Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (18 page)

Since all believers are given new life in Christ, they are part of the same community, the Church. Paul already used the word 'Church' in two senses, to describe both the local gatherings of Christ-followers in their communities and the body which unites them all through their relationship to Christ. The Church is distinguished wherever its particular congregations meet by a common meal, which Paul described as echoing and remembering actions of Jesus Christ at the Last Supper.
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Everywhere the Church is united by baptism, a once-for-all ceremony of washing the believer with water. Nothing else is able to bring unity to the followers of Christ, because they are so varied - Jews, non-Jews, slaves, freemen, men, women - and also so various, in the gifts for action (
charismata
) which God has given them. 'For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body - Jews or Greeks, slaves or free - and all were made to drink of one Spirit.'
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We are now hearing of a third party beside 'God' and 'Christ': the 'Spirit'. It was a word familiar to any Jew, already echoing through the Tanakh from its very opening sentences, when, before completed creation, 'the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters'.
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Paul is constantly speaking of this Spirit, and questions arise as to how it relates to Christ - indeed, these questions occupied the Church for the next five centuries and the answers then hammered out have often been contested since. Rather than see the questions as a problem, Paul and the communities to whom he was writing would no doubt have said that all he was doing was trying to express a reality which they had found in their midst. Indeed, one of Paul's motives for writing to the Church at Corinth was that they were celebrating their experience of the Spirit in ways which he found imprudent; he sent them an extended health warning on this theme (I Corinthians 14), particularly the practice of speaking ecstatically in unknown 'languages'. The power of the Spirit was like a volcano under the community, showing itself in forms ranging from such spectacular displays to the everyday. The Spirit might perfect or express our prayers with sighs too deep for words, yet might also use us like ventriloquists' dolls, making us echo Jesus's cry to his Father,
Abba!
, and make it our own.
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In one of the earliest stories in the Book of Acts (2.1-13), it took over the reconstituted Twelve Apostles and made them speak the languages of all those who heard, on the Jewish feast which was known by Hellenized Jews as Pentecost. Eighteen centuries later, Christians would remember that first Pentecost of the Church and make something new of it (see pp. 912-13).

Entering Paul's theological world in his letters is rather like jumping on a moving merry-go-round: the point of entry hardly matters. It is an intensely painted set of portraits of how a Christian community works and what a Christian community signifies - but one has to remember that it is only one vision of Christian community. It has curiously little interest in the life and teaching of its founder, concentrating instead on the effect of his death and resurrection in God's cosmic plan. The individual, living in Christ, is never his own person. Love, participation, indwelling bind all together: such relationships transcend the usual human bonds of marriage, family ties or social status, which are allowed to survive precisely because they are irrelevant to the categories of the new age to come. The Christian future was to present many alternative situations and possibilities.

THE GOSPEL OF JOHN AND REVELATION

Paul was not alone in his development of a Christ message which strayed away from Jesus's own emphases. Some very similar themes are to be found in the fourth Gospel, John, which is thought to have been written rather later than the Synoptic Gospels, some time around the turn of the first and second centuries CE. Perhaps it should be seen as a fruitful meditation on the tradition which the Synoptics were creating.
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John has much information about Jesus which is not to be found in Matthew, Mark and Luke. He seems genuinely to supplement their picture of Jesus's life; yet that is not John's main purpose, and his information is put to uses other than those in the Synoptics. He portrays from the outset a Jesus who, in the Gospel's great opening hymn, is already fully identified with the pre-existing Word which was with God: John's Gospel narrative is a progressive glorification of this figure, to the Cross and beyond. John's Jesus, in the course of his majestic discourses, sets himself up in great metaphoric statements prefixed by 'I am', mystically seven in number like the days of creation. He is Bread, Light, Door, Shepherd, Resurrection/Life, Way/Truth/Life, Vine.
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He repeatedly refers to himself as the Son of God, which he does only once (and then only by implication) in the Synoptics, though they frequently put this title into the mouth of others.
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This Johannine Christ says little about forgiving one's enemies, which is such a strong theme in the Synoptics. His pronouncements about himself might seem arrogant, even insufferable, to those who could not accept them; they might be interpreted as a voice solemnly speaking through a man who is possessed. The Spirit of whom Paul speaks is also a constant presence in this Gospel, from the moment that John the Baptist sees it descending on Jesus in his baptism in the River Jordan.
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The tradition of John's Gospel is reflected in a number of minor letters which have also taken the name of John as author, and it may be seen as evidence of another strand within the non-Jewish communities which in parallel to those chiefly influenced by Paul were spreading beyond the Jewish matrix of the Church. A strange poetic work known as Revelation now forms the last book of the New Testament, an open letter addressed to a number of named Church communities in what today is southern Turkey. It is likely to have been written in the time of the Emperor Domitian (81-96 CE) and to be the product of Christian fury at his brutal campaign to strengthen the cult of emperor worship. Like much inter-Testamental literature (see p. 68), it is an 'apocalypse' (the Greek for 'revelation'): a vision of cosmic struggles in the End Time and of a triumphant judgement of God. Its author is also called John, and may be a contemporary of the Gospel writer (from whom he is distinguished by being called 'the Divine'); his crude Greek style is very different, as are his preoccupations.

