CHRISTIANITY

David Chidester was born in 1952 in Pasadena, California. He was educated at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he received his Ph.D. in Religious Studies. After lecturing there for a few years, he moved in 1984 to teach at the University of Cape Town. Since 1994 he has been Professor of Comparative Religion and is now Head of the Department of Religious Studies there. He is also Director of the Institute for Comparative Religion in Southern Africa.

Professor Chidester has published extensively on Christianity and comparative religion, including Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa and Salvation and Suicide: An Interpretation of Jim Jones, the People's Temple, and Jonestown, both of which won the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in Religious Studies.

DAVID CHIDESTER

CHRISTIANITY

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List of Illustrations

1. Jesus as the Good Shepherd, mosaic, second quarter of the fifth century, in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Ravenna (photo: Scala)

2. Jesus as the Sun, mosaic, mid-third century, in the Necropolis under St Peter's, Vatican, Rome (photo: Scala)

3. Inner compartment of the reliquary of the True Cross, Byzantine, c. 955, silver-gilt and enamel, in the Cathedral Treasury, Limburg (photo: Werner Forman Archive)

4. Justinian and his court, Byzantine mosaic, after 540, in San Vitale, Ravenna (photo: Scala)

5. Canto XXII: Paradise, manuscript illumination from Dante's Divine Comedy, c.1313, in the Biblioteca Nazionale, Firenze (photo: Scala)

6. The Coronation of the Virgin, central section of mosaic by Jacopo Torriti, c. 1290, in Santa Maria maggiore, Rome (photo: Scala)

7. Martin Luther, woodcut by Lucas Cranach the Younger, mid-sixteenth century, in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg (photo: Scala)

8. Monstruous creatures from beyond the Ganges, reported by travellers in India, woodcut from Sebastian Munster's Cosmographia Univer-salis, 1550 (photo: Mary Evans Picture Library)

9. The Virgin of Guadalupe, painting by Juan de Villegas, late-seventeenth century, in the Museum de America, Madrid (photo: Giraudon)

10. The Christian God holding the deified heavenly bodies of the Incas, drawing by Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala from his book, The First New Chronicle and Good Government, 1614

11. Matteo Ricci with the Chinese Emperor (possibly Wan-Li or Ming Shenzong), engraving from Athanasius Kircher's China Illustrated, 1670, in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (photo: Giraudon)

12. The Miraculous Cross of St Thomas the Apostle at Meliapore in India, engraving from Athanasius Kircher's China Illustrated, 1667, in the Stapleton Collection (photo: Bridgeman Art Library)

13. African crucifix, undated, in the Museo Missonario-Etnologico, Vatican, Rome (photo: Scala)

14. Painted wooden votive board or ‘henta’ depicting a hut on stilts and the white ‘spirit being’ surrounded by the riches of the white man, Nicobar Islands, late nineteenth/early twentieth century, in the Museum vor Volkerkunde, Leiden (photo: Werner Forman Archive)

15. Adolf Hitler greeting Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller, leader of the ‘Deutschen Christen’, during the Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg, September 1934 (photo: AKG London)

16. Cuban leader Fidel Castro greeting Pope John Paul II in Havana during his five-day visit to Cuba, January 1998 (photo: Popperfoto/ Reuters)

Preface

At the beginning of a new Christian millennium, I am writing this preface in Cape Town, South Africa. By birth, I am an American. By virtue of living for the past fifteen years as a permanent resident in South Africa, I am an African. Under contract with Penguin Books in the United Kingdom, I have been working for a distinguished publishing house in England. America, Africa, England – this book was already global even before I started to write. As the product of these international relations, my account of Christianity could not be anything other than a worldwide story.

In taking up that global challenge, I present the story of Christianity as a sweeping epic that moves from ancient origins, through the historical transitions of the medieval and Byzantine periods, to the religious transformations of the modern world. As we begin a new Christian millennium, the global character of Christianity has dramatically expanded through new forms of travel, communication, economic exchange, and political relations. More than ever, we need a global understanding of Christianity.

But this history of Christianity is also local. Extending throughout the entire world, Christianity is a religious tradition that displays distinctive local features in different times and places. This book dwells in local detail. While concentrating on specific beliefs and practices, the book explores the textures and rhythms, the spirituality and materiality, the creativity and conflicts that have arisen within the rich variety of local forms of Christianity. Although I provide a broad, comprehensive overview, I hope that I have lingered long enough over individual cases to give a sense of depth and dimension to our understanding of the many distinctive locations of Christianity in the world.

