianity must take into account the timing and setting of the appearance of a figure like Jesus.²⁰ The area the Romans called the Province of Judea was a constant source of turmoil, struggle, and imperial irritation. The Romans had grabbed control of the area in 63 BCE during a civil war between the sons of Queen Salome Alexandra, the last great monarch of the Hasmonean Dynasty. After a millennium-long struggle against the various larger empires washing over it from all sides, the Jews had finally achieved their own state again, ruled by the Hasmoneans—until Rome ended that, as I described in the previous chapter. Nevertheless, the Jews remained fiercely nationalistic, and retained their commitment to their distinctive religious tradition, centered on the Temple, God’s house, in Jerusalem.

The Romans first tried ruling the region with a Hasmonean puppet, Hyrcanus II, while giving the real power to a man named Antipater, who had helped the Romans take control of Judea.²¹ The politics got messy when Caesar was murdered in 44 BCE. Antipater was murdered the next year, poisoned by one of Hyrcanus’s cupbearers. But in the chaotic aftermath, it was actually one of Antipater’s sons who wound up on top: Herod, one of history’s most ruthless and extravagant monarchs. Herod had managed to sneak away to Rome where he presented himself to the Senate, swearing allegiance to the empire. The Romans knew they had their man and proclaimed him king of the Jews in 40 BCE. And so he was, at least in name, until 4 BCE.22

Herod pretty much immediately set about clearing the decks of the remaining Hasmonean nobility, cleverly claiming to align himself with them before finding each individually guilty of some capital offense. Herod also set about on a massive building campaign, fueled by equally massive tax increases. He built a gorgeous new seaside capital, Caesarea Maritima, named to honor his Roman patrons, including a lavish palace. (The remains are now a popular Israeli national park.) He was more than a bit paranoid, though. So he also ordered the building of two remarkable fortresses, in case of need: the Herodium and the plateau-top fortress of Masada. Herod planned the former to double as his mausoleum. He had it erected on a huge artificial hill, making the Herodium to this day the highest point in the Judean desert. It was basically a kind of pyramid topped by a fortress. But what a fortress: inside were a bath complex, banquet halls, courtyards, and a 450-seat theater, all guarded with a massive wall and four security towers, each seven stories high. Masada—later the site of a tragic Roman siege of a party of radical Jews during the Jewish Revolt some seventy-five years after Herod’s death—was another staggering feat of ancient engineering. Herod ordered it built on top of a mesa surrounded by cliffs up to thirteen hundred feet high, making it nearly inaccessible. Herod edged the top with a thirteen-foot-high wall, fortified its access paths, and erected barracks, storerooms, administration buildings, cisterns, a bathhouse, and two palaces.

Needless to say, with such self-centered and expensive excesses, Herod was not a widely liked monarch, especially among the common people of Judea. So Herod also set about on a more popular project: a massive expansion of the Temple in Jerusalem, the temple that Jews refer to as the Second Temple, which had been built when Cyrus the Great gave the Jewish elite permission to leave Babylon and return to Judea. By the time Herod got done with it, the Second Temple was virtually an entirely new building, often referred to by historians as the Herodian Temple. It didn’t last long, though. The Romans leveled it in 70 CE during the Jewish Revolt, leaving only the huge platform on which it was built, including the supporting wall that Jews today call the Wailing Wall, now widely considered the holiest place in Judaism. The site is also widely revered as the third holiest place in Islam, commemorated by the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, from which Muslims hold that the prophet Muhammad ascended to Heaven one evening to meet with God and the earlier prophets.

In rebuilding the Second Temple, Herod was doing more than wowing the masses with grand architecture. He was also following a basic formula of the day: a strong centralized state needs a strong centralized religion. Not everyone appreciated this formula, though. There was much about such an imagination of governance, as well as such an imagination of the divine, that didn’t fit with the dreams and experience of people in their daily lives.

But before we get to that, let me describe another set of tensions that had emerged in those dreams and in that experience.

Around 700 BCE, or possibly a bit earlier, the Kingdom of Aegina, a small Mediterranean island south of Greece, hit upon an amazing and transformative idea: minted money. Stamped with a turtle, the drachma of Aegina was the first true coin ever produced, as far as we know. Initially the idea spread slowly, turtle-like. Then around 600 BCE, the Lydians produced their own coin, stamped with the head of a lion, and the idea soon roared across the kingdoms and empires of the world.

Earlier, people had mainly traded or paid taxes using commodities.23 Recall those three annual Old Testament harvest festivals, when a man from every household was expected to head to Jerusalem for celebration and sacrifice—which meant bringing the products of the harvest into that central institution of the state, the central temple. Today, we don’t think of harvest festivals like Thanksgiving as an exercise in paying taxes, but that is, in large measure, what they were for agrarian civilizations. The trouble is a chicken or a goat doesn’t store very easily. They have to be housed, fed, and bred to last. A bag of wheat does better in a well-maintained granary, but still not longer than a few years, and it can easily spoil if it isn’t stored properly. Commodity-based trade and tax collecting made it hard to amass wealth because the riches could easily either die on you or just rot away.

Plus there were troubles with standardizing weights and volumes of commodities, and debating what and how much of any commodity was equivalent to another. You could easily get cheated. People started using stable commodities of known volumes or weights, like a shekel of silver—which was about eleven grams. That was better, but it was hard to know if the shekel being offered to you really was silver, and if it really was eleven grams. The minted coin took away much of the uncertainty by backing up the unit of money with a royal imprint, making it easier for people to treat the metal in the coin as actually being what it purported to be. Not everyone had access to a mint, after all, so it wasn’t easy to counterfeit coins by mixing in lower value metals and stamping them with unauthorized images of the king’s head or symbol. Plus coins were indeed very convenient, and you could make change, vastly easing commercial transactions. You no longer had to trade things. You could just sell them.

A few centuries earlier than the rise of minted money, the Phoenicians hit on another amazingly transformative idea: the alphabet. Dozens of other societies in the Iron Age soon made their own versions, generally based on the Phoenician model. Now you only had to learn a couple of dozen signs to be able to read and write, instead of thousands of hieroglyphics or hundreds of cuneiform signs. And other societies came up with nonalphabetic writing improvements, such as the Demotic script for writing Egyptian hieroglyphics.24 Easier reading and writing made for a greater spread in literacy, and thus better record keeping. Combined with the way coins made money more abstract and numeric, rather than a matter of commodity exchange, better record keeping in turn made it far easier to keep track of who owed how much to whom.

We are also, by this point, solidly in the Iron Age, which archaeologists date to about 1200 BCE, immediately after the Bronze Age collapse. People had figured out how to do iron smelting at least a thousand years earlier. But the early iron tools were actually softer than bronze ones. They were cheap to make, but wore out quickly. Eventually, though, smiths figured out that adding a bit of carbon turned iron to steel and made much stronger tools, including lighter weapons that really held an edge. That was the transformative change, not the use of iron itself. (Perhaps the Iron Age really should be termed the Steel Age.) So it became much easier to defend your riches and raid the riches of others.

Together, coins, better writing, and steel tools made it possible to concentrate wealth like never before—and not just for individuals. The state found it much easier to collect taxes, to record who had paid and who hadn’t, and to store up the results. It also made it easier to convince people to do the state’s bidding, through either enticing them or forcing them. With a stock of coins, the state could more easily pay people to build a new city wall or a new palace for the elites, or to fight in armies to defend those walls and palaces. Plus it takes arms and armor to make an army (armies being made up of those who are armed and armored), and cheaper, stronger, lighter arms and armor made it easier to compel people to do that building and to pay the taxes the state said they owed. And similarly the state could more easily entice and force people to carry out the wide range of tasks necessary to its structure and governance. Consequently, state power and the number of those who worked for it expanded considerably, allowing it to concentrate even more wealth. But not only state wealth. Much of what state power did was protect merchants and their commerce—as remains true today—which in turn built up more wealth for the state to tax.

