Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (17 page)

It is hardly surprising that in the two millennia of Christian history since these profound surprises and mysteries, Christianity has been a perpetual argument about meaning and reality. Readers of this book may become bewildered, bored or irritated by my extended discussions of the theological niceties which once aroused such passions among Christians; but no history of Christianity which tries to sidle past its theological disputes will make sense. The problem is simple in its utter complexity: how can a human being be God? Christians can be passionately convinced that they meet a fellow human in Jesus who is God, but they may not like the implications of this: how can God be involved in the unhygienic messiness of everyday life and remain God? There are basic problems of human dirt, waste and decay from which devotion recoils - yet without dirt, where is the real humanity of Christ, which tears other humans away from despair and oblivion towards joy and life? The variety of answers to these questions dominated the development of the Church in its first five centuries, and at no time have those who call themselves Christians reached unanimity on the puzzles. And the disagreements were not academic in any sense of the word; they were matters of eternal life or eternal death. We will meet a crowd butchering a bishop who had signed up to the wrong solution; we will find Christians burning other Christians alive over matters which now seem no more than points to debate in a university seminar. We should try to understand why these people of past societies were so angry, frightened and sadistic, even if we cannot sympathize with them. That will mean encountering a crowded menu of theology, centring on the Lord Jesus Christ.

'Lord' - the Greek word
Kyrios
- resounds so much through the Bible that my old concordance of words occurring in the Bible, compiled by the magnificently obsessive eighteenth-century Scotsman Alexander Cruden, takes eight pages in three columns of tiny print to list all the usages of 'Lord' through Old and New Testaments. Nearly all relate to divine figures: first in the Old Testament as a translation via Greek of the Hebrew words for the name of God, and then throughout the New Testament, directly and newly for Jesus Christ. All the New Testament writings are written with this consciousness in mind: Jesus is Lord, the word for God. Probably none of these texts were written by anyone who had known Jesus in person, though some have taken the names of people who did. Those now thought to be written first - in other words, before the Gospels which narrate the ministry of Jesus - were the work of a man who came to an intense relationship with Jesus Christ a year or two after the Lord's Ascension. He was called Saul, which after his turn to Christianity he changed to Paul; he was a businessman, by trade a tent-maker, from a Mediterranean port called Tarsos or Tarsus, hundreds of miles north of Palestine in what is now Turkey.

