Chapter 11

MAKING FAITHS

The Making of World Religions

And the Lord said unto me: “This city shall be delivered up for a time, and the people shall be chastened during a time, and the world will not be given over to oblivion.”

2 BARUCH 4:1

ABOUT 120 CE, Basilides of Alexandria was one of the brightest lights of the new Christian movement, although later generations marginalized him as a Gnostic. Among his influential theories, he described “those angels who occupy the lowest heaven, that, namely, which is visible to us, [who] formed all the things which are in the world, and made allotments among themselves of the earth and of those nations which are upon it. The chief of them is he who is thought to be the God of the Jews; and inasmuch as he desired to render the other nations subject to his own people, that is, the Jews, all the other princes resisted and opposed him. Wherefore all other nations were at enmity with his nation.” According to Basilides, only by deception and error was this angel mistaken for God, and he became the deity of the Old Testament. But the true and supreme God, the Father, sent a redeemer to rescue people from this evil Creator deity. This savior was “his own first-begotten Nous [Mind], (he it is who is called Christ) to bestow deliverance on them that believe in him, from the power of those who made the world.”¹

In every particular, Basilides was imagining a universe derived from Jewish speculations of the Crucible years, with its heavenly hierarchies and its angels and the sense that the world was under the sway of these lesser divine beings. Even the idea of deities being allocated their own particular territories ultimately comes from Deuteronomy. But if the approaches were unmistakably Jewish, the conclusions were anti-Judaic, if not anti-Semitic. I will discuss this paradox shortly, but the case of Basilides illustrates just how thoroughly leading thinkers and theologians had borrowed their worldview and the cast of spiritual characters from those Jewish predecessors. They preached not just anti-Judaism but rather an “inverted Judaism.” And these ideas developed within the familiar Hellenistic Triangle, that cultural region that looked to Alexandria, Antioch, and Seleucia-Ctesiphon.2

By the time of Jesus and Paul, the spiritual revolution was well advanced, although its victory was not quite assured, and it was still far from clear how those new insights would be institutionalized in the form of religions. Some movements acknowledged their Jewish heritage, while others actively rejected it. In hindsight, we know that Christianity and Judaism would be the two great heirs, but other claimants existed. Some ideas survived and flourished, others faded to the margins or vanished altogether, but all were manifestations of a wider and potent spiritual impulse. When modern scholars write the histories of such major faiths and sects as Jews, Christians, Gnostics, dualists, and Manichaeans, they are applying those terms retroactively, to groups that should be placed on a single continuum. All were heirs of the same religious revolution and shared very similar beliefs about the spiritual universe.

EVEN THE FALL of the Temple in 70 did not end the agonizing violence that had begun with the Jewish Revolt: further political disasters followed in the coming decades, reaching a climax in the 130s. The intervening years were an interwar period, one that lived with the aftereffects of one disaster while grimly awaiting the near-inevitable second phase. That whole period, from 70 through 135, not only marks a crisis within Judaism itself but among the various religious movements that had grown up within the Jewish framework.³

Earlier, I used the example of Queen Salome Alexandra to show how many tumultuous events could occur within a single lifetime. If we imagine another Jewish girl born in 70 CE, one blessed with around three score and ten years, then she likewise would until her dying day witness disasters and national calamities. Apart from brutal political and religious divisions, she would see recurrent famines and subsistence crises like the brutal one of the 90s that inspired the writing of the book of Revelation. From her earliest years too, her family would be subjected to the onerous Jewish Tax, the fiscus judaicus, which the Romans imposed as a collective punishment for the great revolt.4

In 115 she would hear of a new wave of Jewish revolts that began in Egypt and spread across much of the Near East, almost constituting a second Roman-Jewish War. Because the Roman commander Lusius Quietus played such a prominent role in suppressing this insurgency, the events are known as the Kitos War. The most traumatic events occurred in Egypt, where a Jewish revolt in Alexandria was followed by a Roman reaction that uprooted an ancient and crucial community. Reprisals were savage and involved executions and confiscations. Jewish life in the city, and in Egypt more generally, never fully recovered. That was vastly significant given Alexandria’s role as a second Jewish capital and a primary center of Christian thought and innovation. In the 130s, our imaginary woman would hear of a new Jewish revolt in Palestine itself, led by one Simeon bar-Koseva, who took the messianic name Bar-Kokhba, Son of a Star. (A passage in the book of Numbers foretold the rise of “a star out of Jacob,” and the Qumran War Scroll had already quoted this as a messianic prophecy.) But as in the 60s, the new revolt was totally defeated, and Jewish casualties were heavy. The Romans responded by the mass expulsion of Jews from the city of Jerusalem, which was renamed Aelia Capitolina, after the family name of the emperor Hadrian. The name of Judea vanished from the map, and the province was renamed Syria Palaestina.⁵

It is tempting to describe such repeated conflicts and bloodshed as “apocalyptic,” but that term is wearyingly appropriate in these circumstances. Our Jewish woman likely died in the despairing belief that she had seen the end of the Jewish realm—Israel, or Judea—and the obliteration of Jerusalem.

THE INTERWAR CRISES inspired many writings, as Jews and Christians alike tried to make sense of the disasters around them, and many did so through the apocalyptic and messianic tradition that had emerged in the previous three centuries. The era between 70 and 135 was a golden age of apocalyptic.

