The Faith Instinct (25 page)

Adherents of the Jesus cult became known as Ebionites. A closel
y related sect known as the Nazarenes survived until at least t
he fourth century. The idea of Jesus as a human prophet, sent by a single god, is st
rongly reminiscent of Islam. Indeed, the Qur’an refers to Christians as al-Nas
rani, an archaic term used by East Syrian churches. The Ebionit
es were condemned as heretical by the victorious Christ movemen
t and slowly faded from the historical record. “We do not know when they cease
d to exist,” writes the religious historian Barrie Wilson. “Perhaps, som
e speculate, they were absorbed into Islam, which shares some o
f their views of Jesus—as human, teacher, and prophet.”
¹⁸⁸

The Christ movement, in contrast, saw Jesus as a divine being whose death and resurrection, as in the mystery cults prevalent in the Roman empire, was celebrated by symbolic consumption of the god’s sacrificial body. Jews expected the prophesied messiah of the Hebrew bible to be a human prophet with the temporal role of evicting the Roman occupiers. But in translating the word
messiah
into Greek—both
mashiah
and
christos
mean “anointed”—the framer of the Christ movement made Jesus into a god who was heir to a heavenly kingdom, not an earthly one.

The framer was presumably Paul, from the internal evidence of t
he New Testament documents. Unlike the Jesus movement, which wa
s directed to Jews, required strict observance of Jewish laws and operated in Aramai
c, Paul addressed his Christ movement to the Greek-speaking gen
tiles of the Roman world. He dropped the requirements of circum
cision and observance of Jewish law. Paul in his letters refers very little to Jesus
’ life or teachings. His most important statements, such
as those concerning the eucharist and resurrection, are based on his personal revela
tions and not from information about Jesus from those who had k
nown him. “But I certify to you, brethren,” Paul tells the Galatians, “that the gospel which
was preached of me is not after man. For I neither received it
of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ.”
¹⁸⁹

During the first three centuries A.D., many different religions and brands of Christianity competed with one another. Christianity slowly displaced the mystery cults that were its rivals, helped by the fact tha
t the Christ movement had adopted the cults’ central idea of a sacrificial god and grafted it onto the ancient religious heritage of Judaism. The Christ movement prevailed over the Jesus movement, many of whose members perished in the siege of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, and all the other early brands of Christianity, until it was chosen as the state religion of the Roman empire by Constantine and Theodosius.

Just as the victors usually write the history books, it was the inheritors of Paul’s Christ movement who shaped the New Testament to support their version of Christianity. Many documents about Jesus and his followers were in circulation during the first three centuries of the Christian era. The Gospel of Peter seems to have been one of the most popular, to judge by the number of surviving fragments.
¹⁹⁰
But like many other documents, it was rejected by the compilers of the official record.

Their selection of books apparently did not become final until the mid-fourth century A.D. when the list of books now in the New Testament was first mentioned by Athanasius, the patriarch of Alexandria, in a letter of A.D. 367. If these books had been arranged in order of their date of composition, the letters of Paul would have come first, given that all the authentic ones were written before A.D. 70, and the four gospels, all of which were written after A.D. 70, would follow. But that would have given the impression, which the compilers of the New Testament presumably sought to avoid, that Paul shaped Christianity as a religion for gentiles and loosely tied it to the person of Jesus, an orthodox Jew interested only in making a minor adjustment to Judaism. By placing the lives of Jesus first, the compilers lent support to the official story, that Jesus was the founder of Christianity who sent his disciples and apostles to preach the gospel to Jew and gentile around the world.

The New Testament’s book of Acts records the disagreement between the leaders of the Jerusalem church, who wanted recruits to obey Jewish law in all respects, and proselytizers such as Paul who understood the new cult’s great potential in the world outside Judaea if it could only break free from the ethnic barriers, such as circumcision and the rigorous Jewish dietary laws, that restricted it to Jews. The author of Acts also implied that the differences between the two movements were patched up, which seems not to have been the case given the very different directions taken by Paul and the Jesus movement. But by implying a resolution, the book of Acts helps to graft Pauline Christianity onto the Judaic rootstock of the Jesus movement.

