This is a series of posts seeking to follow the prompt set forth by David Bentley Hart in his recent lecture posted to his Substack, Leaves in the Wind. I have not linked every single scriptural text for the sake of length.
The formation of Christianismos as a separate identity from Ioudaismos came at great cost for both, but is also, most likely, the only way that either could have survived in the ongoing life of the Roman Empire or its rival Sasanian Empire. Christianos is first applied to the followers of the Way, we are told in the Book of Acts, in Antioch (Acts 11:26); the word means something like “partisan of Christ” in context, and could only have been a meaningful term to Greek-speaking Jews, who would know that christos was an indigenous idiom for king, where the word would have had no meaning to the average Greek or Roman uneducated about Judaism. It is probably from this appellation that non-Jewish Christ-followers derived the title, but the concept that to be Christianos implied a particular mode of activity or way of life, Christianismos, particularly one that could be contrasted with Ioudaismos, “Judaism” or “Jewishness,” was novel in the second century, where it first appears in the writings of Ignatios of Antioch (). From Ignatios onwards, a long tradition of Adversus Iudaeos, or “Against the Jews,” literature helped to define Christianismos against Ioudaismos. This literature can be described by three primary features. The first feature, with attention to the world behind the text, is that it is a discourse of appropriation, of earlier Jewish thinkers claiming to represent the authentic continuation of Judaism in the New Testament texts, by non-Jews, and that it is the discourse of a very small minority of the Roman Empire against a much larger, more established minority, in large part by way of trying to secure legitimacy in the eyes of the wider majority. Christian anti-Judaism in the early centuries prior to enfranchisement was a matter of virtue signaling: by claiming to truly succeed the patriarchs, prophets, and righteous people of biblical Israel as one reads about in Jewish scriptures, and by claiming to read Jewish scriptures rightly in contradistinction to Jewish exegesis, which was deemed “carnal,” Christian writers helped soothe the vulnerability of Christian communities for individual Christians by assuring them that they were the singular, true heirs of God’s promises, covenants, and providential concern, in contradistinction to the Jews. Their reason for rhetorically typecasting the Jews is much less likely to be the experience of Jewish persecution of Christians (with what power or standing?) or Jewish collaboration with the Roman authorities to effect such persecution (since, as most modern scholars acknowledge, the Romans did not normally pursue official persecution of Christians), and much more likely to be an attempt to distance their communities from Jews and Judaism in the midst and aftermath of the First and Second Jewish-Roman Wars (66-74 CE; 132-136 CE). Writers in the Adversus Iudaeos tradition were also writing for a tiny minority of literate people like themselves. The second feature of note is that the literary quality of the Adversus Iudaeos literature is clearly marked by the rhetorical excess of polemicism common to the Greco-Roman tradition of diatribe. Whether homiletical, dialogical, or discursive treatise, the Adversus Iudaeos texts often reflect limited awareness of the nuances in Jewish communities, texts, and reading practices, and often front outrage, lampoon, and binary rejections of Jewish interpretations of Jewish texts by way of buffering the comparatively non-obvious character of Christian readings of the same text. In some noteworthy cases, this involves outright mendacious accusations of Jews as having corrupted their scriptures to obscure support for the Christian gospel, as in the suggestion that the LXX text of Isaiah 7:14, which speaks of a parthenos, a “virgin,” conceiving and giving birth, has been intentionally changed in the Hebrew Masoretic Text to alma, “young woman,” all the while not realizing that this is also the general semantic meaning of parthenos as well and that the Matthean read of this verse as a messianic prophecy about a virginal conception and birth is both late and unique to Matthew. Moreover, Christian authors lump Jewish readings of scripture together into a crude literalism, not realizing both that the tradition of Jewish exegesis assumes together with Christian readers that the literal sense of the text cannot always be followed for moral or theological wisdom and that the text hides deeper, more spiritual meanings beneath its outer, more concrete layer. The third feature of note is that the world in front of the text, of the reception of such literature, still included Jewish individuals and communities that professed belief in Jesus in ways that ranged across the spectrum of possible Christologies and that existed in unclear relationship to the late antique synagogue and to the rabbinic schoolhouse. Jews, for their part, also had polemical literature against Christians, like the Toledot Yeshu, though the full damning portrait of the rabbinic Jesus is saved for the Babylonian Talmud (the Bavli), where the Jesus of Toledot Yeshu is weaponized in conversation with Christian interlocutors outside of the bounds of the Roman Empire. It is also largely in these literary, intellectual circles that the essentialist boundaries between “Judaism” and “Christianity” were primarily worked out in the second, third, and fourth centuries CE, though it seems apparent that those boundaries did not everywhere prevail by way of description as late as the rise of Islam in the seventh century CE. Yet it is probably the case that either Christianity’s reduction to its native Judaism or Judaism’s