The Triumph of Christianity (10 page)

Of even greater significance is the abundant evidence of continuing Jewish influence within Christianity. Consider that, with the exception of Luke and Acts, the New Testament was written by Jews. Moreover, many of the early heretical movements such as Marcionism, as well as the bulk of writings identified as Gnostic, were remarkably anti-Jewish. These attacks, as well as the ease with which they were rejected as heretical, support an inference of continuing strong Jewish influence within the church. Turning to a later period, what are we to make of all the concern over Judaizing expressed by various Christian leaders as late as the fifth century? Historians agree that in this era large numbers of Christians showed such an affinity for Jewish culture that it could be characterized as “a widespread infatuation with Judaism.”
²³
It seems unlikely that this was but a lingering attraction, not if it had really been several centuries after Jewish conversion had ceased. On the other hand, this is precisely what one would expect to find in Christian communities containing many members of relatively recent Jewish origins, who retained ties of family and association with non-Christian Jews, and who therefore still retained a distinctly Jewish aspect to their Christianity. Moreover, this is consistent with Constantine’s order early in the fourth century “that Jews be restrained from attacking members of their communities who converted to Christianity,”
²⁴
as well as repeated Roman prohibitions against mixed marriages between Christians and Jews, one such statute being promulgated as late as 388
CE
.
²⁵
Governments seldom bother prohibiting things that are not taking place.

Consequently, what may have been at issue was not the Judaizing of Christianity, but that in many places a substantial Jewish Christianity persisted. And if that were the case, there is no reason to suppose that Jewish Christians had lost the ability to attract new converts from their network of Hellenized families and friends. Hence, rather than seeing the evidence as indicative of a sudden outbreak of Judaizing, it seems more plausible to interpret it as proof that Jewish conversion had never stopped. When John Chrysostom (349–407
CE
) railed against Christians frequenting the synagogue, he addressed his remarks to an audience who knew whether he spoke the truth, so we can assume this was actually going on. The most reasonable interpretation of Chrysostom’s polemic is that it aimed to separate a church and synagogue that were still greatly intertwined—and this at the start of the fifth century!

But probably the most fundamental assumption concerning the “failure” of the mission to the Jews is that after Christianity had overwhelmed Rome, there remained a substantial Diasporan Jewish population actively sustaining synagogues, and hence the Jews
must have
rejected the Christian mission efforts. But that overlooks that there were millions of Diasporan Jews, far more than enough to have provided large numbers of Christians while still sustaining synagogues. If the projections in chapter 9 are close to correct, there were only about a million Christians by the year 250, which means that only about one out of every five or even out of nine Diasporan Jews need have converted to fill that total without any Gentile conversions at all. And, of course, there were many Gentile converts.

Population data lend further support to the assumption of a very large number of Jewish converts. As noted, the Diasporan Jews constituted at least 10 percent of the total population of the empire, and perhaps as much as 15 percent. Medieval historians estimate that Jews made up only 1 percent of the population of Latin Europe in about the tenth century.
²⁶
Granted that some of that percentage decline was caused by the Islamic conquest of areas having substantial Jewish populations. Nevertheless, the figures also suggest a considerable decline in the European Diasporan population during that millennium, and that is consistent with there having been a substantial rate of conversion. Indeed, a recent study suggests that there continued to be a high rate of Jewish conversions until about the seventh century.
²⁷
Nor was the survival of strong synagogues inconsistent with that supposition. Indeed, by peeling away all of the tepid, Hellenized Jews, conversion to Christianity would have produced an increasingly orthodox, highly committed Jewish community, a community ideally constituted to sustain stout resistance to Christianization.

