The Triumph of Christianity (5 page)

No doubt many Romans did resent that Jews dismissed the gods as illusions and their temples as blasphemous, but it seems likely that the most compelling objection on the part of the state was the standard complaint—that the major sin of the Jews was to be a strong, well-organized, separated community, in addition to which the Jews sought converts, as did all of the Oriental faiths. This likely created hard feelings in the pagan temples because converts to Judaism or to the other Oriental faiths ceased patronizing the temples. This might have been ignored in a society wherein the temples enjoyed lavish state support. But in Rome, even the temples of Jupiter had to exist on voluntary contributions. Hence, it seems plausible that many tales of sexual immorality cited by the Senate in its persecutions were composed and spread by pagan priests.

This whole phenomenon soon would be repeated when Rome took sufficient note of the new religion come to Rome from Jerusalem.

Pagan “Monotheism”

P
ERHAPS STIMULATED BY THE
presence of Jews in their midst and by contacts with Zoroastrianism, many Greek and Roman philosophers began to entertain monotheistic ideas, while several pagan groups attempted to transform one of their gods into as close an approximation of monotheism as was possible within the limiting assumptions of polytheism. The most extensive efforts in this direction were made on behalf of the goddess Isis.

When Isis came west, she soon shed her Egyptian role as responsible for the rise and fall of the Nile. Instead, she began to be hailed as the Goddess Supreme, the Queen of the Sky, the Mother of the Stars, and often was referred to as the savior goddess. As Plutarch explained: “Isis is the female principle in nature, which is the receiver of every act of creation; wherefore she is called ‘nurse’ and ‘receiver of all’ by Plato, and by mankind in general ‘the goddess of ten thousand names.’ ”
⁷³

The many surviving inscriptions and scriptures in praise of Isis
⁷⁴
include such claims as:

It was Isis “who separated earth from heaven, showed the stars their courses, ordained the path of sun and moon.”

Isis is “sole ruler of eternity” and “all call me the highest goddess, greatest of all the gods in heaven,” and “nothing happens apart from me.”

Isis is “ruler of the world... greatest of the gods, the... ruler of heavenly things and immeasurable.... You are the ruler of all forever.”

But no matter how often Isis was referred to as the “one True and Living God,”
⁷⁵
she could not escape the limitations of paganism. She could be recognized as a
supreme
god, but not as an
only
god because the existence of a whole pantheon of other gods, including her son Horus, could not be denied within the context of paganism. Moreover, hers was entirely an otherworldly tale, in contrast to the manifest historicity of Judaism. That is, Isis’s “biography” took place entirely within the invisible world of the gods. It was there, within the womb of her mother Nut (Goddess of the Sky), that Isis had sex with her twin brother Osiris. It was in this same invisible world that Osiris was murdered by his evil brother Seth, his body torn into fourteen pieces and these flung throughout space. And it was in that nether world that Isis searched for these pieces in order to reassemble Osiris—finding everything but his penis. And so on. As Cyril Bailey (1871–1957) put it: “On the one side were the legendary figures, unhistorical and mere puppets in a story... [whereas] on the [ Jewish] side there were indeed historical personages.”
⁷⁶
God was believed to have revealed himself to mortal Jews, and the Bible tells the history of a real people and occurs on this earth.

Conclusion

O
N
C
HRISTMAS
E
VE
, J
UDAISM
was the only fully developed monotheism available in the Roman West. It is well known that the Jews played a crucial role in preparing the way for the Christianization of Rome. But much too little has been made of the extent to which the Oriental religions also prepared the way: the geography of the spread of early Christianity through the empire closely followed the geography of the spread of temples devoted to Cybele and to Isis.
⁷⁷
By the same token, the persecution of the Oriental faiths, and of the Jews, anticipated the later Roman attempts to destroy Christianity.

