When, where, and how, within this culture, did Christianity begin? The question is more difficult to answer than it might seem. The mission and message of Jesus of Nazareth, Christianity’s retrospective founder, was addressed almost entirely to fellow Jews in the Galilee and Judaea. Jesus’ message of the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God sounded themes long traditional in biblical and post-biblical Jewish prophecy: the expectation of God’s radical intervention in history, the ingathering of the 12 tribes of Israel, the righting of wrongs, the consolation of the oppressed, the resurrection of the dead (Sanders 1985, 1993; Meier 1991; Fredriksen 1999). After the trauma of Jesus’ execution, some 500 of his followers (so Paul) reassembled, convinced that they had seen Jesus again, raised from the dead (1 Cor 15:5-6). They saw their experience as a miracle confirming Jesus’ message: the Kingdom really was at hand, the general resurrection of the dead was nigh, the liberation from bondage to the evil cosmic powers of the age about to begin (1 Cor 15 passim).
By the forties of the first century, what would become Christianity was still a form of messianic Judaism, with a necessary and idiosyncratic twist. The messiah, they held, would establish God’s Kingdom (that much is traditionally messianic). But since they now identified this figure with Jesus, they believed that the establishment of God's Kingdom would actually mark their messiah’s second coming, since his first coming had ended in the crucifixion/resurrection. His original disciples evidently expected this final event - again, on the strength of their experience of Jesus' resurrection - to occur within their own lifetimes (Fredriksen 2000: 133-42). So too did that apostle who joined the movement a few years after Jesus’ death, and whose name history most associates with the mission to the gentiles: Paul.
We know more about Paul than we do about any other member of this first generation of the Christian movement. His letters - seven undisputed ones, six more attributed to him by tradition - date from the late forties-early fifties CE. They are thus a generation earlier than the earliest gospel, Mark. Paul's letters dominate the New Testament collection, and preserve the oldest stratum of evidence available to us.
Despite his prominence in later Christian tradition, however, Paul’s cultural formation differed in significant ways both from that of Jesus and from that of Jesus’ earliest followers. Jesus’ first language had been Aramaic. His audiences were fellow Jews in the villages of Galilee and Judaea: the only major city of his acquaintance was the capital, Jerusalem. Jesus’ teachings were exclusively oral, his formal education most probably slight (Meier 1991: 253-315). The version of the Bible familiar to him would have been in Semitic languages, whether Hebrew or Aramaic. The other Jews whom he gathered as disciples from Galilee and Judaea were similar in language, culture, and experience.
Paul, by contrast, was cosmopolitan. A Jew of the Diaspora, his vernacular and his scriptural tradition were Greek. Literate, well-educated in Greek rhetoric as well as in his own religious culture (the ‘‘traditions of my fathers,’’ Gal 1:14), Paul left behind not just teachings, but writings. He traveled broadly throughout the great cities of the eastern Mediterranean. And - perhaps the most significant contrast of all - Paul’s audiences, unlike those of Jesus and, initially, of his disciples, were not primarily fellow Jews, but rather ‘‘gentiles,’’ the Jewish term for non-Jews. In other words, Paul’s hearers were pagans.
Until Paul had brought them his message (evangelion), these non-Jews had, naturally, worshipped their own native gods. Paul dismisses their former practice as idolatry, the futile worship of lower powers. ‘‘When you did not know God, you were enslaved to beings that by nature are not gods,’’ he tells his communities in Galatia (Gal 4:8; so too 1 Cor 6:10-11; 1 Thes 1:9). Through baptism into Christ, Paul tells them, they have been freed from their bondage to these lower gods in order to worship Christ’s father, the God of Israel. Purged of their idol worship and its attendant sins (fornication, drunkenness, and so on: Paul takes a dim view of the morality of pagan culture, Rom 1:18-32), these formerly pagan gentiles-in-Christ can now worship ‘‘the true and living God’’ while awaiting his Son from heaven (1 Thes 1:9-10). Being brought into the redemption promised to Israel through their incorporation into Christ (Rom 15), these ex-pagans will be spared the ‘‘wrath of God’’ which will fall upon sinners in the last days. The returning Christ, whom Paul and his congregations expect to live to see (1 Thes 4:15-17), will raise the dead, transform the living, vanquish evil, and finally establish the Father’s Kingdom (1 Cor 15:23-5).