full absorption into emergent Christianity would have meant the annihilation of the distinctive importance of each as a community, a lifeway, and an intellectual tradition. If the followers of Jesus had remained within the fold of Judaism as a tolerated theological minority, which is certainly one possible counterfactual history, it is deeply unlikely that the teachings of Jesus would ever have managed to be more than a Mishnaic or Talmudic footnote in the larger commentary tradition of the late antique and medieval Jewish sages, and his followers would gradually have lost the distinctive walk of the Way in favor of the arguably much more stable halakhic reasoning of the rabbis. But conversely, if Jews had not found boundaries to demarcate Judaism from Christianity, it is entirely probable that they would have been assimilated, gradually or forcibly, by gentile Christians. In actual fact, despite these boundaries, many were absorbed or annihilated in the Hellenistic Diaspora of the Late Antique Roman Empire prior to the rise of Islam, as soft and hard imperial Christianization put pressure on Jewish communities to assimilate. The cost to Christianity of separation was the loss of a significant portion of the aboriginal logic of the politics of resurrection as God’s vindication of Israel in the vindication of Israel’s messiah; the cost to Judaism was that Christianity assumed the role of the pagan oppressor, but without the categorical ease of dismissal as actual paganism. The paradox of what to make of this state of affairs continues to be a question of interest for Jewish thinkers to this day, just as do the creative challenges to the Christian metanarrative presented by the enduring existence and witness of the Jewish people for theologians.
The self-conception of Christianismos as a collegium preserved the character of the first-century Way in a second-century context in a manner both appreciable given the other changes endemic to Early Christianity and ultimately unsustainable given the consolidating and expanding power of the Roman Empire in the second century. The collegium or guild was a traditional feature of the Greco-Roman polis that connected artisanal and mercantile class peasants across neighborhoods, cities, and provinces by virtue of common labor and/or religious interests. Popular cults of the Imperial period were often socially organized as collegia, like the cult of Isis. But in Rome, at least, collegia often functioned with the power of gang muscle, and in the outlying provincial metropoleis they were a frequent cause of social and political unrest. This state of affairs continued throughout the later Empire, actually, acquiring the force of ecclesiastical wars of attrition in the conflict, for example, of the Blues and the Greens in medieval Constantinople. So when the Romans first became conscious of Christianoi as a distinct community from Ioudaioi, their perception, in the person of Pliny the Younger, of Christians as a collegium was of a new religio-political guild or burial society was treated with the same indifferent, carte blanche response as the Romans offered to other such voluntary associations of their kind. When, at Trajan’s suggestion, Pliny proceeded to round up accused Christians, offer them the chance to recant, and execute them when they refused, he was doing the same that he might have done to other guilds in a city where guilds had been outlawed; the Romans rarely possessed any special animus for Christianismos. Modern scholars rightly maintain, in fact, that virtually all premodern suggestions of widespread Roman persecution of Christians, from the Johannine Apocalypse onward, have been greatly exaggerated, reflecting more of the smallness and vulnerability that ancient Christians perceived their movement to have as opposed to a real systematic program of official discrimination. When the Romans did officially persecute Christians (the most important stretches were from 161-180 CE under Marcus Aurelius, 249-251 under Decius, 253-260 under Valerian, and 283-305 under Diocletian), it was often by way of response to other pressures the empire was experiencing rather than some sort of targeted campaign aimed at the essence of what Christianity was or is. That is to say, Christian perception of Christian suffering in antiquity was often somewhat hyperbolic, and actual Christian suffering was usually that of any religious or ethnic minority at the whims of a powerful empire in need of such expiating violence to effectively mollify its citizenry. So, the collegial disposition of Christianismos in the second, third, and early fourth centuries should not be misrepresented as a time of rapid, constant, and wanton violence against Christians. In some periods it could be, but for the most part, Christians simply constituted a growing demographic of social dissidents from certain aspects of Greco-Roman culture (but not others) with an unclear, negotiated relationship to ongoing Judaism, one that Greco-Roman critics of Christianismos often highlighted as justification for their skepticism of Christian ethical, political, and intellectual integrity. At the same time, Christianismos as a collegium permitted Christian communities to continue many of the collectivist/communistic practices of their first-century forbears, including common collection of money, food, and goods, common distribution (through the organ of the eucharistic banquet and the diaconal faculty under the liturgical presidency of the episkopos), the maintenance of strict ethical standards within the larger network of the guild, and the continued preservation of the apocalyptic heraldry of the gospel, both in imminentist (that is, expecting a historically, “horizontally” future eschaton) and transcendentalist (that is, expecting a cosmic, “vertically” realized eschaton) forms.
