Peoples of the Bible: God's evolution in West Asia and Europe (1700 b.c.e - 1000 c.e)
Into a world that believed in many gods who often fought with one another and interfered capriciously in human life, the Hebrews introduced and perpetuated the concept of a single god whose rule was both orderly and just. In contrast with the many gods of polytheism, each with his or her own temperament and judgment, the new monotheism provided a more definitive statement of right and wrong. At the same time, it demanded much greater conformity in both faith and action, calling for adherence to a strict code of ethics within a community governed by laws proclaimed by a single god.
The Hebrews’ belief in one god was not simply a reduction in the number of gods from many to one. Their god represented a new religious category of a god above nature and free from compulsion and fate. Their belief in only one god, however, also confronted them with a fundamental theological dilemma, a dilemma for all monotheistic religions: If there is only one god, and if that god is both all-powerful and caring, then why does human nto a world that believed in many gods who often fought with one another and interfered capriciously in human life, the Hebrews introduced and perpetuated the concept of a single god whose rule was both orderly and just. In contrast with the many gods of polytheism, each with his or her own temperament and judgment, the new monotheism provided a more definitive statement of right and wrong.
At the same time, it demanded much greater conformity in both faith and action, calling for adherence to a strict code of ethics within a community governed by laws proclaimed by a single god. The Hebrews’ belief in one god was not simply a reduction in the number of gods from many to one. Their god represented a new religious category of a god above nature and free from compulsion and fate. Their belief in only one god, however, also confronted them with a fundamental theological dilemma, a dilemma for all monotheistic religions: If there is only one god, and if that god is both all-powerful and caring, then why does human life on earth often appear so difficult and unjust?
The Hebrews’ early home was in the Middle East, and other peoples in that region sometimes expressed similar ideas. In Egypt, for example, Akhenaten also proclaimed a belief in one god. His declaration of faith, however, came several centuries after that of the Hebrews. More importantly, his new faith did not survive his death and had no lasting effects on his country. Later pharaohs rejected Akhenaten’s beliefs and his style of worship. In Mesopotamia, Hammurabi of Babylon issued a law code in the name of his god Shamash, by the year 1750 b.c.e., some 500 years before Hebrew sacred texts record a similar gift of a legal system from their god YHWH, through their leader Moses. Over time, however, the code of Hammurabi was forgotten in Mesopotamia while the Hebrew people kept their legal codes alive as they evolved into the Jewish people.
In their early years the “Hebrews” were known as the people whose legendary founder, Abraham, came from eber, meaning “the other side” of the Euphrates River. Later they took on the name of Jews, in honor of one of their tribes, Judah, and of the new territory that they claimed in Judea, in the modern land of Israel and Palestine.
Today there are only about 15 million Jews worldwide, but their role in history has been disproportionate to their numbers. Many of their core beliefs were incorporated into Christianity and Islam, the two great monotheistic faiths that have come to include half the world’s population today. Meanwhile Judaism itself adapted to changing conditions over time and space, maintaining its own core beliefs, traditions, and identity as an independent religious community. We begin this chapter with a study of Judaism and then proceed to Christianity, which emerged from it, and challenged it.
Judaism
The story of Judaism, as recorded in Hebrew scriptures, begins some 3,800 years ago with one man’s vision of a single, unique God of all creation. They tell us that God and Abraham sealed a covenant stating that Abraham’s descendants would forever revere and worship that God, and God, in return, would forever watch over and protect them. From then until now Judaism has remained a relatively small, family-based religion, with branches throughout the world, but focused in part in Israel, the land that Jews believe God promised to Abraham.
The Sacred Scriptures
Our knowledge of early Jewish history comes from the scriptures known collectively as the TaNaKh: Torah (the Five Books of Moses), Nevi’im (the Books of the Prophets), and Ketuvim (additional historical, poetic, and philosophic writings). Christians have incorporated the entire TaNaKh into their Bible, referring to these scriptures collectively as the “Old Testament.” Because the New Testament is written in Greek and the Old Testament in Hebrew, the TaNaKh is often referred to as the “Hebrew Bible.”
The narratives of the five books of the Torah abound with miracles, as God intervenes continuously in the history of the Jews. The Torah begins with God’s creating the world and contracting his covenant with Abraham. Over the next several generations, the Torah continues, famine struck Israel (then called Canaan), the land God promised to Abraham. Abraham’s grandson and his family traveled to the Nile valley of Egypt in search of food. At first invited by the pharaoh to remain as permanent residents, they were later enslaved. About 1200 b.c.e., after 400 years of slavery, the Jews won their freedom and escaped from Egypt under the leadership of Moses through the miraculous intervention of God. During their journey back to Israel through the wilderness of the Sinai Desert, the contentious group of ex-slaves was forged into a small but militant nation. The Torah records a dramatic miracle at Mount Sinai in which God revealed a set of religious and civil laws for them to follow.
For centuries, Jews and Christians believed that these earliest books of the Bible, which describe the creation of the world and the earliest history of the Jewish people, were the literal word of God. During the past two centuries, scholarship has given us a new sense of the historical place of these books. Today historians ask: When and where were the books of the Hebrew Bible composed and how valid are they as historical documents?
Modern scholarly analysis of the TaNaKh texts became a prominent academic enterprise in Germany during the early nineteenth century. The founders of “Biblical criticism” noted certain inconsistencies in the Biblical texts. For example, the first chapter of Genesis reports that God created man and woman simultaneously, “male and female he created them,” while the second chapter reports that God first created man and then removed one of his ribs and created woman from it. The critics noted also that different names are used for God in the Hebrew text—most notably YHWH and Elohim—and they suggested that the different names represent the stylistic preferences of different authors. They noted similarities between the stories and laws of the Bible and those in the literature of other peoples of the region, and they suggested that some of the external stories had found their way into the Biblical accounts. Through rigorous analysis, the Biblical scholars argued persuasively that Josiah (r. 640–609 b.c.e.), the king of the Jewish state of Judea, first made the decision to begin to edit and write down the definitive edition of oral texts that had been passed from generation to generation.
The story of Josiah’s reign is told in the Biblical book of 2 Kings, chapters 20–21. Struggling to survive in the face of the powerful Assyrian Empire, Josiah was anxious to promote allegiance to the state and its religion. He centralized Jewish worship in the national temple in Jerusalem, and collected and transcribed the most important texts of his people. Josiah regarded adherence to the laws laid down in these scriptures as fundamental to the maintenance of the Jewish religion, the Jewish people, and his own Jewish kingdom. From existing literary fragments, folk wisdom, and oral history he had the Book of Deuteronomy, the fifth book of the TaNaKh, written down. Soon, additional literary materials from at least three other major interpretive traditions were also woven together to create the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. Together with Deuteronomy, these books formed the Torah, or “Five Books of Moses.”
With the ravages of time, older copies of the Torah, written in Hebrew on parchment scrolls, began to perish and new ones were copied. The oldest existing Hebrew manuscripts of the entire Torah date only to the ninth to the eleventh centuries c.e., but fragments dating to as early as the second century b.c.e. have been discovered.
Stored in caves near the Dead Sea in Israel, these Dead Sea Scrolls have been rediscovered only since 1947. Another very early edition of the Torah is a Greek translation from the Hebrew, the Septuagint. It was prepared for the Greek-speaking Jews of Egypt in the third and second centuries b.c.e. It still exists and is consistent with the Hebrew texts of our own time. In short, the written text of the Torah appears to have been preserved with great fidelity for about 2,600 years, although the oral texts on which the written scriptures were based date back much farther.
The Torah remains one of the greatest examples of myth-history. Although its stories should not necessarily be read as literal, historical records, their version of events gave birth to the Jewish people’s concept of itself and helped to define its character and principal beliefs. The stories of the Torah tell us what the Jewish people, and especially their literate leadership, have thought important about their own origins and mission. They also define images of God that have profoundly influenced the imagination and action of Jews, Christians, and Muslims for millennia.
