How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (48 page)

In a book that has deservedly become a classic study of the rise of anti-Judaism in the early church, called
Faith and Fratricide
, theologian Rosemary Ruether sets forth the social implications of Christian power in the fourth century for Jews of the empire.
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The short story is that Jews came to be legally marginalized under Christian emperors and treated as second-class citizens with restricted legal rights and limited economic possibilities. Jewish beliefs and practices were not actually made illegal, in the way pagan sacrifices were at the end of the fourth century, but theologians and Christian bishops—who now were increasingly powerful not only as religious leaders, but also as civil authorities—railed against Jews and attacked them as the enemies of God. State legislation was passed to constrain the activities of Jews.

Constantine himself passed a law that forbade Jews from owning Christian slaves. This may seem like a humane measure in our day and age, when slavery of all kinds is viewed with disgust and contempt. But Constantine did not ban slavery and was not opposed to it. On the contrary, the Roman world continued to work as a slave economy. Without slaves one could not run any serious manufacturing or agricultural business. But if the population became increasingly Christian, and Jews could have only Jewish and pagan slaves, then any chance for Jews to compete economically with Christians was curtailed.

Eventually it became illegal for a Christian to convert to Judaism. Under the emperor Theodotius I, near the end of the fourth century, it became illegal for a Christian to marry a Jew. Doing so was considered an act of adultery. Jews came to be excluded from serving in public office. In 423
CE
a law was passed that made it illegal for Jews to build or even repair a synagogue. Accompanying all these forms of legislation were acts of violence against Jews that, even if not sponsored by the emperor or other state authorities, were tacitly condoned. Synagogues were burned, lands were confiscated, Jews were persecuted and even murdered—and the authorities turned a blind eye. Why not? These were the people who had killed God.

A key example illustrates the situation. In 388
CE
the bishop of a town called Callinicum incited his Christian parishioners to assault the local Jewish synagogue. They did so, leveling it to the ground. When the Jewish population in town protested to the emperor Theodosius, he ordered the bishop to have the synagogue rebuilt with church money. At that point, a powerful Christian leader interposed to try to reverse the emperor’s judgment. One of the most influential bishops at the time was Ambrose, the bishop of Milan. When word of the emperor’s intervention and demand for reparation reached Milan, Ambrose wrote a harsh letter in protest, arguing that the emperor was in danger of offending his own religious duty by this intervention and insisting that the bishop should by no means be required to restore the synagogue.

Here we have a remarkable situation. Less than a century earlier, Christian leaders were being hunted down and persecuted by the ruling authorities. Now Christian leaders were reprimanding the emperor in writing and expecting that they would be obeyed. How the tables have turned!

Theodosius decided to ignore Ambrose’s protest, but as it happens, he made a trip to Milan and attended a worship service in the cathedral there. Ambrose claims, in his own account of the affair, that he preached a sermon directed to the emperor’s “misbehavior” and afterward, in the middle of the service, walked down from the altar to confront the emperor face-to-face, publicly demanding that the emperor back down. In this very public arena, the emperor felt he had no choice. He acceded to the bishop’s demand, the Christian mob in Callinicum went unpunished, and the synagogue remained in ruins (see Ambrose,
Letters
40 and 41).
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Now, not only is Christ God, but his servants the bishops have real political power. And they are using that power in ugly ways against their longtime enemies, the Jews, those who allegedly killed their own God.

W
ITH THE CONVERSION OF
the emperor to the belief that Christ was God and that the God of the Christians was supreme, the discourse of Christians among themselves clearly changed. Earlier arguments of Christians with Christians were over issues that came to be seen as basic and foundational. Was Christ God? Yes. Was he a human? Yes. Was he, though, just one person, not two? Yes. By the early fourth century, when Constantine converted, the vast majority of Christians agreed with those affirmations. You might think that this would put an end to the theological debates and the search for heretics in the midst of the orthodox. But the historical truth is that the debates were just starting to warm up.

I have already mentioned the fact that the Arian controversy did not die out with the Council of Nicea; it went on for another half century or more. And new debates arose, over issues that would have been unthinkable just a hundred years earlier. Theological views that developed in the wake of the conquest of orthodox understandings of Jesus as both divine and human became increasingly sophisticated and nuanced. What earlier had been acceptable positions among the orthodox came to be challenged in their minutest details. The issues may seem picayune to outside observers, but to insiders they were matters of real moment, with eternal consequences. As a result, the vitriol did not lessen now that the “major” issues had been resolved. If anything, the rhetoric was significantly ratcheted up, and error on even the smallest point became a matter of enormous importance—the stuff of excommunication and exile.

I will not try to provide even a cursory treatment of the various theological controversies of the fourth, fifth, and later centuries, but instead will give the slightest taste, by briefly describing three views that came to be articulated, debated, and eventually denounced as heretical.
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This quick overview will at least give an idea of the level of argumentation carried on between Christian and Christian.

One of the major proponents of the Athanasian, anti-Arian views adopted at the Council of Nicea was the bishop of Ancyra, named Marcellus (died 374
CE
). He saw himself as hyperorthodox. But he realized that the decisions leading to the creed of Nicea left considerable room for development, especially on the question of how Christ—who was coeternal and equal with God—actually related to the Father. Were Christ and the Father two separate but equal beings, or hypostases (a term that now meant something like “person” or “individual entity”)? Marcellus fully realized that a modalist view could no longer be accepted. But was there some way to preserve the oneness, the unity, of the godhead without falling into the trap of Sabellius and others like him, so that no one could charge the Christians of having more than one God?