Cities long predate coins, better writing, and steel tools, of course. But these technologies of inequality and the social formations that accompanied and grew along with them decisively changed urban life, and widened the gulf between the rural and the urban. Aristocrats like Herod were no longer the only ones living lavishly, as had been the case with the early cities of the Bronze Age. In contrast to the Iron Age cities of empires like Rome, archaeological excavations of Bronze Age cities generally show little spatial differentiation and segregation of housing size and type by wealth and class. Instead, the Mesopotamian archaeologists Elizabeth Stone and Paul Zimansky note, “group formation tends to be based on kinship, occupation, ethnicity, or some other non-class basis, with the result that all residential districts contain both elites and commoners” in a Bronze Age city.25 Similarly, in the early Iron Age cities of Israel—still a dominantly pagan and agrarian context—“differences of social class were not particularly marked by the architecture,” notes the biblical archaeologist Volkmar Fritz.²⁶

Of course, there was indeed inequality in these early cities. But rather than a pyramid of wealth distribution, such as is familiar to class society, it was more of a flagpole. The number of the elite was proportionately much smaller, and their spatial distribution was either largely confined to the temple and palace districts or distributed relatively evenly through the residential areas.

Yet in Iron Age cities, many more citizens found they too could gather together fortunes, “restlessly, endlessly,” as Horace put it in 20 BCE.²⁷ The middle classes expanded rapidly as well, through employment with the state and through trade. The archaeological record of Roman cities shows the change, with a wide variety of size and grandeur of housing types becoming the norm, from villas for the second assistant tax collector and the merchant whose ship had just come in to simpler houses for shopkeepers, potters, knife sharpeners, brewers, weavers, soldiers, masons, and more. As well, cities began to spatially divide into different districts for the rich, the poor, and the in-between.

Not only could you now more easily amass wealth, you could also lose it like never before. Instead of a group having to mount a raiding party to make off with your cattle or your grain stores, someone could just rob your wallet full of coins, at steel dagger point. Or someone could swindle away your money with some complex scheme you signed your name to on a piece of papyrus. It was a lot easier to make a large and foolish economic choice, get yourself in debt, and be stuck paying back loans at interest that you couldn’t afford, perhaps even requiring you to sell your land or even to sell yourself or a family member into slavery.28

Difference was rising along another axis too. Before the rise of social class, ancient agrarian civilizations saw little distinction in culture or kinship between rural and urban people. Pretty much everyone was at least a part-time farmer, whether or not their home lay in relative security within city walls. Cities were agrarian too. That is, they were mainly populated by farmers, albeit ones who likely had an economic sideline associated with urban life, such as a trade like pottery-making or leather goods. As the art historian Lothar von Falkenhausen notes concerning ancient Chinese agrarian cities, “there is no indication that they stood culturally apart from the surrounding rural areas, which were populated, as far as we know, by members of the same group that inhabited the urban sites.”²⁹

Indeed, it seems that many ancient civilizations did not even have a comparable word for the modern notion of a city as a place of high population density. The Yoruba of West Africa defined city—the ilú—by the location of the ruler’s palace.³⁰ Similarly, rather than a “city” in the modern sense, the Maya spoke of the cacab, meaning the area controlled by the ruler, including any densely populated districts as well as the countryside.³¹ For the most part, farming was the main employment of the population of both rural and urban areas. So ancient agrarian peoples saw little need to remark on what would later become not only a spatial category but also a social and economic category: whether or not one lived in a city.

But that homogeneity was changing. Through the workings of these three transformative ideas (coins, better writing, and steel) along these two axes of difference (richer and poorer within the city, and the general wealth of the city versus the general poverty of the countryside), the Iron Age cities of Rome and other empires of the time manifested a dramatic rise in social inequality. Cities were no longer agrarian, no longer population centers of farmers plus a few aristocrats and priests. They were becoming too big for that, and too differentiated for that. Cities were becoming bourgeois, the nexus points of both vertical and horizontal economic inequality.

It took a while for these gaps to develop. We start to see them in ancient Greek society, as chapter 3 describes. With Roman culture, though, bourgeois life expanded mightily, and social and economic gaps with them. People could see the wider gaps plainly, and it caused moral tensions for everyone. For the urban and rural poor, the question that probably occurred to pretty much everyone was this: Why should I give up the product of my hard work to support their villas, parties, and wars—except that I don’t have much choice? For those on the upside of bourgeois life, the moral issue was no less intense: What right do I have to be better off than all those complaining about my richer status?

After all the gilding was scraped away, it was increasingly hard to escape the same dirty answer: politics.

“Descendez, s’il vous plait, monsieur.”

Monsieur? Did she mean me? I was standing on a partially reconstructed wall at Glanum, a vast Roman archaeological site just south of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where Van Gogh had lived for a time in a sanatorium, and where he had painted some of his best-known paintings, including Starry Night. Glanum nestles at the base of the Alpilles Massif, and at one time was a small fortified city, famous for its sacred well. We had traveled down for the day from Avignon during my sabbatical there. At that moment, my daughter Eleanor lay down below, sprawled out in a glorious bed of wildflowers that had grown up in the ruins of one of the rooms of Glanum’s Roman bathhouse. The sun was shining, and so was everything else. Eleanor looked fit for a magazine cover, and I was trying to get a photo.

“C’est interdit,” the guard at the archaeological park continued. She looked me over. American, clearly. “It’s forbidden,” she repeated in English.

“Okay. Sorry. I’m done anyway.” I don’t have much French. “Excusez-moi,” I tried with a smile. The guard frowned back, but walked away after I jumped down. It was then I noticed the small sign in both French and English saying that you weren’t supposed to climb on the walls. Fair enough.

Glanum is definitely worth a visit, if one is ever in the area. The setting is spectacular, as are the ruins. Just outside of the town’s front gate a two-thousand-year-old triumphal arch still stands, as does a mausoleum that is even older and must be over fifty feet high. Both are in remarkably good shape. Proceed into the ancient town and, after passing the site’s museum and ticket office, a huge expanse of excavated area opens up, mainly along the main street where the shops would have been, with villas immediately behind on both sides. If you keep going up the main street, you’ll come to a bathhouse, the market place, the sacred well, the forum, and the famous “twin temples,” a few Corinthian columns of which yet remain. It’s a vast site.

But what really caught my eye at Glanum is the spatial layout of the residences for the townsfolk. In the center, safely within the walls, are the villas, each built as a two-story square of buildings surrounding a courtyard, or in some cases two adjoining squares with two courtyards. Only the bases of the walls remain, but there is clear evidence that the villas had running water, with several ruined fountains and drain openings in the courtyards. An upper-middle-class person today would have found any one of these villas spacious and comfortable.32

Keep going up the main street, though, out through the back gate in the southern rampart, the more humble entrance to Glanum. There, just outside the city wall, are the ruins of a small sacred spring (not to be confused with the sacred well inside the walls) and a couple of tiny temples, cheek by jowl on the left-hand side. And even more cheek by jowl on the right are the ruins of a series of tiny houses built into the side of the hill, with little twisting passageways and stairways to get to one or the other. No courtyards here. No fountains. No drains.

If you could, it would be instructive to proceed farther down the old main street through what used to be the second southern gate, out into the countryside. But you’ll just have to look at the lovely miniature reconstruction of the full landscape setting of Glanum in the site’s museum, or to look at the excellent relief map of the site, which includes little drawings of all the buildings. There are no nearby ruins of rural Roman homes to visit—but not because there weren’t any. Rather, Roman rural houses were mostly scattered small huts and shacks, although some of the wealthy maintained sumptuous villas and estates in the countryside, like that of Horace.³³ Archaeologists can find evidence of these huts and shacks, but their traces are now mainly reduced to a few stones and discolorations in the soil. They aren’t the kind of thing most people would pay €9.50 a ticket to see.³⁴

All evidence of that widespread characteristic of Roman society: the bourgeois life of social class and rural-urban differences.

What did the rise of bourgeois life in the empires of the Iron Age mean for religion in the Middle East? Although some people benefited from the rise in social inequality, many did not. That’s what we mean by a rise in social inequality, after all: gains are not evenly distributed. The new social order that went with the new economy and the politics behind it clearly troubled a Jewish man who was probably born in 4 BCE, the same year that Herod died: Jesus of Nazareth.35 (The monk who established the starting point of the Common Era, thinking it to be the birth year of Jesus, made a calculation error.)

