Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (22 page)

Gnostic contempt for the flesh ran against the whole tendency of Jewish religion, with its earthy affirmation of created things and its insistence on God's personal relationship with his chosen people. Because of this distancing from Judaism, it was extremely easy for Christians to see the logic of pursuing gnostic solutions to the problem which had exercised Paul so much: how much of the Jewish heritage to jettison from the new faith. The gnostics included people of sophistication and learning - the complexity and frequent obscurity of their literature impressively demonstrated that - and arguably they had a more intellectually satisfying solution to the problem of evil in the world than the mainstream Christian Church has ever been able to provide. Evil simply exists; life is a battle between good and evil, in a material world wholly beyond the concern of the true God.

Rather distinct from gnostic concerns was the contemporary approach to Christian identity adopted by a Christian thinker of the early second century named Marcion. Son of the Bishop of Sinope on the Black Sea, he was successful in the shipping business and used this wealth to pursue a career of theological exploration. After he had come to Rome about 140, he was eventually expelled by the Church there when the full radicalism of his approach to the faith became apparent. Like gnostics, with whom he has often been wrongly identified, he was determined to pull Christianity away from its Jewish roots. He saw the writings of Paul as his chief weapon, but moving on from Paul's own conflicted relationship with Judaism, he came to the same conclusion as gnostics in saying that the created world must be a worthless sham and Jesus's flesh an illusion; his Passion and death should be blamed on the Creator Demiurge. In characteristically Greek fashion, Marcion found the Tanakh in its Greek form crude and offensive - 'Jewish myths', in a phrase of the Epistle to Titus, which he would have attributed to the Apostle Paul.
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He saw the Creator God of the Jews as a God of judgement, rather than the God of love whom he saw perfectly revealed in Jesus Christ. Christ had died to satisfy the Creator God.

It is not easy to reconstruct Marcion's biblical writings and commentary, since they were largely destroyed by his enemies, but it is clear that he was a literalist who despised any figurative or allegorical interpretation of scripture and rather took the first apparent sense. If that sense clashed with his own sense of true religion, he simply rejected the text. The result was that all the Tanakh had to go, even though Marcion still drew on its prophecies to complete his picture of the saving work of Christ. What remained of the New Testament was a collection of Paul's letters (probably the collection which he inherited), together with a version of Luke's Gospel. Perhaps he simply chose this because Luke was the Gospel with which he had grown up, but it may have been because Luke's constant references to the Spirit in the story of Christ and the life of the Church appealed to him, or because of Luke's evident association with Paul through Luke's authorship of the Acts of the Apostles.
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To hammer home his anti-Jewish and ultra-Pauline message, he added a book of
Antitheses
, pointing out the difference in approach between his selection of scripture and the Hebrew sacred books. He was no isolated eccentric: references to Christians opposing Marcion come from places as far apart as France and Syria, so it is clear that his teachings had a widespread effect, and there is evidence that congregations with Marcionite beliefs survived until as late as the tenth century in what are now the borderlands of Iran and Afghanistan.
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Marcion fascinated the great German Lutheran Church historian of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Adolf von Harnack, and it must be said that there are curious resemblances in Marcion's thought to the spiritual progress of Martin Luther: the revulsion against the idea of a God of judgement, the contrast between Law and Gospel, the fascination with Paul and the single-minded search for a core message within the inheritance of sacred writings.
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CANON, CREED, MINISTRY, CATHOLICITY

