There are no contemporary witnesses to the life and death of Joshua of Nazareth, who came to be known in the Greek-speaking world as Jesus Christ (the king). He was born, it seems, in 4 A.D. and died at the age of thirty-three on the cross, a cruel fate the Romans reserved for their more hated convicts.
The earliest accounts of the life of Jesus were three gospels (good news reports) written twenty or more years after his death. His ultimate successor as leader of the Christian sect, Saint Paul, never saw Jesus in the flesh but only in an epiphanic vision on the road to Damascus.
For 175 years, New Testament scholars have mulled over the scraps of information and threnodies of sentimentality in the three “synoptic” (connected) gospels that may have taken their stories primarily from one common source written by a writer known to us by the code name “Q,” who was a contemporary of Jesus and witnessed his crucifixion, or maybe not.
The Nazarene was one of many preachers roaming Judea early in the first century A.D., during a time of incipient political rebellion and spiritual ferment. He had a relative named John the Baptist, who was one of these purifying and faith-healing preachers until he somehow ran afoul of the puppet king Herod, whom the Romans had temporarily installed to keep order, and was decapitated by royal command.
John had predicted the coming of one greater than he was, and Jesus fulfilled his relative’s prophecy. He achieved local fame in the Galilee area of northern Judea both as a faith healer and as the preacher of an ethic of peace and love and sensitivity to the miseries of the poor. Urged by a group of Galilean fishermen, who were among his most devoted disciples, he carried his ministry to big-time in Jerusalem, where he drew the attention and ire of both the Hebrew priests and the Roman authorities. An incompetent Roman governor named Pontius Pilate (who never got another job in the Roman imperial administration) had been installed after King Herod’s death. Pilate decided that Jesus, as “King of the Jews,” was a political subversive and crucified him as a common criminal. Stories spread that three days after Jesus’ body was taken down from the cross, it disappeared, suggesting possible resurrection and elevation to heaven, like the old prophet Elijah.
Under Simon Peter (“Rocky”), the small sect of Christians remained loyal to the laws of the Torah, but memorialized Jesus as someone special. People wondered why this impoverished sect went around with smiles on their faces. They gained converts. Everything changed when Saul of Tarsus, an eccentric Jewish rabbi (teacher of the law, not a priest), joined the group and, much to Peter’s chagrin, set about transforming the beliefs and practices of the Christians.
Saint Paul, as we know him, was much impressed by the later chapters of the Book of Isaiah (probably written around 500 B.C. in Baghdad). Here the writer had spoken of the Lamb of God, a Messianic figure, as God’s suffering servant through whose shedding of blood the Gentiles were vicariously forgiven their ugly sins. Saint Paul saw Jesus as such a suffering servant.
Well versed in Greek philosophy and religion, Paul transformed Jesus into a dying and reborn savior, a common religious belief in Asia Minor where Paul came from, as well as in Egypt. Paul also opened—after a terrible row with Peter and James, “the brother of the Lord”—the Christian sect to Gentiles, who were not required to be circumcised or follow the Kashrut laws. Paul made Christianity a universal religion open to Jew and Gentile, to freeman and slave, to man or woman, to any ethnic group in the Roman Empire. Reported to the Roman authorities as a subversive, probably by rabbis, Paul insisted that, as a Roman citizen, he be tried in Rome. There he died in or about 66 A.D., four years before the great Jewish rebellion against Rome led to the destruction of the Temple and exiling of Jews from Jerusalem.
Christian legend later claimed that Peter also went to Rome and there became head of the Christian community, that is, a bishop. Both Peter and Paul, according to the Catholic version, died as martyrs in the Eternal City. Paul definitely went to Rome, and may have been martyred there. But that Peter, a very devout, timid Jewish fisherman, uneducated, and knowing little or no Greek, and no Latin, would have ended in Rome is most unlikely. Thus the whole claim of later bishops of Rome (the popes) that their authority in the Church was derived from its alleged first bishop, Saint Peter, was likely wishful thinking, if not an absolute hoax, that developed in the late second century A.D.
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By 100 A.D., Jesus had become the Divine Word to whom the Christians were individually attached by two sacramental (magical) rites. The first was baptism, which John the Baptist (among many other Jewish preachers) had practiced. The other was the sacrament of the Mass, or Eucharist, the eating of a wafer (the body of Christ) and drinking of wine (the blood of Christ).
Sacramental attachments to a dying and resurrected savior was a common idea in the Roman Empire. The religion of Mithraism, very popular in the army and open only to males, bathed the initiate in the blood of a bull.
Christians found a basis for the Mass in one of the gospels. Reportedly, just before his arrest by Roman authorities, asked by his disciples at a Passover seder to tell them how to memorialize him, Jesus took a piece of matzo and a cup of wine and suggested that consuming this seder fare would remind his disciples of Jesus after his death. And so it was and continues to this day.
The most important fact to know about the Christian Church in the two hundred years after Jesus’ death is that only at the end of this period did the Church comprise as many people as the far-flung Jewish community numbered (five million) in the Roman Empire. Christianity developed an intense rivalry with Judaism, and for many decades was compared to the Jews as a minority. This accounts for the intense anti-Semitism that became enshrined in Christianity by 200 A.D.
Judaism was a legal religion in the Roman Empire; Christianity was not until the first Christian emperor ascended the throne in the fourth century A.D. There were periodic persecutions of the Christians by the imperial state and local officials. The resulting martyrs, often upper-class women of unusual devotion, only served to draw more attention and converts to the Church. When the first Christian emperor, Constantine I, ascended the throne in Rome in 313 A.D., 25 percent of the population of the empire was already Christian. Some historians believe that Constantine was just betting that the Christians were the winning side. Otherwise, his surprising conversion was due to seeing Christian symbols in the sky and to the inevitable dreams that claimed to give him power to conquer.