Marcellus’s solution was to say that there was only one hypostasis, who was Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In his view, the Christ and the Spirit were eternal with God, but only because they were resident within him from back into eternity and came forth from the Father for the purposes of salvation. In fact, before Christ came forth from God—when he was resident within him—he was not yet the Son; he could be the Son only when he came forth at the incarnation. And so before that time he was the Word of God, within the Father. Moreover, on the basis of his interpretation of 1 Corinthians 15:24–28, which says that at “the end” of all things, Christ will “hand over the kingdom to God the Father,” Marcellus maintained that Christ’s kingdom was not eternal. Ultimately, God the Father is all sovereign; Christ will deliver his kingdom to the Father; and then he will return to be resident within him.

This view obviously toed the line on the major Christological issues of the second, third, and early fourth centuries. Christ was God, he became man, and he was only one person. And it was not a modalist view. But other church leaders thought it sounded too much like modalism and condemned it as a heresy. The matter was discussed and finally decided at the Council of Constantinople in 381. That is when the line was introduced into the Nicene Creed that is still said today, that “his [Christ’s] kingdom shall have no end.” This line was added to demonstrate the theological rejection of the views of Marcellus. Other church leaders disagreed with this rejection. And so the debates continued.

Apollinaris (315–392
CE
) was too young to have attended the Council of Nicea, but as an adult he became a friend of Athanasius and was appointed bishop of the city of Laodicea. Like Marcellus before him, he claimed to be a true supporter of the form of orthodoxy embraced by the anti-Arian creed of Nicea. But he was consumed with the question of how Christ could be God and human at one and the same time. If Jesus was a god-man, then was part of him God and another part of him a man?

We are a bit handicapped in knowing exactly how Apollinaris expressed his views, since very little of his writing survives. What he was later
accused
of teaching was that the incarnate Christ did not actually have a human soul. Like others at his time, Apollinaris appears to have understood that humans are made up of three parts: the body; the “lower soul,” which is the root of our emotions and passions; and the “upper soul,” which is our faculty of reason with which we understand the world. Apollinaris evidently maintained that in Jesus Christ, the preexistent divine Logos replaced the upper soul, so his reason was completely divine. And so, God and human are united and at one—there is only one person, Christ—but they are united because in the man Jesus, God had a part and a human had a part.

One result of this view was that Christ could not develop morally, or in terms of his personality, since he did not have a human soul but instead the divine Logos. This more than anything else is what led to the condemnation of the Apollinarian view. If Christ was not fully human, in every respect, he could not set an example for us to follow. We are not like him, so how can we be like him? Moreover, if Christ was not fully human, then it cannot be clear how he could redeem the entire human being. In this understanding, Christ’s salvation would extend to the human body but not to the human soul, since he didn’t have a human soul.

Or so the opponents of Apollinaris argued. He and his views were condemned at the Council of Constantinople in 381, and even though in light of
earlier
controversies he seemed perfectly orthodox, he was not allowed any longer even to worship in a Christian church in public.

As a final example of a controversy that emerged from the conquest of orthodoxy, I turn to a later figure whose views came to be attacked, even though he himself wanted nothing more than to represent the orthodox views of the faith. Nestorius (381–451
CE
) was a leading Christian spokesperson of his day who was appointed to the prestigious position of bishop of Constantinople in 428
CE
. The controversy surrounding Nestorius and his views relates to an issue I have not yet addressed. Once it came to be affirmed that Christ was God by nature, from back into eternity, theologians began to ask what it meant to say that Mary was his mother. Mary herself, of course, came to be exalted as a person of unique standing, and legends and traditions about her proliferated. Theologians who considered her role in the salvation brought by Christ began now to call her
Theotokos
, which means “one who gives birth to God” but came to mean, more roughly, “the mother of God.”

This term was in wide use by the time of Nestorius in the early fifth century, but he came to object to it, publicly. In Nestorius’s view, to call Mary the mother of God sounded too much like Apollinarianism—that Mary gave birth to a human being who had the Logos of God within him instead of a human soul. Nestorius believed that Christ was fully human, not partially so, and also that Christ was fully God, not partially so. Moreover, the divine and the human cannot intermingle, since they are different essences. Both the divine and the human were present in Christ at the incarnation.

In stressing this view that Christ was both fully God and fully human, Nestorius came to be seen as someone who wanted to argue that Christ was two different persons, one divine and one human—with his human element tightly embracing the divine so that they stood in a unity (much like a “marriage of souls”). But by this time orthodox Christians had long maintained that Christ was just one person. In the end, Nestorius’s enemies attacked this “two-person” Christology by arguing that it divided Christ and thereby made him a “mere man” rather than some kind of “divine man.” As a result, Nestorius and his views were condemned by Pope Celestine in 430 and by the ecumenical Council of Ephesus in 431.

My point in looking at these three later heresies is not to give a full survey of Christological discussions of the fourth and fifth centuries. It is rather to illustrate the fact that once Christ was declared to be God from back into eternity who had become a human, all the problems of interpretation and understanding were not solved. Instead, new problems were introduced. And once these were resolved, yet more theological issues came to the fore. Theology became more nuanced. Views became more sophisticated. Orthodox theology became even more paradoxical. Many of these issues were not finally resolved in any “official” way until the Council of Chalcedon in 451. But even that “resolution” did not end all disputes about God, Christ, the Trinity, and all related topics. Disputes would rage for many centuries to come and in fact continue in our own day.

I
N NONE OF THE
Christian controversies I have discussed in this epilogue was there any question of whether Jesus was God. Jesus was in fact God. All of the participants in these debates had a “Nicene” understanding of Christ: he was God from back into eternity; there never was a time when or before which he did not exist; he was the one through whom God had created all things in heaven and on earth; he was of the same substance as God the Father; he was in fact equal with God in status, authority, and power. These are all quite exalted things to say about an apocalyptic preacher from rural Galilee who was crucified for crimes against the state. We have come a long way over the three hundred years since Jesus’s death.