Who were these people? How did Paul find them? And how did they, as pagans, make sense of, and ultimately commit themselves to, Paul’s fundamentally Jewish message? To answer these questions, we have to situate ourselves within the ancient Greco-Roman city. We have to consider, in particular, one of the most well-established groups living within the ancient city: the Jews.
The Greek diaspora caused by Alexander the Great’s victories had brought the Jewish one in tow. Alexander’s conquests led to the wholesale resettlements of Greek veterans, merchants, and travelers in his new territories. They drew new immigrants with them, among them ancient Jews. Unlike Israel’s experience of exile, when Nebuchadnezzar took ancient Judaeans as captives to Babylon, this later Diaspora was for the most part voluntary. By the dawn of the Christian era, Jews had been settled for centuries everywhere in the Mediterranean world. Strabo the geographer and historian, and elder contemporary of Jesus of Nazareth, remarked that ‘‘this people has made its way into every city, and it is not easy to find any place in the habitable world which has not received [them]’’ (in Jos. AJ 14.115).
Establishing themselves in their new cities of residence, these Jews, over the course of four centuries, absorbed and adapted Greek language and culture. As their vernacular shifted from Aramaic to Greek, their scriptures shifted too. By about 200 bce, Jews in Alexandria had completed the Septuagint (LXX), the translation of their sacred texts into Greek. Through this medium, Jewish ideas about divinity, worship, creation, ethics, piety, and practice came to be broadcast in the international linguistic frequency. And due to this same fact of translation, the vocabulary of paideia - Greek ideas about divinity, cosmology, philosophy, and government - was established in these texts. Their creative interpenetration would have enormous consequences for Western culture, as we shall see.
Living in foreign cities put Jews in a potentially awkward situation. Like everyone else, Jews had their own ancestral, thus ethnic, traditions. But unlike anyone else, because of these traditions, Jews in principle were restricted to worshiping only their own god. Some pagan observers commented irritably on this fact, complaining of Jewish civic irresponsibility, or disloyalty, or impiety, or at least discourtesy. But majority culture was extremely capacious, and respect for ancestral tradition was the bedrock of Mediterranean religious, political, and legal civilization. Thus ancient pagans by and large were prepared to respect Jewish religious difference, and even to make social allowances for it, precisely because of Judaism’s ethnicity and antiquity. Where awkwardness might result - Jewish members of town councils, Jewish athletes, Jewish military men, all of whose activities necessarily involved them with cultic activities dedicated to other gods - Jews negotiated exemptions as they could, and so found ways to serve both their city and their own traditions. Eventually, once Rome ruled the entire Mediterranean, such exemptions were written into imperial law (Linder 1987; Pucci ben Zeev 1998).
The city provided one context for shared social and religious activity between pagans and Jews. Another was that singular institution common to Jewish populations wherever they were found: the synagogue.
Ancient synagogues functioned as community centers and as a type of ethnic reading-house, where Jews could gather at least once every seven days to hear instruction in their ancestral laws. Literary and epigraphical evidence - donor inscriptions in particular - afford us a glimpse of the mixed population that frequented, and supported, this Jewish institution. Pagans as well as Jews attended synagogue activities. Some, like the professional magicians whose recipes relay ‘‘magic’’ Hebrew words and garbled biblical images, might drop by simply to hear stories about a powerful god read aloud in the vernacular. Other pagans, called ‘‘godfearers’’ in inscriptions and literature, voluntarily assumed some Jewish practices: ancient witnesses most frequently mention lighting lamps on the Sabbath (Friday evening), avoiding pork, or keeping community fasts or feasts. Some wealthy pagans, prominent in their own religious communities, contributed conspicuously to Jewish ones, too: Julia Severa, a noblewoman and priestess of the imperial cult, built a synagogue; Capitolina, a wealthy woman and self-described ‘‘god-fearer’’ furnished an interior; nine town councilors among the godfearers of Aphrodisias contributed to the synagogue fund drive (Fredriksen 2003: 48-55).