The best-known example was the Revelation (Apocalypse) of John, which has exercised an incalculable influence on Western religion and culture, not to mention the visual arts. It was not unique in its day, and other Christian revelations such as that credited to Peter were also once celebrated. But John’s text is the great survivor. At every stage, the book shows the pervasive influence of such seminal books as 1 Enoch and Daniel, while Second Zechariah provides the organizing framework of the whole vision. Revelation is centrally focused on the Judgment and the events and struggles preceding that ultimate historical climax. This is Doomsday, using the old English word for “law” or “judgment.” Heaven and Hell are both very material realities. The greatest truths, moreover, are preserved in heavenly writings and mystic scrolls, as well as the books of life that record all human deeds. As this is an apocalypse, rather than a traditional prophecy, angels play a critical role in transmitting these messages and pronouncements.6

Revelation depicts a world ruled by the forces of sin and evil, in which God’s people represent a tiny persecuted minority deeply at odds with all institutions and ideologies. Matters grow steadily worse under the rule of a number of evil figures who represent or serve the Devil—the Great Beast, the Whore, the Antichrist. Satanic forces exercise power through their control of worldly empires, above all the titanic power of Rome. Evil forces demand that believers choose between collaboration and martyrdom, until the powers of good intervene—Christ and the angelic legions, led by Michael. Great battles and tribulations devastate the world until divine forces decisively defeat the powers of evil, following the battle of Armageddon. The story culminates in Christ’s millenarian reign on earth and the creation of an ideal New Jerusalem.⁷

Revelation shows how the political and religious crisis forced believers (Christians and Jews alike) to resort to these End Times visions to comprehend what was, evidently, the ruinous end of a world that had existed for centuries. Apocalyptic prophecy was the best way to understand the sober politics of the era. Less famous than Revelation are two Jewish works—2 Baruch and 2 Esdras—written at almost exactly the same time and responding to similar circumstances and theological quandaries. Such writings struggled to imagine how the Jewish people could survive in a world bereft of an institution as fundamental as the Temple. Was this the end of a faith, a race, even a world? Yet there were new hopes, new visions, even dreams of how God would restore his creation.8

The book of 2 Baruch shares many assumptions with Revelation and occupies a near-identical spiritual universe.⁹ Angels proliferate throughout the work, and one of them, Ramiel, provides advice and explication to the prophet, Baruch. Both Revelation and 2 Baruch imagine the opening of heavenly books as a portent of the coming End. Both also treat actual cities like Rome and Jerusalem in symbolic or spiritualized form, and both use Babylon as a coded way of referring to Rome. But the resemblances to Revelation go far beyond these specifics. Both are grounded in their belief in the imminent coming of the Messiah and the Judgment of the world. That cataclysm will be followed by a general resurrection and the reward or punishment of the restored dead. Baruch asks God the agonized questions that Jews must have asked after 70:

What, therefore, will there be after these things? For if you destroy Your city, and deliver up Your land to those that hate us, how shall the name of Israel be again remembered? Or how shall one speak of Your praises? Or to whom shall that which is in Your Law be explained? Or shall the world return to its nature of aforetime, and the age revert to primeval silence? And shall the multitude of souls be taken away, and the nature of man not again be named? And where is all that which you did say regarding us?10

This is a work of lament, of grief, to the point of asking whether a man would not have been better off not being born. Even so, God responds with a message of hope. The destruction, he says, was done with his approval, in order to hasten the coming of the Judgment. “Therefore have I now taken away Zion, that I may the more speedily visit the world in its season” (20:2). Baruch describes the coming Judgment, which will be preceded by wars and chaos. On the great day, “the books shall be opened in which are written the sins of all those who have sinned, and again also the treasuries in which the righteousness of all those who have been righteous in creation is gathered” (24:1). The righteous would be resurrected in glory; the wicked would suffer torment and perdition.

The Latin Apocalypse of Ezra assumes a comparably Enochian universe. This again dates from around 100 and is presented in the form of visions received by the prophet Ezra during the Babylonian exile. Like Baruch, Ezra too gropes to find meaning in the sack of the city, after “our sanctuary is laid waste, our altar broken down, our temple destroyed” (10:21). God sends an angel, in this case Uriel, to explain the signs of the times. In passages recalling the book of Job, Uriel explains that humanity cannot fully understand God’s purposes. Even so, the apparent catastrophe is a harbinger of the imminent End Times. The theme of judgment runs through the work, as does the doctrine of future rewards and punishments. “For after death shall the judgment come, when we shall live again: and then shall the names of the righteous be manifest, and the works of the ungodly shall be declared” (14:35).¹¹

Like Revelation, Ezra’s Apocalypse imagines cosmic visions in animal form, and in this case the Roman Empire is portrayed as an eagle, confronted and destroyed by a lion. Recalling Enoch’s Son of Man, Ezra sees the Messiah as a “man from the sea,” who eliminates Gentile enemies without bothering to raise a sword or weapon. “He sent out of his mouth as it had been a blast of fire, and out of his lips a flaming breath, and out of his tongue he cast out sparks and tempests” (13:10). After the struggle, a New Jerusalem would arise.

BUT IF CHRISTIANS and Jews at this stage thought and wrote in such close parallel, the differences between the two groups grew enormously over time. In the process, each side built on that Crucible inheritance while divesting itself of particular aspects of that legacy.