NEW DIRECTIONS: PAUL OF TARSUS

Saul was a devout and soundly educated Jew in the Pharisaic tradition, reflecting the great centuries-long dispersal of the Jewish people because he spoke as his first language not Jesus's Aramaic but Greek, the common (
koine
) Greek of the marketplace and quayside. This vigorous, non-literary, everyday Greek was the style in which virtually all the New Testament was written and the earliest surviving parts are a series of letters which Paul wrote to various congregations of Christ-followers. Some of these letters survive in lightly edited form, seven in number in their present arrangement, alongside slightly later pastiches of the authentic letters which have also taken Paul's name.
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The Church knows them as 'epistles', from the Greek word
epistole
, which reflects the character they have come to assume in Christian tradition as 'commands' or 'commissions', not simply as messages. We meet Paul too in the text of a slightly later work in the biblical canon. It is called the Acts of the Apostles, and presents itself in its introduction as having been written by the author of the Gospel of Luke, though in the course of its tales of the adventures of Paul and of other early Christian activists, Acts has something of the feel of a historical novel. Acts is eager to play down the fact that Paul was often to be found in confrontations with the earlier leaders of the Church, and that his message had distinctive qualities. It also has to be said that the Paul of Acts does not always sound like the Paul of his own letters (letters which are never actually mentioned in Acts). The general excitement of the stories in Acts has frequently eclipsed the considerably more personally complex Paul to be met in his own words.
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The tent-maker from Tarsus turned from active hatred of Christianity to become the most prominent of its early spokespeople whose memory has survived. The circumstances of this conversion as described in Acts are dramatic; it came in the wake of his watching and approving of the stoning to death in Jerusalem of Stephen, the first known martyr for Christ after Christ's death, some time in the early 30s CE. Maybe it was the effect of witnessing this violence which produced such a violent reaction in Saul. As he travelled on the road to Damascus, 'suddenly a light from heaven flashed about him. And he fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" '
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It was Jesus himself speaking. Such was the trauma of this vision that Saul temporarily lost his sight and was struck dumb for several days. Paul's own account in his letter to the Churches in the Roman province of Galatia (in central Asia Minor) is more reticent. It merely says that God 'was pleased to reveal his Son to me', and that his good news had came to him 'through a revelation of Jesus Christ', but even this reference is coupled with the notice of a dramatic new direction for the proclamation of the good news: Paul claims that God had set him aside to preach Christ 'among the Gentiles' - that is, non-Jews. Paul also says that he did not consult any of the existing Jewish leaders of the Jesus movement in Jerusalem, or indeed any 'flesh and blood'. He went away to Arabia to preach Christ, then three years passed before his first encounter in Jerusalem with two of the original Twelve, Peter (whom he calls Cephas) and the leader of the Jerusalem Church, James.
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Acts says nothing of that first mission to Arabia, and the suspicion occurs that it was not a great success - though maybe this country remote from Tarsus and Jerusalem was also the crucial setting in which Paul's extraordinary version of the Jesus message took shape. Paul's journeys which we know about from Acts, some of which are also attested in his surviving letters, take him in an entirely opposite direction: the eastern Mediterranean, and finally to Rome, the scene of his death some time in the mid-60s CE. It was a momentous change, which in the long term was to turn Christianity from a faith of the Semitic East into something very different, in which the heirs of Greek and Latin civilization determined the way in which the Christ story was told and interpreted. For Paul was not merely a Jew: he was one of those countless subjects of the Roman Empire who had obtained grants of citizenship and could consider themselves privileged people entitled to the consideration of the emperor in Rome. It is noticeable that in geographical references throughout his letters, he refers as a matter of course to the names set up by the Romans for their various provinces throughout the empire.
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When Paul was put on trial by a provincial tribunal in Palestine (according to Acts, because he had brought a non-Jew into the Temple in Jerusalem), he insisted on appealing to the emperor, though his appeal did not do any more than buy him a good deal of time to spread his message more widely before his eventual execution in Rome. He took pride in the title he had conferred on himself: 'an Apostle to the Gentiles'.
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In reality, Paul's move towards the Gentile world may at first have been partial and cautious. The Book of Acts does portray him preaching in fully Gentile settings, although the most famous of such encounters, in the centre of Athens, is not presented as having much result. Yet Paul's authentic letters take for granted a very detailed knowledge of Jewish tradition in their readers, which does not suggest that his congregations were made up of converts recruited at random from the general Classical public. It is far more likely that in making his approaches to the Gentile world, Paul was helped by a particular feature of many synagogue communities in the Mediterranean world: in addition to those members of the synagogue who were identified as Jews, through birth and the physical mark of circumcision, there were groups of non-Jews who had consciously bought into the faith of Judaism. The writer of Acts calls them by various terms, one of which is 'God-fearers' or 'God-reverers' (
theosebeis
), and he makes them an important part of Paul's audience.

Some commentators on Acts have doubted the historical reality of this category
theosebes
, but in 1976 archaeological excavations at Aphrodisias, in what is now south-west Turkey, revealed an inscription belonging to a synagogue from the third century CE in which that same word was used in a list of benefactors of the building: the set of names was arranged separately from Jewish names and represented only slightly less than half of the total number of donors. So at least this synagogue boasted a substantial proportion of people emotionally committed to Judaism and its tradition, yet still part of a wider world. Paul himself does not use the word
theosebes
in his letters, but his epistle to Christians in Galatia is by implication directed exactly to such an audience: pressure is being brought on them to be circumcised, indicating that they are not already but are still knowledgeable enough about Judaism to be expected to appreciate Paul's detailed references to Jewish sacred literature and beliefs.
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They might be ready to listen to a message which was both radically different from what they had heard before and yet clearly had a relationship to it, a relationship expressed with a passion and urgency appropriate for a final age.