Brooding on the Roman government's maltreatment of Christians, John the Divine delighted in constructing a picture of the Roman Empire's collapse which would have been familiar to pre-Christian Jewish writers in the apocalyptic tradition. He described Rome in a frequent Jewish shorthand for tyrannical power, 'Babylon'. Significantly, John the Divine is the only New Testament writer uninhibitedly and without qualification to use the provocative title of 'king' for Christ. There are plenty of New Testament references to the Kingdom of God, or Christ as the King of the Jews, or the King of Israel; but those are not the same at all. The early Christians were scared of what the Roman authorities might think if they started calling Christ a king; after all, Jesus was crucified because he was said to have claimed to be just that, 'King of the Jews'. So the rest of the New Testament seems almost to be avoiding the idea; modern Western Christians, who tend to talk a lot about Christ as king (see pp. 931-41), generally do not notice this. When two eighteenth-century English Evangelicals, John Cennick and Charles Wesley, wrote what has become a widely loved hymn, 'Lo, he comes with clouds descending', they drew most of its rich kingly imagery from Revelation:

Yea, Amen! let all adore Thee,
High on Thine eternal throne;
Saviour, take the power and glory,
Claim the kingdom for Thine own;
O come quickly! O come quickly! O come quickly!
Everlasting God, come down!

So Revelation is the great exception: the one book of the New Testament which positively relishes the subversiveness of the Christian faith. It is not surprising that, through the ages of Christian history, again and again this book has inspired oppressed peoples to rise up and destroy their oppressors. Such emphases frequently alarmed Christians and hindered Revelation's entry into full acceptance in the biblical family; but what probably saved the book was the major aspect of its picture of Jesus Christ which did resonate with Paul's writings and with John's Gospel. Once more, Jesus is a figure of cosmic significance, the Lamb who at the end of worldly time sits upon the throne. For John's first readers, this Lamb would be resonant of the sacrifice in the Jewish Passover, and would therefore lead them to a tangle of thoughts about the Last Supper which was their first Eucharist. Significantly, together with God the Almighty, the Lamb has replaced any need for a Temple in the city which is the New Jerusalem.
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For by the time that John the Divine was writing, the relationship of Christ-followers to the Old Jerusalem had radically changed: the future of Christianity was to move away from Jerusalem.