Jews, of course, had to reconstruct and redefine their faith, which involved a fundamental shift of emphasis from the now impossible Temple sacrifices to prayer and study in the synagogue. That change also transferred power and prestige from the old priestly elites to new categories of scholars, sages, and teachers or rabbis. We are observing the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism. The emphasis on texts and scholarship, rather than sacrifice, allowed the community to survive far beyond its original geographical home. Ioudaios now meant Jew rather than literally Judean, while “Judaism” denoted an ethnic and religious concept separated from any homeland.12

From the late first century CE, rabbis and scholars undertook the immense project of debating and expounding Jewish law and practice, a process that involved literally centuries of study and argument. Of course, the scholars reaffirmed the central truths of Jewish identity—the Law, the Covenant, Sabbath observance, dietary laws, circumcision, and the sacred bond with the land—but they also expounded just how the biblical commandments offered a total and demanding framework for every aspect of daily life. Between 180 and 220 CE, the sages compiled the oral Torah in the great collection called the Mishnah, which was assembled in Palestine. Further commentaries and elucidations appeared in the Jerusalem Talmud in the fourth century. Finally, chiefly between the fifth and seventh centuries, the heart of intellectual life moved eastward, as Mesopotamia became the indisputable intellectual center of Judaism, with the flourishing of the Talmudic (Geonic) academies. Scholars in this region compiled the Babylonian Talmud, the Bavli. That text itself noted that “The Holy One, blessed be He, knows that Israel is unable to endure the cruel decrees of Edom [Rome], therefore He exiled them to Babylonia.”¹³

Not only did rabbinic Judaism triumph, but over time histories were written to assert that this was the inevitable goal toward which earlier developments had inevitably been tending. Rival forms of Judaism were written out of the story, and some were all but forgotten until modern times. This was partly because some older movements and factions had suffered so heavily in the wars or been discredited. Both Sadducees and Essenes vanished from debate, leaving the field to the heirs of the Pharisaic tradition. Overtly Essene and Enochic sources are conspicuously absent in the founding texts of rabbinic Judaism from the late second century onward.

That purge profoundly reshaped attitudes to scripture and to pseudoscriptural works. The scale of the task that the rabbis faced is apparent from the passages in Ezra’s Apocalypse about the restoration of scripture and also its limits. God appears to the scribe and orders him and his assistants to write down the visions they had received (14:45). The result is ninety-four books, twenty-four of which represent the standard number for the canonical Old Testament, and these were to be read by worthy and unworthy alike. The other seventy were to be delivered only to the wise. Presumably, that vast additional library signifies a range of noncanonical and pseudepigraphic works of the sort that had proliferated since the time of 1 Enoch.

Despite “Ezra’s” vision, those works remained very controversial for Jews, all the more so given the political and intellectual dangers of the time. In the aftermath of the twin disasters of 70 and 135, that meant deep suspicion about any texts or traditions hinting at political messianism or apocalyptic. Also, Jewish leaders were increasingly aware of the rival movement of Christianity, which divided so many communities and synagogues. The minority sect was now definitively excluded from synagogues and its members persecuted. Hostility grew as Christianity became a potent presence across the whole Mediterranean world in the third century and after it gained the active support of the Roman Empire in the fourth.14

Jewish scholars reacted viscerally against beliefs and texts that were favored by Christians, a reaction that went far beyond the messianic ideal itself. That reaction shaped attitudes to Enochic ideas and texts and to many of the once influential pseudepigrapha. The second century CE text known as the Dialogue with Trypho reports a Jewish apologist citing a well-known tale from Enoch to complain about how gullible Christians were in accepting falsehoods, “nay, even blasphemies, for you assert that angels sinned and revolted from God.” Christian claims to a continuing tradition of charismatic prophecy made Jews suspicious of such doctrines, especially when prophetic revelations threatened to supersede canonical scripture. Contemporary visionary claims of heavenly journeys were treated with just as much disdain. More basically, the Christian predilection for the Septuagint encouraged Jews to reject that version and the additional books that it contained over and above Hebrew versions.15

Rabbinic Judaism strictly defined the limits of scripture, to the point of suppressing most noncanonical texts. In many cases, that meant eliminating the Hebrew or Aramaic originals of pseudoscriptures, which survived only in Christian contexts or in other languages. The Apocalypse of Ezra mainly survives in Latin, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs in Greek. Gradually, Christian churches themselves became hostile to some of these writings, which survived only in peripheral regions and isolated churches. Only in Ethiopia did Christians not just carry on reading 1 Enoch and Jubilees but still regarded them as canonical scripture. A whole library of ancient Jewish texts was preserved in the Slavonic-speaking churches of eastern Europe, where such long-forgotten works as 2 Enoch and the Apocalypse of Abraham have been rediscovered in modern times. Other texts were recovered only gradually, and partially, at Qumran and elsewhere.¹⁶

Of course, reconstructed Judaism did not altogether lose access to mystical and esoteric ideas, although it is difficult to trace the exact means by which older ideas survived. However thoroughly these were (notionally) suppressed, medieval Jewish sages still referred obliquely to texts like Jubilees. In addition, a whole genre of visionary literature, the Hekhalot, harks back to Enochic stories of heavenly ascents. (The word Hekhalot refers to the temples or palaces above.) Other forms of historical Jewish mysticism retained their own memories of sectarian ideas from the Crucible years. The very influential Qabalistic tradition powerfully recalls Gnosticism, even though issues of chronology make it difficult to see direct linkages. The most ancient Qabalistic texts were written down long after the disappearance of active Gnostic communities, no earlier than the sixth century CE. Even so, much of that tradition sounds like a close facsimile of ancient Gnostic and Neoplatonic schools. Perhaps Jewish thinkers were drawing on sectarian traditions of a kind that also, separately, contributed to making Gnosticism. Strongly recalling the Crucible years was the central role of Adam in Qabalistic thought—or rather, of the two Adams, both the heavenly and spiritual Primal Man, as well as the flawed and fleshly ancestor of humanity. Connections between Qabala and the older sectarian world are highly likely, even if we cannot plainly see the intervening stages.17

THE CRISIS OF Judaism reverberated throughout the religious world. The collapse of central control allowed the upsurge of many previously minor groups, especially the nascent Jesus movement. Within that new sect, the multiple crises caused a major rupture in the historical continuity from the earliest church. The ensuing debates form much of the subject matter of the New Testament epistles, and the same years also witnessed the composition of the gospels.