Often this attention to specific location produces surprises. For example, where is the Church of England? In England, of course, but the global history of the Anglican communion has resulted in a church that is predominantly African. With nearly 18 million members in Nigeria and 8 million in Uganda representing the largest concentrations of Anglicans in the world, Anglicans in England – approximately 2 million – form a church that is roughly the same size as Anglican communities in Kenya and South Africa. These statistics suggest that the Church of England is by numerical majority an African church. But the Church of England is also an Indian church, with about the same number of Anglicans living in southern India as in England. As the Indian and cosmopolitan novelist Salman Rushdie once remarked, the English do not know their own history because it happened elsewhere. In this history of Christianity, I have looked elsewhere. Although no separate chapter on the Church of England appears in this book, Anglicans definitely appear – in America, Africa, India, China, the Pacific Islands, and even in Great Britain in locations that might be unexpected but nevertheless have been crucial for the global history of Christianity. In similar ways, I have sought out other surprises in retelling the Christian story.

Since this book is not an encyclopedia, many things, perhaps most things, have had to be left out. Certainly, readers will find their own favourite omissions. What is included, however, is intended to provide engaging and challenging occasions for thinking about Christianity as a religion. Over the past 2,000 years, Christianity has emerged as a religion among religions and as a religion in relation to other religions. As I try to show in this book, Christianity is a religion that has been thoroughly inter-religious in its historical formation. Christianity has been shaped by contacts, relations, and exchanges that have taken place between and among religions. Although my primary subject is Christianity, which carries the challenge of bringing to life Christian beliefs, practices, experiences, and social formations throughout the history of the tradition, I also want to understand Christianity as a religion in a world of religious diversity. In a profound sense, the historical character of Christianity can be illuminated from the perspective of those who do not regard themselves as Christians. Obviously, Muslim perspectives on the Crusades, or Jewish perspectives on the Holocaust, are critical for our understanding of Christian involvement in events that shaped the history of Christianity. The perspectives of ‘outsiders’, therefore, can be very important for thinking about the internal dynamics and external impact of the Christian tradition. Accordingly, I offer a history of Christianity that is also a history of religions.

Now, I have to admit, I have also tried to make the history of Christianity interesting, entertaining, and fun. Although I have made every effort to get the facts straight, I have undertaken that historical responsibility with the ethics of a novelist rather than with the ethics of a theologian, suspending the normative requirements of systematic, dogmatic, or practical theology for the narrative demands of telling a good story. Recognizing that many different stories might be told, I have assumed the responsibility of telling stories that stimulate creative and critical thinking not only about Christianity but also about religion, religions, and religious diversity. In that spirit, I offer this global history of Christianity as an occasion for thinking something new.

Many years ago when I first met Archbishop Desmond Tutu, he asked me what I did at the university. ‘Comparative Religion,’ I replied. ‘Ah, Comparative Religion,’ he observed with a mischievous glint in his eye. ‘That is religion for the comparatively religious. ’ I laughed, even though I had heard that joke before and even though it is not particularly funny, especially if you have been working to develop a study of religion that is not about being religious, comparatively or otherwise, but is dedicated to creating a free, open space for the imaginative and disciplined exploration of religion in all its diversity. As I understand it, Comparative Religion is not involved in comparing religions, judging their strengths and weaknesses, and picking the best. Rather, Comparative Religion is engaged in developing resources for understanding religion in all its global variety and local specificity that can in principle be applied to the study of any form of religion. In this book, I have followed that comparative path in exploring the many forms of Christianity in the world.

I would never have written a book on Christianity at all if it had not been for the intervention of John Hinnells, series editor for religion at Penguin UK, who recruited this book. ‘Why me?’ I asked. As I recall, he said that he wanted an author who came from outside of the familiar academic circles in the study of Christianity in Britain or North America, who could work quickly, and who was not afraid of taking risks. Apparently, I fit the bill. For the tangible signs of trust, broad mandate, and interactive readings, I will always be grateful to John Hinnells.

Other debts incurred in writing this book can only be briefly mentioned here: I thank Ninian Smart for telling John Hinnells that I could write a book on Christianity; Charles Long for pointing me away from the land and towards the oceans in our understanding of Christianity; W. Richard Comstock, my mentor in Santa Barbara, for reading the entire manuscript and finding nothing wrong except for one typographical error; Phillip Dexter, my political adviser in South Africa, for reading the entire manuscript and deciding it was actually a detective novel; and Judy Tobler, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Comparative Religion in Southern Africa, for research, collaboration, editing, and care in the painful task of cutting 30,000 words – ‘cutting with compassion’, we called it – out of the original manuscript. Further debts should be clear from the references, although cutting with compassion has eliminated a body of referencing that would have run to nearly 100 pages. Too much. In this regard, as in many other aspects of production, I have been guided by the excellent editorial advice of Caroline Pretty. As always, I acknowledge the Board of Directors for existing, now for over twenty years, and Careen, my wife, now for over ten years, for sharing a life.