The self-presentation of Christianismos as a tertium genus between Ioudaismos and Hellenismos offered the insightful boon of appropriating to the former the functions of ethnicity and the unfortunate side-effect of gradually effacing the cultural distinctives of many Christians, eliminating the context of their politics of resurrection. The New Testament roots of the tertium genus doctrine are fairly clear in the Pauline epistolary corpus, where Paul invited non-Jews into a new ethnic identity as having been incorporated into Israel without undergoing full ritual conversion as Jews (the apparatus for which had only historically recently been contrived under the Hasmoneans and was not widely practiced anyway, and would not be until the rabbinic period). In a real sense, “ex-pagan pagans” were indeed abandoning their received ethnicity as ancient peoples understood it—(fictive and real) ancestry, kinship, customs, especially ritual customs of cult to divine powers, ancestors, and relevant tutelary spirits, practices around marriage, sex, initiation of children, consumption of meals, daily, lived religious, economic, social, and political functions, age, dying, death, burial, and transition to the afterlife, etc.—for a new ethnic identity that came with aspects of a well-known and respected ethnic group (Jews) but not with all the benefits, privileges, and responsibilities of that group (circumcision, kashrut, Sabbath, tax exemptions, religious exemptions, etc.). Modern academic consensus for why most of the earliest generations of Jesus’s followers (but not all; see below) chose to admit non-Jews on this basis tends to revolve around the following observations: Judaism’s traditional encouragement to non-Jews was ethical monotheism in the culture of their birth and respect for Jews, Judaism, and Jewish aspirations for independence, as well as partial participation in Jewish life at local synagogues and at the Temple; Jews were not of one mind about the possibility or desirability of gentiles undergoing full conversion to Judaism, as the means for Judaizing had only been implemented historically beginning with the Hasmoneans; apocalyptic streams of Jewish eschatology in particular imagined many solutions to the “gentile problem,” as Matthew Thiessen has phrased it, but never a solution whereby all the nations became Jews practicing the Torah; and, in the experience of the early communities, non-Jews seemed to receive God’s spirit in Jesus’s name without the need for conversion. Not all of the Jesus Movement was unified around this tactic: Paul tells us that certain people attached to the community of James, the brother of Jesus seemed to advocate separation between Jews and non-Jews in the Jesus Movement and therefore to tacitly call for gentile circumcision (Gal 2:11-14); Matthew, at least if read literally, seems to have Jesus advocate a.) full practice of the Torah (Matt 5:17-20), b.) practice of the Torah in the Pharisaic model of observance (23:1-3), and c.) the discipleship of the non-Jewish nations by observance of all that Jesus commanded (28:19)—that is, theoretically including the call to full Torah observance and therefore probably to circumcision, which also fits well with the modern academic reading of Matthew as “within Judaism” in late first-century Galilee alongside the nascent Pharisaic community in Palestine (later, the tannaim). Why James and Matthew may have advocated gentile inclusion through full Judaization may also reflect a growing sense of anxiety at the delay of the eschaton: Paul’s logic, after all, is that gentile inclusion as gentiles makes sense given the immediacy of Jesus’s return (1 Cor 7), but if Jesus is to be long delayed, then the instinct of James and Matthew that a “bicameral” (to use Mark Kinzer’s phrase) assembly of Jews and gentiles, asking the latter to adapt partially but not totally to the former, asking the former to accept the latter but without the normal instruments of reception and incorporation, would not prove long-term sustainable. So in a later generation, as Christianismos was coined in contradistinction to Ioudaismos, Early Christians retained the memory that a.) their conversion to Christ had involved the abandonment of an ethnic identity and the embrace of a new one and b.) that the new identity was connected to the biblical Israel, but forgot, obscured, or intentionally denied that c.) the new identity with the biblical Israel did not involve the exclusion or supersession of ethnic Jews as also the legacy of biblical Israel (see §1 above). But tertium genus ideology was both about identity construction and about negotiation of use of sources: for if Christians were a “third nation” between Hellenism and Judaism, on the one hand, then they were also, on the other, free to borrow liberally from both Hellenism and Judaism on the other. Hence the construction of Christianismos as a collegium was ultimately part of the strategy of carving out a new social space for Christians beyond the synagogue and apart from the normative theatres of Greco-Roman life (including actual theaters), a social space for a distinctively new ethnic identity (in the ancient mindset) that, to the very degree of its novelty, had to craft a fictive antiquity for itself to earn respect by drawing on its first-century associations with biblical Israel on the one hand and the respected roots of Greco-Roman civilization on the other.