Essential Beliefs of Judaism in Early Scriptures
The Torah fixes many of the essential beliefs and principles of Judaism:
• A single caring God, demanding obedience, who administers rewards and punishments fairly and in accordance with his fixed laws:
Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. (Deuteronomy 6:4–5)
Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who maintains covenant loyalty with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations, and who repays in their own person those who reject him. (Deuteronomy 7:9–10)
• A God of history, whose power affects the destiny of individuals and nations: I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. (Exodus 20:2–3)
• A community rooted in a divinely chosen family and ethnic group: Now the Lord said to Abraham, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” (Genesis 12:1–2)
• A specific, “promised,” geographical homeland: When Abraham reached Canaan, God said to him: “Raise your eyes now, and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward; for all the land that you see I will give to you and to your offspring forever.” (Genesis 13:14–15)
• A legal system to guide proper behavior: religious, familial, sexual, commercial, civic, ethical, and ritual. The introduction to this code was the Ten Commandments, revered as the heart of the revelation to Moses at Mount Sinai.
• A sacred calendar: Jewish religious leaders reconstituted earlier polytheistic celebrations of nature into a calendar of national religious celebration. A spring festival of renewal was incorporated into Passover, the commemoration of the exodus from Egypt; an early summer festival of first harvest was subsumed into Shavuot, a rejoicing in the revelation of the Ten Commandments at Sinai; and an early fall harvest festival became part of Sukkot (Succoth), a remembrance of the years of wandering in the desert. All these festivals were to be celebrated, if possible, by pilgrimage to the central, national temple in Jerusalem. Celebrations of nature, history, and national identity were fused together.
To ground the mystical beliefs and forge the Jewish people into a “kingdom of priests and a sacred nation,” rules issued in the name of God forbade intermarriage with outsiders; prohibited eating animals which do not have cloven hooves and chew their cud, and fish that do not have scales and fins (Deuteronomy 14 and Leviticus 11) (included in the rules of kashrut, “keeping kosher”); and centralized worship in the hands of a priestly aristocracy. Animal sacrifices were to be offered, but only by the hereditary priests and only in a single national temple in Jerusalem.
The later Books of Jewish Scripture
The later volumes of the TaNaKh, the books of Nevi’im and Ketuvim, carry an account of the history of the Jewish people from about 1200 b.c.e. to about the fifth century b.c.e. God continues as a constant presence in these narratives, but he intervenes less openly and less frequently. These later records can generally be cross-checked against the archaeology of the region and the history of neighboring peoples, and they seem generally consistent.
The Book of Joshua begins the story about the year 1200 b.c.e., as the Jews returned to Canaan, or Israel, the land promised to them, and made it their home. This Biblical account tells of continuous, violent, political and religious warfare between the invading Jews and the resident Canaanite peoples. Modern scholarship suggests, however, that the number of Jews who had been enslaved in Egypt was not nearly so great as the Torah states (Egyptian records do not mention Jewish slaves at all) and that reentry into the land of Israel was a gradual process, with fewer, more localized battles and considerably more cultural borrowing among all the groups in the region.
To ground the mystical beliefs and forge the Jewish people into a “kingdom of priests and a sacred nation,” rules issued in the name of God forbade intermarriage with outsiders; prohibited eating animals which do not have cloven hooves and chew their cud, and fish that do not have scales and fins (Deuteronomy 14 and Leviticus 11) (included in the rules of kashrut, “keeping kosher”); and centralized worship in the hands of a priestly aristocracy. Animal sacrifices were to be offered, but only by the hereditary priests and only in a single national temple in Jerusalem.
Rule by Judges and by Kings.
Arriving in Canaan, the Jews first organized themselves in a loose tribal confederacy led by a series of “Judges,” ad hoc leaders who took command at critical periods, especially at times of war. Despite warnings that a monarchy would lead to increased warfare, profligate leaders, extortionate taxes, and the impressment of young men and women into royal service, the Jews later anointed a king. For three generations (c.1020–950 b.c.e.), strong kings, Saul, David, and Solomon, are said to have ruled and expanded the geographic base of the people. They established a national center in Jerusalem, where they united political and religious power by building both palace and temple, exalting both king and priest. The earlier warnings against royal excesses, however, proved prescient. Unable to sustain Solomon’s legendary extravagances in expenditure and in his relationships with 700 wives, many of them foreign princesses, and 300 concubines, the kingdom split in two, the kingdom of Judea and the kingdom of Israel.
The Teachings of the Prophets: Criticism, Morality, and Hope.
Continuing despotism by their kings and greed on the part of their wealthier citizens ripped apart the social fabric of the two splinter kingdoms. A group of prophets emerged, demanding reform. In powerful and sublime language, these men called for a reinstitution of justice, compassion, and ethics. Speaking in the name of God and of the people, they cried out against the hypocritical misuse of religious and political power.
The prophet Isaiah, in the eighth century b.c.e., led the charge:
When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, Learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. (Isaiah 1:15–17)
A century later, Jeremiah continued in the same spirit of moral outrage, rebuking the rulers and people of Judea, the southern kingdom:
You keep saying, “This place is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord!” This catchword of yours is a lie; put no trust in it. Mend your ways and your doings, deal fairly with one another, do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, shed no innocent blood in this place, do not run after other gods to your own ruin. (Jeremiah 7:4–6)
So even at the time that Israel and Judea developed into powerful kingdoms, the prophets remembered that the beginnings of the Jewish people were in slavery and that a significant part of its mission was to identify with and help the downtrodden. When destruction came, the prophets interpreted it as punishment not of their God, as earlier peoples had often done, but by their God. Destruction of a corrupt nation indicated not the weakness of its God, but God’s ethical consistency.
Finally, the prophets not only harangued, blamed, and condemned, they also held up visions of a future to inspire their listeners. They saw God transforming human history. He offered rewards as well as punishments. He offered hope. Micah’s prophecy in the eighth century b.c.e. is one of the most exalted, and perhaps utopian:
He shall judge between many peoples, and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more; but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken. (Micah 4:1–4)
Micah closed with a vision of great Jewish religious commitment, balanced by equally great appreciation for the diversity of others:
For all the peoples walk each in the name of its god, but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God for ever and ever. (Micah 4:5)
The Evolution of the image of God
The Torah portrays God as an evolving moral force in dialogue with humans. In God’s early interactions with humans, his nature is still malleable. Disgusted at human disobedience, he destroys almost all humankind through a flood, but he then pledges never to be so destructive again, creating a rainbow as a kind of treaty of peace with humanity (Genesis 6–8). Still fearful of the collective power of humanity, God confounds their intercommunication by dividing them into separate language groups at the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11). While deciding the fate of the sinful cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, God listens to Abraham’s plea for the defense: “Far be it from thee to do this—to kill good and bad together; for then the good would suffer with the bad. Far be it from thee. Shall not the judge of all the earth do what is just?” (Genesis 18–19). God apparently bans child sacrifice when he stops Abraham from killing his son Isaac. (The Muslim Quran reports this to be Abraham’s son Ishmael.)
When asked by Moses to identify himself by name, God replies enigmatically and powerfully, “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14). The Hebrew designation for God’s name is YHWH, “Being.” English-speaking readers have usually rendered it either Jehovah or Yahweh.
In Jewish theology, God is almighty but still directly accessible to every human being through prayer and even through dialogue. Indeed, humans and God come to understand each other by arguing with one another in a process that the contemporary rabbi Arthur Waskow has called “Godwrestling.” If Jews are to be God’s people and to follow his will, he, in turn, is expected to be a compassionate and attentive ruler.
This view challenged the polytheistic beliefs in self-willed gods, but it left Judaism with no strong answer to the eternal problem of evil in the universe: If there is a single God, and if he is good, why do the wicked often prosper and the righteous often suffer? One Biblical response is found in the Book of Job (c. 600 b.c.e.). To the questions of the innocent, suffering Job, God finally responds with overwhelming power:
Who is this whose ignorant words cloud my design in darkness?
Brace yourself and stand up like a man; I will ask the questions, and you shall answer.
Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations? Tell me, if you know and understand.
Who settled its dimensions? Surely you should know ...
Is it for a man who disputes with the Almighty to be stubborn?
Should he that argues with God answer back? (Job 38:2–5; 40:2)
But while God lectures Job for his brashness in questioning his authority and power, he understands Job’s anguish at the apparent injustice in the world and ultimately rewards Job with health, a restored family, and abundance for his honesty in raising his questions.