PART ONE:
ANCIENT ORIGINS

Beginnings

During the last year of his reign over the Roman province of Judaea, King Herod the Great (73–4 BCE) erected a magnificent statue of a golden eagle above the main gate of the temple in Jerusalem. In a dramatic act of defiance, two religious teachers, Judas and Matthias, along with forty of their students, went to the temple and pulled down the golden eagle. They were arrested and tried before King Herod. ‘Who ordered you?’ the king demanded. ‘The law of our fathers, they confidently replied. ‘And why so exultant,’ Herod asked, ‘when you will shortly be put to death?’ As the teachers explained, they had defied the king's authority, even under threat of execution, ‘Because after our death we shall enjoy greater felicity.’ If they were faithful to their ancestral religion, they asserted, they would be rewarded after death. At the conclusion of their trial, Herod had the teachers and their students executed by burning them alive.¹

Christianity began in the first-century Roman provinces of Galilee and Judaea. There Jesus of Nazareth lived, taught, and was executed. The incident of the golden eagle illustrates some of the characteristic features of religion in the time and place of Christian beginnings. Religion operated in different spheres – political, priestly, and popular – that intersected in the emergence of Christianity. First, political religion, which was ultimately located in the extensive power and administrative scope of the Roman empire, was also localized in the province of Judaea through the rule of King Herod. Under imperial authority, Herod not only ruled Judaea as a Roman surrogate, but he also engaged in ceremonial projects – constructing a theatre in Jerusalem, building an amphitheatre outside the city, holding athletic contests – that were all familiar forms of Roman imperial religion. When he placed the statue of the golden eagle at the gates of the temple as a votive offering to the divine Caesar, Herod indicated the lengths to which he was prepared to go in accommodating the city of Jerusalem to the religion of the empire.

Second, a priestly religion was dedicated to maintaining the religious life of the temple. Throughout the ancient world, priests and other attendants at temples officiated at the sacrifices, feasts, and festivals that enacted a regular cycle of religious ritual. In Jerusalem, an organized priesthood was responsible for preserving the temple as a sacred space – the centre of the world – by observing a ritual cycle of sacrifices and festivals. According to Judas and Matthias, however, the priests had conspired with Herod to defile the purity of that sacred space by introducing an alien symbol of a foreign imperial religion into the temple. Not only symbolizing Jerusalem's political domination by Rome, therefore, the golden eagle represented a violation of the purity of the sacred centre of the city.

Third, an ancestral religion, embodied in written and oral traditions, provided popular religious resources that were in principle independent of either the political or the priestly spheres. For example, in their opposition to foreign domination and spiritual defilement, Judas and Matthias did not appeal to the Judaean king or to the Jerusalem priests. Rather, they invoked the authority of the ‘law of our fathers’ that they felt had been betrayed by both. According to these teachers, ancestral religion provided resources that could be mobilized against both political and religious injustice. In this conviction, Judas and Matthias echoed the terms in which resistance to political oppression and religious defilement had been advanced during the Maccabean revolt between 168 and 167 BCE against foreign imperial rule. As one Maccabean leader had declared, ‘We are ready to die rather than transgress the laws of our fathers’ (2 Macc. 7:2). Ancestral religion, therefore, was a way of life that could be valued more than life itself. Like the Maccabees, Judas and Matthias even asserted that adherence to the ancestral law in the face of execution promised a transcendence of death in which they would ‘enjoy greater felicity’ or experience an ‘everlasting renewal of life’ (2 Macc. 7:9).

For the most part, however, ancestral religion did not depend upon promises of personal salvation after death. It was a way of life that was anchored in the patriarchal household, modelled on village-based society, and tied to the agricultural cycles of the land. Preserving an ancient covenant with God, ancestral religion established the terms and conditions for a life of piety and purity. However, in first-century Palestine that way of life was under enormous pressures from foreign domination, heavy taxation, and socio-economic changes that were creating an impoverished peasantry. In response to this colonial situation, a series of movements, led by bandits or brigands, by prophets or messiahs, gained popular followings for various political and religious objectives. This era of revolt against the Roman empire, as well as against the priestly aristocracy that acted as imperial surrogates in Jerusalem, exploded in the Jewish War that began in 66 CE As the culmination of that conflict, the destruction of the temple and the city by the Romans in the year 70 CE marked a dramatic turning point in the history of religion in the region. Out of that sudden destruction, Judaism and Christianity only gradually emerged as alternative and competing ways of being religious.