In retrospect, knowing as we do the subsequent development of the two faiths, we often assume that both Judaism and Christianity achieved their own distinctive identities very early on, leaving obscure sects of “Jewish Christians” as a heretical curiosity. But even speaking of Jewish Christians is misleading, as it would be impossible at this time to have a kind of Christianity that was not essentially Jewish, or grounded in the Jewish world of the previous three centuries. Even the New Testament doctrines that at first sight most strongly signal Greek or non-Jewish influences can be traced directly to the Jewish world of the Crucible years.18

Later Jews, of course, were scandalized by the messianic claims made for Jesus and appalled when these advanced to assert his divine status. But throughout that process, Christians were drawing faithfully on ideas that were quite familiar within the Jewish world, albeit within forms of Judaism that were now tainted as sectarian. At an early stage in the story, Christian thinkers explored some of the intermediary figures that Jewish thinkers had devised to explain God’s interactions with the world. Might Jesus have been an angel? One interpretation of the Son of Man passages in Daniel understood the heavenly creature in human form to be an angel or archangel. When gospel writers describe Jesus’s ascension to heaven following his resurrection, the passage draws heavily on the scene in the book of Tobit when another archangel, Raphael, returns to the heavenly realms (12:16–22).

Other writers turned to the idea of Wisdom (Sophia) and to Philo’s theory of the Logos to explain the divine nature of Christ. Like so many Jewish contemporaries, New Testament authors were well acquainted with Platonic language, none more so than in the Epistle to the Hebrews. In a typical passage, the Epistle states, “The Law is only a shadow [skia] of the good things that are coming—not the realities themselves” (10:1). The earthly sanctuary is “a copy and a shadow” of a heavenly Temple, where Jesus serves as eternal high priest (8:5). The heavenly city is a type, a pattern, of its earthly manifestation. At the end of the first century CE, the gospel of John described the Logos, the Word, as the means by which God created the world and affirmed moreover that this same Logos had taken flesh as Jesus Christ himself. Paul’s Letter to the Colossians proclaims Christ as “the image [eikon] of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible.… He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (1:15–17).

Generations of scholars viewed such texts almost as a Hellenistic excrescence, an infusion of alien philosophies that departed sadly from the Jewish thought world of the pristine early Christian church. Yet such ideas had long been thoroughly absorbed into that Jewish world, as was the dualistic language of Light and Darkness that John’s Jesus so often employed. Jesus proclaimed himself “the Light of the World,” and he promised that his followers would not walk in darkness but have the Light of life. In the earliest surviving Christian text, 1 Thessalonians, Paul offered this theme of Christ’s followers as children of Light, who belong neither to the night nor to Darkness (see 1 Thess. 5:5 and Eph. 8:5). Paul may have been a Pharisee, but he really does sound like a Qumran adherent when he warns his readers, “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ [the Messiah] with Belial?” (2 Cor. 6:14). Early in the second century, an unknown Christian who probably lived in Alexandria wrote a tract called the Epistle of Barnabas, which came close to being included in the canonical New Testament. One section of Barnabas includes a lengthy disquisition on the Two Ways, which likewise reads as if it could have come directly from Qumran: “There are two ways of teaching and of power, the one of Light and the other of Darkness; and there is a great difference between the two ways. For on the one are stationed the light-giving angels of God, on the other the angels of Satan.”19

The separation of Judaism and Christianity was slow and gradual, spread over the seventy years or so following the Fall of the Temple. Before about 120 CE, it is exceedingly difficult to draw sharp lines between the Jesus movement and Judaism broadly defined, and examples of hostility and exclusion in one region did not necessarily apply elsewhere. Particularly in key regions outside Palestine, the real split with Judaism came in the mid-second century CE rather than in the first. Across the Near East, anti-Judaism became rife following the Kitos War of 115–17, and so did critical attitudes toward Jewish claims to exclusivism. Another decisive break came in the 130s with the desperate nationalist revolt led by Bar-Kokhba, which we have already encountered. The total failure of that movement discredited nationalist militancy, but the affair also further alienated Christians from the Jewish mainstream: Bar-Kokhba, “Son of the Star,” himself had made messianic claims, and his forces persecuted the followers of Jesus. The resulting hostility shaped the church’s bitter memory of the event, as recorded by the later Christian historian Eusebius. Bar-Kokhba, he said, “possessed the character of a robber and a murderer, but nevertheless, relying upon his name, boasted to them, as if they were slaves, that he possessed wonderful powers; and he pretended that he was a star that had come down to them out of heaven to bring them light in the midst of their misfortunes.”20

What was rapidly becoming the mainstream of the Great Church had to acknowledge the new realities, the new schism.