Gnosticism and Marcionism offered two possible futures for the Jesus cult. A gnostic Christianity would have bred immense diversity of belief; indeed, because of gnosticism's general hospitality to mixtures of doctrine, Christianity might have drained into the sands of a generalized new religiosity within the Roman Empire if gnostic beliefs had become dominant within it. By contrast, a Church in which Marcion prevailed would have been a very tidy organization, given boundaries by the new master, just as Paul and the Pauline communities before him had sought to fence themselves in. The Christianity which emerged in reaction to these two possibilities adopted the same strategy as Marcion: it sought to define, to create a uniformity of belief and practice, just as contemporary Judaism was doing at the same time in reaction to the disaster of Jerusalem's fall. That demanded a concept of the Church as one wherever it was: a universal version of Christianity which had taken up Paul's mission to the Gentiles and combined it with much of the rhetoric and terminology of ancient Israel to express its wider unity. From an ordinary Greek adjective for 'general', 'whole' or 'universal',
katholikos/e
, there developed a term of great resonance for Christianity, despite the fact that the word is not to be found in the Bible. Bishop Ignatius of Antioch provides the first known use in his letter written to the Christians of Smyrna, in the early second century, but he evidently expected his readers to be familiar with it; he certainly did not bother to explain exactly what he meant by 'the whole' (
katholike
) Church.
⁴⁶

This was a momentous development. Christians have never since abandoned their rhetoric of unity, despite their general inability to sustain it at any stage in the reality of history. Yet they have gone on trying, and have used three main tools to build a 'Catholic' faith: developing an agreed list of authoritative sacred texts (a 'canon' of scripture, from the Greek for 'straight rod' or 'rule'); forming creeds; embodying authority in ministers set aside for the purpose. It is easy (and traditional) to tell the history of all three developments in the early Church as a story of convergence and synthesis, but that story has left many casualties along the way. The last of the three has in fact proved one of the major forces to divide Christianity, as rival systems of ministry split or made their own claims to exclusive Catholic authority; almost equally divisive has been the question of what creeds should actually say. If we seek one explanation of why 'Catholic' Christianity so successfully elbowed aside both the gnostic alternatives and the tidy-mindedness of Marcion, it is to its sacred literature that we should point: its formation of a text which still remains the anchor of Christian belief, and which is held in common throughout the many varieties of Christian Churches.

To begin with, Christians had the Jewish Tanakh, obsessively redirected in its reference towards their efforts to grapple with the meaning of the life and death of Jesus, and when they spoke of 'scripture' at the beginning of the second century CE, it is the Tanakh that they meant. By the end of that same century, 'scripture' was a more complicated word, because by then many Christians would include in the term a new series of books, a 'New Testament' of exclusively Christian works. The construction of a canon of scripture to stand in this New Testament alongside the Tanakh was a gradual process, even given the spur that Marcion was proposing to do the same thing. It is likely that the first collection of biblical 'New Testament' books which would be familiar to modern Christians was made in the middle of the second century, but that is not the same as saying that it was universally accepted by Christians straight away.
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The earliest surviving complete list of books that we would recognize as the New Testament comes as late as 367 CE, laid down in a pastoral letter written by Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria. Even then, parts of the Church continued to argue whether it was really necessary to have four Gospels which did not always agree with each other, and some Churches went on into the fifth century using a harmony (in Greek,
Diatessaron
) combining all four, produced by the Syrian writer Tatian at the end of the second century (see pp. 181-2). Besides this, some books drifted in and out of the canon: the Church in Corinth long treasured as scripture the first of two epistles written to them by the Roman Church leader Clement (see pp. 132-3), and elsewhere the strongly anti-Jewish Epistle of Barnabas enjoyed lasting influence.
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Some Christian communities in the eastern Mediterranean regarded the Book of Revelation with suspicion as late as the fifth century.