Finally, a wealth of archaeological findings in Italy (especially in Rome and Venosa) show that “Jewish and Christian burials reflect an interdependent and closely related community of Jews and Christians in which clear marks of demarcation were blurred until the third and fourth centuries C.E.”
²⁸
Similarly, excavations in Capernaum on the shores of the Sea of Galilee reveal “a Jewish synagogue and a Jewish-Christian house church on opposite sides of the street.... Following the strata and the structures, both communities apparently lived in harmony until the seventh century.”
²⁹

It also is worth noting that Origen mentioned having taken part in a theological debate with Jews before “umpires” sometime during the first half of the third century.
³⁰
This seems inconsistent with the assumption that church and synagogue had long been separated. Equally inconsistent is evidence that as late as the fourth century Christian theologians consulted “rabbis about the interpretation of difficult Scriptural verses.”
³¹

For all these reasons, it seems likely that the mission to the Jews was far more long-lasting and successful than has been assumed.

Gentile Yearnings

T
HE
D
IASPORAN COMMUNITIES WERE
founded by Jews who migrated from Palestine. But neither continuing migration nor fertility could have produced the millions of Jews living in these urban settlements by the start of the first century
CE
. Rather, as Adolf von Harnack recognized, “it is utterly impossible to explain the large total of Jews in the Diaspora by the mere fact of the fertility of Jewish families. We must assume... that a very large number of pagans... trooped over to Yahweh.”
³²
Thus, Josephus was probably accurate when he claimed that “all the time they [the Jews] were attracting to their worship a great number of Greeks, making them virtually members of their own community.”
³³
By including the word
virtually,
Josephus acknowledged that many pagans embraced Jewish monotheism, but remained marginal to Jewish life because they were unwilling to fully embrace Jewish ethnicity—not only adult circumcision, but some other aspects of the Law as well.
³⁴
As already has been noted, these “virtual” Jews were known as “God-fearers.”

But it wasn’t merely by converting to Judaism or by becoming a God-fearer that Greco-Romans displayed a yearning for monotheism. That also was the basis for the remarkable success of the Oriental religions that preceded Christianity in sweeping over the Roman Empire. Indeed, in an earlier study I found statistical evidence that the Oriental faiths were effective forerunners of Christianity. For example, of seventeen major Greco-Roman cities having at least one temple devoted to Isis, eleven had a Christian congregation by the year 100
CE
. Of the fourteen similar cities lacking a temple to Isis, only two had a congregation by the year 100, and seven still had no congregation in the year 180.
³⁵
In similar fashion, of the ten cities with a temple devoted to Cybele, eight had a Christian congregation by 100
CE
, while only five of the twenty-one cities lacking such a temple had a congregation that early.
³⁶
Recall from chapter 1 that although followers of Isis, Cybele, and other such faiths acknowledged the existence of many gods, they presented theirs as a Supreme God and generated an exclusive commitment. And the key to it all was a conception of God as loving, trustworthy, and all-powerful.

It is true that doctrine does not play the primary role in attracting converts, but we must not forget that doctrine determines whether or not the term
conversion
even applies to a shift in religious orientation. Where polytheism prevails, people add gods or easily switch their patronage among them, whereas conversion means to make an exclusive commitment to a particular divinity. That is, conversion implies monotheism (or something very close to it) and therefore rests on doctrine. Indeed, the ability of monotheism to generate strong, competitive organizations of people prepared to act on behalf of their faith rests on doctrine—on the far greater value and credibility of exchanges with a God of maximum scope, power, virtue, and dependability, as opposed to small gods whose intentions often are not benign. It was this comparison that fueled the early success of the Oriental faiths and that, by the same token, caused a supreme goddess such as Isis to vacate her position to a One True God. Monotheism prevails because it offers a God worth dying for—indeed, a God who promises everlasting life. And that’s why Christianity triumphed among the pagans and why, even in the midst of a profoundly Christian world, Judaism has endured.
³⁷
Indeed, had Judaism not been so tightly linked to Jewish ethnicity, it might have swept over the pagan world long before the birth of Jesus.

Pagan Cultural Continuity

A
SERIOUS OBJECTION OFTEN
raised against the entire Christ story is that it seems so fundamentally pagan. What purpose was served by the Crucifixion? Surely a God of miracles could simply have offered universal clemency to those who believed and thereby could have dispensed with any need for a “blood sacrifice.” Although such a sacrifice may have seemed plausible to pagans, it rings quite false in our more enlightened times.