BUT EVEN AFTER Jews and Christians had become more delineated, the two groups still interacted closely in many parts of the world. As late as the end of the fourth century, the famous preacher John Chrysostom angrily condemned the many Antioch Christians who happily attended the synagogues and observed Jewish feasts and customs.²¹

A substantial middle ground of believers fitted entirely into neither of the new religious categories. These so-called Jewish Christians accepted Jesus as the Messiah but also obeyed Mosaic rules about Sabbath obedience, circumcision, and dietary laws. Church fathers often refer to sects in this mold called the Ebionites or Nazareans, who claimed to be heirs of the most ancient Jerusalem church. For centuries, indeed, a common academic mythology has portrayed the Ebionites as the authentic vessels of Jesus’s true message, before it was betrayed by figures like Paul. That view is exaggerated, but Jewish Christians should be counted among the heirs of sectarian movements that had all but vanished in the mainstream Jewish tradition—groups like the Essenes, the Qumran sect, and the mysterious followers of Enoch.22

Before the 60s, such movements had exercised a potent influence in Jewish thought and culture. Presumably, the conflicts of those years did not annihilate each and every thinker of those movements or destroy all their texts; their flight from Palestine spread their ideas, although in new forms. The resulting exodus contributed to a widespread diaspora of alternative and sectarian forms of Judaism. Arguably, that alternative Judaism did not simply evaporate during the Jewish Revolt and its aftermath; rather, it relocated. Or as we might rather say, it returned to its spiritual home. So many of the innovations of the Crucible years had been influenced by Eastern cultures, both Persian and Mesopotamian, and we have seen the pervasive influence of Mesopotamian ideas in 1 Enoch. The revolution of the 60s CE forced many Jews to seek refuge in the East, ultimately in Mesopotamia itself.

Members of Jerusalem’s Jesus movement now fled east across the Jordan, and so, almost certainly, did the followers of the Jewish baptist sects that looked to John rather than Jesus. Syriac Christian tradition reported the Jerusalem church’s eastward migration into Mesopotamia. Reputedly, Christians reached Edessa very soon after the death of Jesus, with the earliest missionaries stemming from Antioch. These accounts point to a Christian presence based in Seleucia-Ctesiphon from the early second century, which meshes well with the vigorous Jewish presence in that area. One of the most spectacular archaeological finds from late antiquity is the third-century CE city of Dura-Europos, on the Euphrates, which had both a lavishly decorated synagogue and an early church. Continuity from the Jewish sects is highly likely in Mesopotamia, the base of the great Church of the East (the later “Nestorian Church”), which in the Middle Ages spread its influence across much of Asia, reaching China, India, and Turkestan.²³

Yet the closer we look at early Mesopotamian Christians, the more they resemble not just sectarian Judaism in general but specifically the world of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Like the people of Qumran, Eastern church thinkers used “holiness” as their technical term for the practice of celibacy. Ascetics also used the same term as the Qumran sect when they described themselves as sons (or daughters) of the Covenant, qeiama. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Mesopotamian church used in their worship and devotion a number of psalms over and above the familiar roster known in Europe, and only in modern times have those mysterious psalms also come to light in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Some kind of linkage from Qumran to Christian Mesopotamia seems likely, if by no means proved.24

Such a legacy might also be sought in early monasticism. In the first century CE, Egypt was the home of a still-mysterious group of ascetics called the Therapeutae, who were devoted to prayer, study, and spiritual reading. As described by Philo, they sound much like Essenes or the Qumran sect, and they seemingly prefigure the Christian monasticism that emerged in Egypt in the third century, though no modern historians draw neat linear connections between the movements. Monks also appear early in the historical record in eastern Syria, Mesopotamia, and Persia. Syrian monks were even fiercer than Egyptian in their asceticism and their contempt for the body. Taking the Egyptian and Syriac stories together, this history suggests at least the possibility of continuities from the sectarian Jewish world into early Christianity.²⁵

TRACING THE GENEALOGIES of other once popular movements shows a similar inheritance. The early Christian centuries produced many communities and teachers that we now describe as Gnostic. That term has to be treated cautiously, because the believers themselves would usually have used some other word of self-description, commonly just “Christian.” Moreover, the actual views that such groups held were so diverse that some scholars reject even the concept of Gnosticism as a myth that was invented in early church polemic and subsequently upheld by uncritical academics. Such a rejection goes too far, as many common threads of belief can indeed be found among the so-called Gnostics. Even so, only in retrospect were the Gnostics portrayed as a rogue Christian heresy rather than a distinctive form of that faith.²⁶

Although Gnostics varied widely in their specific beliefs, most saw the universe in broadly dualist terms, seeing the material world not as fallen but rather as a flawed creation, beyond redemption. They taught a myth of Creation emanating from absolute perfection and descending to lower levels of reality. Commonly, Gnostic theorists identified the Creator of the material world with the Jewish God, as portrayed in the Old Testament, whom they saw as a lower-level divine being. Christ came from higher spiritual realms to redeem and reawaken the sparks of true divinity that survive within the pollutions of matter. Given its denigration of the Jewish God, it might at first sight seem futile to seek any connection between Gnosticism and any kind of Jewish tradition. Gnosticism is much more than just anti-Judaism, but without that element, it makes no sense. That would seem to put the Gnostic tradition at the opposite end of any intellectual spectrum from Judaism, but in fact continuities with sectarian Jewish movements can be traced.27