Patriarchy and Gender Relations
The Torah grants women fewer civil and religious rights (and obligations) than men. By conventional interpretation, women were expected to be responsible for nursing and child-care, tasks that know no time constraints, and they were therefore freed from all ritual obligations that had to be performed at specific times, for instance prayers at certain times of day.
The regulation of sexuality is fundamental in Biblical Jewish law, as it is in most religions. Women are regarded as ritually unclean each month at times of menstruation, and in childbirth. Men may be ritually unclean as a result of wet dreams or sexual diseases (Leviticus 15), but these occurred with less regularity. Marriage is regarded as the norm, with a strong emphasis on bearing children. Homosexual behavior is strongly rejected. (Today, however, many branches of Judaism have
revised gender rules and discarded prohibitions on homosexuality.)
Jewish scriptures credit a few women with heroic roles. Sarah, Abraham’s wife, forced him to choose her son as his proper successor, and she gained God’s approval (Genesis 16). Jewish midwives in Egypt continued to deliver healthy male babies despite the Pharaoh’s decree and death sentence against these children. Deborah led Israel in peace and war during the period of conquering the land of Israel (Judges 4–5). Ruth, a convert, taught the importance of openness to the outside world; she became an ancestor of King David and, therefore, in Christian belief, of Jesus (Book of Ruth). Esther was married to the Persian king and used her position to block the attempts of a court minister to kill the Jews of the Persian Empire (Book of Esther). Although none of these stories can be authenticated externally nor dated exactly, they speak to the significance of individual, exceptional women at turning points in Jewish history, and in the collective mind of the Jewish people.
Defeat, Exile, and Redefinition
Jews represent both an ethnic community and a universal religion. This dual identity became especially clear when foreign conquerors exiled part of the Jewish population from Israel as part of a plan to encourage their assimilation and to open the land to foreign immigration. This dispersion of Jews to various lands ruled by other peoples is known as the diaspora.
First, Sennacherib of Assyria dispersed the Jews of the northern kingdom of Israel in 721 b.c.e. These exiles drifted into assimilation and were subsequently referred to as the “Lost Ten Tribes of Israel.” In 586 b.c.e., Babylonian conquerors destroyed the temple in Jerusalem and exiled thousands of Jews from the southern kingdom of Judea to Babylon, but these Jews remained loyal to their unique identity as a separate community, remembering their homeland:
By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion... Our captors asked us for songs: “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither! Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy. (Psalm 137).
When the emperor Cyrus permitted the Jews to return to Judea some 60 years later, many Jews left Babylonia, returned to Judea, rebuilt their temple, and reconstructed national life. But many did not. Those who remained did not assimilate into Babylonian culture, however. Instead, they reconstituted their religion, replacing the sacrificial services of the temple with meditation and prayers offered privately or in synagogues. They replaced the hereditary priesthood with teachers and rabbis, positions earned through study and piety. In academies at Sura and Pumbeditha, towns adjacent to Babylon, rabbis continued the study of the Torah. They interpreted and edited Jewish law, and elaborated Jewish stories and myths, which often conveyed moral principles. The multivolumed record of their proceedings, the Babylonian Talmud, was completed about 500 c.e. So distinguished was the Jewish scholarship of Babylonia that this Talmud was considered superior in coverage and scholarship to the Jerusalem Talmud, which was produced about the same time in academies in Israel.
Jews lived in substantial numbers both in Israel and in the diaspora. Many had chosen to remain in Babylonia even after they were permitted to return to Judea. Many others traveled by free choice throughout the trade and cultural networks that were established by the Persians in the sixth century b.c.e., enhanced by Alexander the Great in the fourth century b.c.e., and eventually extended by the Roman Empire.
A census of the Roman Empire undertaken by the emperor Claudius in 48 c.e. showed 5,984,072 Jews. This figure suggests a total global Jewish population of about 8 million. At the time, the population of the Roman Empire was perhaps 60 million, while that of the Afro-Eurasian world was about 170 million. Most Jews outside Israel continued to look to Jerusalem as a spiritual center, and they sent funds to support the temple.
Judea itself passed from one conqueror to another, from the Persians to Alexander the Great and his successors, and then to the Roman Empire in 63 b.c.e. Struggles simmered continuously under Roman rule, not only between Jews and Romans, but also among Jewish political and religious factions. Three major revolts broke out and Roman authorities responded with overwhelming force in suppressing them.
In 70 c.e. they destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, exiled all Jews from the city, and turned it into their regional capital. In 135 c.e. they dismantled the political structure of the Jewish state and exiled almost all Jews from Judea.
Unlike earlier exiles, this Roman dispersion fundamentally and permanently altered Jewish existence, removing all but a few Jews from the region of Israel until the twentieth century. This final exile established the principal contours of Jewish diaspora existence from then on: life as a minority group; dispersed among various peoples around the world; with distinct religious and social practices; united in reverence for sacred texts and their teachings, as interpreted by rabbi-scholars; usually dependent on the widely varying policies of the peoples among whom they lived; and sometimes forced to choose between religious conversion, emigration, or death. Jews preserved their cohesion through their acceptance of the authority of the TaNaKh and the importance of studying it, and their persistence in seeing themselves as a special kind of family even in dispersion.
Minority–Majority Relations in the Diaspora
In general, Jews remained socially and religiously distinct wherever they traveled. This identification was imposed partially from the outside by others, partially by internal discipline and loyalty to the group, its traditions, and its laws. Jewish history becomes a case study also of tolerance and intolerance of minorities by majority peoples around the world.
In some civilizations, Jewish life in the diaspora survived and even flourished. For example, Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, Spain, visited Muslim Baghdad in 1160–70 c.e. and reported: “In Baghdad there are about 40,000 Jews, and they dwell in security, prosperity, and honor under the great Caliph, and amongst them are great sages, the heads of Academies engaged in the study of the law. In this city there are ten Academies …” (Andrea and Overfield, Vol. I, p. 245).
There were contrary examples, however. The Book of Esther, written about (and probably during) the Persian diaspora, 638–333 b.c.e., captures the vulnerability of minority existence. A royal minister sees his chance to advance his career and profit, and argues to the king:
There is a certain people, dispersed among the many peoples in all the provinces of your kingdom, who keep themselves apart. Their laws are different from those of every other people; they do not keep your majesty’s laws. It does not befit your majesty to tolerate them. If it please your majesty, let an order be made in writing for their destruction; and I will pay ten thousand talents of silver to your majesty’s officials, to be deposited in the royal treasury. (Esther 3:8–9)
The king agrees: “The money and the people are yours; deal with them as you wish” (Esther 3:11). On this occasion, according to Jewish traditions, the actions of Esther saved these Jews from destruction. But the Biblical account captures a pattern of official xenophobia and greed on the part of the majority, repeated frequently in Jewish history—and in the history of many minorities.
Christianity
While Judaism remained a religion of a relatively small group of people, it gave birth to the most populous religion in the world, Christianity. Here we trace the steps of Christianity’s evolution: from the teachings of Jesus, a Jewish preacher and miracle worker who his followers believed to be the son of God, literally; to his disciples who began to spread the word of his teachings, and to transcribe them into writing; to Paul of Tarsus, who took Jesus’ message to the broader world of the Mediterranean; to Emperor Constantine, who reversed centuries of persecution of Christians and began the process of making the Roman Empire Christian; to the division of the Catholic Church into Eastern and Western (Roman) branches; to the widespread institution of monasteries and convents throughout the remnants of the Roman Empire, the conversion of the barbarians, and the attempt to construct a new Christian Empire, the Holy Roman Empire.
Christianity Emerges from Judaism
At the height of Roman rule over Judea, a splinter group within the Jewish people was forming around the person and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. The times were turbulent and difficult. As a colony of the Roman Empire, Judea was taxed heavily and suppressed economically and politically. The Romans also demanded emperor worship from a people who were devoted to monotheism. Religious and political antagonisms were closely intertwined in an explosive mixture. The Jewish prophets of the Old Testament had promised a final end to such anguish, and many of Jesus’ followers believed that he was the “servant” who had been promised to lead them into a brighter future.