The politics remained pretty intense after Herod’s death. But eventually things settled a bit through the institution of the Tetrarchy: a division of Herod’s kingdom into three parts (despite the four implied by the prefix tetra-), one for each of his sons, all of them confusingly also named Herod. The biggest chunk went to Herod Archelaus, who got Judea, Samaria, and Idumea. Herod Antipas got Galilee and a stretch of land just north of the Dead Sea called Perea, which was actually not contiguous with Galilee. The third brother, Herod Phillip, got the land in between Galilee and Perea—the Golan Heights and the area behind it to the northeast.

Rome wasn’t too happy with the job Herod Archelaus did, though. After a few years, they removed him and reorganized his area as a Roman province, meaning it would be run by a governor sent from Rome, not a local king. The Romans called it the Province of Judea, even though it also included Samaria and Idumea.³⁶

Thus Jesus, although a Jew, was not actually raised in Judea, the ancient heartland of the Jewish people. He was supposedly born there, in the Judean town of Bethlehem—or so some of the Gospels recount. But he was not raised there. His parents had been living in Nazareth, a midsized town in Galilee, but they traveled to Bethlehem for his birth, later returning to Nazareth.³⁷ Because of the Tetrarchy, Galilee at that time was part of a separate, although largely Jewish, kingdom. Rome was a mighty influence on the government of Galilee, and Herod Antipas had to rule with Rome very much in mind, but Rome did not govern the area directly.

Consequently, Galilee enjoyed a measure of political remove from Rome. Plus Galilee is a rough and rocky area, with many mountains. Its rugged topography gave it some additional physical separation from Judea, and thus from Rome as well—which made Galilee an apt place to try to organize a Jewish resistance movement against the Roman Empire and the ways of life the empire encouraged.³⁸ Since the local people were mainly Jews, they were no doubt plenty upset that the Romans had politically separated them from the Temple back in Judea’s capital, Jerusalem, the focal point of their sense of faith and nation. And yet they were nicely sheltered by geography and political lines from the great eye and hand of Rome.

Was Jesus, then, the leader of a Jewish nationalist movement, bent on recovering the Jewish state and shaking off Roman control? It seems pretty plain that, however Jesus understood his message, many of his followers and detractors saw him that way: a Jewish leader of a Jewish movement in a time of Jewish oppression. “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?” ask the three wise men from the east at his birth.39 Yes, that phrase could be understood as meaning the theological king of the Jews, and not the political king of the Jews. Okay, sure. But more likely, that potential second reading was something of a cover for the nationalist dimension of what historians sometimes term the “Jesus movement.”⁴⁰ (Historians call it that because Christianity did not then exist, and all of Jesus’s contemporary followers were Jews, just as Jesus was a Jew.) At least the writers of the Gospels seem very intent on not giving a definitive answer to the question of whether Jesus is king of the Jews, whether understood politically or theologically. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all report Jesus himself as refusing to answer one way or the other.⁴¹

Yet the Gospels are also quite intent on establishing that Jesus was descended from the house of David, the traditional line of the Jewish monarchy.⁴² Routinely, the Gospels report local people calling Jesus the “Son of David.” As well, the Old Testament reports King David as coming from Bethlehem, and predicts that the Messiah—the Jewish king who is supposed to usher in an age of world peace and harmony at the end of time—will also come from Bethlehem. It is a central tenet of Christianity, of course, that Jesus is the Messiah, fulfilling this passage from Micah:

But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah,

who are one of the little clans of Judah,

from you shall come forth for me

one who is to rule in Israel,

whose origin is from of old, from ancient days …

he shall be great

to the ends of the earth;

and he shall be the one of peace.⁴³

Many have speculated that this is why Matthew and Luke report Jesus as being born in Bethlehem, based on what skeptics even in New Testament times found to be an awkward and inconsistent story.⁴⁴ Skeptics also like to point to another awkwardness. Jesus’s claim to descent from David is via his father “Joseph, of the house of David,” as Luke describes him.⁴⁵ But the Gospels famously describe Jesus’s father as actually being God, not Joseph. Direct descent from God would appear to preclude direct descent from David. Of course, his descent from David could be via his mother Mary. But Mary is never described in the Gospels as being of the house of David—only Joseph.

Whatever the actual history, this much is sure: the Gospels clearly want to make the case for Jesus’s descent from the Jewish royal house, thus amplifying the image of him as a rightful national leader.

Plus the whole arc of Jesus’s life reads as a steadily building confrontation with Rome, from the swelling crowds that follow him in small Galilean towns and villages to his eventual crossing into Judea and entrance into Jerusalem, with all the tragic events that took place there, leading up to his crucifixion. As the sociologist Reza Aslan notes in his much discussed book about Jesus, the Romans used to reserve the punishment of crucifixion for political crimes.46 Again, however Jesus saw himself, it is clear that a good many others understood him as a nationalist figure.

But it was not only the nationalist implications of his teachings that attracted so many followers. It was also how Jesus articulated what the moral problems were with the current Roman social order.

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal.⁴⁷

No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.⁴⁸

If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.⁴⁹

… [I]t is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.⁵⁰

These quotes are all from the Gospel of Matthew, and the first two are from the famous Sermon on the Mount, one of history’s most vigorous complaints about the troubles of economic inequality. These are hard-hitting lines. You can’t take it with you. Sell all your possessions. Besides, it’s basically impossible for a rich person to be part of God’s kingdom. All three of the first Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke, what are often called the “synoptic Gospels” because of their similarities—are quite critical of economic inequality, especially Matthew and Luke. The camel and eye of the needle line shows up in all three of them.51 All three similarly report Jesus advising people to sell all they own and give it to the poor.⁵² The Gospel of John doesn’t bother much with direct critique of inequality, but is very keen to emphasize Jesus’s own humble background. “How does this man have such learning, when he has never been taught?” John reports Jews as wondering about Jesus, implying that he was not even literate. John also describes Jesus as entering Jerusalem on a young donkey, as opposed to a horse, and as washing others’ feet—a deep statement of humility in the culture of that time, usually associated with the lowest of the low.⁵³

Doubt about the morality of wealth and inequality has ever since been a central theme of Christianity. Here is the well-spring of monastic vows of poverty and other forms of Christian asceticism. Here is the touchstone of St. Augustine’s concern about the “lust for domination” and the problem of desire.⁵⁴ The Gospels also report Jesus as having a fair bit to say about desire in the sexual sense. He strongly inveighs several times against adultery, and he is plainly against divorce. But his greater concern—at least in terms of number of times and ways he speaks about it—is the problem of desire for material gain.

This is a different kind of teaching for sure, a different kind of teaching for a different time. The early books of the Hebrew Bible show almost no concern about wealth accumulation. That concern does make increasing appearance in some of the later books, in tune with the steady rise of class differences and urban and rural differences as cities grew in size and wealth. But it doesn’t hit with anything like the force of Jesus’s sharp words on the subject—words that evidently resonated strongly with his audience of Jews suffering under the lash of the Roman Empire. A new vision of evil was plainly growing in people’s minds, waiting to be articulated by a powerful voice. Disloyalty—horizontal evil, the problem of maintaining the integrity of the group—was still a great concern, and I’ll have more to say about that in a moment. Desire—vertical evil, the problem of maintaining the integrity of each self—was now equally plain as a great issue for human society, and perhaps even the greater one.

Jesus, or the writers of the Gospels, evidently had noticed that the Ten Commandments don’t exactly put it that way. The ten Mosaic laws foremost stress loyalty to the god of the group and the group of the god, and put the five more desire-oriented commandments further down the list, as I discussed in chapter 4. But the Gospels recount Jesus as completely skipping the first four when asked about the commandments—the four that are most strongly about loyalty to the group and the group’s god. Here’s the relevant passage in Mark.55

As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.’ ”

If order indicates priority, the injunction against murder is now the top commandment (as my daughter thought it should be). Jesus does retain one of the loyalty commandments, number five, about honoring one’s father and mother, listed last here. And he also adds a sixth commandment, placed in the fifth position, about not defrauding—another statement of the vertical problem of desire. Jesus drops entirely the injunctions about no other god before me, no idols, no taking the Lord’s name in vain, and remembering the Sabbath day. He doesn’t specifically reject them. He just passes over them.