I have described the quandary faced by Jewish thinkers in the Hellenistic years, who had to reconcile their familiar beliefs with Platonism. Some, like Philo, argued that the absolute God might in fact have created the world on the lines portrayed in Genesis—but that was not the only possible interpretation. One might also view the material world as the work of an imperfect or even malevolent creator, a sinister Demiurge, who was at odds with the one true God. Such a conflict meshed well with the powerful drive in the Jewish world at exactly this time to imagine a powerful Devil who (by some accounts) was in fact Lord of this world. If that Satan is identified with the Demiurge, then this really would constitute full-scale cosmic dualism. On the available evidence, no group moved toward such despairing conclusions before the first century CE, but some assuredly did thereafter.²⁸

Scholars have long debated the exact relationship between Gnosticism and Christianity, and the hypothetical existence of a “pre-Christian Gnosticism.” I make no claims whatever for the existence of such a phenomenon, for any actual schools, sects, or movements during the pre-Christian era. Even so, much of Gnosticism could have been constructed without wandering too far outside Judaism as it existed, in its very diverse forms, in the Crucible years.

BEYOND MERELY CITING parallels, direct linkages can be drawn between the old Jewish world and the newer Gnostic sects. Taken together, these continuities help answer the question of how some of the most radical insights of the Crucible years actually developed when they were excluded from Jewish and Christian orthodoxies.29

Because of the means by which documents have been preserved, and particularly the dry climate, the vast majority of textual discoveries have been made in Egypt, most famously the Nag Hammadi library discovered in 1945. That emphasis does not mean that Egypt was the sole home of the movement, which had at least as firm a foundation to the east, in Syria and Mesopotamia. Throughout the early Christian centuries, much of the spiritual ferment occurred in the borderlands between the Roman and Persian empires. The earliest Gnostic thinker who can be identified with any confidence is Menander of Antioch, who taught in the last quarter of the first century CE. He was regarded as the Syrian founder of the movement, while Basilides was the pioneer in Egypt.³⁰

The doctrines of both movements, Syrian and Egyptian, were absolutely rooted in the Crucible years. According to the orthodox church father Irenaeus, the mysterious Gnostic thinker Simon Magus claimed to have been incarnated because the angels ruling the world exercised their power badly, with each struggling for supremacy. His pupil Menander believed that the world was in subjection to angels, from whom believers needed to be liberated. In turn, Menander’s successor, Saturninus (ca. 110 CE), taught that the world was the creation of seven angels. Angels created humanity, making man “a shining image bursting forth below from the presence of the supreme power.” Saturninus was “the first to affirm that two kinds of men were formed by the angels, the one wicked, and the other good. And since the demons assist the most wicked, the Savior came for the destruction of evil men and of the demons, but for the salvation of the good.”31

At so many points, those words carry a powerful sense of déjà vu. The division into evil and good races would have been thoroughly familiar to Jewish groups of the second and first centuries BCE, especially those at Qumran. So would the focus on angels, astrology, and the emphasis on determinism and predestination. Gnostic mythologies also gave a prominent role to the figure of Wisdom, Sophia, who was so central to Crucible-era speculations. In seeking an explanation for the sinful world they contemplated, many Gnostics turned to the Creation story. God himself could not have fallen into sin or darkness, but perhaps his handmaiden did. In one common system, Sophia had fallen from the dominions of Light to become entrapped in material darkness, from which she must be redeemed. Wisdom is thus the possession of the spiritual elite, and it distinguishes them from the gullible herd of humans mired in the material, the victims of cosmic deception.³²

No less important than the ideas are the setting in which they first appeared. Antioch—which played a pivotal role in nascent Gnosticism—was a junction for many different groups and influences, including Jews, Samaritans, Christians, and pagan Greeks. As a former capital of the Seleucid kingdom, it was a center of Hellenistic learning, and its role in the spice routes and the Silk Road meant that its connections stretched deep into Asia. Already in the first century, Antioch had become one of the great centers of the eastern Mediterranean, surpassed only by Alexandria. Demonstrating the city’s close link to Palestine, Antioch was the stronghold watching over Judea after the first Jewish War, the base from which future risings could be prevented. Antioch stands about three hundred miles from Jerusalem. Naturally, it had a thriving Jewish population in its Kerateion quarter, and it was, famously, the place where Jesus’s disciples were first called Christians. As we have seen, this was one of the centers where Jews and Christians remained closely intertwined at least through the fourth century.³³

With those parallels and potential points of contact, how plausible is it that the new Gnostic synthesis might have drawn on the Jewish sectarian world and even on Qumran itself? The chronology is suggestive. The Qumran settlement ceased to function around 70 CE, when the Dead Sea Scrolls were concealed. If (we might speculate) at least a few of the sectaries retained their ideas and sought to reconstruct something of what they had lost, then the natural setting for such activity would have been in Antioch during the 80s and 90s CE. That was the same time and place as the historical Menander and the Gnostic theorizing with which he is credited. Shortly after that, at the opening of the second century, a comparable Gnostic school emerged in Alexandria.

This is not to imply that Menander himself was a veteran of Qumran. For one thing, he was by origin a Samaritan rather than a Jew. But individuals who had known the Essene or Qumran worlds could have found their way directly to Antioch. We know that people circulated between the different schools of Jewish thought, and some seekers might well have made the transition to versions of Jewish Christianity. Defections and ideological shifts were particularly likely in a crisis atmosphere like that of the 70s, when even the revolutionary nationalist Josephus defected to the Romans. Even if not through actual individuals, older ideas could have migrated to Antioch through imported texts.