In the face of Roman colonialism, the Jews were divided into at least four conflicting groups. The largest of these, the Pharisees, identified with the masses of the population in resenting the Roman occupation, but, seeing no realistic alternative to it, found some comfort in keeping alive and reinterpreting Jewish religious traditions. The more elite Sadducees, the temple priests and their allies, had become servants of the Roman state and preached accommodation to it. A much smaller, militant group of Zealots sought, quixotically, to drive out the Romans through violence. A fourth, still smaller group, the Essenes, lived a prayerful existence by the shores of the Dead Sea, stayed aloof from politics, and preached the imminent end of the world as they knew it.
Into this volatile and complex society, Jesus was born to Joseph, a carpenter, and Mary, his betrothed, about the year 4 b.c.e., in the town of Bethlehem, about 10 miles southwest of Jerusalem. (The year of Jesus’ birth is not recorded. The Christian calendar places it at the beginning of the year 1, but it must have taken place no later than 4 b.c.e., for Herod, king at the time of Jesus’ birth, died that year.) Biblical accounts report little about his early life, except that his parents took him to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover holiday when he was 12 years old, and he entered there into probing discussions of religion with teachers sitting in the temple, astonishing onlookers and his parents. Jesus next emerges, at about the age of 30, as a powerful preacher, attracting multitudes to his sermons, which are filled with allegories and parables concerning ethical life, moral teachings, and predictions of the future.
In his calls for rapid and radical religious reform, Jesus found himself in opposition to the more conservative Pharisees, whom he frequently referred to as hypocrites. Like the Essenes, he spoke often of an imminent day of divine judgment of the whole world. He promised eternal life and happiness to the poor and downtrodden people of colonial Judea if only they would keep their faith in God. Similar predictions had also been common among the Jewish prophets centuries before, and Jesus’ emphasis on the coming of the kingdom of God resonated strongly with the earlier voices as well as with the Essenes. Jesus’ message, however, stressed a future not on earth during people’s lifetimes, but in heaven after their deaths. In this he differed from most Jewish beliefs of his time. In addition to his preaching, according to Biblical accounts Jesus also performed exorcisms and miracles, fed multitudes of people, cured the blind and lame among his followers, and even brought the dead back to life. He pursued his unorthodox search for truth in the Galilee, the beautiful and lush northern region of Judea, only recently converted to Judaism. There he continued his preaching, angering both the Roman imperial government, which feared the revolutionary potential of his rabble-rousing, and the Jewish religious establishment, which viewed him as a heretic. Jesus said that he had come “not to abolish the Jewish law but to fulfill it,” and his followers accepted much of the moral code of Jewish teachings. But they rejected most parts of its legal and separatist covenant. Beginning in a few towns at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, Jesus’ followers built an entirely new organizational structure for sustaining and spreading their new faith.
Jesus’ followers—mostly common people—revered him as one specially chosen and anointed by God (Messiah in Hebrew, Christos in Greek). They proclaimed Jesus to be the source of eternal life and accepted him as a miracle worker and the son of God. They believed, according to the Biblical accounts, that his birth had been a miracle, that he had been conceived by the Holy Spirit of God and born to Mary, who was a virgin.
As Jesus’ fame spread, the fears of the Jewish religious authorities and the Roman colonial administrators increased. To prevent any potential rebellion, the Roman government seized him when he once again returned to Jerusalem to preach and to celebrate the Passover, and executed him by crucifixion when he was 33 years old.
But death did not stop Jesus’ message. His followers believed that he arose from the grave in a miraculous resurrection and triumph over death, and ascended to heaven to join God the Father. Their belief contained equal measures of admiration for his message of compassion and salvation and for his ability to perform miracles. Jesus’ disciples took his message of compassion, salvation, and eternal life to Rome. The proud upper classes of Rome scoffed at first, but more and more of the simple people believed. Despite early persecution under several Roman emperors, Christianity increased in influence, until, in the fourth century, it became the official religion of the empire.
Spread through the networks of the empire, the Christian Church ultimately became the most important organizing force in post-Roman Europe. The message of Christianity and the organization of the Church expanded throughout the world. Today more than two billion people, one-third of the world’s population, distributed among numerous different churches and denominations, declare themselves followers of Jesus, the simple preacher from Judea.
Jesus’ life, Teachings, and Disciples
Whatever the reality of the miracles associated with Jesus, clearly a new religion, Christianity, emerged from earlier Jewish roots, and, in this process, a number of adaptations and innovations took place.
Adapting Rituals to New Purposes.
As we have seen, newly forming religions often adapt rituals and philosophies from existing religions, as, for example, Buddhism adapted the concept of dharma from Hinduism. This borrowing and adaptation can be attractive to members of the existing religion who wish to join the new one, for it assures them that their spiritual customs will be maintained. At the same time, a new interpretation gives the ritual a new meaning for the new faith. Jesus’ form of prayer and much of his preaching were fully in accord with Jewish tradition. When he accepted baptism from the desert preacher John the Baptist, however, Jesus prepared the way for adapting an existing practice and giving it new meaning for his followers. A minor practice within Judaism, baptism would later become in Christianity a central sacrament of purification enjoined on all members.
Another example of adaptation is Jesus’ “last supper,” a Passover ritual meal. Jesus ate unleavened, flat bread as a symbol of slavery in Egypt, and he drank the wine that accompanies all Jewish festivals as a symbol of joy. Then he offered the bread and wine also to his disciples with the words, “This is my body ... this is my blood.” Thus he transformed the foods of the Passover meal into the Eucharist, or Holy Communion, another central sacrament, a mystery through which Christians believe the invisible Christ grants communion to them.
Overturning the Old Order.
In his teachings, Jesus also addressed political and social issues, staking out his own often ambiguous positions in relationship to the different and competing philosophies of the day. When Jesus, following John the Baptist, taught, “Repent; for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matthew 4:17), he was not explicit in describing that kingdom or its date of arrival. But in metaphor and parable he preached that life as we know it on earth would soon change dramatically, or even come to an end.
Jesus’ words must have been especially welcome to the poor, as he spoke repeatedly of the “Kingdom of Heaven” in which the tables would be turned:
It will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. (Matthew 19:23–24)
Jesus declared that the most important commandment was to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind,” and the second was “Love your neighbor as yourself,” both directly cited from the TaNaKh (Deuteronomy 6:7 and Leviticus 19:18). Indeed, he projected these principles into new dimensions, declaring “Love your enemies and pray for your persecutors” (Matthew 5:44). But he also warned that the coming apocalypse would be violent:
Do not think that I have come to bring peace to earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. (Matthew 10:34)
Jesus and the Jewish Establishment.
The gospels depict Jesus’ attitude toward Jewish law as ambivalent but often condescending, and his relationship toward the Jewish religious leadership as confrontational. He scoffed at Jewish dietary laws: “It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth
that defiles” (Matthew 15:11). He constantly tested the limits of Sabbath restrictions, declaring that: “The Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). He restricted divorce, announcing that: “If a man divorces his wife for any cause other than unchastity he involves her in adultery; and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery” (Matthew 5:32). Many of his teachings may have reflected his desire to return to earlier beliefs in faith and spirituality and his belief that the future lay in heaven, not on earth.
Miracles and Resurrection.
The gospels describe Jesus’ ministry as filled with miracles—healing the sick, restoring sight to the blind, feeding multitudes of followers from just a few loaves and fishes, walking on water, calming storms, and even raising the dead. Reports of these miracles, perhaps even more than his ethical teachings, brought followers flocking to him. The gospel narrative of Jesus’ suffering on the cross, presenting him at the final moment of his life as both human and divine in one personage, and, finally, his miraculous resurrection from the grave, his appearances to his disciples, and his ascent to heaven, complete the miracle and the majesty of his life and embody his promise of eternal life for those who believe in his power.
The stories of Jesus’ life and death, message and miracles, form the basis for Christianity, at first a new sect located within Judaism. Although different followers attributed more or less divinity and greater or lesser miracles to him, apparently all accepted Jesus as a new, reforming teacher. Many saw him as the long-awaited “Messiah,” a messenger and savior specially anointed by God. His apostles, especially Paul of Tarsus (d. 67 c.e.), now refocused Jesus’ message and built the Christian sect into a new, powerful religion. The apostles’ preaching, organizational work, and letters to fledgling Christian communities fill most of the rest of the New Testament.