The development of a distinctively Christian philosophy, of which Christian theology is the most prominent discursive element historically, on the one hand reformulated the apocalyptic, cosmological, and mystical vision of Jesus and his earliest followers in a manner suitable for finding respectability in the intellectual climate of the Greco-Roman world, and on the other hand increasingly trended towards a dogmatism that tended to sublimate the polyphony and urgency of the earliest Jesus Movement. There had never really been anything like Christianismos in the Roman Empire until this point: a new, transethnic ethnos, cultically similar to but distinct from Judaism (in most places; again, there continued to be “Jews” and “Christians” who blurred, crossed, and protested the lines here for several centuries), ensconced within but intentionally separate from the wider culture of the empire socially, morally, and politically. The novelty and perceived deconstructivity of Christianismos invited pagan critique as early as the late second century with Celsus’s On the True Doctrine, spare comments from Galen, and finally Porphyry’s Against the Christians, but these pagan critics, as Robert Louis Wilken pointed out, were also attacking the credibility of Christian beliefs. Judaism had been connected to the wider world of Hellenic wisdom since the campaigns of Alexander the Great from 336 to 323 BCE, and to the Near Eastern wisdom traditions of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Persia for centuries prior. The earliest Jewish sapiential literature, liberally appropriating, adapting, and responding to Near Eastern philosophy, appears in the Hebrew Bible in the form of the books of Proverbs, Job, and Qohelet or Ecclesiastes; in the Hellenistic period, the Wisdom of Jesus Ben Sirach and Wisdom of Solomon were also written in this wider genre. Simultaneous with the development of Jewish sapiential literature was Jewish apocalypticism, preceded by Persian apocalyptic dualism, grown from the prophetic genre and appearing for the first time in texts like the visions of Ezekiel, Zechariah, Deutero-Zechariah, and Trito-Isaiah, and constituting its own full-blown literary type by the Hellenistic period, when the Enoch apocalypses, the Book of Daniel, oracular and testamental literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and more were composed. Jewish apocalypticism and Jewish sapiential literature both asked similar questions about the relationship between God and the world, God’s control of history, and personal experiences of fate, fortune, and freedom; they asked mutual questions about the character and relationship of good and evil, the qualities of the good life, and the providential involvement of God in the world’s ordering; and they each asked these questions in the context of Jewish subjection to Babylonian, Persian, and Hellenistic rulers. And elements of each genre appears in the other: the Enochic apocalypses, for example, are clearly versed in some Wisdom texts, while Wisdom of Solomon clearly references some apocalyptic beliefs in eschatological, vindicating divine justice on behalf of the righteous and the notion of the providential periodization of history. But on the whole, Jewish apocalypticism was not interested in explaining Judaism or eschatology to non-Jews; the Jewish philosophical tradition carried out in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, both in sapiential texts and in the writings of figures like Aristobulus and Philo of Alexandria, was much more invested in ensuring that Judaism’s overall intelligibility was on par with respected Greco-Roman standards of credibility. While the Jesus Movement represented, as I wrote in the last post in this series, the pre-Christian diversity of Early Judaism in its ranks, Jesus and his earliest followers were all, clearly, much more invested in Jewish apocalypticism as it was practiced, written, read, and talked about in Judea than they were in Jewish sapiential traditions and philosophical literature in the Diaspora. Even Paul, clearly educated about the popular logic, ethics, and physics of the Greco-Roman world of his day (which were Stoic), was at heart an apocalyptic messenger of the gospel to non-Jews, not a philosopher. As such, the New Testament itself neither philosophizes nor theologizes as ancient people understood those disciplines, and what philosophy and theology can be found in it reflect those of pre-Christian Jewish texts, canonical and non-canonical, and Hellenistic Stoicism. So, in the second and third centuries, when the philosophical respectability of Stoicism had declined and so-called “Middle” Platonism (a renewed dogmatic interpretation of the Platonic tradition beginning in the Hellenistic period but not triumphant until much later) was ascendant, Christianismos seemed intellectually incredible to Greeks and Romans on two grounds: first, it did not even rise to the level of Judaism, the antiquity and venerability of which was respected in the Hellenistic and Imperial periods but declined severely in the aftermath of the First and Second Jewish-Roman Wars; and second, it reflected ethics, politics, psychology, physics, and metaphysics that Greeks and Romans found questionable at best and despicable at worst. This forced the hand of Christian intellectuals to reformulate the gospel—which, again, is at its heart an announcement (kerygma), an urgent piece of breaking news about the irruption of the Kingdom of God into the world and the kind of change God requires for those who would live in his Kingdom—into a philosophical schola, presenting its own doctrine on par with that of the Greco-Roman schools. And, in fact, the dominant strategy of the early Christian philosophers was, on the whole, to make the argument that Christianismos matched the Greco-Roman philosophical climate where consensus agreed it was centered (Middle Platonism