Menander’s Samaritan background points to other dimensions of the problem of origins. I have repeatedly mentioned the size and influence of the Samaritan population in Palestine in these centuries, and Samaritans, like Jews, spread widely in their own Diaspora. At least some of the first Christians also had a Samaritan background, probably including the Stephen recorded in the book of Acts, the faith’s very first martyr. (Stephen’s last speech, a pioneering example of Christian biblical exegesis, repeatedly draws on Samaritan readings and interpretations.) That context is important because early Christian commentators consistently described the first-century Gnostic pioneers as Samaritans, or else they were based in that region. That includes Simon Magus himself, and the shadowy Dosithean sect from which Simon supposedly drew his ideas. Can we assume that first-century Samaritans shared many of the sectarian Jewish beliefs we have traced? Perhaps they had evolved a parallel esoteric tradition, which has otherwise been lost to history.34

Such a Samaritan angle would also explain why ideas that grew out of sectarian Judaism assumed such a radically anti-Judaic guise. Jewish-Samaritan relations degenerated during the first century CE, with intercommunal violence and raiding. Samaritans were also much less supportive of the anti-Roman revolt of the 60s than were the Jews, although some at least supported the revolutionary cause. The ethnic division was still greater during the Bar-Kokhba revolt, in which Samaritans remained neutral. In consequence, Jewish attitudes toward Samaritans hardened between 70 and 130, to the point that Jewish scholars and rabbis usually dismissed them as no different from Gentiles. Samaritan thinkers had little reason to praise “the God of the Jews.”³⁵

That trajectory closely recalls the patterns of Christian-Jewish relations in these same years. During the first century, members of the mainstream Jesus movement hoped to remain within the larger Jewish world, until they were forcibly expelled from synagogues and the larger community. Each side in the schism claimed to have a true understanding of God, rejecting the deformed version preached by its rival. Adding to the hostility were the successive political crises between 70 and 135 CE. Basilides, Carpocrates, and other Alexandrian Gnostics were working only a very few years after the suppression of the bloody Jewish insurgency in that city. No more than a decade following the failure of the Bar-Kokhba movement of the 130s CE, Marcion of Pontus became one of the most significant Christian thinkers of the whole century. He taught a radical separation between the Old and New Testaments, with only the latter portraying divine truth. The God of the Jews was a sinister being, quite distinct from the true God revealed in the New Testament, with his son, Jesus. Although Marcion was denounced as a heretic and (sometimes) a Gnostic, his anti-Judaic ideas survived for centuries.³⁶

HOWEVER THEY ARE defined, Gnostics are today celebrated in popular history and religious writing, but Syria and Iraq both produced other important movements and thinkers who could with equal legitimacy claim an inheritance from the Crucible years.37

One intriguing current runs from the followers of John the Baptist. Usually, John is regarded as a precursor of Jesus, and the literature has assimilated him into the narrative as his cousin. The movement largely vanished as it was absorbed into mainstream Christianity, but that was a lengthy process. In fact, his movement had a very long afterlife as an independent group or denomination. Even today, the tiny Gnostic-dualist sect of the Mandaeans, which still survives in southern Iraq, claims a special inheritance from John the Baptist.³⁸

Another pivotal movement was the Elchasaites, the so-called “Babylonian Baptists,” who take us back to archaic forms of Jewish Christian belief. Western church writers report a heretical Parthian thinker called Elchasai, who lived in the early second century CE. He reported a vision he had experienced of the Son of God, a titanic being many miles tall, who had revealed to him a heavenly book. Elchasai advocated a special baptism for the remission of sins, but also urged full obedience to the Mosaic Law. This sounds like a standard Jewish Christian package of beliefs, but just where had Elchasai found his ideas? The fourth-century Christian writer Epiphanius places Elchasai in the context of a group of Jewish and Jewish Christian sects, including the Nazareans, but also a group he calls the “Ossaeans.” That is a suggestive name, and the Ossaeans might be identical with the Essenes. Epiphanius is by no means the world’s most reliable writer, but if he is correct in this instance, then Elchasai was an adherent of an Ossaean/Essene sect, which still lived around the Dead Sea at the end of the first century CE.³⁹

Like that other sectarian Jewish movement, the mainstream Christians, the Elchasaites originated in Palestine, but during the era of political turmoil, they moved eastward into Syria and later established their major center of activity in Mesopotamia. And in this region, they created an enduring legacy.

In the third century CE, the prophet Mani founded a dualistic-Gnostic movement that drew on Christianity but was also influenced by Zoroastrianism and Buddhism. Mani taught an eternal struggle between two forces, God and Satan, who were identified with Light and Darkness, and the flawed material creation represented a mixture of Light and Dark forces. As in Gnostic thought, Jesus is the redeemer figure, who restores the fallen Adam. In its day, Manichaeanism was a great world religion, with influence stretching from France to the Pacific, and in various forms its manifestations appeared in Byzantium and Bulgaria, China and Turkestan. Even Augustine belonged to the sect for some years. Not until the seventeenth century did Mani’s movement finally vanish from its last Chinese fastnesses. Manichaeans created a substantial body of scriptures and commentaries, most of which are now lost.40

This faith is the only example of a world religion that has arisen and then vanished entirely, seemingly without trace. The fact that it disappeared should not be taken to indicate any inherent weakness or failing of the movement, in comparison to (say) mainstream Christianity. The most important difference was that while Christianity acquired the support of states, Manichaeanism did not, and it was swept away by centuries of wars and persecutions.