RELIGION OF THE EMPIRE

Conquered by Roman troops in 63 BCE, Judaea and the entire eastern Mediterranean was brought within the imperial Pax Romana. The Romans set up a system of indirect rule in Judaea that relied upon the compliance of the Jerusalem ruling class and priestly aristocracy. Although a small military force was stationed at Caesarea on the coast, the Roman empire asserted its political authority primarily through the collection of tribute and taxes. In the conduct of religion, Rome required daily sacrifices for the emperor in the Jerusalem temple, but otherwise did not directly interfere in the religious life of the region. Nevertheless, certain features of the religion of the Roman empire were unavoidable. During the reign of the emperor Augustus (r. 27 BCE-14 CE), key terms of an emerging imperial religion became part of the sacred vocabulary of the Greco-Roman world. Imperial temples, public inscriptions, and religious festivals proclaimed the ‘good news’ (euangelion) of the deified emperor, who, as saviour or son of God, had brought peace, faith, and justice into the world. Assuming the highest priestly office of pontif ex maximus, the emperor himself became a divine being in Roman imperial religion.

Throughout the Roman empire, temples provided the most visible manifestations of religion. In Corinth on the Greek mainland, for example, the first-century Roman city featured temples to Aphrodite, the goddess of love; to Apollo, the god of wisdom and prophecy; to Asklepios, the god of healing; to Hera Argaea, the goddess of marriage and childbirth; to Tyche, the god of fate and good fortune; and to Demeter and Kore, goddesses of fertility, where the Eleusinian mysteries of Dionysius were celebrated in both public spectacles and secret rites. Each of these temples, with their priesthoods and attendants, their devoted patrons and adherents, contributed to a Greco-Roman religious life of processions, hymns, sacrifices, festivals, and feasts.

Feasting represented the most frequent and tangible form of participation in Roman religion. Patronized by a social élite, Roman sacrificial ritual was regarded as a civic duty necessary for upholding public order. But sacrificial ritual also presented opportunities for personal involvement in a sacred meal. Although ceremonial meals could be held in the private homes of the wealthy, the temple offered a public sacred site for eating and drinking together with friends in the presence of divinity. As the divine being of the temple served as host, master of ceremonies, or guest of honour, participants ate the sacrificial meat and drank the consecrated wine. However, as the Roman philosopher Plutarch (c.46–120 CE) explained, ‘It is not the abundance of wine or the roasting of meat that makes the joy of festivals, but the good hope and belief that the god is present in his kindness and graciously accepts what is offered.’² Eating and drinking in the presence of a divine being, therefore, was a significant ritual event in Roman religion.

More portable than temples, however, were texts. Drawing upon traditions of ancient Greek theoretical reflection, Roman philosophical schools developed various text-based approaches to religion. In general, these philosophical schools developed essentially utopian ways of talking about divinity. From a Platonic perspective, for example, all the gods of the Greco-Roman pantheon could be explained as different names for the one God. According to Plutarch, that one God transcended name, space, and time. ‘Therefore,’ he concluded, ‘in our worship we ought to hail him and address him with the words “Thou art”.’³ Behind the display of temples, statues, festivals, and processions, therefore, philosophical reflection could discern a divinity that transcended all the conditions of the world.

At the beginning of the first century, the religion that revolved around the city of Jerusalem involved both temple and text. Religion was centred in the daily sacrifices and annual festivals of the temple; it was authorized by a sacred text – the Torah – that contained the model for religious, ritual, and ethical life. Like many other ancient religions within the Roman domain, the religion of Jerusalem had also been relocated to other parts of the empire, establishing diaspora communities in Syria, Egypt, Rome, Asia Minor, Babylonia, and elsewhere in the East. The institution of the synagogue emerged as the centre of Jewish life in the diaspora. In that relocation, the transportability of the sacred text was crucial. The Hebrew text of the Torah was translated into the Greek text of the Septuagint; it was reinterpreted in terms of Platonic philosophical categories by religious thinkers such as Philo of Alexandria. However, the temple in Jerusalem remained a centre of religious attention. Until its destruction in 70 CE, the temple in Jerusalem was a fixed centre of religious life in Roman Judaea.

RELIGION OF THE TEMPLE

Originally built in 516 BCE after the Babylonian exile, the Jerusalem temple, which is often referred to as the ‘second temple’ because it succeeded the first sacred structure that was built by Solomon during 960–950 BCE and destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 BCE, was substantially modified under the reign of King Herod. Retaining the temple's basic design, which divided its sacred space into a porch, an outer room, and an inner ‘holy of holies’, Herod constructed a large compound around the temple and rebuilt the fortress at its north-west corner. As another indication of his accommodation to Roman rule, Herod renamed the fortress ‘Antonia’ in honour of the Roman general, Mark Antony. For most adherents, three annual pilgrimage festivals, especially the observance of Passover, provided the strongest connection to the temple in Jerusalem. In the first-century temple, sacrifices were performed as they were required by the Torah, while additional sacrifices in honour of Rome and the emperor were introduced. Certain tensions were evident, however, in the religious and political contradictions that were imposed on the temple by Roman domination. For example, since the annual Passover festival celebrated the liberation of the people of Israel from enslavement in Egypt, many people wondered: how could such a festival of liberation be celebrated by those who were currently enslaved by the Roman empire?