Because the writers of the New Testament took such care to integrate their work with Judaic belief, it is hard at this remove to appreciate the Greekness of Christianity. All the books of the New Testament were originally written in Greek. Jesus (Iēsous) is the Greek form of Yeshua or Yeshu, his name in Aramaic. Because Greek was the lingua franca of the eastern Roman empire, all early church services outside Judaea took place in Greek, even in Rome. Followers of Jesus were first called Christian
s in the Hellenistic city of Antioch. The Hebrew Bible was read and referred to in its Greek translation, the Septuagint. Only around A.D. 200 did Roman congregations start holding services in Latin, retaining even then such Greek phrases as
kyrie eleison
—“Lord have mercy.”

Not only was the culture of early Christianity Greek but several of its central beliefs have little or no counterpart in Jewish thought. They were, however, perfectly familiar in the Greco-Roman world of the first two centuries A.D. One is the worship of a mother and child, as in the ancient cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis. She is often shown as suckling her infant son Horus, who was conceived by a virgin birth. The Isis cult was popular throughout the empire, particularly in Rome during the first century B.C. The church in Egypt co-opted the cult, plagiarizing its iconography to depict mother and child in the now familiar image of the virgin and Jesus.

In the world of early Christianity, the Egyptian church—now known as the Coptic church—was very large and its patriarchs in Alexandria rivaled those of Constantinople and Rome for influence. It was they who pressed for a stronger role for the virgin in Christian worship and theology. “The Egyptian patriarchs, Theophilus and Cyril, led the Greek world,” writes the historian Peter Brown. “The Council of Ephesus in 431, in declaring that Mary was the
Theotokos
—‘She Who gave birth to God’— ratified the fervour of the Copts, who had worshipped her as such, suckling the new-born Jesus. This prototype of the most tender scene in medieval art was a Coptic adaptation of Isis suckling the infant Horus.”
¹⁹¹
The figure of Isis and Horus “is so like that of the Madonna and child that it has sometimes received the adoration of ignorant Christians,” noted the anthropologist James Frazer.
¹⁹²

A prominent feature of several popular mystery cults of the tim
e was the theme of a god who dies and is later resurrected, as in the cults of Diony
sus or of Attis and Cybele. The common idea, presumably inherit
ed from the dawn of agriculture, was of a vegetation god who dies in autumn and must
be resurrected in the spring with appropriate ritual. Follower
s of Dionysus, the god of wine, would tear apart a live bull—
or occasionally a person—and eat the flesh raw, in commemoration of the killin
g and resurrection of the god. As for Attis, he was born of a virgin—his mothe
r Nana conceived by placing a ripe pomegranate in her bosom—
and his death and resurrection were celebrated at a spring festival at which his fol
lowers shed copious amounts of blood through self-mutilation.
¹⁹³

Mithraism, a religion with a large following among Roman army officers, included among its rites “sacred meals not unlike the Christian eucharist and offers souls away through the seven planetary spirits which bar the ascent to the Milky Way after death,” writes Chadwick.
¹⁹⁴

A follower of any of these mystery cults, whether of Adonis, Isis, Mithras, Dionysus or Attis, would have recognized many familiar elements in Christianity, such as the virgin birth, the death of the god, the springtime resurrection festival, and the symbolism of the eucharist in which celebra
nts consumed bread and wine that were taken as representing the body and blood of the sacrificial god.

Given that Jews are strictly forbidden to taste blood, which must be drained away before an animal can be eaten, it would have been strange indeed for Jesus, an observant Jew, to recommend that his disciples should drink his blood, even symbolically.
¹⁹⁵
Indeed in a very early description of the eucharist, that of the Didache, also known as “The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,” no such symbolism is indicated nor is any connection made with Passover or the resurrection. Celebrants are told simply to give thanks “for the holy vine of thy servant David which thou has made known to us through thy servant Jesus” and similarly for the broken bread.
¹⁹⁶
The Didache, known to the early church fathers but excluded from the New Testament canon, was lost for many centuries and rediscovered only in 1873. It is so unlike other Christian literature that scholars have not known how to date it. But its strangeness may arise from its early date: it seems to come from or reflect a period before Christianity had taken its final form.

What then is the origin of the communion rite or eucharist? The earliest description in the New Testament appears in the apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Paul, a Jew born around A.D. 5 in Tarsus in present-day Turkey, was doubtless familiar with the several mystery cults then popular in the Roman world. He was a forceful advocate of spreading Jesus’ message to non-Jews in the world outside Judaea, as the Roman province was then known.