Chapter Two
Many Judaisms

A
LTHOUGH
J
UDAISM WAS THE ONLY
fully developed monotheism within the Roman Empire, there was as much religious variety and conflict in Palestine as in Rome, despite the fact that everyone involved claimed to be a Jew. Samaritan claims to be Jewish were rejected by the other Jewish groups, all of whom treated the Samaritans with contempt and sometimes with bloody brutality. Jews living in the Hellenized cities founded in Palestine by Greeks following Alexander the Great’s conquests also were locked in nasty struggles with other Jews. As for the rest of the Jewish groups, some demanded strict observance of the Law, while others were very lax in their observance. Some collaborated with Roman rule, others plotted rebellion, and still others anxiously awaited the Messiah who would restore Jewish independence and power.

On Christmas Eve there were about nine million Jews living in the Roman Empire (which had a total population of about sixty million), about 90 percent of them living in the larger Roman cities west of Palestine. In addition, at least several million Jews lived in cities to the east of Palestine; there was a large Jewish community in Babylon. These communities made up what is known as the Jewish Diaspora (or dispersion) and came to play a very significant role in the spread of Christianity. However, the story of Christianity begins in Palestine.

If we place Christmas Eve in 6
BCE
,
¹
King Herod’s brutal reign was nearly over. His death two years later prompted an outbreak of bloody revolts by Jewish zealots. In response, the Romans crucified thousands of Jews and placed Judea under the rule of a Roman Procurator—a position eventually filled by Pontius Pilate.

Herod

O
NLY BECAUSE
R
OMANS WROTE
most of the history of the era is King Herod (73–04
BCE
) typically remembered as “Herod the Great.” Romans remarked on his immense building projects and his faithful service to Rome. Jewish history remembers his brutality, his immorality, his subservience to Rome, and his profanation of the Temple—even though he had also caused it to be rebuilt.

Herod was not born a Jew. His mother was the daughter of an Arabian sheik and his father, Antipater, was an Edomite—a pagan people living in what is now Jordan. Antipater was a gifted opportunist who backed the right Hasmonian prince in a succession struggle and managed to marry a Hasmonian princess and secure an appointment at court. Next, he displayed excellent political judgment in backing Julius Caesar in the civil war against Pompey. For backing Caesar, Antipater obtained the appointment of his twenty-five-year-old son Herod as governor of Galilee. Soon after taking office Herod suppressed an uprising led by Hezekiah (or Ezekias), and put him and a large number of his followers to death. Taking “the law into his own hands got him in grave trouble with the Jewish Council in Jerusalem,”
²
a conflict with religious Jews that was to continue throughout his life.

After Caesar was murdered, his assassins Brutus and Cassius took control of the East and demanded funding from the local rulers. Herod complied but eventually fled to Rome where he somehow gained the favor of Mark Antony and the Second Triumvirate, and they caused the Senate to elect him “King of the Jews.” With this backing, in 37
BCE
Herod gained the throne of Judea. To help secure his claim to the throne, he banished his wife and son and then married his teenage niece.

Herod claimed to be a Jew, but many Jews did not accept him as such. In an effort to gain support from the more traditional Jews, Herod undertook a massive rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem on a far more magnificent scale. Later he greatly compromised this achievement by placing a huge golden eagle over the main entrance to the Temple. This was hotly condemned by leading Pharisees as an idolatrous Roman symbol, and some young zealots smashed it during the night, for which they were arrested and burned to death by order of Herod.

As king, Herod was empowered to appoint the high priest. Being cautious about possible rivals, as his first selection he appointed “an obscure Jew from Babylonia.”
³
This infuriated his mother-in-law and eventually Herod withdrew the appointment and gave the job to his mother-in-law’s seventeen-year-old son Aristobulus. Soon after, Herod arranged a bathing party at Jericho, at which he had Aristobulus drowned. Subsequently, in an effort to overcome their angry opposition, Herod began to appoint Sadducees (the hereditary priestly class) to the high priesthood, each serving a short term and retaining his privileges after leaving office. This helped in building a base of influential religious supporters. But they were of little help in shielding him from growing religious antagonism, some of it based on his dreadful family life.