The Growth of the Early Church
At first, the followers of Jesus functioned as a sect within Judaism, continuing to meet in synagogues and to identify themselves as Jews. Peter, described in the Gospels as Jesus’ chosen organizational leader, first took the Christian message outside the Jewish community (Acts 10). Declaring circumcision unnecessary for membership, he welcomed gentiles (people who were not Jewish) into the new Church. James, Jesus’ brother and leader of the Christian community of Jerusalem, abrogated most of the Jewish dietary laws for the new community (Acts 15). These apostles believed that the rigorous ritual laws of Judaism inhibited the spread of its ethical message. Instead, they chose to emphasize the miraculous powers of Jesus and his followers. They spoke little of their master’s views on the coming apocalypse but stressed his statements on the importance of love and redemption.
Paul organizes the Early Church. Tensions continued to simmer between mainstream Jewish leaders and the early Christians. One of the fiercest opponents of the new sect was Saul from the Anatolian town of Tarsus. Saul was traveling to confront the Christian community in Damascus when he experienced an overpowering mystical vision of Jesus that literally knocked him to the ground. Reversing his previous position, Saul now affirmed his belief in the authenticity of Jesus as the divine Son of God. In speaking within the Jewish community, he had preferred his Hebrew name, Saul. Now, as he took his new message to gentiles, he preferred his Roman name, Paul. Jewish by ethnicity and early religious choice, Roman by citizenship, and Greek by culture, Paul was ideally placed to refine and explicate Jesus’ message. He became the second founder of Christianity and dedicated himself to establishing it as an independent, organized religion.
To link the flourishing, but separate, Christian communities, Paul undertook three missionary voyages in the eastern Mediterranean, and he kept in continuous communication through a series of letters, Paul’s “Epistles” of the New Testament. He advised the leadership emerging within each local church organization: the presbyters, or elders; the deacons above them; and, at the head, the bishop. He promised eternal life to those who believed in Jesus’ power. He declared Jewish ritual laws an obstacle to spiritual progress (Galatians 5:2–6). Neither membership in a chosen family nor observance of laws or rituals was necessary in the new religion. Paul proclaimed a new equality in Christianity:
There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28)
Paul formulated a new concept of “original sin” and redemption from it. Jews had accepted the story told in Genesis of Adam and Eve’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden as a mythical explanation of some of life’s harsh realities: the pain of childbirth, the struggle to earn a living, the dangers of wild beasts, and, most of all, human mortality. Paul now proclaimed that Adam and Eve’s “original sin” could be forgiven. Humanity could, in a sense, return to paradise and eternal life. Jesus’ death on the cross atoned for original sin. According to Paul, those who believed in Jesus and accepted membership in the new Christian community would be forgiven by God and “saved.” Although they would still be mortal, at the end of their earthly lives they would inherit a life in heaven, and, much later, would even be reborn on earth (Romans 5–6).
The Christian Calendar.
Like other religions, Christianity established a sacred calendar. People had long celebrated the winter solstice; in the fourth century Christians fixed the observance of Jesus’ birth, Christmas, at that time of year, although no one knew the actual date of his birth. Good Friday, at about the time of Passover, mourned Jesus’ crucifixion and death; three days later his resurrection was celebrated in the joyous festival of Easter. Corresponding to the Jewish holiday of Pentecost, the anniversary of receiving the Ten Commandments 50 days after the Passover, Christianity introduced its own holiday of Pentecost. It commemorates the date when, according to Acts 2, the “Holy Spirit,” the third element of the Trinity along with God the Father and Jesus the Son, filled Jesus’ disciples and they “began to talk in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them power of utterance,” enabling them to preach to the various peoples of the world. (Modern-day Christian Pentecostals “speak in tongues,” praying and uttering praises ecstatically, healing through prayer and laying on of hands, and speaking of experiencing spiritual miracles.)
Over time, special saints’ days were designated to mark the lives and deaths of people who helped to spread the new religion. The new Christian calendar, which has become the most widely used in the world, fixed its first year at the approximate date of Jesus’ birth. The Jewish Sabbath, a weekly day of rest and reflection, was transferred from Saturday to Sunday.
Gender Relations.
Jesus attracted many women as followers, and women led in the organization of several of the early churches. Paul welcomed them warmly and treated them respectfully at first, but women gradually lost their influence as Jesus’ disciples institutionalized the Church. Although they taught spiritual equality, early Christians allowed gender and social inequalities to remain. Paul had proclaimed that in Jesus “There is no longer male or female,” but he seemed to distrust sexual energies. Like Jesus, he was unmarried. He recommended celibacy and, for those unable to meet that standard, monogamous marriage as a means of sexual restraint:
It is well for a man not to touch a woman. But because of cases of sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. (1 Corinthians 7:1–3)
Paul’s discomfort with sexuality continued to haunt Christianity. One result was the decision, by about the sixth century, to proclaim marriage as one of the Church’s seven sacraments. Marriage would no longer be a contract that a man and woman could enter—or leave—on their own, but a ritual performed by a priest, in the name of Jesus, binding the man and woman forever in an unbreakable bond. For people seeking greater sanctity through celibacy, Church leaders established hundreds of monasteries and convents throughout the Christian world hosting thousands of unmarried, celibate men and women dedicated to the mission of the Church. Many clergy who were not monks, however, continued to marry. In 1139, the second Lateran Council (named for the Pope’s Lateran Palace in Rome, where it convened) declared all clerical marriages not only unlawful but also invalid (MacCulloch, p. 373). Despite the protests of many priests, especially those who had married, and despite breaches in practice, the Council’s decision prevailed as the law of the Church.
Paul moved to subordinate women, first at home:
I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the husband is the head of the wife ... he is the image and reflection of God; but woman is the reflection of man. Indeed, man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for the sake of woman, but woman for the sake of man. (1 Corinthians 11:3–9)
Then in church:
Women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. (1 Corinthians 14:34–35)
Paul had also declared that spiritually “There is no longer slave or free,” but in practice he accepted slavery, saying, “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling.” He did urge masters to be kind to slaves and to “stop threatening them for you know that both of you have the same Master in heaven, and with him there is no partiality” (Ephesians 6:5–9). These contrasting statements would later be invoked to justify both Christian approval and disapproval for the institution of slavery.
From Persecution to Triumph
Having established the central doctrines of the new religion and stabilized its core communities, both Peter and Paul moved to expand its geographical scope. They saw Rome as the capital of empire and the center of the international communication network of the time, and they traveled there to preach and teach. Tradition holds that both were martyred there in the persecutions of the emperor Nero, about 67 c.e., and that both are entombed and enshrined there.
In this capital of empire, Christianity appeared as one of several mystery religions, all of which were based on beliefs in supernatural beings. They included the religion of Mithra, a Persian sun god; Demeter, a Greek goddess; YHWH, the god of the Jews; and an eclectic mixture of beliefs called Gnosticism. Romans seemed to be in search of a more inspiring, otherworldly faith than paganism provided, but at the time of the deaths of Peter and Paul, Christianity was still a relatively weak force.
The first Christians, Jews by nationality, were scorned as provincial foreigners. Some Roman authorities thought that Christian beliefs in resurrection and an afterlife undermined pride in citizenship and willingness to serve in the army. About the year 100, the historian Tacitus wrote of:
a class of persons hated for their vices whom the crowd called Christians. Christus, after whom they were named, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate, and the pernicious superstition was checked for a moment only to break out once more, not only in Judaea, the home of the disease, but in the Capital itself, where everything horrible or shameful in the world gathers and becomes fashionable. (Tacitus, Annals XV:44)
Paradoxically, because they refused to worship the emperor or to take oaths in his name, official Rome viewed Christians as atheists. Their emphasis on otherworldly salvation and their strong internal organization were seen as threats to the state’s authority. Roman leaders also mocked the sacrament of the Eucharist, in which Christians consumed consecrated wafers and wine as the body and blood of Christ, as a sign of cannibalism. Official treatment of Christianity was erratic but often marked by severe persecution. Nero (r. 54–68) scapegoated the Christians, blaming them for the great fire in 64, apparently executing both Peter and Paul among his victims, and sending hundreds of Christians to die in public gladiatorial contests and by burning.
Edicts of persecution were issued by emperors Antoninus Pius (r. 138–61), Marcus Aurelius (r. 161–80), Septimius Severus (r. 193–211), Decius (r. 249–51), and Diocletian (r. 284–305). In 257 Emperor Valerian (r. 253–60) was prepared to launch a major persecution of Christians, but he was captured in battle by Persians. In these early years of persecution, thousands of Christians suffered martyrdom.