What this meant was that from now on there was a large literature of books excluded from the mainstream, both Jewish and Christian in origin, taking the form of 'Gospels', 'Apocalypses', 'Acts' and the like. A few, mainly the oldest, were gathered in the approved secondary character of 'apocrypha' (see pp. 67-8), but others flitted in and out of Christian consciousness, particularly if they provided a good story or memorable images or information not otherwise found in canonical scripture. Thus the name of Mary's mother and Jesus's grandmother, Anna or Anne, is only provided in the excluded books, first the work which is termed the 'Infancy Gospel [
Protevangelium
] of James'. Likewise the ox and the ass commonly thought of as fixtures of Jesus's birth in the stable in Bethlehem appear only in a text from as late as the eighth or ninth century, although it probably reflects earlier lost apocryphal books (see Plate 25). The same is true of accounts of the beheading of St Paul or of St Peter's martyrdom: according to the apocryphal
Acts of Peter
, Peter apparently insisted on being crucified upside down so that his death would be more debasing than that of his Lord. Popular awareness of this vanishing literature was therefore sustained through the vivid pictures which these stories continued to stimulate in Christian art - in the case of the ox and the ass, down to the Christmas cards and carols of the present day.
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The advantage of credal statements was that almost anyone was capable of learning them quickly to standardize belief and put up barriers against speculation or what was likely to be a boundless set of disagreements about what the Christian scriptures actually meant. New believers had probably been given such formulae at baptism from the earliest days of Christ-following; several can be traced embedded in the texts of the epistles both of Paul and of others. However, in the second century these creeds took on a new aggressive tone in response to the growing diversity of Christian belief. Take, for instance, a credal statement set down by Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons in a work of instruction written in Greek in the late second century and now preserved only in an Armenian translation: for ease of remembering, it is fashioned into three articles, dealing with three aspects of the Christian encounter with the divine:

God the Father, uncreated, beyond grasp, invisible, one God the maker of all; this is the first and foremost article of our faith. But the second article is the Word of God, the Son of God, Christ Jesus our Lord, who was shown forth by the prophets according to the design of their prophecy and according to the manner in which the Father disposed; and through Him were made all things whatsoever. He also, in the end of times . . . became a man among men, visible and tangible, in order to abolish death and bring to light life, and bring about the communion of God and man. And the third article is the Holy Spirit, through whom the prophets prophesied and the patriarchs were taught about God . . . and who in the end of times has been poured forth in a new manner upon humanity over all the earth, renewing man to God.
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This creed contains much less matter than subsequent creeds, which were concerned to exclude other challenges to the Church's identity, yet practically every clause in it hits at gnostic attitudes. No gnostic could have asserted that God made everything, or that Jesus was 'tangible', or that the Spirit had inspired Hebrew prophets and taught the Jews about God.

Above all, there must be a universally recognized single authority in the Church able to take decisions: to choose sacred texts for canonical status or compare the content of local creeds in Churches for a uniform direction in teaching. Such a Church would be 'Catholic' indeed. The second century saw a marked increase in the authority and coherence of the Church's ordained ministry. By 200 CE there was a mainstream Catholic Church which took for granted the existence of a threefold ministry of bishop, priest and deacon, and there would be few challenges to this pattern for the next thirteen hundred years. When the pattern was indeed challenged in the sixteenth-century Reformation in the Western Church, those arguing about the nature of ministry looked for proof of their respective opposing viewpoints in the earliest years of the Church, and in the end no party could find complete satisfaction in the evidence. Let us discover why.

It was not surprising that the Jerusalem Church had a single leading figure in the wake of the death of Jesus, since it was Jesus's own brother, James. He seems to have presided over apostles; they included the remaining figures from the original Twelve but also numbered others awarded this description. The leadership in Jerusalem under James had a group of elders as well: the Greek is
presbyteroi
, which would descend into the English 'priests', as well into other terms which much later took on polemical overtones, 'presbyters' and 'presbytery'. In addition to these, there was a group of seven deacons: the word is the ordinary Greek for servant,
diakonos
.
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So it is tempting to see in this the equivalent in embryo of the later grades of bishop, priest and deacon. A similar picture emerges from one of the earliest major Christian centres, Antioch in Syria, when Antioch re-emerges at the end of the first century, after a hiatus in surviving documentation. At this stage, the Church in Antioch had a single leader, overseer or 'bishop' (
episkopos
), just like the (by then dispersed) community in Jerusalem: Ignatius - interestingly, a man with a Latin name, in the same way that the enduring Antiochene nickname for Christ-followers,
Christiani
, was a Latin rather than Greek idiom (see p. 110). Ignatius was also assisted by presbyters and deacons. It might seem that the later Catholic case for ministerial order is clinched by such foundational examples, but the full story is to be found elsewhere.