The Gospels of Luke and Matthew contain similar passages that list just five or six commandments, focused on issues of desire.⁵⁶ And in Matthew the parallel passage makes a striking addition at the end of the list: that “also, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Here is a version of the famous “golden rule,” a powerful statement about controlling one’s hierarchical desires. A little later on in Matthew, Jesus gets it down to just two commandments.⁵⁷

“ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Here we find a repeat of the anti-desire, anti-hierarchy golden rule about loving one’s neighbor as oneself. But now Jesus gives primary footing to loving “your God,” a mighty command for loyalty to the God to whom you belong.

Is concern for loyalty, then, actually number one for Jesus? Perhaps. Yet overall Jesus gives a lot more attention to the problem of desire than did the Hebrew Bible. A case could be made that he is actually giving equal priority to addressing both disloyalty and desire. The “second is like” the first, he says, and maybe the message here is that each of the two commandments supports the other. Anti-desire prevents discord of one person against another, helping prevent the group from splitting apart. And mutual loyalty to the group gives a person confidence that one’s fair treatment of another will be returned in kind. It’s an interactive matter. If you treat someone well, there is a better chance they will be loyal to you—and vice versa.

Whether or not Jesus and the Gospels intended this message, on the whole such an interactive materiality is a pretty decent way to lead your life.58

It’s also a pretty good recipe for running a powerful social movement. Jesus is rather top-down about it, though—even authoritarian. He demands loyalty, telling his followers to “make disciples of all nations” and to teach them “to obey everything that I have commanded you.”⁵⁹ And Jesus can be rather threatening about disloyalty, too, saying, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever disobeys the Son will not see life, but must endure God’s wrath.”⁶⁰ But alongside this obey theme is a theme of abundance for his followers—“fed by faith,” as I put it earlier—appealing to people’s material needs. Take the miracles of the loaves and fishes. First, he feeds five thousand people with just five loaves and two fishes, breaking them into small pieces and having his disciplines distribute them to the crowd.⁶¹ Then shortly afterward he does it again, almost as efficiently, this time feeding four thousand people with seven loaves “and a few small fish.”⁶² This is therefore clearly someone worth following, the Gospels suggest, even to very radical ends.

Yet at the same time that the Jesus movement had radical ambitions, it also had conservative concerns. I’ve already described the concerns about the justice of class hierarchy. But class isn’t only a matter of how wealthy you are. It’s also a matter of what social ties you have, and what social ties you can safely reject. Class is as much about the kind of claims of obligation you can make on others, and the ability to ignore some claims of obligation others might request or expect of you. Think of the resumes and letters of reference of today. Credentials and a good word from a teacher mattered a lot in early class societies too, and represented claims made and—for those who didn’t get the position—claims denied. In pagan, kinship-based society, claims of obligation flow along lines of kin and clan, not credentials and references. Your kin lines are your bank account in times of trouble, just as you are part of the bank account of help for others of your kin when they in turn have need. So kin can be a mighty help. But also a mighty hindrance. Family obligation has long been two-edged. When you don’t have much else to rely on, though, you go with it, despite the second edge.

Increasingly, some people found they did not have to rely on family ties, or at least not so much. Class-based ties have long been in tension with kin-based ties, as they remain today, even in settings where nuclear family structures dominate. For people in the countryside, where the Jesus movement began, that tension no doubt rankled those who found their expectations of mutual aid disrupted by class’s increasing power—perhaps even expectations for aid from close family members who had found a way to start climbing the ladder of class, in place of carrying assistance back and forth along the footbridge of kinship. Class disrupts kinship. That’s part of its point.

There’s something else that powerfully disrupts our lines of obligation and expectation: sex. It has long been the case that we experience sexual union as more than a pleasure of intimate communion with another—or find ourselves constrained to experience it as more than that. For there is commonly much resistance to the redrawing of social ties and boundaries that intimate pleasures so often imply. Does it have to be that way? Maybe not.63 But sex’s compulsions have long proved a fruitful way to get others to accept constraints, applying the simple maxim that disallowing some sex allows other sex. Here’s how you can have sex, we say in effect: by honoring a particular set of social obligations. And don’t tangle the whole complicated web by crossing the lines. Don’t commit adultery. Don’t violate the calculations of financial exchange and mutual obligation that others have made through arranging your marital match. Don’t mess up the deal. Honor your father and your mother, and all they represent concerning your and their kin and livelihood. And therefore expect that any children—a common outcome of sex, after all—will do the same for you.⁶⁴

Of course, people have long routinely ignored sexual injunctions and what they mean for our social abilities and disabilities. Sometimes they have done so for love. Sometimes they have done so for lust. Sometimes they have done so because they saw some social or financial gain in the scrambling of the lines of obligation and expectation—always a delicate matter, and one that oft goes awry. And perhaps most usually, all three motives have often been at work in some combination or another. However, the point is, like class, sex has enormous disruptive power for social life, sometimes creative and sometimes destructive, largely depending on where you stand and therefore on your point of view and nexus of needs. Sex too is a political act.

The disruptions presented by sex and class interwove in ancient times, as they continue to do today. By challenging kinship and its lines of obligation and expectation, the rise of social class revolutionized sex and its intimate politics. Sex, after all, is central to kinship. By revolutionizing sex, bourgeois life gave kin-based society a second political challenge, equal to, and compounded with, the challenge represented by social class.

Rural, agrarian life too has its potential for disrupting the expected lines of sexual obligation and pleasure. But sexual disruption in rural life is harder to disguise. Although one can easily overstate the matter, in rural life fewer people constitute the significance of one’s days, and those fewer typically know each other better—in part because they watch each more, having fewer to watch at all. This doesn’t necessarily mean that community life is stronger in a village, as legions of rural sociologists have documented.65 It may mean just the reverse. Visibility can give occasion for as much suspicion as confidence, divisiveness as unity. But it is a plain fact of life in the Roman Empire that the brothels and bars were mostly in town. So were the marketplaces and shops and workshops. So were the service businesses like laundries, tailors, barbers, and doctors. So were the temples and government offices. So were the baths. So were most of the places where partners could meet and discretely arrange the love, lust, and gain of sex, outside the confines of kinship and the sexual bargains it imposed.

Moreover, class society and the bourgeois sexual revolution promoted each other. By challenging kin ties, what we might term bourgeois sex gave greater weight to one’s class power. And by promoting urban society and urban form, class gave longer leash to sex’s disruptive potentials.

Plus more than that: by stimulating the mobility of people and capital through trade and coinage, and by accentuating inequality, class society encouraged and facilitated the commodification of sex. Ancient pagan life knew of sex as a commodity, but to nothing like the same extent as the class life of ancient bourgeois cities. Take Pompeii, a city of some ten to twelve thousand souls, the Roman city we know best because of its spectacular misfortune to be suddenly buried by a volcanic eruption. It had forty-one brothels, according to one detailed study, mostly staffed by slaves selling sex for as low as one Roman as, or about a dollar or two in today’s money, as well as more expensive sexual services for the elite.⁶⁶ If we assume that about four thousand of that population were sexually mature men (recalling that a large proportion of the inhabitants would have been children, and roughly half would have been female), that’s about one brothel and perhaps ten prostitutes for every hundred or so adult male residents.⁶⁷ Of course, many of the clients were visitors from the countryside—but that was exactly part of the concern that many had about the city, and still do: the city as reputedly the principal site of sin, vice, and ethical corruption.

As well, many wealthy people imposed sex on their family slaves. Not all bourgeois sex was sex as property, but much of it was, then as now. Bourgeois sex had its freedoms and its lack of freedoms. It had disruptive potential but also oppressive potential.

In the face of these ambivalences, Jesus and his movement tried to reckon with the two basic imaginations of evil, disloyalty and desire, finding them connected. For both material and sexual desire lead easily to disloyalty, and thereby to new loyalties, loyalties that often prove stronger. In a time of weakening kin ties, concern nettled about all potential sources of that weakness, especially among those who found themselves disadvantaged by the changes.

In the chapters to come, we will see the same increased concern about material and sexual desire associated with the rise of other religious movements that react to the coming of bourgeois society.