A variety of religious positions were adopted in relation to this contradiction. First, different styles of accommodation were advocated, not only by the priesthood in Jerusalem, but also by other adherents of the religion throughout Roman Palestine. Within the orbit of the official religion that was centred in Jerusalem, scribes, lawyers, and teachers found scope to extend the influence of the religion of the city, in different ways, to the surrounding cities, towns, and villages of the region. As officials of the temple, scribes were charged with maintaining regional outposts, or ‘stations’, for the Jerusalem temple throughout Judaea, Samaria, and Galilee. Although they might assume responsibility for offering religious instruction, scribes were primarily responsible for collecting tithes and encouraging pilgrimage to the temple.

Less directly connected to the temple than the scribes, two other religious movements – the Sadducees and the Pharisees – also found ways to accommodate themselves to the imperial situation that dominated religious life in Jerusalem. Perhaps originating within the priestly aristocracy, the Sadducees formed a religious movement that was devoted to a strict, conservative, and literal interpretation of the Torah. In opposition, the Pharisees, perhaps emerging from the scribal class that was attached to the Jerusalem temple, developed standards of piety, purity, and religious observance that made them widely regarded as interpreters of the personal and social implications of the Torah. Although they respected the claims of the Jerusalem priesthood, the Pharisees placed greater emphasis on the covenant that they understood to be binding upon the lives of all the people of Israel.

Second, different styles of resistance to the religion of the Jerusalem temple were also evident during the first century. Within Judaea, resistance could be demonstrated by a radical withdrawal from society. Retreating to the desert, the Essenes established an alternative society beyond the reach of Jerusalem. As reflected in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the community at Qumran acted out a new ‘exodus’, leaving behind a Jerusalem priesthood that they regarded as corrupt, to form a new ‘Israel’ in the desert. In developing a dualistic worldview, the Qumran community understood the universe to be a battlefield between God and Satan, between the Prince of Light and the Angel of Darkness. Poised between these spirits of truth and falsehood, each person was engaged in a struggle between two opposing ways of life that was expected to continue until the end of the world. This apocalyptic expectation of a sudden end of the world promised the restoration of the old order of Israel. In earlier apocalyptic texts, visionaries had described the restoration of Israel as a unified nation (Ezek. 37:1–14; Hos. 6:1–3; Isa. 26:19), or the vindication of the nation's martyrs, as in the Book of Daniel, when ‘one like a son of man’ would appear through the clouds and join the ‘Ancient of Days' on his throne to judge the dead and identify the righteous who had died for Israel (Dan. 7:13–14). Within the Qumran community, however, apocalyptic visions of the end were directed explicitly against foreign imperial domination and the illegitimate priestly rulers who were established in Jerusalem. In Qumran, therefore, the dualism of good and evil and the apocalyptic promise of ultimate triumph provided a framework for locating one small community of light in the midst of a vast Roman darkness that had even darkened the temple.⁴

A more obvious form of resistance could be demonstrated by open revolt against the priesthood, the temple, and the foreign rulers. From the beginning of the first century, organized revolts against the prevailing political order periodically erupted. These revolts almost always revolved around the issue of taxation. Since the system of Roman indirect rule was supported by dual taxation – one tax for Rome, one tax for the priestly aristocracy – many people experienced the system as both a political and a religious problem. While the Jerusalem priesthood advocated payment of taxes as a way of ensuring peace, there were many who resisted payment even at the risk of war. In such acts of resistance, popular support could be mobilized in the name of God against the religion of the temple.

RELIGION OF THE VILLAGE

In the villages of first-century Palestine, relations with the temple flowed in two directions. Agents of the temple came to the villages, while villagers were supposed to go on pilgrimage three times a year to the temple. Independent of the temple, however, village life sustained an ancestral religion that was centred in the patriarchal household. Interwoven in kinship relations, agricultural production, and ancestral claims to the land, that religion of the village reinforced the household as a domestic sacred space. Under the patriarchal authority of the father, the household was created as a religious space of piety and purity.