and then, later, Neoplatonism) and appropriated, eclectically, the best of other philosophical schools (Peripatetic, Neopythagorean, Stoic, even, on occasion, Epicurean) just as every talented philosopher aspired to do. Christian theologia, both as a practice of trying to praise God aright (determining orthodoxia, that is) in Christian cult as well as of clarifying the fundamental Christian doctrine about God, is really a product of this encounter between Christianismos and Hellenismos conditioned by the new Christian demographic and social circumstances of the second and third centuries. It is telling, as a test case proving the rule, that Rabbinic literature does not ask or answer most of the same questions that consume Christian theology in the second, third, and fourth centuries (apart from the question of divine binitarianism, though even this is not treated in the same way by the rabbis), and that Judaism generally would not have its true philosophical reckoning with Neoplatonism until the middle ages. But where a philosophical school arises, sectarianism becomes, in the Greco-Roman milieu, intolerable and destructive. The notion of philosophical haeresis was the ground for public scrutiny of philosophy as a discipline in the Greco-Roman world and became the site of contest between philosophers for the right to define their tradition; in seeking to present itself as a new-old schola, Christianismos assumed the same necessity. But as the Christian collegia were still geographically widespread, diverse in their local leadership, practices, and teachings, and inconsistently connected both inside and beyond the empire, philosophical unity among Christians required overall greater uniformity of Christian communities at a time of heightened diversity, creativity, and originality. The value judgment that this culled diversity is a tragedy would reflect as much prejudicial bias as the idea that it was wholly necessary; what we may observe with a fairly equanimous mens is that the shape of Christian belief had many possible futures in the early centuries and that the historical contrafactual inherent in that observation should prevent us, as David Bentley Hart has recently argued, from prematurely arguing that the Christian tradition is an obvious or inevitable unfolding of first principles. In the abyss of history are many lost Christianities that may have been, and in some instances undoubtedly were, far more faithful to the first-century Jesus Movement’s real ethos in the first-century than the Christianity that survived and flourished in the era of the “Great Church” on the eve of imperial establishment; and yet, there is no guarantee that any such vehicle of the gospel would have succeeded half as well as did the Christianity of Nicaea.
The formation of a distinctively Christian mystery cult, in which the rites of the earliest followers of Jesus, divorced from their original Jewish setting and treated as a new option in the religious marketplace of antiquity, on the one hand facilitated the power, presence, and availability of the divine life offered through the crucified, risen, and glorified Jesus to his followers, and on the other hand in some ways compromised the original context and content of those rites themselves. Jesus and his Movement remained within the overall milieu of Second Temple Judaism and continued to partake of the ordinary domestic, local, and central institutions of Jewish life and ritual like other Jews; the practices that they centered, prioritized, and invested with further meaning came from the Jewish milieu, even when they had broader analogues in the cultures of the Mediterranean and Near East. Jews were not, for example, the only ancient people to immerse in water for ritual purity or to associate basic foodstuffs with sacrificial offering and the potential for communion with a deity; neither, therefore, were Christians. But the distinctive associations with which the Jesus Movement regarded many of these practices—immersion for regeneration, the imposition of hands and anointing, eucharistic banqueting, and so forth—were deeply infused with traditional, cultural, and scriptural meaning derived from the Jewish tradition. Baptism regenerates, for instance, because water provided ritual purity, because God created the world by drawing it forth out of the primordial waters (in which he also slew the dragon, Leviathan), because the Exodus generation crossed the sea through the parted waters on dry land to freedom, because they crossed through the Jordan into Canaan, etc.; bread and wine are “pneumatic food and drink” (1 Cor 10:1-4) because Melchizedek offered bread and wine, because the bread of the presence was offered in the Temple, because Jewish prophetic literature associates the eschaton with banqueting, etc. But in the second century, as Christianismos was divorcing Judaism and formulating its own distinctive cultural identity, these rites could still be explicated by appeal to the scriptural logic undergirding them but not by reference to wider Jewish practice and cultural sensibility; they also became the unifying rituals of reception and connection for geographic disparate Christian collegia across the Roman Empire. What endured from the original foundations of these rites, however, in the development of a sense of baptism and eucharist as distinctively Christian mysteries, alongside a host of other ritual practices codified in the Apostolic Tradition literature of the third century (fictively, and in a wider process of liturgical standardization in the increasingly federated Christian communities of Alexandria and Rome), was the sense of the earliest community that in its common life God’s spirit had been poured out on it in Jesus’s name and this spirit was conveying to them the divine life, the angelic life, the life of heaven and/or the age to come, the life of the resurrection, the eschatological