Despite the scorn and the persecution, Christianity continued to grow. Its key doctrines and texts were written, edited, and approved by leaders in the network of Christian churches. After years of debate, Christian leaders and scholars agreed on the contents of the New Testament by about the year 200, and by 250 the city of Rome alone held about 50,000 Christians among its million inhabitants. Most were of the lower classes, attracted by Jesus’ message to the poor, but middle- and upper-class
Romans had also joined. In particular, Christianity proved attractive to the wives of Roman leaders, who often contributed to their husbands’ conversions. By the reign of Constantine, estimates reported that one out of ten inhabitants of the Roman Empire was Christian.
The Conversion of Constantine.
In 313, Emperor Constantine (r. 306–37) had a vision in which a cross and the words in hoc signo vinces, “in this sign you will be victorious,” appeared to him the night before he won the critical battle that made him sole emperor in the Western Empire. He immediately declared Christianity legal. He funded Christian leaders and their construction of churches, while withdrawing official support from the pagan churches, making Christianity the de facto official religion of the Roman Empire. On a personal level, Constantine encouraged his mother, Helena, to embrace Christianity, which she did enthusiastically. Helena had churches built in Asia Minor and the Holy Land, and traveled to Jerusalem seeking the cross on which Jesus died. After her death, she was canonized as a saint in the Catholic Church.
As emperor, Constantine took a leading part in Church affairs. He sponsored the Council of Nicaea in 325, the largest assembly of bishops of local Christian churches up to that time. He convened the council primarily to establish the central theological doctrines of Christianity, but it also established a Church organization for the Roman Empire, a network of urban bishoprics grouped into provinces, with each province headed by the chief bishop of its largest city. In 337, on his deathbed, Constantine accepted baptism.
In 392, Emperor Theodosius I (r. 379–95) declared Christianity to be the official religion of the Roman Empire. He outlawed the worship of the traditional Roman gods and severely restricted Judaism, initiating centuries of bitter Christian persecution of both traditions.
How Had Christianity Succeeded?
How had Christianity, once scorned and persecuted, achieved such power? Christian believers attributed the success to divine assistance. Historians seek more earthly explanations. Let us consider one of the major historians to tackle the topic, Edward Gibbon (1737–94).
In 1776, Gibbon began the publication of his six-volume masterpiece, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. A child of the Enlightenment philosophy of his time, which rejected supernatural explanations, Gibbon rather sarcastically presented five reasons for Christianity’s victories. But beneath his sarcasm Gibbon revealed the profound strengths of the new religion:
• Its “inflexible and intolerant” zeal, derived from its Jewish roots.
• Its promise of resurrection and a future life for believers, soon augmented by the threat of eternal damnation for nonbelievers.
• Its assertion of miraculous accomplishments.
• The austere morals of the first Christians. The Christian search for spiritual perfection, a monogamous sexual code, the rejection of worldly honor, and a general emphasis on equality attracted many converts. In the extreme case, martyrdom won admiration, sympathy, and followers. Later commentators noted that the simplicity and self-sacrifice of the early Christians reminded some Romans of the ideals of the early Republic.
• The Church gradually generated a state within a state through the decentralized leadership of its local bishops and presbyters, the structure Paul had begun to knit together. As imperial structures weakened, Christianity provided an alternative community. This Christian community distributed philanthropy to needy people, Christian and non-Christian alike. It also publicized its message effectively—in Greek, the language of the eastern part of the empire.
Many later commentators noted that the Christian community included a local church in which to share the joys and sorrows of everyday life, celebrate life-cycle events, and commemorate major events in the history of the group. At the same time it provided membership in a universal Church that extended to the entire known world, and suggested participation in a life that transcended earthly concerns altogether.
Doctrine: Definition and Dispute
As it grew after receiving official recognition, institutional Christianity refined its theology. The most influential theologian of the period, St. Augustine (354–430), bishop of Hippo in North Africa, wrote The City of God to explain Christianity’s relationship to competing religions and philosophies, and to the Roman government with which it was increasingly intertwined.
Despite Christianity’s designation as the official religion of the empire, Augustine declared its message to be spiritual rather than political. Christianity, he argued, should be concerned with the mystical, heavenly City of Jerusalem rather than with earthly politics. Although Augustine encouraged the Roman emperors to suppress certain religious groups, some elements of his theology supported the separation of Church and state.
Augustine built philosophical bridges to Platonic philosophy, the dominant system of the Hellenistic world of his time and place. Christianity envisioned Jesus, God’s son, walking the earth and suffering for his people. He was, literally, very down-to-earth. God, the Father, had more transcendent characteristics, but they were less emphasized in Christian theology at the time. Plato (c. 428–348 b.c.e.) and later Neoplatonic philosophers, however, provided the model of a more exalted, more remote god, a god that was more accepted among the leading thinkers of Augustine’s time. According to Augustine, Plato’s god was:
the maker of all created things, the light by which things are known, and the good in reference to which things are to be done; ... we have in him the first principle of nature, the truth of doctrines, and the happiness of life. (Augustine, p. 253) In addition, Plato’s god existed in the soul of every person, perhaps a borrowing from Hinduism.
Augustine married these Platonic and Neoplatonic views to the transcendent characteristics of God in Christian theology. This provided Christianity with a new intellectual respectability, which attracted new audiences in the vast Hellenistic world. He also encouraged contemplation and meditation within Christianity, an important element in the monastic life that was beginning to emerge among Christians (as it had among Buddhists). Augustine himself organized a community of monks in Tegaste (now Souk-Ahras), the city of his birth.
In his earlier Confessions (c. 400), Augustine had written of his personal life of relatively mild sin before his conversion to Christianity. Now he warned Christians that Adam and Eve’s willfulness had led to original sin; sin had unlocked the forces of lust, turning the flesh against the spirit; and lust had called forth a death sentence on all humans in place of the immortality originally intended for them:
As soon as our first parents had transgressed the commandment, divine grace forsook them, and they were confounded at their own wickedness … They experienced a new motion of their flesh which had become disobedient to them, in strict retribution of their own disobedience to God ... Then began the flesh to lust against the Spirit … And thus, from the bad use of free will, there originated the whole train of evil … on to the destruction of the second death, which has no end, those only being excepted who are freed by the grace of God. (Augustine City of God, pp. 422–23)
For Augustine as for Paul, and thus for early Christianity, sexuality was perilous and woman suspect. In early Christian theology, profane flesh and divine spirit confronted each other uneasily.
Augustine also believed that Christians should subordinate their will and reason to the teachings and authority of the Church. Although it is usually associated with the development of Protestant religions much later, the idea of predestination—that is, that individuals could do nothing through their own actions to obtain salvation and entrance to heaven—dominated Augustine’s theology. Some Christian theologians, such as Pelagius (c. 354–after 418), rejected Augustine’s argument about original sin and taught that human beings could choose between good and evil to determine their own fate. They feared that the growing acceptance of Augustine’s beliefs would devalue both public service for the poor and private initiative by less disciplined Christians. Ultimately, Augustine’s views prevailed, and popes at the time labeled those of Pelagius heresy.
Battles Over Dogma.
Some theological disputes led to violence, especially as the Church attempted to suppress doctrinal disagreement. The most divisive dispute concerned the nature of the divinity of Jesus. The theologian Arius (c. 250–336) taught that Christ’s humanity limited his divinity, and that God the Father, wholly transcendent, was more sacred than the son who had walked the earth. The Council of Nicaea, which Constantine convened in 325 to resolve this dispute, issued an official statement of creed affirming Jesus’ complete divinity and his indivisibility from God. The Arian controversy continued, however, especially on the fringes of empire, where Arian missionaries converted many of the Gothic tribes to their own beliefs. Wars between the new Arian converts and the Roman Church ensued, until finally Arianism was defeated in armed battle. Of these struggles the historian Ammianus Marcellinus (c. 330– 95) wrote: “No wild beasts are such enemies to mankind as are most of the Christians in the deadly hatred they feel for one another.”