Recognizing the troubles facing kin obligations as class society developed allows us to see a special attraction in the way Jesus described and organized the movement he was trying to incite. Throughout the Gospels, and continuing on with the letters of Paul and others, we see a constant exhortation to recognize a new form of kinship: a quasi-kinship of faith, connecting the divine and the human into a community of the good—into what the New Testament calls “a holy nation, God’s own people.”68

We can see the rise of quasi-kinship in the changing names for the divine in the Bible. In the New Testament, God is no longer YHWH. He is no longer El, Elyon, Elohim, YHWH Elohim, El Shaddai, or Adonoi—the Most High, the Master, the Lord God, or the Lord God Almighty. He is Kyrios, Greek for “Lord” or “Master,” a term the New Testament also often uses for Jesus. Or he is Theos, the Greek word for God, and another variant on the PIE people’s term for the head god, Dyeus—the word that was also the basis for Zeus and Jupiter. These new names largely keep company with the older forms, albeit in Greek tones, reflecting the respect for Greek culture throughout the Roman Empire. But now God is also often Pateras, Greek for father, yet given in the New Testament as a title: a divine Father. God had been occasionally described as a father in the Hebrew Bible, but only as a metaphor, not father as a title. Romans came closer to using father as a title in the name Jupiter, which, as I mentioned in chapter 2, is a contraction of Dyeus and pater, meaning father god. And maybe there was a little Roman influence going on here. More likely, though, most adherents of Roman religion did not recognize the etymological roots of the name Jupiter. Romans did not place anything like as much emphasis on divine fatherhood that the Jesus movement did, and as Christianity has since done.

Plus there is not only the divine Father in the New Testament. Now there is also the divine Son. Jesus is everywhere described as the Son. He is the Son of God, of course, but also the Son of Man and the Son of David. And Jesus constantly speaks of carrying out the will of his Father. The image of Jesus as Son is central to the New Testament.

The New Testament doesn’t carry this divine kinship through to Jesus’s mother Mary, however. Christians today often speak of the “Holy Family” of Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, continuing the family language of divine kinship. But “Holy Family” is not a phrase from the New Testament. (Nor is the phrase “Virgin Mary,” for that matter, although Mary is described as being a virgin at Jesus’s birth.) Mary is now venerated as a saint, as is Joseph. But she is not herself divine. The New Testament is plain on that, and she gets left out of what Christians eventually (for it too is not a term used in the New Testament) came to call the Trinity, the idea that the divine manifests as three consubstantial persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Many have felt some sexism at work here, as the Trinity does not represent the basic triad of kinship: Father-Mother-Child. That’s as may be. But because she is not divine—or not fully divine, perhaps a semidivinity—Jesus is able to use Mary to develop the human side of Christian quasi-kinship.

For example, Jesus often exhorts his followers to think of themselves as brothers and sisters, and to abandon their birth families. His followers are to think of each other as their true kin, not the families they were born into. In Matthew, Jesus even says that he no longer recognizes his own mother and brothers as kin.

While he was still speaking to the crowds, his mother and his brothers were standing outside, wanting to speak to him. Someone told him, “Look, your mother and your brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.” But to the one who had told him this, Jesus replied, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” And pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”69

Such hard treatment of his birth family would be difficult to sustain if Mary were divine, at least divine at the level of God, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Plus, because Mary is human, Jesus is human while still being fully divine. And as a human, Jesus can welcome other humans as quasi-kin, despite his status as a divinity. In this way, the quasi-kinship of faith links the divine to the human, sanctified by the former and put into practice by the latter.

Such hard treatment of one’s birth family must also have been difficult for Jesus’s followers to sustain. Giving up on their families also meant giving up on that bank account of kinship—as well as the pleasures of fellowship that family can provide. But Jesus promises great rewards for joining this new quasi-kinship, not just material sustenance but the transcendent hope of life everlasting. As he says, “everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold, and will inherit eternal life.”70

For the pagan, blood ties are the main source of transcendence, granting a sense of progeny continuing on afterward in the undying body of descendants. For most of us today, the blood ties of kin can still grant a feeling of transcendence (and perhaps to at least that extent, we yet retain some pagan sensibilities—a point I will expand on in later chapters). Paganism’s ancestor veneration gives a divine spark to this everlasting remembrance of blood. Jesus’s divine quasi-kinship provides this spark as well, amplified through the communion ritual of bread and wine he introduces at the Last Supper, here described in the Gospel of John.

So Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me.”⁷¹

The quasi-kinship of faith was a welcome service for a disoriented people in a troubled time, giving them a new basis for transcendent social ties when those they thought they could expect were fraying. For part of the Roman game plan for subjugation was to give people a different basis for social relations than that of their local kin. Rome generally hired local people to staff the government apparatus of its various provinces, and welcomed efforts to expand local market activity and to export goods throughout the empire. Getting people hooked on class meant getting them hooked on Rome. The quasi-kinship of the Jesus movement gave people a way to reengage with one another, but not along the lines of Roman class and not along the lines of kin that Roman society had already frayed for many.

Plus it helped build the Jesus movement. Whether or not Jesus himself was actually trying to revive the Jewish nation, he certainly used the Jewish confrontation with Roman society and the Roman state to provide edge and impetus to assembling his collectivity. As Jesus is reported saying in John, in one of the most controversial passages in the New Testament,

Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided:

father against son

and son against father,

mother against daughter

and daughter against mother,

mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law

and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.72

Even more controversial is the parallel passage in Matthew:

Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.⁷³

For all his universalism—“My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations”—Jesus also starkly sets out the deep question of any profession of community: that of the boundary.⁷⁴ Where it lies. How firm it is. And what you do with it.

Yet despite all the evident political implications of what Jesus asks of his followers—even to the point of rejecting peace and taking up arms against one’s own kin, kin who may have been enchanted by the seductions of class and Roman life—the Gospels are at pains to present Jesus as nonpolitical. And because he is nonpolitical, he is good. He is a natural other, a basis for a natural conscience.

Or perhaps we could say he is a supernatural other, a basis for a supernatural conscience. But let’s not have too many terms. The world has an abundance already. Plus, I think having the same terminology for describing the moral transformation of what we have come to call nature (as I have earlier described) and for the moral transformation of faith helps us see their historical and social parallels. So I will call Jesus’s nonpolitical standing a basis for a natural conscience—even though, as we’ve seen, he had very little to say about ecology and agronomy. There are more bases for a natural conscience than nature.

The Gospels establish Jesus’s nonpolitical character in several ways. One is through externalization of motive. Jesus doesn’t act on his own ambitions, say the Gospels. He acts on those of God the Father in heaven. “My teaching is not mine but his who sent me,” says Jesus.75 What is key about God the Father, the one who sent Jesus, is that he is not human, and therefore has no stake in human politics. So when Jesus acts or judges something, he does so unaffected and uninfluenced by human machinations and intrigues. As John reports Jesus saying,

I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge; and my judgment is just, because I seek to do not my own will but the will of him who sent me.⁷⁶

As a result, both God the Father and Jesus are impartial. Mark reports (and there is a similar passage in Matthew) that some Israelites admired Jesus because “we know that you are sincere, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality, but teach the way of God in accordance with truth.”⁷⁷ Paul similarly states that “God shows no partiality” and “judges all people impartially according to their deeds.”⁷⁸ God and Jesus are politically neutral and therefore represent the truth.

Plus the New Testament is clearly trying to argue that God the Father is the only god there is. It is maybe not always 100 percent effective at making this case, but that’s definitely where the New Testament is headed. Take the phrase “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart.” The implication of “the Lord your God” perhaps could be taken to mean that others have their own gods, an echo of the monolatry we sometimes see in the Hebrew Bible. Similarly, the Gospels sometimes portrays Jesus as speaking on behalf of the condition of Jews, implying that Pateras is the god for the Jews. But overall—and this is a point that the letters of Paul and much later Christian exegesis make a huge effort to establish—the New Testament presents Pateras as the only god there is anywhere for anyone. God the Father doesn’t have to argue or compete with other gods because there aren’t any. He has no divine politics.