metamorphosis, etc. in the here and now. The Christian mysteries are, in that sense, the primary and enduring exercise of citizenship in the Kingdom of God according to the politics of resurrection: they are the means by which Jews and non-Jews alike are able to affiliate with the Kingdom of God in the here and now, renew their membership in it, and experience assimilation to its form of life that then becomes the grounds for the collectivist social practices that the early community was known for. Deification and social justice go together. It is also for this reason that the eucharistic banquet of the household assemblies in the second and third centuries was the privileged distribution center for funds and food to the poor, continuing the practices of the common purse inherited from the early Jesus Movement in the first century. The participation in divine life that baptism and eucharist afforded had both a mystical quality, as something non-obvious to the senses in the physical and metaphysical transformation of the human communicant, as well as a social quality; and it would ultimately be the emphasis placed on the emergent cult by Early Christians that would become the primary driver of Christianity’s intellectual and social development in the late third and early fourth centuries.
The evolution of Christian officers into a hierarchical system of authority both saved Christianismos from irreparable fracture in the early centuries and betrayed the deeply egalitarian vision of the earliest Jesus Movement. It bears repeating: the Jesus Movement of the first century had no formal organizational structure or administrative organs. Jesus himself preached in synagogues and asked local Jewish communities to democratically adopt his teachings as their formal way of life; those communities where people accepted his teachings in some cases continued to do so after his death and resurrection, such that an anchor community led by James, Jesus’s adelphos, in Jerusalem coexisted with Galilean communities of his disciples to the north and Diasporic communities of Jews and non-Jews scattered throughout the Mediterranean. The authority of James and the “Twelve,” as the leaders of the original community, was in all likelihood largely nominal in the wider Movement: having known Jesus, followed him, and borne witness to his resurrection should not be mistaken for some kind of really exercised authority on the part of these men, about the end of whose lives we possess relatively little in the way of reliable information. The most reliable martyrdom of the apostles, for example, the execution of Peter and Paul under Nero—Peter by crucifixion upside-down, Paul by beheading on the grounds of his citizenship—is not narrated in full for centuries after the events described. What we can say with greater certainty is that these communities were served by networks of itinerant missionaries and prophets who coordinated with local episkopoi and their diakonoi in planted assemblies, as well as qualified didaskaloi, to build up their communities into self-sufficient household groups and city-wide collegial fraternities. Throughout the second century, this model continued to hold, as every house community had its own episkopos, the episkopoi related to one another as presbyteroi, “elders,” and they continued to sponsor and host traveling prophets and to subsidize or suppress the work of local teachers. But by the end of the second century, episkopoi would begin claiming the mantle and authority of teachers and prophets for themselves in response to the perceived crisis generated by the teachings of gnostic didaskaloi and the Montanist “New Prophecy.” Where the episkopoi sought, essentially, respectability and stability for Christians in the Roman Empire, as a core part of its social world that would not provoke pagan criticism or imperial persecution, gnostic thought provoked philosophical disgust from the figures Christians sought parity with and the charismatic, prophetic frenzy of the Montanists seemed to undermine the emerging structure of traditioned authority that episkopoi felt would normalize their status. Internally, these distinct movements also challenged the school of what modern scholars call “proto-orthodoxy,” that is, the particular philosophical account of Christianismos that was becoming normative in places like Alexandria, Antioch, and Rome and that would later be victorious in the imperial councils. As Christians sought to form a stable collegial, ethnic, scholastic, and mysteriological culture, the standardized authority first of the episkopoi in general and then later of a single, polis-wide episkopos in Alexandria and Rome by 250 and by 325 everywhere else as well, served to enable a basic uniformity of belief and practice at the lowest-common denominator among late antique Christians in the Roman Empire. But this standardization also fueled the rise of a distinct, hieratic clerical class of bishops, priests, and deacons, now closed to women, now exercising tremendous power over a growing Christian population, now deeply entwined with the powers and offices and privileges of the empire. The appropriation by the bishops of, among other things, the diocesan/parochial system of Roman administration, the titles of late Roman nobles, the architecture and aura of the Roman government, courthouse, and provincial apparatus, all represented a cultural osmosis between developing Christianismos and Rome. The disruptive, antiestablishment, apocalyptic energies of the gospel were never fully suppressed, as continues to be evident in periodic apocalyptic movements, texts, and tendencies, as well as in the continued existence of dissident Christianities in protest of the mainstream. But the internal development of the episcopal office contributed in no small way to the eventual Christianization of the empire and the imperialization of Christianismos which is Christendom.