But that’s the whole point. The message the Crucifixion sent to Greco-Roman pagans was: “Christ died for your sins!” Forget offerings of a hundred or even a thousand cattle! The Christian “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” ( John 3:16). That message spoke powerfully and eloquently to a culture that took sacrifice, especially blood sacrifice, as fundamental to pleasing the gods—some of the Oriental faiths used blood from sacrificial animals to “wash away” an initiate’s sins.

The same interpretation applies to the other aspects of the Christ story that so often have been condemned as derived from paganism. Mary’s conception seems very like that of many women who were said to have been impregnated by pagan gods. Zeus was believed to have fathered “more than a hundred children by human mothers, most often, though not always, by virgins.”
³⁸
These half-gods, as Hesiod (700
BCE
?) called them, include both Perseus and Dionysus as well as Helen of Troy. In similar fashion, dramatic signs and portents were to be expected at any celebrity birth, and always at the arrival of a future divinity. It was believed that many prodigies and portents accompanied the births of both Alexander the Great and Caesar Augustus. For some born of women to have ascended into godhood after gory deaths was a common belief—Fraser recounted many such “myths” in
The Golden Bough
.

But to claim that these similarities with pagan mythology discredit Christianity is to fail to see how these features played to the pagan world! There they were taken as compelling proof of Christ’s divinity—the Christ story fulfilled every element of the classical hero, of how a human rose to become a god.
³⁹
The early church fathers fully understood this. Having told the Christ story to a Roman magistrate, Tertullian (ca. 160–?) suggested that he “accept this story—it is similar to your own.”
⁴⁰
And as the early church fathers realized, these similarities can be interpreted as examples of
divine accommodation
.

The doctrine of divine accommodation holds that God’s communications with humans are always limited to their current capacity to comprehend. As St. Gregory of Nyssa wrote in the fourth century, God is so “far above our nature and inaccessible to all approach” that he, in effect, speaks to us in baby talk, thereby giving “to our human nature what is it capable of receiving.”
⁴¹
Hence, if the Christ story seems steeped in pagan conventions, this can be interpreted as having been the most effective way for God to communicate within the limits of Greco-Roman comprehension. These were “proofs” of Christ’s divinity that pagans could most easily recognize. The perceptive Cyril Bailey (1871–1957) expressed this very well: At the time Christianity arose “men were looking in certain directions and couched their religious aspirations and beliefs in certain terms. Christianity spoke the language which they understood and set its theology and its ritual in the forms which to its own generation seemed natural.... [T]he Gospel [could not] have won its way if it had not found an echo in the religious searchings and even the religious beliefs of the time.”
⁴²

Moreover, the “pagan elements” of the Christ story maximized cultural continuity between Greco-Roman paganism and Christianity. Pagan converts could retain many of their familiar conceptions about the gods and miracles, while embracing the far more intense levels of commitment, more comprehensive morality, and the far more compelling message of salvation. But unlike converts to Judaism, those who became Christians did not need to entirely abandon the more comprehensible, more familiar, more “human” aspects of the gods and embrace the remote, far less comprehensible, and forbidding Yahweh. Instead, Christians could have it
both
ways! Indeed, Jews and Muslims often object that Christianity is not monotheistic because it acknowledges Jesus as a divinity in his own right. Be that as it may, Christ gives a comfortable, reassuring, and more comprehensible aspect to Christianity than either Judaism or Islam can provide. Christ is regarded as an understanding, forgiving
person
who not only died that all may be saved, but who continues in the role of intercessor. Moreover, while Yahweh, Jehovah, and Allah are invisible and indescribable, Christ is plausibly
depictable—
consider the extraordinary impact of Christian art.
⁴³
It is because Jesus so fully humanizes divinity that there has been little tendency for Christians to relapse into polytheism. But that, of course, forced the irrevocable break with Judaism.