Here the New Testament is very much in keeping with the Old Testament. YHWH in the Hebrew Bible also doesn’t have divine politics—as I discuss in chapter 4, he does not have politics with other gods because the Old Testament also contends that there are no other gods. YHWH is plenty political, but his conflicts are with “stiff-necked” humans. What is distinctive in the New Testament about God the Father is that he doesn’t have politics with humans either. You can’t influence Pateras. You can’t argue with him, like Moses does with YHWH. And Pateras is ordinarily so transcendent and abstract you can’t even interact with him, at least not directly. He has no house. He doesn’t have a garden. He doesn’t walk around. He doesn’t pervade a pillar of smoke or a pillar of fire. You don’t see him on the Earth, although occasionally you do hear his rumblings from on high. And when he gets involved in something as intimate as sexual reproduction, he appears as the Holy Spirit, not as a concrete presence, and sends the angel Gabriel to explain to Mary what is happening to her.79 A transcendent, abstract, and non-interactive god is a nonpolitical god.

Jesus, however, is an immanent, concrete, and interactive presence, all of which are crucial to his appeal. But although he satisfies and inspires in these ways familiar to the pagan divine, it would serve only to annoy Christians to classify Jesus as a pagan god. For equally crucial to Jesus’s appeal is that he follows the will of the Father, and therefore does not practice the two evils, as pagan gods routinely do. He is unflinchingly loyal to the Father, and to the followers of the Father—even to the point of antagonizing disbelievers and the Roman state into crucifying him. And he does not commit the characteristic bourgeois sin, that of desire. He is humble from humble origins. He does not seek wealth or glory. “I do not accept glory from human beings,” he says.⁸⁰ “If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my Father who glorifies me.”⁸¹ Thus, no one will be able to manipulate him for political gain, enticing Jesus into acts of partiality to glorify himself or his followers, as politicians have long done.

Nor does Jesus have a sexual partner, at least in the accounts of the Gospels—although some have long murmured about whether another New Testament Mary, Mary Magdalene, was a love interest of Jesus, and others have enjoyed speculating about the “Judas, son of Jesus” ossuary.⁸² Indeed, he was even born without an act of sex, the Gospels relate, via immaculate conception between God the Father and his mother Mary, via the Holy Spirit. Therefore we can expect no scrambling of the lines of quasi-kinship from Jesus. We can trust that he will not show partiality on sexual grounds either. For, the Gospels claim, Jesus is beyond the politics of sex.

Jesus also distances his movement from the state and economy, the basic political drivers of the two evils. “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” he says.⁸³ And in one his few flashes of emotion in the Gospels, he loses his temper when he encounters “my Father’s house”—the Temple, lapsing here briefly into an Old Testament vision of an immanent divine—turned into a marketplace, with “people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables.”⁸⁴ What was being sold were sacrificial animals, required to pay homage at the Temple and necessary probably for an urban person who did not farm. Also on hand were people to make change to facilitate the transaction, ultimately supporting this central institution of the state. But Jesus wants a religion that is separate from the state and economy. Plus the vision he proclaims is of a God who can’t be influenced by currying favor with a sacrifice. Unlike Zeus or Jupiter, God the Father does not rely on sacrifices to pile up riches, such as Aristophanes described in his play Wealth. God the Father has no need for such a human motive. You can’t influence him. So Jesus famously makes a “whip of cords,” drives out the sellers, and overturns the tables of the money changers.85

Impartial. Loyal. Free of material and sexual desire. Separate from the state and economy. And—most fundamentally, for this is the claim underlying all of these—nonpolitical. As with God the Father, Jesus presents a concept of divinity that is profoundly different from the pagan divine: a nonpolitical divine.

And because they are nonpolitical, with no disloyalty or desire, Jesus and the Father are everywhere described as good, in contrast to YHWH’s violence and what my daughter called his “anger management problem.”⁸⁶ Jesus constantly proclaims the “good news of the kingdom” and the “good news of God,” and he exhorts his disciples to “go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation.”⁸⁷ The phrase “good news” appears twenty-four times in the Gospels. Indeed, the very word “Gospel” derives from the Old English for “good news,” godspel, just as the term “evangelist” derives from the Greek for “good news,” euangelion. Jesus himself is the “good shepherd.” He is also the “good teacher.” Jesus’s followers are to “let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good.”⁸⁸ They are to “guard the good treasure entrusted to you.”⁸⁹ They are to “share in suffering like a good soldier of Christ Jesus.”⁹⁰ And they are to “live as children of light—for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.”⁹¹

Upon this foundation of nonpolitical goodness, upon the moral strength of this supernatural natural other, the Christian can gain a feeling of a different self, a good self, a self apart from the machinations of the social: a natural me, as I earlier called it. “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth,” the Apostle Paul counsels. When you “put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly” you will see that “you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self.”⁹² No longer rooted in the social, this new self can grow resiliently, protected by righteousness from criticism. As Jesus promises in the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.”93 Cleansed of the social, this self gains a childlike innocence, maintained by faith in Jesus as thee, a natural other.⁹⁴ “Abide in me as I abide in you,” Jesus says.⁹⁵

This natural me gains greater strength and power through its connection to what I’ll term a natural we, a sense of a nonpolitical community derived from a natural other—the natural we of Christian quasi-kinship.⁹⁶ This we is a good community for it is a community of the good, divinely sanctioned. “We are justified by faith,” Paul declares.⁹⁷ “We, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.”⁹⁸ Indeed, there is even no partiality in joining this community—no political intent in acting with good intent—for it is not the believer who chooses the divine. Rather, the divine chooses the believer. “As God’s chosen ones,” Paul writes,

holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience…. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body.⁹⁹

Billions have been moved by this understanding of nonpolitical goodness, a sociological trinity of thee, me, and we.

But in this divine goodness of the nonpolitical one can also hear the metallic ring of authoritarianism: the emphasis on obeying that I mentioned earlier. For all the love, kindness, and impartiality that is part of the New Testament vision of God and the good, we also often hear that the good cannot be debated. God the Father is not described as a gentle figure who, trying to do his best to be even-handed in dealing with the various disputes and wrongdoings of his children, recognizes that he doesn’t necessarily know the full context and therefore encourages dialogue and discussion in case he missed something. This is not your modern, softball-playing dad. This Father only plays hardball. You are not supposed to argue or debate. You aren’t supposed to try to influence him. Instead, “blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it.”¹⁰⁰ You’re not supposed to argue or debate with Jesus either, or to doubt or deny him, as Peter and Thomas infamously do in the Gospels. As the Gospel of John opines, “whoever disobeys the Son will not see life, but must endure God’s wrath.”¹⁰¹

More tough words, but tough words framed as being the authority of God, who is beyond politics, and therefore good nevertheless. The result is not just goodness. It is absolute goodness—the summum bonum, a supernatural natural other for establishing a conscience that many experience as innocent of politics.

So why such a commanding God? Perhaps because this conscience is not as innocent as it often appears. As Acts reports the disciples discussing, “We must obey God rather than any human authority.”102 The absolute goodness of the nonpolitical thus affords goodness to political absolutes. In uncertain times, that affordance can be a great comfort—however illusory that comfort may oftentimes ultimately be.

The rural, pagan trust in birth-based kinship does not center around the goodness of the divine. It has less need for such a logic. Birth-based kinship gives one far more certainty about the patterns of relations upon which one can rely, and therefore about one’s identity, than does social class.¹⁰³ You can lose your social class, but your parents and kin will always be your parents and kin. Of course, life for the pagan does not necessarily always work out happily. The pagan explanation for our troubles is straightforward: the divine is not beyond politics, and consequently is by no means necessarily good. No natural conscience here, as conscious of what we now call nature pagan faiths all are.

The New Testament does not totally ignore what we now call nature, however. I want to be clear about that. The term “nature” even shows up in the New Testament, its earliest versions being written in Greek with many indications that its writers were quite conversant in Greek philosophy, as I’ll discuss in the next chapter. The terms physis (nature) or physikos (natural) show up seventeen times, although never in the Gospels—only the later sections.¹⁰⁴ It appears in a first nature sense of something’s essential and defining characteristics, as in Paul’s description in Romans of God’s “eternal power and divine nature.”¹⁰⁵ And it also appears in a second nature sense as a moral good, as in Paul’s complaint about homosexuality a short while later in Romans, where he writes that many “women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another.”¹⁰⁶ But the New Testament writers do not seem concerned to help followers with the pagan challenges of wresting a living from an oftentimes resistant ecology. Rather, the main way they consider ecological matters is to demonstrate that Jesus is very, very, powerful—that he is supernatural, above and able to control nature.