Manichaean origins are today an exciting area of research in Jewish and early Christian history, particularly following the discovery of major collections of early documents, chiefly in Egypt. Mani, we now know, was born near Seleucia-Ctesiphon around 216 CE. He had many dealings with the Persian royal court, before his eventual martyrdom in 270. His mother was Parthian, and his father belonged to the Elchasaites. Mani himself was an Elchasaite in his youth, before deserting that sect to explore the revelations he had received from an angelic mentor. That would make his movement a lineal heir of Jewish dualist thinking.41

Mani also drew heavily on Enochic traditions, including some not recorded by Christian churches, even in Ethiopia. His elaborate Creation myth makes much use of great spiritual beings, rulers or archons, who recall the angels of the Enochic writings. Manichaeans venerated the book of the Giants, as rewritten by Mani to express his own distinctive doctrines. In that form, the Manichaeans treated the work as canonical, and through them it circulated in multiple languages, including Syriac, Greek, Latin, Middle Persian, Parthian, Old Turkic, Coptic, Sogdian, Uyghur, and Arabic. It was an international best seller.⁴²

The Manichaeans drew on other movements that likewise combined Jewish sectarian and baptist ideas with Gnostic trappings. The most important of these was the Sethians, who venerated Adam’s son Seth. Several major Sethian works have been rediscovered in modern times, including their alternative gospels. Early Jewish sects had a special interest in pre-Flood patriarchs like Adam and Seth, who were the common ancestors of all humanity, not just Jews alone. Beyond framing a classic Gnostic myth of Creation and Fall, Sethian writings describe practical means of responding to such a universe. They offer techniques for traveling to heavenly realms and sharing in the angelic liturgy and even rising to the status of divine beings. At so many points, Sethian thought harks back to Enochic mystical themes and the world of Qumran. Much of the sect’s literature took apocalyptic forms, especially the Apocalypse of Adam found at Nag Hammadi. The work may derive from a baptist sect like the Elchasaites, and it speaks often of the water of life and “the holy baptism and the living water.”⁴³

ULTIMATELY, EVEN THE Manichaeans were consigned to the distant margins of historical development. However, another faith rising during these years was no less fully an heir of the Crucible years.

Western historians would say that the religion of Islam emerged in the Arabian peninsula during the early seventh century. In Muslim eyes, such a statement is incorrect, in that Islam actually originated with Adam and was subsequently upheld by the prophets and patriarchs extolled by Judaism, as well as by John the Baptist and Jesus. Muhammad merely restated the primeval truth. Islam grounded itself entirely in Jewish and Christian traditions, as these faiths existed in the early centuries of the Common Era.

At every stage, Islamic beliefs were products of the Crucible. Prophecy offers one example, and Muhammad’s own revelation began when he first heard words uttered by the angel Gabriel. Muslims hold that revelation, the Qur’an, not just to be sacred but to preexist Creation itself, much like the images of cosmic Wisdom, and like later Jewish concepts of the Torah. The idea of the Day of Judgment dominates every part of the Qur’an, usually accompanied by florid descriptions of Heaven and Hell. Islamic eschatology would have been thoroughly familiar to Jews from the time of the Enochic writings onward or to early Christians. Under the name Idris, Enoch is a celebrated prophet of Islam and the focus of many tales. Appropriately, his Arabic name may reflect his role as “interpreter.”44

Islam and its scriptures drew massively on Jewish and Christian precedents and by no means only from strictly orthodox models. The Qur’an often uses Old and New Testament stories, but commonly views them through later apocryphal lenses. The Qur’anic story of Adam and his Fall, for instance, is taken from the tradition found in the Life of Adam and Eve, which also provides the story of Satan’s own rebellion and Fall. Islam teaches nothing like dualism, and Jesus’s messianic role is denied. Even so, there are plenty of survivals from the older movements, including Jewish Christians and Gnostics. Following early Gnostic writings, the Qur’an portrays a Jesus who escaped an illusory Crucifixion.⁴⁵

But Islamic thought continued to develop long after the completion of the Qur’an. By the mid-seventh century, most of the Middle East was under the political power of Islamic regimes, which ultimately ruled from the Atlantic to the borders of China. The Hellenistic Triangle now became the central core of the Islamic world, although the older cities were by now replaced by more modern successors—respectively Baghdad, Cairo, and Damascus. In those areas, Muslims encountered thriving Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian cultures and acquired many of their beliefs, often from new converts to Islam. During the early eighth century, Islamic writers developed apocalyptic beliefs that focused on the imminent return of “Jesus the Messiah.” However marked the differences between Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, the three faiths shared a pronounced family resemblance and common heritage in the Crucible era.46

THE GEOGRAPHIC SCALE of these developments is stunning. In the third and second centuries BCE, new ideas and themes emerged chiefly in Palestine and also in Diaspora territories such as Egypt. In the first centuries of the Common Era, the dispersal of Jewish-derived movements brought the insights of the Crucible era to a much larger canvas. By around 100 CE, Christian writings are known from believers in Anatolia and Egypt, Greece and Italy, and soon, such texts would appear throughout the Roman and Persian empires. By 800 the Church of the East was establishing itself in China and Tibet. Emerging rabbinic Judaism found its most congenial home in Mesopotamia. But that was only part of a vast and indeed transcontinental story. Quite apart from mainstream Christianity and Judaism, the Jewish Christian and dualist sects carried these spiritual motifs throughout the Middle East and North Africa, indeed deep into central Asia and ultimately China. And that was accomplished even before the rise of Islam, which dominated a realm ranging from Spain to China. The revolution spanned the known world.