The imperial sanction of Christianismos represented, on the one hand, the final realization of Paul’s appeal to Caesar (Acts 25:11), and, on the other hand, the inversion of the logic of the Cross. Paul, while on trial before Roman governors and observers from his kinsmen, makes use of Roman citizenship in the Book of Acts to appeal to Caesar as a justification for his eventual trip to and imprisonment in Rome. In Acts, Paul never finally does appeal to Caesar—no audience is given with either Claudius (41-54 CE) or Nero (54-68 CE)—though tradition stipulates that Paul, with Peter, dies in the Neronic persecution following the Great Fire of Rome in 64. Whether this is historically true or not (an emerging group of scholars think that Acts was probably written in the early second century CE; the tradition of the two principes apostolorum dying in Rome was not standardized for many centuries), the basic point that the apocalyptic announcement of the gospel was ultimately aimed at the most powerful man in the world at the time both makes sense in terms of its content about the Kingdom of God’s arrival and its call to both Jews and non-Jews to embrace the politics of resurrection here and now, a call to repentance that theoretically includes even Caesar, the despotic puppet of Satan in the apocalyptic imagination of, for example, John of Patmos (Rev 13), but also as a word of warning about the imminent overthrow of the world order by the returning, victorious Christ. It is safe to say that if Paul ever spoke with the emperor (unlikely), his warning was unheeded. The empire would eventually descend into chaos during the so-called Year of the Four Emperors following Nero’s suicide in 69, during which Vespasian, then on campaign in Judea, was ultimately acclaimed emperor and had to go to Rome to secure his position, leaving his son Titus to finish the siege and destruction of Jerusalem in 70. Vespasian’s accession brought about a dynastic change from the Julio-Claudians to the Flavians, and an overall transformation of the Roman principate model begun by Augustus into the more obviously monarchical empire of the later centuries. Christians ancient and modern have looked back on these events as indicative of anything from a divine punishment for the Jews for the death of Jesus, a partial parousia, or the total realization of new heaven and new earth and fulfillment of prophetic promise. But whatever the interpretive spin, Jesus’s followers after 70 continued to live in strange tension with the empire, though much of it perceived, invented, and self-selected on their end. Writers like John of Patmos exaggerated the numbers of Jesus-followers in the Roman Empire as well as Roman awareness, interest, or antipathy for their movement; so too did the later authors of the martyrdom literature, like the Martyrdom of Polycarp or the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis, the latter of which was probably composed by a member of the charismatic, messianic “New Prophecy” of the Montanist circle (possibly even Tertullian himself). While the apocalyptic strain of the gospel against the empire endured in many places and many formulations of Christianismos, the mainstream movement on the whole sought formal toleration by the empire and even recognition by enfranchised Greeks and Romans as a pious and socially positive sect. Working against this goal were the ways that Christianismos clearly threatened the traditional stability of Mediterranean civilization by asking non-Jews to abandon their ethnic affiliations to gods and city in favor of the Jewish God, but without actually joining the Jewish ethnos, as well as asking them to abandon widely affirmed social hierarchies of dominance in favor of equality, equity, and reversal. However often Christian communities did or did not realize those goals in their actual relations, Nietzsche was not wrong to understand Christianity as a “slave’s morality,” since in the centuries immediately following the life of Jesus of Nazareth its principal attractions were to slaves, women, and the lower classes of the Roman Empire, to whom the gospel of Jesus promised change of fortune either this-worldly or next-worldly, whether in the form of a just society not run in the manner of the “gentiles” (Matt 20:25) or in the form of a literal transfer of riches and power (as imagined by John of Patmos, and as argued by Bart Ehrman) from the wealthy gentile Romans to the followers of Jesus, in an intrahistorical or transhistorical Kingdom of God. Whether each of these visions of the Kingdom of God is attractive to us or fully consonant even with the gospel’s own principles is for the moment irrelevant; but that Christianismos was perceived to be and derided as a populist movement of the poor, the uneducated, and the socially inferior by the Greeks and Romans and that its apocalypticism traded, as apocalypticism often does, in the mollification of those who perceive their agency to be opposed or limited is beyond argument. From the perspective of this history, the eventual victory