During his reign, Herod ran through ten wives and not only disinherited his sons from previous marriages, but had at least three of them murdered. Late in his reign he became very alarmed at the rapidly growing outbreak of messianic hopes and prophecies, and anyone he suspected of being the Messiah he had put to death. When he became suspicious that his current wife was involved with a group expecting the Messiah, he had her killed too.
⁴
Matthew 2:16 claims that, hoping to eliminate Jesus, Herod ordered the death of all the children under the age of two in Bethlehem. Whether or not this actually happened, it was utterly in character.

In any event, Herod was both a tyrant and a suspected pagan, and his long reign exacerbated conflict among the many Jewish religious groups and provoked even greater antagonism toward Rome.

Samaritans

N
ESTLED BETWEEN JUDEA IN
the south and Galilee in the north lies Samaria. For nearly two centuries, the city of Samaria was the capital of Israel and the area around the city was home to the leading families. Then the Assyrians arrived in 597
BCE
and took thousands of important Samarian Jews away to be held as captives in Babylon. Apparently, at this time the Assyrians also settled some of their own people in the Samarian region. Subsequently, these settlers requested teaching by Israelite priests and ever since have regarded themselves as Jews—as did all the Jews remaining in Samaria from before the invasion. However, when the descendents of the Jews taken to Babylon returned to Palestine, they refused to recognize the “Samaritans” as Jews and did not allow them to participate in the rebuilding of the Temple. In response, the Samaritans built their own temple at Nābulus, at the foot of Mount Gerizim.

Bitterness increased in 128
BCE
when the Hasmonean (Maccabean) King John Hyrcanus had the Samaritan temple destroyed. There followed a long series of acts of reprisal and counter reprisal. “The hatred was such that to be called a Samaritan was a grievous insult... some rabbis said that to eat the bread of Samaritans was to eat pork, or to marry a Samaritan was to lie with a beast.”
⁵
Thus the barbed irony of Jesus’s parable of the “Good Samaritan” (Luke 10:30–37).

Hellenistic Judaism

S
AMARITANISM WAS NOT THE
only form of Judaism regarded as outside the acceptable sphere. Almost as bitter were the attacks on Hellenized Jews who lived in the many Greek-speaking cities that had arisen in Palestine. They were accused of flirting with pagan gods and neglecting the Law. Moreover, the Hellenized Jews regarded themselves as culturally superior, and their haughtiness, their overt discrimination against more traditional Jews, and their presumed complicity in a campaign to eliminate Judaism entirely prompted the Maccabean Revolt.

The Hellenization of Judaism began with Alexander the Great’s conquest of the entire Middle East, with the result that Palestine came under the control of Ptolemaic (Greek) Egypt. This soon led to the founding of twenty-nine Greek cities in Palestine—some of them in Galilee, the two largest of these being Tiberias (on the Sea of Galilee) and Sepphoris, which was only about four miles from Nazareth.
⁶
By early in the second century
BCE
, Jerusalem was so transformed into a Greek city that it was known as Antioch-at-Jerusalem.
⁷

Soon the Hellenized Jews gained control of the high priesthood with the support of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (215–164
BCE
), ruler of the Seleucid Empire, a portion of Alexander the Great’s conquests that included Palestine. Antiochus assumed the right to appoint the high priest. When a conflict broke out between Hellenic factions over who should be the next high priest, Antiochus initiated a purge of Judaism. He “imposed the death sentence on any Jew who circumcised his children or observed the Sabbath. The authorities even forced the Jewish population to participate in pagan rites and eat forbidden foods, particularly pork, and the temple was desecrated and rededicated to Olympic Zeus.”
⁸
Not surprisingly, these acts provoked the bloody Maccabean Revolt during which traditional Jews committed massacres in some of the Greek cities in Palestine and forced the Hellenized communities to conform to tradition—the sons of Hellenized Jews were “forcibly circumcised,”
⁹
for example.

Maccabean rule endured until 63
BCE
when Pompey captured Jerusalem and placed Palestine under Roman rule, whereupon Greek influence strongly reasserted itself, if not in purely religious terms, then overwhelmingly in political terms: “Greek influence reached its height under King Herod... who built a Greek theatre, amphitheatre, and hippodrome in or near Jerusalem”
¹⁰
in addition to rebuilding the Temple.