Constantine enriched the bishops, endowed new churches, and favored Christians for appointment to imperial offices. When emperor Theodosius I banned paganism in 393 A.D., the great majority of the population of the empire was already Christian. The practice of Judaism was still allowed but under severe restrictions until Jesus, in his Second Coming, would decide what to do with the adherents of this gutter religion.
The ultimate triumph of Christianity was aided by the internal drive within Roman paganism toward some kind of monotheism. By 150 A.D., whatever vitality had once existed in ancient polytheism had mostly declined, and the gods played little or no role in individual lives. The state temples to the old gods became civic centers rather than religious entities.
But paganism went about reforming itself. It drew upon the Alexandrian mystical form of Platonism, taught by Plotinus—what we call Neoplatonism—to conjure an image of the deity as a single spiritual fountain of life that fructifies the world.
This Neoplatonic monotheism became popular in aristocratic circles in fourth-century Rome and gave such renewed vitality to paganism that the triumph of Christianity had to be bolstered by state proscription of this latter-day monotheistic paganism. By 390, Roman paganism was almost as close to monotheism as was Christianity.
The sociology of religion gives another reason for the triumph of Christianity. The Church provided a sense of community and institutions of friendship and caring within the largely joyless, anomic world of the Roman Empire. Sociologists suggest that its social utility, more than its doctrine, account for the rise of the Church.
In spite of the tension between Roman political authorities and the Church before Constantine, the triumph of Christianity was facilitated by the nature of the empire itself. It provided law and order and a peaceful ambience in which the Church’s missionary work could be pursued through freedom to travel and, in large part, freedom to preach and communicate. Saint Paul was proud of his Roman citizenship, and his letters to various Christian communities in the empire presupposed an effective communications system that only Roman government, law, and military might allowed.
The Church’s administration evolved as the imperial government’s structure was modified over time. An archbishop ruled a large territory that the Romans called a province. A bishop ruled a diocese, a smaller Roman administrative unit dominated by a large city.
The capitals of the eastern and western parts of the empire—Constantinople and Rome—came in time to signify unusual and superior power for the bishops resident there. When the Roman state was dissolved in the Latin-speaking world around 458 A.D., the pope replaced the emperor as the political leader of the Eternal City.
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At the end of the fourth century, the three Church Fathers—Saint Augustine of Hippo in North Africa; Saint Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan; and Saint Jerome, who spent his later years in Jerusalem being attended to by adoring matrons—shaped Christian doctrine, literature, and ritual.
Ambrose insisted that only males should govern in the Church, and he also inaugurated the troubling doctrine that priests should be celibate (a doctrine not enforced until the twelfth century). Jerome translated the Bible into Latin from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Jerome’s Vulgate (“Popular Version”) is the foundation of all later translations before the twentieth century.
Saint Augustine proliferated central theological and political doctrines of the Church, following Saint Paul closely. History is the scene of the struggle between the Heavenly and Earthly Cities, but only God before the Last Judgment knows the membership rolls. Human nature is so sinful (rebellious and corrupt) that only those who have received grace, i.e., have been chosen by God to love Him, can be saved for eternal life. This theory caused a lot of trouble for the medieval church, which by and large abandoned it. It was revived much later by Martin Luther.
By the early fifth century, at a series of church councils, the Christians had hammered out a compromise theory of the Trinity—God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (Church)—more or less of one substance but with three personalities. Those who would not accept this compromise were branded as heretics and sooner or later persecuted by the imperial state.
The Gnostics (also called Manichees) postulated that there were two gods—the Christian God of goodness and light, and an evil anti-God of darkness. This theory provided an easy explanation of why there was evil in the world. It was rejected by Catholic Christianity in favor of the monotheistic view that there was one God who created only goodness. Evil was sin, a rebellious falling-away from God, a perversion of His goodness. This was the foundation of the evolving Christian concept of Satan.
The Arians said Christ’s nature was divine, but of a lower degree of divinity than God the Father’s. The orthodox enemies of the Arians complained that the Arian view was a reversion to Roman polytheism. The Monophysites said Christ’s nature was divine, not human. All three minorities were persecuted, but, meanwhile, a lot of sharp theological discourse resulted from these intellectual conflicts. At least fifty volumes of Christian theology survived to later centuries and are scarcely read today.
By the early fifth century, the Church that had begun as a tiny group of fishermen and other poor people meeting in modest abodes had joined the Roman trend in classical culture in becoming logocentric, relying heavily on written texts—the Bible, the sacramental services, and the theology of the Church Fathers.
Beginning as a movement in Egypt around 200 A.D. and reaching France by 500 A.D., a special place of holiness was attributed to monks and nuns in a monastic setting because of their celibacy. Monks often became bishops; nuns were told to stay in their convents and shut up.
Jesus’ preaching had emphasized care and love for the poor and downtrodden. Along with some of the Hebrew prophets, he uttered the most democratic cries to be found in antiquity. By 400 A.D., the bishops and theologians had pretty well drained this egalitarian strain out of the Church.
It was still there in the Vulgate of Jerome, but by then there had been a severe decline in literacy in the Roman world. The bishops did not encourage reading of the Bible. In fact, Augustine thought that Jerome was wasting his time and literary genius putting the gospels into good Latin. It would take many centuries before Christian preachers started to teach that when Christ said, “Blessed are the poor for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven,” he meant not just the poor in spirit (the pious), but the actual impoverished masses of people.
The conservative and narrow spirit of the evolving classical heritage during late antiquity filtered out the radical side of Jesus’ teachings. It is very difficult for even religious leaders to go against the structure of the dominant culture. And the bishops, many of whom came from the old aristocracy, did not even try.