Paul has a good deal to say about the communities of Christ-followers, mostly from a Jewish background, who looked to the leaders of the Church based in Jerusalem after the death of Jesus and his removal from earthly life. As we have noted (see p. 98), the most important among these leaders was at first James the brother of Jesus. When the Jewish authorities executed James in 62 CE on charges of breaking the Jewish Law, his place was taken by another 'kinsman' of the Lord, Simeon. If the gathering of Christ-followers in Jerusalem had intended to become the mainstream expression of Judaism, they had failed, because they remained a minority grouping on the edge of the religious life in the city and in Palestine generally. Nevertheless, among the emerging Christ-followers they had a good deal of prestige because of their leaders' intimate connection with Jesus. Paul was constrained to admit when writing to the Corinthians that these men had experienced Resurrection appearances of the Lord before his own, in an order which he is careful to make clear - first Peter, then James.
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Indeed, Paul repeatedly urges the Churches to whom he writes around the Mediterranean to send funds to the Jerusalem Church, in the same way that Jews made a contribution to the Temple. This implies that the institution of the Jerusalem Church was beginning to take the place of the old Temple in the esteem of Christ's followers, and it is not surprising that Paul would have to respect it. Yet he represented the growing number of communities which placed their trust in Christ as Lord far away from Jerusalem around the Mediterranean world: communities which had grown in circumstances which will probably always remain obscure, despite the brilliant flashes of light or apparent light which illuminate their origins in Paul's epistles and the Book of Acts.

The separate inspiration of much of Paul's message (a matter which, as we have seen, he himself emphasized) was bound to bring tensions with the Jerusalem leadership, and in fact there were bitter clashes hinted at even in the emollient prose of the Book of Acts. A furious passage in Paul's letter to the Galatians reveals the real seriousness of the quarrel, as Paul accused his opponents, including Jesus's disciple Peter, one of the original Twelve, of cowardice, inconsistency and hypocrisy.
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At stake was an issue which would trouble Christ-followers for 150 years: how far should they move from the Jewish tradition if, like Paul, they preached the good news of Christ's kingdom to non-Jews? Questions of deep symbolism arose: should converts accept such features of Jewish life as circumcision, strict adherence to the Law of Moses and abstention from food defiled by association with pagan worship (that would include virtually all meat sold in the non-Jewish world)? Paul would allow only that Christians should not eat food which they knew had been publicly offered to idols, and otherwise not make much of a fuss about wares on sale in the market or about the dishes at a non-believer's table.
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One might have expected that the result of this would be the development of two branches of Christianity in fundamental disagreement with one another about their relationship with the parent Judaism: there would be a Jewish Church looking to the tradition represented by James and a Gentile Church treasuring the writings of Paul and John. In fact this is not so. There is one epistle in the New Testament which has been given James's name, and which does represent a rather different view of the Christian life and the role of the Law from that of Paul, but otherwise all Christians alive today are the heirs of the Church which Paul created. The other type of Christianity once headed by the brother of the Lord has disappeared. How did this happen? A great political crisis intervened to transform the situation.

THE JEWISH REVOLT AND THE END OF JERUSALEM

In 66 CE a Jewish revolt broke out in Palestine which drew its inspiration from the traditions of Jewish self-assertion and rage against outside interference which looked back to the heroic era of Judas Maccabeus (see pp. 65-6). The comforts provided by Roman rule were not enough to persuade everyone in the Jewish community that they should outweigh the constant reminder from the Roman authorities that Jews were not masters of their own destinies. The rebels eventually took control in Jerusalem and massacred the Sadducee elite, whom they regarded as collaborators with the Romans. The Jewish Christian Church, interestingly, fled from the city; it was distant enough from the world of Jewish nationalism to wish to keep out of this struggle. The result of the revolt was in the long term probably inevitable: the Romans could not afford to lose their grip on this corner of the Mediterranean and they put a huge effort into crushing the rebels. In the course of the capture of Jerusalem, whether by accident or by design, the great Temple complex went up in flames, never to be restored; its site lay as a wasteland for centuries.
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Jewish fury accumulated at this highly unusual destruction of one of the Mediterranean world's most renowned shrines and in 132-5 they rose again in revolt. Now the Romans erased the name of Jerusalem from the map and created a city, Aelia Capitolina. It took its name with deliberate offensiveness from a new temple of Jupiter, the chief god of the Roman pantheon as worshipped on the Capitoline Hill in Rome itself (the temple was built apparently on a site which encompassed the place of Jesus's crucifixion and burial, although this was probably coincidental). So Aelia Capitolina was not even intended to be a Greek city; it was a Roman colony.
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