In the eastern Mediterranean, too, bitter and violent conflicts broke out among rival Christian theological factions, again over the precise balance between Jesus’ divinity and his humanity. Persecution of dissidents by the Orthodox Church in Carthage, Syria, and Egypt was so severe that the arrival in the seventh century of Muslim rule, which treated all the Christian sects equally, was often welcomed as a respite from the struggles.
By the sixth century, Christians far surpassed Jews in numbers, geographical spread, power, and influence. Christian missionaries continued their attempts to convert Jews, often by coercion. In 576, for example, a Gallic bishop gave the Jews of his city the choice between baptism and expulsion, a pattern that was repeated periodically, although Jews had not yet immigrated into Western Europe in large numbers.
Christianity in the Wake of Empire
Christianity spread to Western and northern Europe along the communication and transportation networks of the Roman Empire. Born in Judea under Roman occupation, Christianity now spread throughout the empire, spoke its languages of Greek and Latin, preached the gospel along its trade routes, and constructed church communities in its cities. Thanks to official recognition and patronage, the Church grew steadily. As the Roman imperial government weakened, it enlisted the now official Church as a kind of department of state. While the empire weakened and dissolved, Christianity emerged and flourished.
The Conversion of the Barbarians
During the first millennium c.e., bishops in the Western Church came “from the ranks of the senatorial governing class … they stood for continuity of the old Roman values … The eventual conversion of the barbarian leaders was due to their influence” (Matthew, p. 21). “None of the major Germanic peoples who entered the Roman provinces in the fourth and fifth centuries remained pagan for more than a generation after they crossed the frontier” (Mann, p. 335). About 496, Clovis, chief of the Merovingian Franks, rejected Arianism and converted to Roman Christianity, the first barbarian to accept the religion of the empire. He established his capital in Paris and had thousands of his tribesmen converted, for, in general, followers accepted the religion of their leader. Clovis’ acceptance of Christianity brought him the support of the Roman ecclesiastical hierarchy, including the pope, and insured the triumph of this version of Christianity in Gaul.
Decentralized Power and Monastic Life
In Western Europe, Christianity developed a multitude of local institutions. Churches, monasteries, and convents were established, and leadership was decentralized. In regions that lacked organized government and administration, local Church leaders and institutions provided whatever existed of order, administration, and a sense of larger community. For several centuries, “Christendom was dominated by thousands of dedicated unmarried men and women” (McManners, p. 89), living in
monasteries throughout the Christian world. Missionary activity continued enthusiastically, but now turned northward toward the Vikings and the Slavs, as other geographical doors had been forcibly shut by the victorious Muslim armies emerging from Arabia.
Pope Gregory I (r. 590–604) saw the usefulness of the monasteries and monks in converting and disciplining the barbarians, and he began to encourage the monastic movement. By the year 600 there were about 200 monasteries in Gaul alone, and the first missionaries dispatched by Rome arrived in England c. 597. By 700 much of England had been converted. In the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, missionary activity was directed toward the “Northmen,” the Vikings from Scandinavia, who raided and traded for goods and slaves from North America and Greenland, through the North Sea and the Baltic, down the Volga River, across the Caspian Sea, and on as far as Baghdad. The Vikings came into the Christian fold with only a tenuous link to Rome and a strong admixture of pagan ritual.
Although the pope in Rome had nominal authority over Christian affairs in the West, the Church’s power was, in fact, fragmented and decentralized between 500 and 1000. Christianity spread in urban areas through its bishops in their large churches. In rural and remote areas, monks, acting as missionaries, carried the message. Monasteries, which were small, isolated communities, each under the local control of a single abbot, modeled the spirituality and simplicity of the earliest Christian communities. Because sexual activity was ruled out, monasticism became as accessible to women in convents as to men in monasteries, and was equally valued by both. Many monasteries contained both men and women, each living in celibacy.
The most famous of the early monastics, St. Benedict (c. 480–547), founded a monastery at Monte Cassino, about 100 miles southeast of Rome. The writings of Pope Gregory I give us the most detailed information on the life, regulations, and discipline of that exemplary institution, although each monastery had its own variations in administration and practice.
Through a variety of educational institutions, the churches, monasteries, convents, and bishops kept Rome’s culture alive in northern and Western Europe. In much of rural Western Europe, local authorities valued the monks not just as the only literate people in the region but also as the most capable in administering land and agriculture. These authorities also sought an alliance with the prestige and power of the Church. They granted land and administrative powers to nearby monasteries, transforming them into important local economic forces. (Compare the administrative roles of Hindu priests and Buddhist monks in south and Southeast Asia in the chapter entitled “Hinduism and Buddhism.”) Monks became courtiers and bishops as well as missionaries as they expanded the geographic, social, and economic dimensions of the Church. Until the Fourth Lateran Council (1216) under Pope Innocent III (r. 1198–1216), monasteries could form and dissolve at local initiatives, so we have no record of their exact numbers in the early centuries.
A history of the very decentralized Church of this time would have to be written from the bottom up. The Church in the West was decentralized partly because the Roman Empire was decentralized, having lost its administrative power. There was no longer an emperor in Rome. The Church and what was left of the government in Western Europe groped toward a new mutual relationship.
The Church Divides Into East and West
In the far more literate and sophisticated Byzantine Empire, political leaders did not relinquish their power to Church authorities. Indeed, the emperor at Constantinople served as administrative head of the Church, a pattern that had been set by Constantine when he presided over the Council of Nicaea, outside Constantinople.
Today, Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism share the same fundamental faith and scripture and maintain official communication with each other, but they developed many historic differences over Church organization, authority, and language. Doctrinally, at the Council of Chalcedon (451) both Eastern Orthodoxy and the Roman Church accepted the belief that Jesus was simultaneously an historical person and one with God. Organizationally, however, the Eastern Church remained far more urban. The West had so few roads and so little trade that it was held together organizationally by its military and ecclesiastical strongholds. The Council of Chalcedon recognized four centers of Church organization, or sees, in the East—Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Constantinople— with Constantinople predominating and having the same leadership role in the East as Rome had in the West. Rome, once one of the patriarchates, and the only one in the West, was now deemed an entirely separate administrative center, still under its own emperor and with its own bishop.
The Split Between Rome and Constantinople.
Rome and Byzantium have remained divided over the authority of the bishop of Rome to the present. From the sixth century, he has claimed to be pope, papa, father of the (Roman) Catholic Church and the direct organizational successor of the apostle Peter. Eastern Orthodox Christianity, however, has never recognized the pope’s claim to preeminent authority, accepting as their principal authority the patriarch or bishop of Constantinople. Also, unlike the Roman practice, all but the highest clergy in Eastern Orthodoxy are permitted to marry, so here again the two clergies have not accepted each other’s authority. The language of Rome is Latin, while the East uses Greek and the various Slavic languages of eastern Europe.
When Leo IX became pope in 1048, he aimed to expand his influence over all of Europe and sponsored the writing of a treatise that emphasized the pope’s power. He sent one of his more zealous reformers to Constantinople to argue against the patriarch of Constantinople’s claims to be independent of Rome’s control. After failed negotiations, the reformer excommunicated the patriarch; in response, the patriarch excommunicated the reformer. Through this mutual rejection, called the Great Schism of 1054, the two Churches divided definitively into the Latin (later Roman Catholic) Church, which is predominant in Western Europe, and the Greek Orthodox Church, which prevails in the East. Friction between the two groups has waxed and waned over time, with the most direct confrontation coming in 1204, when crusaders dispatched by Rome to fight against Muslims in Jerusalem turned northward and sacked Constantinople instead.
New Areas Adopt orthodox Christianity.
As in the West, monastic life flourished in the Byzantine Empire, with exemplary institutions at remote, starkly beautiful sites such as Mount Sinai and Mount Athos. The greatest missionary activity of the Orthodox monks came later than in the West. Hemmed in by the Roman Church to the west and by the growing power of Islam to the east after about 650, Byzantium turned its missionary efforts northward, toward Russia. The brothers St. Cyril (c. 827–69) and St. Methodius (c. 825–84) translated the Bible into Slavonic, creating the Cyrillic alphabet in which to transcribe and publish it. When Russia embraced Orthodox Christianity in the tenth century, it also adopted this alphabet. In the late fifteenth century, after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks (1453), Moscow began to refer to itself as the “Third Rome,” the spiritual and political heir to the Caesars and the Byzantine Empire.