of Christianismos in winning the conversion of the empire, first in the person of Constantine who granted toleration with the Edict of Milan in 312 and then in the imperial councils of Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople I in 381, surviving in the interim the brief attempt to reverse Christianization in the reign of Julian the Apostate from 361 to 363, and culminating in the Theodosian Decrees which formalized Christianismos as the imperial cult, outlawed cult to pagan deities, and restricted (but did not formally suppress) Judaism, might be seen as Christ’s true conquest of the great pagan empire of Rome which had oppressed his people, the Jews, and the people called out from among the nations for his name, the nascent Christian community. And, as many authors have posited, it would be foolishly naïve and vanishingly uneducated to pretend that the Christianization of the empire accomplished nothing morally or socially positive in the transformation of Rome: from legal rights for previously disenfranchised members of Roman society, to the growth of hospitals and the expansion of the scope of beneficia, to the homiletical calls of great preachers like the Cappadocians or John Chrysostom to the castigation of the rich and the care of the poor, Christianity really did improve some systemic inequalities of Roman society that had been in place since its foundation. But not all of them: and from another vantage, the Christianization of the empire was as much tragedy as victory precisely to the degree that it inverted the logic of the cross which is at the heart of the politics of resurrection. Roman hierarchy endured; Roman violence endured, especially Roman violence against Jews and Judaism, both actual and verbal, often advocated or approved in the words and wishes of canonized Christian saints (Chrysostom is one of the worst offenders, but Ambrose of Milan was not much better); Roman slavery ended less because of Christian agitation (though the first person in Western history to make the moral argument against slavery on biblical grounds was Gregory of Nyssa) than because of shifts in the late antique Roman economy, and slavery did not disappear from Europe or the Mediterranean simply because it temporarily subsided in the late antique and early medieval confines of the Empire; the radical egalitarianism of the gospel with respect to women, children, and foreigners was subsumed into the traditional misogyny of the Romans, now with Christian imprimatur; and the Roman state now became the weapon of Christians simply against those that they deemed their intellectual and religious enemies, especially Christian dissidents, Jews, lingering pagans, and later Muslims. Where the cross had once been the weapon of the state against Jesus, first depicted in reference to Christianity by way of mockery in the graffito which has an ass-headed man hanging upon it and reads “Alexamenos worships his god,” was now the weapon of the state theoretically on behalf of Jesus against Jesus’s enemies. The betrayal at the heart of the trajectory which saw a community sparked by the public execution of Jesus of Nazareth as a dissident and his divine vindication by resurrection end as the state religion of the empire that killed him, now killing others in his name as though he were merely the patron god of the state (and that is exactly how his Mother and the other Saints of imperial Christianity functioned in the imperial cities), would be continually witnessed by precisely these groups, and in the long run, the rivulets of ante-Nicene and early Nicene Christianity would break forth into an earnest delta of competing tributaries of Christian continuity both within and beyond the empire, whose divided waters would leave the empire itself shipwrecked upon the intervening crags.
Continuandum in partem tertiam.
Enjoying this series tremendously. How much do you see the economic elements of nascent Christianity such as communism and Jubilee filtering into a politics of resurrection? The works of economist Michael Hudson sees the revolutionary populism surrounding debt forgiveness/clean slates as vital to Christ’s role as an apocalyptic preacher that soon becomes an unattainable dream that is pushed out to the far end of the apocalyptic horizon once the delayed Parousia became apparent.
Christ, like the Gracci brothers and even Julius Caesar, and the Greek tyrants like Solon found themselves fatally at odds with their contemporary aristocracies when they either promised or pushed for these measures. In many ways the enduring economic legacy of Greco-Roman culture that persists to this day is the sacrosanct status of debt agreements.
Somehow, given our own historical situation, this element seems particularly important.
I am not a biblical scholar. I am nowhere near being up-to-date on scholarship regarding early Christianity or Judaism in this time. I wonder in context of Hellenism and Judaism if any readers are familiar with this book. https://vridar.org/series-index/russell-gmirkin-plato-and-the-hebrew-bible/