During the first century, however, the household was threatened by the social forces of economic exploitation and imperial domination. Under the pressure of double taxation, members of any household were increasingly at risk of going into debt and losing their ancestral land to large estates that were run by stewards on behalf of absentee landlords. In the religion of the village, land was regarded as sacred on the grounds that it was ultimately owned by God. Increasingly, however, ancestral lands were being lost through conquest or expropriation. Under these conditions, many entered wage labour, tenant farming, or debt slavery. This socio-economic situation marked a profound crisis in the religious life of the village.⁵

Throughout the first century, a series of popular prophetic movements addressed this crisis by gaining village-based support for some alternative religious or political project. As the historian Josephus (c.37–100) complained, all of these prophets were nothing more than charlatans who ‘under the pretence of divine inspiration worked to bring about revolutionary changes and tried to persuade the multitude to act like madmen, leading them out into the desert under the belief that God would there give them tokens of deliverance’. Even worse, from Josephus's perspective, popular leaders of such mass movements ‘aspire to the kingship’. They desired to ‘be acclaimed king’, the ‘anointed one’, the ‘messiah’ of Israel. For example, in the case of a leader by the name of Judas, the son of the brigand-chief Hezekiah, his popular tax revolt in 4 BCE inspired people of the town of Sepphoris, a few kilometres from Nazareth in Galilee, to proclaim him as their king. The Romans, however, responded by conquering the town, devastating the region, and selling the people into slavery. Other popular movements were similarly suppressed by the Roman army.⁶

The most devastating Roman exercise of military force, with the most serious consequences for the location of religion in first-century Palestine, occurred in response to widespread revolt that broke out in 66 CE. Initially led by Zealots, the insurrection eventually involved both temple-based and village-based leadership. Under the Roman general Vespasian, imperial troops crushed the revolt in 70 CE by destroying the temple and the city of Jerusalem. Although the last fortress held out until 73, when the garrison at Masada chose to die by suicide rather than surrender, the destruction of Jerusalem had removed the heart of the revolt.

After 70 CE, therefore, the religion of the temple ceased to have any location in the world. The political religion of divine kingship, royal priesthood, and temple worship had been effectively destroyed. In certifying that destruction, the Romans captured Simon bar Giora, who had been proclaimed king during the 70 CE revolt, took him to Rome, and executed him as the one who had operated during the war as the king of the Jews.⁷ In response to the end of the religion of the temple, however, a group of religious scholars under the leadership of the sage, Johanan ben Zakkai, relocated the heart of religion from the temple to the text. Gathering in Yavneh around 90 CE, this group of scholars began the work of reformulating traditional religious resources in ways that would result in the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism. Based on the interpretation of sacred texts and the preservation of oral traditions, religious life could thereby continue without the temple. In this process of reformulation, Pharisees emerged after 70 CE as the dominant group in Palestinian Judaism. Increasingly, however, they found themselves competing for Jewish loyalty with new religious movements that adhered to the memory of an earlier Galilean prophet named Jesus.

Jesus

Jesus was born some time between 6 and 4 BCE, in the Galilean village of Nazareth, shortly before the end of the reign of King Herod the Great. He was raised in a pious Jewish family, the eldest of five brothers and several sisters. His home language was Aramaic, but he knew some Greek and biblical Hebrew. He acquired an education in basic literacy and learned the craft of a woodworker. In his early thirties, Jesus was attracted to the religious movement of John, known as the Baptist, who was gaining a following at the Jordan river for his ritual of repentance and purification. Shortly after receiving John's baptism, Jesus embarked upon his own project of teaching. He travelled around the villages of Galilee and went to the city of Jerusalem during pilgrimage festivals. After less than three years of public activity, Jesus was arrested in Jerusalem, examined before officials of the priestly aristocracy, turned over to the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate, and condemned to death by crucifixion. Suffering that tortuous form of Roman execution reserved for traitors or rebels, Jesus died in his mid-thirties around the year 30 CE.

Such is the bare outline of the life of Jesus of Nazareth as it might be reconstructed by a modern historian.¹ Every aspect of this account, however, has been subject to intense historical debate. The precise dates for Jesus's birth and death are uncertain. His family life, educational training, occupation, and marital status have all been questioned. And his religious background, his participation in the religion of the Jerusalem temple, and the degree of his involvement in the baptizing movement of John have been disputed. Most significantly for the history of religion, Jesus's brief public activity has been reconstructed in vastly different ways. Historians confront us with conflicting versions of that public project. In different accounts, Jesus has appeared as a Jewish preacher, a wandering sage, a magical healer, or a political revolutionary. The modern search for the ‘historical Jesus’ has produced multiple images of the same man.

Ancient historians provide little help. Writing at the end of the first century, the Jewish historian Josephus (c.37–100) referred to Jesus as both a philosophical sage and a wonder worker. Jesus was ‘a wise man’ and a ‘doer of startling deeds’. According to Josephus, Jesus was ‘a teacher of people who receive the truth with pleasure’. Gaining a following among people of both Jewish and Greek origin, Jesus was accused by religious officials in Jerusalem and condemned to crucifixion by the Roman procurator, Pilate. After the death of Jesus, followers preserved his memory, so that, Josephus concluded, even at the end of the first century, the ‘tribe of Christians’ named after him had not died out.