Look, there is the Star of Bethlehem, appearing at Jesus’s birth. Look, there is Jesus at the Sea of Galilee, walking on water. Look, there is Jesus feeding thousands with just a few fish and loaves of bread. Look, there is Jesus “rebuking” the wind and the sea, turning a tempest into a dead flat calm. Onlookers “were afraid and amazed, and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that he commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him?’ ”107 Plus Jesus has power over disease and even over life itself, curing the crippled and withered, causing the dead to rise again. And, of course, Jesus himself rises from the dead. But Jesus is not immanent in nature. The wind and the waves are not material manifestations of him, in the manner of the pagan divine. Rather, he transcends and directs nature.

We do get a bit of divine immanence in nature in New Testament descriptions of God the Father. Pateras sometimes speaks from heaven, as I noted above, and sometimes flashes heavenly lights, storm-god style. For example, when Jesus arrives in Jerusalem for the final showdown with the authorities, he strikes up a divine conversation with God the Father.

“Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, “An angel has spoken to him.” Jesus answered, “This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out.”¹⁰⁸

Justice thundering down from the skies. Later, after he has died and risen into heaven, Jesus himself gets some storm-like powers, as when he challenges Paul (who was then still named Saul) on the road to Damascus and convinces him to become one of his followers.

Now as he [Saul/Paul] was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.”¹⁰⁹

This is universal immanence, however, not place-based immanence in the manner familiar to pagan thought. God the Father is everywhere, not here or there in a certain spot—and, after he rises to heaven, the same for Jesus. Neither are confined by human form. Moreover, God the Father no longer lives in his house, the Temple, in Jerusalem (despite the story of Jesus and the money changers). As we hear in Acts, God “does not dwell in houses made with human hands.”110 The New Testament divine is usually too abstract, too non-material, too powerful for that.

Which is another reason why God the Father does not require sacrifices—not just because he is beyond the politics of influence, but because part of what sets God the Father beyond influence is that he does not have human needs. He doesn’t need food. He doesn’t need wealth. He doesn’t need a house. Everything comes from him anyhow, through his control of the material world. As Acts later elaborates,

The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.¹¹¹

The demonstration of extreme power through control of nature amplifies the divine’s absoluteness and status as the definer of the good. But nature in the New Testament also begins to take on another meaning: the negative, problematic moral load that bourgeois cultures have often laid upon it, even while cherishing nature in other ways. The morally negative use of nature stems from the difficulty humans have in controlling it, unlike Pateras and Jesus. In this view nature beats with a wild, two-chambered, demon heart: our desires and how they scramble our loyalties. This third basic use of the concept of nature seems to have developed third in intellectual history, after the notion of nature as a moral good. So we might term it third nature: nature as a moral bad, as the seat of desire and thus of politics.

The true divine does not suffer from such a demon pulse. After he is baptized by John, Jesus is “led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.”¹¹² There in this state of pure nature, he fasts for forty days, showing his ability to even overcome the bodily desire for food. Then the devil shows up and tells Jesus, if he is hungry and divine, to turn stones into bread and eat them. Jesus refuses and famously replies, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’ ”¹¹³ The devil then tests Jesus’s loyalty to God by asking him to test God’s loyalty to him, jumping from a pinnacle and seeing if God will send his angels to save him. Jesus again refuses, saying, “Again it is written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’ ”¹¹⁴ Finally, the devil tests Jesus’s desire for material power, telling him that Jesus can have “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor” if he agrees to worship the devil instead of God. “Away with you, Satan!” Jesus responds, and the devil vanishes.¹¹⁵

In the centuries to come, the imagination of the devil as nature, and nature as the devil, would only grow in Christian tradition. Christian images of the devil took on a strongly animalistic quality, and not the features of animals that people typically admire. Horns. Hooves. Bat wings. Goat legs. Fangs. A hairless tail. And the devil became characteristically red, the animalistic red of desire and vanity. Weak humans may struggle against these wild sensibilities, but Jesus and the Father are unaffected by them. Jesus and the Father are not controlled by nature, the damning seat of our desires. Rather, they control nature. Therefore, they have no desires and thus no politics.

So are we supposed to follow nature or not? Do we let ourselves be directed by second nature or third? Should we strive only to commit “natural” acts, or should we resist demon nature? And how do either relate to the first nature of God’s essential divinity and supreme power? Are we part of the divine at least in some small way, for the divine does, after all, sometimes take human form? Are we part of nature in some big way, or are we to overcome our nature and its politics through our faith in the divine?

The New Testament seems to ask these questions more than it resolves them. They all confront the adherent to this day. Maybe that’s their moral point. But the sociologist wants to underline something else that is going on here: Distinctions are forming and widening. Just as supernature was becoming more distinct from the human, so supernature was also becoming more distinct from nature, in turn demonstrating supernature’s distinction from the human community. The human relation to nature was now also very much at issue, clearly having a first nature but caught in ambivalence between second and third nature. And overlaid with a second ambivalence: both second and third nature imply our separation from nature, either as a Thoreauvian failing or an Augustinian aspiration, just as first nature implies our unavoidable connection.

The ancient triangle forms and immediately begins to split apart. Indeed, it seemingly forms in order to split apart.

The New Testament case, then, is not for a pagan monotheism. Its case is for a bourgeois monotheism, responding to the context of an increasingly bourgeois society of class, city, state, and empire. It speaks little to the pagan’s concrete concerns for ecological sustenance, and offers an abstract sustenance by faith in its place. It shows great concern for inequalities of wealth and how they scramble age-old social ties of obligation and trust. It is also deeply suspicious of sexuality and its own great power to scramble social ties, and to upend the economics of arranged marriages. It attempts to institute a new manner of social ties, a quasi-kinship of faith, that cuts across the contentiousness of class and the frayed pagan commitments of birth-based kinship. In these ways, it shows largely equal concern for both of the two evils, disloyalty and desire, and their politics, and tries to offer a resolution to them. And it offers a new vision of the divine, a divine that is beyond these politics because it is unitary, universal, and uninfluenced; because it is nonhuman and has no interest in material or sexual desire; because it is transcendent and in control of nature; and because it is therefore good, absolutely good. It is a natural conscience without nature, for its innocence ultimately lies in being not just beyond politics but beyond what it sees as the very origin of politics: our desirous natures.

A curiosity of the history of the Christian formulation of a bourgeois divine, however, is that its initial followers were themselves largely country people from a largely country district—Galilee in the first century CE. Some of Jesus’s first followers were from the elite of local villages and towns: a tax collector, a scribe, a member of council, a soldier, a rich man, to list some of their descriptions in the Gospels. But his first followers also included rural people with more characteristically humble rural employment, including four fishermen among his twelve disciples: Peter, Andrew, James, and John. Whether from village, town, or open countryside, and whether from among the humble or the local elite, Jesus’s first followers were mainly rural people, and not from the larger cities of the time. Some historians have even argued that the Jesus movement was largely a peasant movement, and there is some evidence—even if much of it is circumstantial—to make that case.116

That too is as may be. What is more certain is that most rural folk quickly lost interest in Jesus after his disastrous encounter with the Roman state, resulting in his execution. The theology of bourgeois monotheism was likely a bit of a stretch for most of them anyway. No doubt people with pagan circumstances appreciated Jesus challenging their ambitious city cousins, and no doubt they appreciated him challenging the Roman Empire, whose taxes were the cause of so much complaint and misery. They also probably applauded his argument that the Temple shouldn’t be taking money either. For many years, everyone had been paying a high “Temple tax”—even after Galilee and other areas had been split from what had become the Roman Province of Judea, home of Jerusalem and the Temple. But sustenance by faith? And replacing birth-based kinship with the quasi-kinship of faith? Sure, birth-based kinship was being eroded by class, but it probably still seemed to most rural people a trustier thing than the kinship of strangers. Plus, if you were very poor, the anti-wealth argument perhaps seemed rather overdrawn. Wealth, after all, is what the poor generally feel they need most. And this abstract, distant notion of the divine? Maybe that worked when Jesus was around to balance the Father’s transcendence with his own immanent presence. But after he was gone? And after crucifixion’s bitter reminder of what happens if the Romans are pushed too hard? It had all seemed more promising in the isolation of Galilee. The quiet life in the countryside, for all its troubles, apparently came to seem as good a circumstance as rural people were likely to have.