His seven authentic letters in the New Tes
tament were probably composed between A.D. 49 and 55, and several decades before the
four gospels which scholars generally agree were all written a
fter the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in A.D. 70.
¹⁹⁷
Paul had met in Jeru
salem with members of the Jerusalem church who knew Jesus, incl
uding the apostle Peter, and might be expected to have heard from them of the euchar
ist service. But he attributes his knowledge of it directly to Jesus: “For I h
ave received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you,”
he writes in introducing his account of how the eucharist should be conducted.
¹⁹⁸
Since Paul never met Jesus, he implies the information was imparted in a personal vision, perhaps similar to the one on the road to Damascus in which Jesus instructed him to cease his persecution of Christians.

Some scholars suggest Paul’s phrase means that he was handing on his account through the authorization of the church, or that he meant just to emphasize its authenticity. But the simplest construction is that he means he received the account through direct revelation. If so, the rite was an idea of his own which the gospel writers later followed. They did not, however, use Paul’s unfortunate name for the rite—
kuriakon deipnon
or “lordly meal”—which was apparently the same phrase as used for sacred meals in the mystery cults.
¹⁹⁹
They called it instead the eucharist, a Greek word meaning thanksgiving.

At the very least, the early church had two versions of the eucharist. In one, there was a simple benediction for food and wine, similar to Jewish blessings, and an invocation of Jesus. In the other, the mystery cults’ central idea of a sacrificial and resurrected god is elegantly fused with the conventional benediction, generating a powerful rite attractive to both cultists and Christians.

It is perhaps possible to catch a glimpse of another element under construction in the case of the resurrection. The Didache might be expected to mention the redemptive resurrection of Jesus but does not do so. The earliest document in the New Testament to describe the resurrection is again a Pauline epistle, his first letter to the Corinthians. He says that Jesus, after his resurrection, “was seen of Cephas [the apostle Peter], then of the twelve: After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep. After that, he was seen of James; then of all the apostles. And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time.”
²⁰⁰
The letter was probably written in A.D. 49 or 52.

Paul, certainly on his own behalf, is describing a vision of a spiritual resurrection, and he makes no distinction between the form of his own experience and those he attributes to others. But by the time of the gospels, two decades or more later, the spiritual resurrection described by Paul had been solidified into a bodily resurrection, possibly to quench objections from Jews who criticized the idea. The treatments of the resurrection in the gospels bear some indications of being later additions to the main texts.

Mark, the earliest gospel, seems to have been written after the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. Mark and an inferred lost document, known as Q, are the principal sources for Matthew and Luke, both of which were probably written between 70 and 100. Mark is therefore the second earliest source after Paul for the events of Jesus’ life. Most scholars are agreed, however, that the last 12 verses of Mark, which describe Jesus’ appearance to his disciples after his death, are a later addition. Of its 163 Greek words, 19 do not occur elsewhere in the gospel, suggesting it is by a different author.

The status of the last 12 verses, Mark 16:9—20, also worr
ied Eusebius, the first historian of the early church and a cri
tic who influenced the selection of books that were to be accepted into the New Test
ament. The authentic text of Mark seems to end after the first
8 verses of chapter 16, which relate how Mary Magdalene and others visited Jesus’
tomb, only to find it empty except for a young man who told th
em Jesus had risen and would be seen in Galilee. Eusebius, writing at some time betw
een 290 and 340, was aware that some versions of Mark contained
the extra 12 verses and some did not. The latter, he said, were the more accurate.
“The accurate copies, at least, fix the end of Mark’s account at the conv
ersation with the young man.... It is in effect at this place that the end has been
marked in almost all the copies of Mark’s gospel; the things
which follow, which are transmitted by some rare copies, and not by all, could be superfluous....”
²⁰¹
The tradition of the early church held that Matthew was the ea
rliest gospel, which is why it is placed first in the canon. Eu
sebius, who would presumably have considered Matthew to be the prime source, may the
refore not have realized the significance of Mark’s testimony to the resurrect
ion. For if so striking an event goes unmentioned by the earlie
st gospel, it has perhaps less credibility in later ones.