Although this brief mention of Jesus by a Jewish historian seems to provide contemporary verification, it was written over fifty years after the death of Jesus. By that point, Josephus could easily have been influenced by the proliferation of groups, which did attract people from Jewish and Greek backgrounds, that had fashioned a particular memory of Jesus, not only as a teacher of wisdom or a worker of wonders, but as the Christ. Among this ‘tribe of Christians’ at the end of the first century, Jesus was remembered as christos, the Greek term for the Hebrew messiah, the royal ‘anointed one' of God. History, therefore, even as it was told by a Jewish historian, could be shaped by that particular religious memory of Jesus as the Christ.²

Writing at roughly the same time, the Roman historian Tacitus (c.56 – c. 120) had little sympathy for the ‘tribe of Christians’. In recalling the great fire that had swept through Rome during the reign of Emperor Nero in 64 CE, Tacitus noted that the emperor had used the Christians of the city as scapegoats by accusing and punishing them for starting the conflagration. According to Tacitus, ‘Their name comes from Christus, who suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate.’ As this brief reference indicates, the Roman historian had been influenced by the presence in Rome of groups that recalled Jesus as the Christ to assume that Christ was the personal name of their founder.

Although many Christians had been unjustly executed on the false charge of arson, Tacitus observed that they were nevertheless justifiably ‘hated for their abominable crimes’. Their crimes, however, derived not from political subversion but from what Tacitus identified as their superstition. Momentarily suppressed by the execution of Jesus, this ‘mischievous superstition again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular‘. In defending the integrity of the city, Tacitus invoked the classic distinction between religio, which reinforced public order through the practices and performances of civic ritual, and superstitio, disruptive practices based on ignorance, fear, or fraud. History, therefore, even as it was told by a Roman historian, could be shaped by the religious interests of a particular social formation.³

In the first century of the Christian era, images of Jesus were shaped at the intersection of history, religious memory, and social interest. Images of Jesus in the Gospels that were eventually included in the Christian New Testament are no exception. Although they contain earlier texts and traditions, the Gospels were only composed after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE. The earliest text, the Gospel of Mark, was written shortly after that event. By editing the Gospel of Mark and interweaving material from a collection of sayings that scholars call Q (from Quelle, meaning ‘source’), as well as from independent traditions that scholars call M and L, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke were written some time between 80 and 90 CE. Although these three gospels are referred to collectively as the Synoptic Gospels (from synopsis, meaning ‘viewed together’), because they seem to adopt a common perspective on Jesus, they actually display considerable diversity of descriptive detail, religious emphasis, and narrative organization.

As an alternative to the Synoptic depictions of Jesus, the Gospel of John was probably written at the end of the first century. Other gospels, such as the sayings collection of the Gospel of Thomas (GT), which many scholars date as early as the 50s CE (but others place between 100 and 150 CE, did not find their way into the authoritative collection – the canon – of the New Testament. All of these accounts represent different ways of remembering Jesus. Although the gospels reflect the social interests of different historical communities, they nevertheless provide evidence of some of the characteristic ways in which Jesus was remembered. They suggest that Jesus was recalled as a teacher of wisdom, a worker of wonders, and a preacher of the kingdom of God.

TEACHER OF WISDOM

According to the Gospel of Mark, Jesus was a teacher. Early in his public work Jesus ‘entered the synagogue, and taught. And they were astonished at his doctrines: for he taught them as one that had authority, and not as the scribes' (Mark 1: 21–2). In the religious life of first-century Palestine, as already noted, scribes were stationed around the region as mediators between the priestly government in Jerusalem and the Jewish people of local towns and villages. As the historian Josephus observed, these representatives of the religion of the temple were known as ‘teachers’.⁴ However, if Jesus was a teacher, he certainly was not an official teacher of the people, such as a priest or scribe, who represented the interests of the temple establishment. Rather, Jesus appeared in the Gospel traditions as a teacher of wisdom, as the transmitter of an alternative knowledge that carried a different kind of authority. He taught a wisdom in which knowledge merged with power. In Mark's account, people who heard Jesus teaching wondered ‘what wisdom is this which is given unto him, that even such mighty works are wrought by his hands?’ (Mark 6:2). At a very early stage, therefore, Jesus was remembered as a powerful teacher of wisdom.

Modern historians, however, continue to wonder, ‘What wisdom is this?’ Ancient wisdom certainly assumed many different forms. For example, in the Jewish literature produced after the return from Babylonian exile in 539 BCE, the wisdom of God was often personified. As a popular figure in Jewish poetry, wisdom – Hokmah in Hebrew, Sophia in Greek – increasingly assumed a divine female form. According to these poetic expressions, divine wisdom was crucial to the order of the world, the city, and the temple in Jerusalem. In the beginning, God and wisdom had created the world (Prov. 8:22–31); during times of crisis, wisdom appeared unrecognized at the city gates (Prov. 1:20–33); and wisdom finally found a home when the temple was rebuilt in Jerusalem (Eccles. 24:1–34). Scribal traditions within Jewish literature, therefore, developed a foundation for stories about the power and presence of divine wisdom.