One wonders what Paul was preaching when he started out. His surviving writings are virtually empty of what the earthly Jesus had taught - teaching (in Aramaic) which would have naturally been passed on to him by 'flesh and blood', if he had consulted them - and the silence contrasts significantly with the fact that he is regularly prepared to quote the Tanakh. A person, and not a system, had captured him in the mysterious events on the road to Damascus. The person was Christ and Lord: the two titles expressed slightly different aspects of who Jesus was for Paul. Jesus is Christ (the Anointed) because he has been chosen to fulfil God's plan, and Lord because his place in God's plan gives him eternal dominion and power.
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The distinction is not a rigid one; but Paul tended in his letters to talk of Jesus as 'Christ' when he was making statements and as 'Lord' when he was pleading with his readers or ordering them to do something. He associated the title 'Christ' with the work of God accomplished on the Cross - no longer a political Messiah or 'Anointed One' to save the people of Israel. He saw Jesus the Lord as the one to whom Christians owe obedience and so he associated the title 'Lord' with the obedient implementing of this work in the life of the Church.
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Paul knew much in his previous belief system about obedience to the Law, and one senses him struggling with his inheritance of Law in ways that are never wholly coherent. In his letter to the Christians in Rome, one can read that the Law brings wrath and sin, but also that it is holy.
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Most striking of all is Paul's repeated insistence that traditional Jewish genital circumcision counts for no more than lack of circumcision, beside keeping the commandments of God. Surely he could not ignore the clear message of the Tanakh that circumcision was indeed one of the commandments of God? It seems that for him, even more than for Jesus, Law was good, Law was bad - he was as fond of a strong paradox as was Martin Luther fifteen centuries later, and perhaps that is why the two men's minds met. But this seeming incoherence may be explained by the completeness of his traumatic Damascus road experience: he had rejected what was good, his Jewish heritage, for something incomparably better - Christ. An intimate meeting with Christ was a better way of being 'righteous', a word at the centre of a cluster of words which he uses with the same root in the verb
dikaioun
, 'to be made righteous' or, in the form made famous by Protestants in the sixteenth-century Reformation, 'to be justified'. The biblical scholar E. P. Sanders has expressed the sense of a grace coming from outside ourselves by coining a memorably clunky phrase, 'be righteoused' - reconciled once more to God.
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Adam, the first man, sinned so completely that no law had power to deal with the universal sin that resulted; neither he nor his descendants could be 'righteoused' through their own efforts, however much they might feel the pain and wretchedness of the Fall away from Eden. Only Christ could repair the damage, and the core of Paul's message was to point to Christ and our need for total faith in him; salvation to eternal life comes through Christ alone. Paul managed to find a prophet of the Tanakh to sum up what he wanted to say: 'the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith, as it is written "he who through faith is righteous shall live" '.
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Thus for the purposes of being 'righteoused', the Law was irrelevant; yet Paul could not bear to see all the Law disappear. For those who were righteoused, it might have its uses, guiding a true obedience for Christ-followers which was just as attainable for Jews as non-Jews.
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Obedience is a theme to which Paul obsessively returns. He speaks of Christ's followers as being like slaves, wives, debtors, younger sons, coheirs: the relationship of the believer to Christ can become so intimate that he can speak of it in terms of one personality absorbing another - one of his characteristic phrases is that believers are 'in Christ'. This is all the more extraordinary since the starting point of this faith is an individual human being in recent historic time, not some abstract Platonic Supreme Soul. And yet Paul presented this Jesus as he had experienced him: a risen, transcendent figure whose earthly life was secondary to what happened as a result of his death. He pointed back to the catastrophe brought about by Adam's disobedience, and then to Christ's triumph over this catastrophe: 'As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive'.
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