The Jesus movement was clearly in crisis in the 30s and 40s CE, following the execution of Jesus. His remaining followers were thinking diverse thoughts about what could be made of the aftermath. Should we keep the movement a Jewish undertaking, and use our remembrance of Jesus and his words to keep the fires of nationalism going? That appears to have been the take of the Apostle Peter, as well as his colleague James, often considered to have been one of Jesus’s brothers. (The idea that Jesus had a brother is hotly disputed by those who hold to the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity, despite the New Testament language that describes Jesus as having four brothers—James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas—as well as some sisters.)117 And indeed, Jewish resistance to Rome continued for another century, although it was ultimately crushed.

A Roman Jew and bourgeois intellectual, the Apostle Paul, had quite a different view—probably because he came from quite a different background than the other Apostles. He was raised in the city, for one thing; the others all appear to have been from the countryside. Paul had also received a thorough classical education. It’s entirely plausible that the other apostles could neither read nor write. Plus Paul was not among the first group of Jesus’s followers. Whatever the reasons, the New Testament is quite explicit that Paul did not get along very well with the other early leaders of the remnant Jesus movement, and that he saw other significance and political possibilities in its theology.¹¹⁸

Paul seems to have taken an especially hard look at the likely results of continuing Jesus’s direct confrontation with Rome. And he seems to have considered carefully the long-term likelihood of a movement based on poor Jewish peasants. Moreover, as an urban person himself, he had urban concerns, and probably had fewer social skills for motivating rural people. So he took his evangelism to the city, setting up a series of churches in cities around the eastern rim of the Mediterranean, with a coordinated and increasingly centralized structure. Under his leadership, what was starting to be called “Christianity” began to rapidly spread through the cities of the Roman Empire.¹¹⁹ But perhaps Paul’s most distinctive move was to say that everyone could, and everyone should, become a “Christian”—and that men would not need to be circumcised to join the church, as is required to be a Jew. Indeed, he liked to call himself “an apostle to the Gentiles,” meaning non-Jews.120

As well, Paul and others likely did some selecting and shaping of Jesus’s message to fit more closely with the moral concerns of a dominantly bourgeois audience, an audience that was proving remarkably receptive. After all, no one disputes that Jesus did not write down the Gospels himself, nor any other book in the New Testament. Paul was among those seeking to give Christianity a written scripture—he was a brilliant writer—which was in itself much more appealing to urban people, who were far more likely to be literate. And he played up strongly the quasi-kinship side of Christianity, which was probably especially attractive to those who experienced the greatest weakening of birth-based kinship: urban folks, living the life of class. His church was almost a new ethnicity, but an ethnicity without birth-based borders. And it soon had a centralized authority not unlike a state or empire, but a state or empire without military-based borders. It was brilliant and it was hugely successful.

The Romans fought it for a good long while. Yet eventually, the Roman Empire too came to see the appeal of a bourgeois religion for a bourgeois time.

There’s an island in the Rhône that gives a great panorama of Avignon.¹²¹ The walls. The towers. The spires. The fourteenth-century bridge, subject of the famous children’s song.¹²² (“Sur le pont d’Avignon.…”) And, on top of the highest hill, the Palais des Papes—the Palace of the Popes—adjacent to Notre Dame des Doms, where I had my sleep-sitting episode. You’re looking east, so sunset puts the whole city aglow. That’s when I was there, taking a stroll in the park at the river’s edge along with hundreds of others—families, lovers, loners, shutter bugs like me—come to admire one of the best views in southern France. Gorgeous.

In a way, though, the building of Avignon began well before the fourteenth century. In 325 CE, at the Council of Nicaea, the Emperor Constantine reversed three centuries of on-and-off Christian persecution. But Christianity was not yet declared the state religion of the Roman Empire. On February 27, 380 CE, the joint Edict of Thessalonica of the Emperors Theodosius I, Gratian, and Valentinian II made the declaration complete:

We authorize the followers of this law to assume the title of Catholic Christians; but as for the others, since, in our judgment they are foolish madmen, we decree that they shall be branded with the ignominious name of heretics, and shall not presume to give to their conventicles the name of churches. They will suffer in the first place the chastisement of the divine condemnation and in the second the punishment of our authority which in accordance with the will of Heaven we shall decide to inflict.123

This close relationship of state and religion doesn’t seem to have been what Jesus had in mind. It was probably closer to the hopes of Paul. Either way, it certainly helped spread the faith. There is nothing like a big and strong empire to spread a religion far and wide. Indeed, all the large world religions today—Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism—have experienced such a boost, as I’ll discuss in the next two chapters. The Edict of Thessalonica didn’t establish a complete unity of religion and state, though. The Romans kept Christianity at a slight remove from the state, essential to the new notion of a nonpolitical divine and its goodness. It was also essential to the ability of state and religion to support each other. If the two were just branches of a single entity, as had been the case with pagan monotheism and with Roman paganism, they wouldn’t have a point of difference across which to offer mutual support. So the Romans really couldn’t make them one and the same.

The slight remove between state and religion was not only conceptual. It was also spatial. After the edict, the Roman state carried on from its various new capitals scattered across the empire, most importantly Constantinople. Meanwhile, the leadership of the Christian church—the Papacy—set up a base of operations in what was formerly the sole capital, Rome. In 1054, Eastern Orthodox Christians split from Roman Catholics, but Roman Catholics continued (as their name implies) to center their organization in Rome.

Except from 1309 to 1377, when the Papacy moved to Avignon. It moved because the remove between state and religion really was only rather slight, and pretty much everybody knew it. Around 1300, the Papacy and the French Crown got into a huge tiff over who had the right to rule in “temporal matters”—that is to say, day-to-day life. Not surprisingly, a lot of the fight had to do with who could collect taxes from whom. Plus a fair bit of French and Italian nationalism was involved. In a memorable line, the French king called the pope (who was Italian) “your venerable conceitedness.”¹²⁴ (One can imagine the pope’s consternation when the wax seal was removed from that particular missive.) Finally, the French were able to get their own man elected pope in 1305: Clement V, from southern France. And in 1309, Clement V moved the Papacy to Avignon, where he and the next six popes—all of whom happened to be French—resided.

In 1378, though, the Avignon Papacy degenerated into the Western Schism when the Italians put forward one Bartolomeo Prignano to be Pope Urban VI, and the French put forward one Robert of Geneva to be Pope Clement VII. Things got even messier for a while with three different men claiming to be pope. Finally, the Italians got their way at the Council of Constance in 1417, resulting in an Italian, Otto Colonna, being accepted as the one pope, Pope Martin V. That was the end of popes living in Avignon.

But you never know what’s coming next in the colorful world of papal succession. So the Papacy in Rome held on to their holdings in Avignon as long as they could. The Palais des Papes is a bit of a misnomer. More accurate would be “Fort des Papes,” given the structure’s twelve defensive towers and walls seventeen feet thick. It looks a lot more like a castle than a palace. Surrounding this massive edifice are the city walls of Avignon, nearly three miles in circumference, twenty-five feet high, with eighty-five more towers. The city walls also used to be surrounded by a moat. The Papacy kept it all—just in case. As a result, Avignon remained part of Rome, not France, until the French Revolution.125

I’m reflecting on the paradoxes of this history, as I amble down the riverside path in the park across from Avignon. How a rural religious movement became an urban religious movement. How a faith that began by contesting state and empire became a creature of state and empire. How a religion that professes itself to be about peace and universal love could lead to so much conflict. I pause for a few photos.

I’m also reflecting on the spectacular natural setting. The Rhône is a mighty work of nature, five hundred miles long, flowing down from the Alps. At this great bend in the river, there happened to be a hundred-foot-high limestone massif, now capped by the golden stone of the Palais des Papes, and ringed by Avignon’s walls, still essentially complete seven hundred years after they were first built. Nature, faith, and the human community all come together here—and come apart. Walls, whether physical or conceptual, do that. For they manifest and create the very thing they seek to keep out: politics.