Despite the bitterness of these disputes over
who
was an authentic Jew, they were in some ways overshadowed by disputes within the recognized Jewish community as to
how
to be a Jew.

Jewish Pluralism

A
S DEMONSTRATED BY BOTH
Romans and Jews, religious pluralism is the
natural
condition of any society (although, in the past it has not been the
usual
condition). That is, if the state permits religious diversity, there will come into being many religious groups spread across a spectrum of intensity. Even if the state suppresses all but an official, subsidized religious institution, as was the case in the classic pagan temple societies such as Greece, Egypt, and Persia, unauthorized religious groups will lurk on the periphery and exist on the sly. This follows from the existence in all societies of variations in individual religious tastes. These diverse tastes constitute a set of potential market niches ranging from groups with little or no interest in religion to ones with very intense religious concerns. This range of tastes has been observed even in primitive societies.
¹¹
No single institution can serve this full spectrum of religious market niches, as no one institution simultaneously can be worldly and otherworldly or lax and strict. It follows that religious monopolies can exist only to the extent that coercion is able to keep dissenting groups tiny and circumspect and that whenever coercion falters, competing religious groups will arise.

Because erstwhile monopoly religions inevitably are relatively lax, lazy, and worldly, most of their opposition will come from groups promoting a far more intense faith—from
sects,
that being the name given to high-intensity religious groups. Monopoly religions slide into accommodation with their social surroundings even when they were first established by those committed to an intense faith. One reason that a monopoly religion drifts toward laxity is that religious intensity is never transmitted very efficiently from one generation to the next. Inevitably, many of the sons and daughters of sect members prefer a lower-tension faith than did their parents.
¹²
So long as leadership positions in a sect are restricted to those who are committed to the original standards, a sect can sustain a relatively high level of intensity. But when these positions are hereditary, and when they are highly rewarded as well (so that the less “religious” seldom depart for other careers), the institution will soon be dominated by those favoring a lower level of intensity.

This process has long been referred to as the
transformation of sects,
the social process that causes successful sects to become more moderate religious groups.
¹³
Transformation also is speeded by the involvement of the religious leaders in worldly affairs, both political and economic. Finally, if such a religious institution lacks the coercive power to muffle competitive impulses, it soon will be surrounded by sect movements mounted by those wanting a higher-tension faith. This is what happened in Israel, beginning soon after the return of the Jews from exile in Babylon.

The Judaism put in place by the Jewish leaders upon their return from exile required strict observance of the Law and absolute intolerance of polytheism. But authority over this new orthodoxy was centralized in Jerusalem and placed in the hands of a professional, hereditary priesthood, and the Temple was rebuilt. A universal tithe was imposed on the entire Jewish population to support the Temple and subsidize the hereditary priesthood.
¹⁴
Of perhaps even greater significance, the Temple became the dominant financial institution, housing money-changers as well as acting as the state treasury and even as an investment bank—“a depository for capital sums, such as money belonging to widows and orphans or to the rich, who feared for their capital under the often insecure conditions that prevailed.”
¹⁵

Soon the priests became “the wealthiest class and the strongest political group among the Jews of Jerusalem,”
¹⁶
given that Israel was ruled as a province by outsiders. Consequently, the high priest was not only “the religious head but also the political leader of the nation.”
¹⁷
Membership in the priesthood was entirely hereditary and even the office of high priest often passed from father to son—and priests tended to only marry the daughters of other priests. Not surprisingly, the priests demanded and enjoyed a high level of public deference. Although many priests did not live in Jerusalem, they went there to serve in the Temple when their turn came, as well as for “the three festivals of Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles.”
¹⁸
Thus, the official Jewish religion was a centralized Temple religion, and the observance of any organized rites elsewhere was frowned upon. Centralization was also served by the fact that the tithes were gathered in Jerusalem and dispersed from there.