In other regions of east-central Europe, Rome and Byzantium competed in spreading their religious and cultural messages and organizations. Rome won in Poland, Bohemia, Lithuania, and Ukraine; the Orthodox Church in Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia. Other national Churches also grew up beyond Rome’s jurisdiction, including the Coptic in Egypt, the Armenian, and the Ethiopian. They also asserted their independence from Constantinople, creating a pattern of distinct national Churches that the Protestant Reformation would later adopt.
Christianity in Western Europe
The abrupt, dramatic rise of Islam throughout the Middle East and into the Mediterranean, which we will examine in the next chapter, had an immediate and profound influence on Christianity. By the year 700, Muslim armies had conquered the eastern Mediterranean and the north coast of Africa, key regions of both Christianity and the former Roman Empire. The Muslim Umayyad dynasty pushed on into Spain and crossed the Pyrenees. Stopped in southern France by the Frankish ruler Charles Martel (c. 688–741) at the Battle of Tours in 732, the Umayyad forces withdrew to Spain. Muslim troops captured segments of the southern Italian peninsula, Sicily, and other Mediterranean islands. These Muslim conquests cut Christianity off geographically from the lands of its birth and early vigor. As a result, Christianity became primarily a religion of Europe, where many of its members were recently converted “barbarian” warrior nobles.
The Pope Allies With the Franks.
In Rome, the pope felt surrounded by the hostile powers of Constantinople and Islam to the east and south, and several Gothic kings to the north and west. Seeking alliances with strong men, he turned to a Frank, Charles (Carolus) Martel, who gave his name to the Carolingian family. As we have seen, Martel had repulsed the Muslims at Tours in 732. In 754 his son Pepin III (r. 751–68) answered the call of Pope Stephen II (r. 752–57) for help in fighting the Lombards, who were invading Italy and threatening the papal possessions. Pepin secured a swath of lands from Rome to Ravenna and turned them over to papal rule. In exchange, the pope anointed Pepin and his two sons, confirming the succession of the Carolingian family as the royal house ruling the Franks.
Charlemagne Revives the Idea of Empire.
Pepin’s son Charles ruled between 768 and 814, achieving the greatest recognition of his power when Pope Leo III (r. 795–816) crowned him Roman Emperor on Christmas Day, 800. In spite of this seeming unity of interests, Charles, who became known as Charles the Great or Charlemagne, rejected the title throughout most of his life and was often at odds with the various popes as he sought to expand an empire of his own. To achieve his goal, Charlemagne spent all his adult life in warfare, continuing the military expeditions of his father and grandfather. He reconquered the northeastern corner of Spain from its Muslim rulers, defeated the Lombard rulers of Italy and relieved their pressure on the pope, seized Bavaria and Bohemia, killed and looted the entire nobility of the Avars in Pannonia (modern Austria and Hungary), and subdued the German Saxon populations along the Elbe River after 33 years of warfare. Himself a German Frank, Charlemagne offered the German Saxons a choice of conversion to Christianity or death.
With Charlemagne’s victories, the borders of his kingdom came to match the borders of the dominance of the Church of Rome, except for the British Isles, which he did not enter. The political capital of Western Europe passed from Rome to Charlemagne’s own palace in Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) in modern Germany. Although Charlemagne was barely literate, he established within this palace a center of learning that attracted Church scholars from throughout Europe, initiating what historians call the Carolingian Renaissance.
Charles persuaded the noted scholar Alcuin of York, England (c. 730–804), to come to Aachen as head of the palace school and as his own personal adviser. The goals of the school were Christian and basic: reading and writing of Biblical texts in Latin, chanting of prayers, knowledge of grammar and arithmetic. This training would prepare missionaries for their work among the peoples of northern Europe. Scribes at the school prepared copies of prayers and Biblical texts for the liturgical and scholarly needs of churches and scholars. In the process they created a new form of Latin script that forms the basis of the lower-case (small) letters we use today.
Charlemagne also fostered the arts by bringing to his capital sculpture from Italy and by patronizing local artisans and craftspeople. Alcuin himself had the ear of the emperor, criticizing him for using force in converting the Saxons and convincing him not to repeat the practice by invading England.
Charlemagne’s coronation challenged the authority of the Eastern emperor in Constantinople, but during the next years Charlemagne managed, through negotiation and warfare, to gain Constantinople’s recognition of his title. There were once again two emperors, East and West.
The Attempt at Empire Fails.
The Carolingian family remained powerful until about the end of the ninth century. But then they could no longer fight off the new invasions of the Western Christian world by Magyars (Hungarians), Norsemen, and Arabs. Regional administrators, emboldened by the weakness of the Carolingian emperor, began to act independently of his authority. Only after yet another century would militarily powerful leaders begin once again to cobble together loosely structured kingdoms in northwestern Europe. Meanwhile, political leadership in Europe was generally decentralized in rural manor estates controlled by local lords.
Religious leadership in the cathedrals, churches, monasteries, and convents filled the gap, providing a greater sense of overall community and order. In this era, 600–1100 c.e., the Church gave Europe its fundamental character and order. The Magyar and Norse invaders, like the Germans before them, converted to Christianity. By the end of the eleventh century, the Roman Church, as well as the political authorities of Western Europe, were preparing to confront Islam.
Judaism and Early Christianity: What Difference Do They Make?
A small group of people, represented in the Bible in the stories of Abraham and his family, brought to the world the concept of monotheism, that one God created and cared for the entire world. As this group of people grew, and became known as the Jewish people, it told the melancholy story of its descent into slavery followed by the sequel of its escape from slavery through the intervention of its God, a story that has inspired oppressed peoples for thousands of years. Then, for about 1,200 years the Jews lived as a politically independent people, although often divided into tribes, with their own governments, on land that they claimed as sacred to them, given to them by their God. During those years, their prophets taught that ethics and morality could prevail in human relations, but only through dedication and hard work, and that unjust rulers should be confronted, whether they were their own rulers or foreign rulers.
Living at a geographical crossroads of people and ideas, the Jews were frequently conquered by other peoples and sometimes exiled from the land they claimed. Nevertheless, in their diaspora in Babylonia, they demonstrated that they could remain cohesive and culturally creative, even far from home. After the Romans exiled the Jews almost completely from their land, they dispersed throughout the world, especially the Roman world. They drew on their earlier experiences to create institutions based on the leadership of their rabbis and allegiance to their law codes and religious customs that enabled them to endure despite the lack of a common home and a cohesive political structure. Even so, life in exile took its toll through oppression and assimilation. At the height of the Roman Empire, there were an estimated eight million Jews in the world. Two thousand years later, there are not quite double that number, 15 million, while Christianity, which grew from Jewish roots, today has more than two billion members.
Christianity originated in Judea and spread throughout Europe. It began with a single Jewish teacher whose message was preached by a handful of disciples and institutionalized through the zeal of a single missionary. It began with a membership of downtrodden Jews, added middling-level gentiles, attracted some of the elites of Rome, and finally converted multitudes of Europe’s invading barbarians. It had expanded its own organizational establishment via the network of transportation, communication, and trade put in place by the Roman Empire. Within that empire, it flowered into two separate, far-flung Church hierarchies and several localized structures. When that empire dissolved and contracted, the Church maintained and consolidated its position within the remains of those old Roman administrative and market centers.
As European society became more rural, Christian monasteries and convents were founded in the countryside and often took on administrative and developmental roles alongside their spiritual missions. In short, the Church, like the empire, was much transformed. By the year 1000 it had become the most important organizational and cultural force in Western Europe.
The transformations of both the Christian religious world and the European political world continued after 1000 with extraordinary developments in crusading vigor, trade and commerce, urbanization, intellectual and artistic creativity, and religious reform. We will explore these transformations in the chapter entitled “Establishing World Trade Routes.” First, however, we turn to equally startling and revolutionary developments that had created another world religion, originating in the Arabian peninsula only a few hundred miles from the birthplace of both Judaism and Christianity. By the year 1000 it had spread across North Africa, northward into Spain, throughout the Middle East, and on through Iran and Afghanistan into India.
Written by Howard Spodek in "The World's History", combined volume, fifth edition, Pearson, USA, 2015, excerpts pp. 302-338. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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