The point, for our present purpose, is that these pagans participated as pagans in Jewish communal activities. The diaspora synagogue evidently welcomed the interest and beneficence of sympathetic outsiders: good will made for good neighbors. Nor did these Jews impose on sympathetic pagans a demand that they commit to the exclusive worship of the Jewish god: that was a command given to them by their god for Israel alone. Within the religious ecosystem of the ancient city, in brief, pagans and Jews mixed and mingled in the schools and in the baths, in the courts and in the curiae, and in the synagogues as well. The synagogue fit comfortably into the religiously open environment of the Greco-Roman city, welcoming outsiders while, at the same time, structuring and facilitating Jewish communal life.
Enter Paul, and other Jewish apostoloi of the first generation of the Christian movement. Its initial stage was radioactively apocalyptic - partly continuous with Jesus of Nazareth’s own message of the coming Kingdom, partly amplified by this generation’s conviction that they worked in a briefwrinkle in time, between Christ’s resurrection and his imminent second coming (Fredriksen 1991a, 1999: 78-119). Inthemid-30s, as the movement spread out from Judaea into Asia Minor and the cities of the western Diaspora, its apostles followed the paths laid out by the network of Diaspora synagogues. These synagogues, unlike their counterparts in Galilee and Judaea, held significant numbers of pagans familiar with the idea of Israel, and with the Jewish scriptures. These pagans responded to earliest Christianity’s apocalyptic message too.
Traditions concerning gentiles are scarce in the gospels: gentiles did not figure prominently among Jesus’ hearers, and accordingly occupied no major place in Jesus’ teachings. But the ultimate fate of gentiles at the end of the world was a theme well-developed within other Jewish apocalyptic traditions. These traditions varied. Some prophecies predicted the final submission of the nations to Israel, others their punishment for having oppressed Israel, and still others their voluntary destruction of their idols and final acknowledgment of the God of Israel once he revealed himself in glory (Sanders 1985: 212-21). The gentiles’ destruction of their idols, in these traditions, does not imply their conversion to Judaism (which would mean, for men, receiving circumcision; also, becoming responsible for maintaining Jewish customs and laws, and so on; Fredriksen 1991a: 544-8). Rather, when God established his Kingdom and redeemed Israel, according to this tradition, gentiles would be included as gentiles. They simply would not worship any other gods any more.
It was this last tradition, evidently, that helped the apostles to improvise in their unanticipated situation. Apostles in the Diaspora received pagans together with Jews into their new messianic movement. The non-Jews, once baptized, were ‘‘in Christ.’’ This meant that they were in a sense already, proleptically, in the vanguard of the Kingdom. The apostles had empirical evidence of this: these gentiles were now released from bondage to their former gods and evil cosmic agents, empowered by God’s spirit to prophesy and to perform ‘‘works of power,’’ capable of discerning between good and evil spirits (e. g. 1 Cor 12:6-10). And, consistent with both the traditions of Jewish apocalyptic inclusivism and with general Jewish social practice, these sympathetic gentiles were neither asked nor encouraged to convert to Judaism as a condition for joining this new movement forming within the penumbra of the synagogue.
Their acceptance into the Christian movement was provisional, however. The proviso was this: these pagans could not continue in their native religions. Here this first generation of apostles, creatively applying an element of apocalyptic hope to their present situation, directly violated long-standing, and eminently pragmatic, Jewish practice regarding sympathetic gentiles. By the same measure, these apostles also threatened to undermine the centuries-long stability of Jewish-pagan relations not only within the synagogue but also within the larger urban diaspora community. By not converting to Judaism, these Christian gentiles maintained their public status, and in a sense their ‘‘legal’’ status, as pagans. But by exempting themselves from the public worship of those gods who were theirs by birth and blood, they walked into a social and religious no-man’s-land. Exemption from public worship was a protected right only of Jews, and that only on account of their ancestral customs. These gentiles-in-Christ were violating their own ancestral customs. They were thus open to the charge of atheism and impiety, thus to suspicion of public endangerment: gods, deprived of the cult due them, grew angry.
