Authors: Karen Armstrong
Fields of Blood (27 page)
After his crucifixion, Jesus’s disciples had visions that convinced them that he had been raised to the right hand of God and would shortly return to inaugurate the kingdom definitively.
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Jesus had worked in rural Roman Palestine and had generally avoided the towns and cities.
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But
Paul, a diaspora Jew from
Tarsus in
Cilicia, who had not known Jesus, believed that he had been commissioned by God to bring the “good news” of the gospel to the gentile world, so he preached in the Greco-Roman cities along the major
trade routes in Asia Minor, Greece, and
Macedonia. This was a very different milieu: Paul’s converts could not beg for their bread but had to work for their living, as he did, and a significant number of his converts may have been men and women of means. Writing in the 50s CE, Paul is the
earliest extant
Christian author, and his teachings influenced the accounts of Jesus’s life in the
gospels of
Mark,
Matthew, and
Luke (known as the
Synoptics), written in the 70s and 80s. And while the Synoptics drew upon the earliest Palestinian traditions about Jesus, they were writing in an
urban environment permeated by Greco-Roman religion.
Neither the
Greeks nor the Romans had ever separated religion from
secular life. They would not have understood our modern understanding of “religion.” They had no authoritative scriptures, no compulsory beliefs, no distinct clergy, and no obligatory ethical rules. There was no ontological gulf separating the gods from men and women; each human being had a
numen
or
genius
that was divine, and gods regularly took human form. Gods were part of the citizen body so the Greco-Roman city was essentially a religious community. Each city had its own divine patron, and civic pride, financial interest, and piety were intertwined in a way that would seem strange in our secularized world. Participation in the religious festivals in honor of the city’s gods was essential to city life: there were no public holidays or weekends, so the
Lupercalia in
Rome and the
Panathenaea in
Athens were rare opportunities for relaxation and celebration. These rituals defined what it meant to be a
Roman or an Athenian, put the city on show, invested civic life with transcendent meaning, presented the community at its best, and gave citizens a sense of belonging to a civic family. Participating in these rituals was just as important as any personal devotion to the gods. To belong to a city, therefore, was to worship its gods—though it was perfectly acceptable to worship other deities too.
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This was potentially problematic for Paul’s Jewish and gentile converts in
Antioch, Corinth,
Philippi, and
Ephesus, who, as
monotheists, regarded Roman religion as idolatrous. Judaism was respected as a tradition of great antiquity, and Jews’ avoidance of the public cult was accepted in the Roman Empire. At this point, Judaism and Christianity were not yet distinct traditions:
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Paul’s gentile converts saw themselves as part of a new Israel.
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But in the crowded Greco-Roman cities, Christians often came into conflict with the local synagogue and, when they proudly claimed to belong to a “new Israel,” seemed to be behaving with impiety toward the parent faith—an attitude that Romans deplored.
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Paul’s letters show that he was concerned that his converts were becoming conspicuous in a society where difference and novelty could be dangerous. He urged them to observe the customary dress codes,
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to behave with the decorum and self-control expected of Roman citizens, and to avoid excessively ecstatic demonstrations of piety.
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Instead of defying the Roman authorities, Paul preached obedience and respect: “You must all obey the governing authorities. Since all government comes from God, the civil authorities are appointed by God, and so anyone who resists authority is rebelling against God’s decisions.”
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Rome was not an evil empire but the guarantor of order and stability, so Christians must pay their taxes, “since all government officials are God’s officers. They serve God by collecting taxes.”
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But Paul knew that this was only a temporary state of affairs, because Jesus’s kingdom would be established on earth in his own lifetime: “The world as we know it is passing away.”
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While waiting for Jesus’s triumphant return, members of his community (
ekklesia
) should live as Jesus had taught them—kindly, supportively, and generously. They would create an alternative to the structural violence of imperial rule and the self-serving policies of the
aristocracy. When they celebrated the
Lord’s Supper, the communal meal in Jesus’s memory, rich and poor should sit at the same table and share the same
food.