The image of divine wisdom was further developed during the first century. In the work of the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (c.10 BCE – c.45 CE), wisdom was present at the beginning of creation, not only in designing the order of the universe, but also in providing instruction to Adam, the first human. According to Philo, ‘The first man was wise with a wisdom learned from and taught by Wisdom's own lips.’⁵ In the Wisdom of Solomon, a Jewish text probably written around 40 CE in Alexandria, wisdom was represented as a divine guide who would lead the righteous into a relationship with God.

The beginning of wisdom is the most sincere desire for instruction

and concern for instruction is love of her,

and love of her is the keeping of her laws,

and giving heed to her laws is assurance of immortality,

and immortality brings one near to God.

(Wisdom of Solomon 6:17–19)

In apocalyptic texts, however, a perceived social, political, or religious crisis might be represented as the departure of divine wisdom from Jerusalem. Having left the world, she waited in the remote heavens, perhaps to return only after a period of cataclysmic judgement.⁶

All of these images of divine wisdom were available to those who remembered Jesus as a teacher of wisdom. Jesus could be imagined as the child of wisdom, who was taught by her own lips to teach others. In the earliest collections of his sayings, however, Jesus was presented as a teacher of wisdom in ways that did not necessarily depend upon such a mythic personification of divine wisdom. The Gospel of Thomas, which might represent an early collection of sayings of Jesus, recorded illustrations of his wisdom that were not placed in a narrative framework about his birth, miracles, or death. In other words, the wisdom of Jesus required no mythic support. Rather, the format of the collection was consistent with the practice of ancient wisdom literature in stringing together memorable ‘sayings of the sages’ that might be characterized as insight. His often enigmatic aphorisms in that collection encouraged people to see the light of divine wisdom that was within them, among them, and all around them. As a quality of insight that was immediately available, divine wisdom was presented in the Gospel of Thomas as a liberating realization of the presence of God.

A similar collection of sayings, which was used in the composition of both Matthew and Luke, has been identified by scholars as Q or the Sayings Source. As it has been carefully reconstructed, the Sayings Source emerges as a text that initially contained instructions in practical wisdom. Here wisdom was less a matter of sophia, of gaining insight into the stable order of the world, than a matter of metis, cleverness in dealing with the practical challenges of specific situations. However, that practical wisdom seems to have had a distinctively unconventional, perhaps even counter-cultural, character in the context of the patriarchal household, the peasant village, and the social relations of first-century Palestine.

In the context of the household, for example, the wisdom of Jesus subverted its patriarchal authority by challenging all bonds of kinship. As recorded in the Sayings Source, Jesus said: ‘Whoever does not hate his father and mother will not be able to learn from me. Whoever does not hate his son and daughter cannot belong to my school' (Luke 14:26–7; 17:33; Matt. 10:37–8; GT 55, 101). By cutting these basic family ties, the student left home to learn the wisdom of Jesus. More than that, however, this demand to forsake the bonds of kinship undermined the domestic foundation of an ancestral religion. When a prospective student in the school of Jesus said, ‘Let me first go and bury my father,’ the teacher replied: ‘Leave the dead to bury their dead’ (Luke 9:57–62). The wisdom of Jesus, therefore, required a renunciation of home, family, and the ancestral religion of the household.

Within the daily life of the village, the teachings of Jesus countered many of the conventions of human relations and social interactions. In the face-to-face relations of the village community, Jesus advocated mutual forgiveness, the cancellation of debts, and an ethical reciprocity that was based on treating other people as one would want to be treated (Luke 6:27–35; Matt. 7:12; GT 45; Luke 11:1– 4). In a society that valued honour, and sought to avoid the humiliation of shame, Jesus recommended humility. ‘Everyone who glorifies himself will be humiliated,’ he observed, ‘and the one who humbles himself will be praised' (Luke 14:11; 18:14; Matt. 23:12). In a society riddled with economic uncertainty, Jesus promised release from all anxiety, saying, ‘Do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. Isn't life more than food, and the body more than clothing?’ (Luke 12:22–31; Matt. 6:25–34; GT 36). Certainly, this practical wisdom of Jesus defied many of the conventions of village life.

DAVID CHIDESTER

CHRISTIANITY

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

PART ONE: ANCIENT ORIGINS

1

Beginnings

RELIGION OF THE EMPIRE

RELIGION OF THE TEMPLE

RELIGION OF THE VILLAGE

2

Jesus

TEACHER OF WISDOM

PART ONE:
ANCIENT ORIGINS