The Book of Acts, written c.100 ce, offers a vivid and realistic description of early responses to the socially disruptive message of this tiny messianic Jewish sub-culture. Itinerant apostles were actively repudiated by their host synagogues, run out of town by irate gentile citizens, and occasionally punished by cautious Roman authorities attempting to keep the peace (Acts 13:50; 14:2,4-6,19; 16:20-4; 17:5-9; 18:12-17 before Gallio in Corinth; 19:23-41 tumult in Ephesus. Cf. Paul’s description of his woes, inflicted variously by Jews, gentiles, and Romans, 2 Cor 4:8-9; 6:4-5; 11:24-6; also Mk 13:6, 11). In the thirties and forties, this unprecedented and disruptive policy of separating gentiles-in-Christ from their native cults gives the measure of the apocalyptic mind-set, and indeed of the time frame, of the earliest apostles. Christ would return soon; all would be finally resolved.
But as Christ delayed and the Kingdom tarried, improvisations and confusions mounted within the movement itself. Baptized gentiles began again to participate in pagan public cult, perhaps confused because, as godfearers, their ancestral worship had caused no problem for the synagogues (e. g., 1 Cor 5:11; 8:7-12; cf. 10:14; Fredriksen 1999: 128-37). By the late 40s some apostles suggested that Christian gentiles should convert to Judaism (Gal passim; cf. Phil 3:2-11: Paul did not like his colleagues’ idea). Such a policy would be no less socially destabilizing to Diaspora synagogue communities, which might still bear the brunt of their neighbors’ resentment. But at least in the instance of conversion to Judaism, these gentiles-in-Christ, socially and religiously, would have some place to stand: pagan culture had long acknowledged conversions to Judaism.
What happened next is difficult to say. As early as we have evidence of the Christian movement - which is to say, with Paul’s letters - so too do we have evidence of loud and roiling internal debate. Vigorous variety characterized this moment of Christian history no less than it characterized the Judaism that was its matrix. This variety - and these arguments - only increased with time. We know that gentile Christians continued for centuries to frequent synagogues and to co-celebrate Jewish festivals and fasts, just as their pagan neighbors did (Fredriksen and Irshai 2004). We know that there were Christians who were traditionally religious Jews. (Justin Trypho 47.3 refers to Torah-observant Christian Jews in the Diaspora; for Christian Jews in the Galilee up through the Talmudic period, see Boyarin 1999.) We know that, by the early second century, purely gentile forms of Christianity were also evolving. We know that well-educated, formerly pagan intellectuals, turning to the Jewish Bible in Greek as the textual ground for their speculations, invented many different forms of Christian paideia. We know that those gentile Christians who refused to worship their ancestral gods became the target of pagan anxieties and, eventually, of pagan persecutions. And we know that a vivid and energetic expectation of Christ’s imminent Second Coming proved paradoxically long-lived, characterizing many different sorts of Christianity throughout this period - and, indeed, continuing into our own day.
This inner-Christian variety, and all these continuing Christian-Jewish-pagan connections, were masked by the triumph of the imperial church. To continue our investigation of Christians in the first three centuries, I would like to trace three topics in particular that convey something of the intellectual, social, and spiritual vitality of Christianity in the pre-Constantinian period. The first is birth and growth of Christian paideia, what we might think of as ‘‘theology.’’ The second is that great anomaly in Mediterranean culture, religious persecution. The third is Christian millenarianism both charismatic and erudite: prophecies of the End, and learned calculations of when the End would come. Interrelated and synchronous, these three phenomena will provide us with a sense of how Christianity developed within the context of the empire.
World History