Early Christianity was not a private affair between the individual and God: people derived their faith in
Jesus from the experience of living together in a close-knit, minority community that challenged the unequal distribution of wealth and power in stratified
Roman society. No doubt the author of the
Acts of the Apostles gives an idealized picture of the early ekklesia in Jerusalem, but it reflected a Christian ideal:
The whole group of believers was united, heart and soul; no one claimed for his own use anything that he had, as everything they owned was held in common … None of their members was ever in want, as all those who owned land or houses would sell them, and bring the money from them, to present it to the apostles; it was then distributed to any members who might be in need.
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Living in this way gave Christians intimations of new possibilities in humanity epitomized in the man Jesus, whose self-abnegation had raised him to God’s right hand. All former social divisions, Paul insisted, had become irrelevant: “In the one Spirit we were all baptized, Jews as well as Greeks, slaves as well as citizens.” This sacred community of people who previously had nothing in common made up the body of the risen Christ.
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In one memorable story, Luke, the evangelist who was closest to Paul, showed that Christians would come to know the risen Jesus not by a solitary mystical experience but by opening their hearts to the stranger, reading their scriptures together, and eating at the same table.
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Despite Paul’s best efforts, however, the early Christians would never fit easily into Greco-Roman society. They held aloof from the public celebrations and civic sacrifices that bound the city together and revered a man who had been executed by a Roman governor. They called Jesus “lord” (
kyrios
), but this had nothing in common with the conventional aristocracy, which clung to status and regarded the poor with disdain.
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Paul quoted an early Christian hymn to the
Philippian ekklesia, to remind them that God had bestowed the title of kyrios on Jesus because he had “emptied himself [
heauton ekenosen
] to assume the condition of a slave … and was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross.”
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The ideal of
kenosis,
“emptying,” would become crucial to Christian spirituality. “In your minds, you must be the same as Christ Jesus,” Paul told the Philippians. “There must be no competition among you, no conceit; but everybody is to be self-effacing. Always consider the
other person to be better than yourself, so that nobody thinks of his own interests first, but everybody thinks of other people’s interests instead.”
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Like the followers of
Confucius and Buddha, Christians were cultivating ideals of reverence and selflessness that countered the aggressive self-assertion of the warrior aristocracy.
A tightly knit and isolated community, however, can develop an exclusivity that ostracizes others. In Asia Minor a number of Jewish-Christian communities, who traced their origins to the ministry of
Jesus’s apostle
John, had developed a different view of Jesus. Paul and the
Synoptics had never regarded Jesus as God; the very idea would have horrified Paul who, before his conversion, had been an exceptionally punctilious
Pharisee. They all used the term “Son of God” in the conventional Jewish sense: Jesus had been an ordinary human being commissioned by God with a special task. Even in his exalted state, there was, for Paul, always a clear distinction between Jesus
kyrios Christos
and God, his Father. The author of the Fourth Gospel, however, depicted Jesus as a cosmic being, God’s eternal “Word” (
logos
) who had existed with God before the beginning of time.
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This high
Christology seems to have separated this group from other Jewish-Christian communities. Their writings were composed for an “in-group” with a private symbolism that was incomprehensible to outsiders. In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus frequently baffles his audience by his enigmatic remarks. For these so-called Johannine Christians, having the correct view of Jesus seemed more important than working for the coming of the
kingdom. They too had an
ethic of love, but it was reserved only for loyal members of the group; they turned their backs on “the world,”
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condemning defectors as “anti-Christs” and “children of the devil.”
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Spurned and misunderstood, they had developed a dualistic vision of a world polarized into light and darkness, good and evil, life and death. Their most extreme scripture was the book of
Revelation, probably written while the
Jews of
Palestine were fighting a desperate war against the Roman Empire.
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The author, John of Patmos, was convinced that the days of the
Beast, the evil empire, were numbered. Jesus was about to return, ride into battle, slay the Beast, fling him into a pit of fire, and establish his kingdom for a thousand years. Paul had taught his converts that Jesus, the victim of imperial violence, had achieved a spiritual and cosmic victory over sin and death. John, however, depicted Jesus, who had taught his followers not to retaliate violently, as a ruthless warrior who would defeat
Rome with massive slaughter and bloodshed. Revelation was admitted to the Christian canon only with great difficulty, but it would be scanned eagerly in times of social unrest when people were yearning for a more just and equitable world.