Whatever else is doubted - and most everything in the history of the early church is doubtful - it can hardly be denied that Christianity originates in the preaching of a Jew to other Jews. All four of the canonical Gospels indicate that Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God to his countrymen in Palestine, thus exciting fears - or at least a charge - of insurrection, and that when he was crucified by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judaea, a mocking rubric, ‘‘Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews’’ was inscribed
Above his head (Mk 15:26 etc.). This testimony is certainly disinterested, for the four evangelists are at one with Paul in holding the Jews accountable for the death of Jesus, though it is not clear from their narratives whether the chief cause of their enmity lay in his blasphemous pretensions, his infringements of the Sabbath and the dietary code, his irreverent demonstrations in the temple, or his strictures on the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, the most rigorous exponents of the Law. Gentile Christians at an early period were allowed to waive not only the ceremonial ordinances but circumcision as well (Acts 15:29); we should not conclude too hastily, however, that the Jesus of the gospels is entirely the creation of gentile churches. Although the Jewish neophytes included a number of Pharisees, and the Christian way of life was often styled a law or nomos (Jas 1:25; Rom 8:2), it was agreed on all sides that faith was the price of entry to the kingdom, and that love, displayed above all in the relief of the weak and indigent, was the fulfilling of the whole law (Rom 13:10). The object of faith was Jesus, as the anointed representative of God the Almighty Father; the Greek for the anointed one is Christos, and when outsiders coined the epithet ‘‘Christian’’ (Acts 11:26), it was quickly embraced by members of the sect. No doubt there were some who stopped short of worship, some who doubted the resurrection, some whose faith demanded no support from the expectation of his imminent return; nonetheless it would seem that the petition maranatha (‘‘Lord, come quickly’’) was common tender in Aramaic-speaking churches, and Paul assured the Greeks that every knee in earth and heaven had already bowed to the ‘‘Name above all names’’ (1 Cor 16:22; Phil 2:9). Not that Paul the Pharisee had renounced the strict monolatry of his teachers: for him the acclamation of the One God was now inseparable from that of‘‘One Lord Jesus Christ’’ (1 Cor 8:4), and the image of God had never been so plainly manifested as in the ignominy of a sinner’s cross.
It is evident (or ought to be) that this cult of a ‘‘crucified sophist’’ (Luc. Peregr. 13) was as alien to Greek or Roman as to Jewish practice. A favorite might be deified by an emperor, an emperor by the Senate, and a prodigy like Alexander of Macedon by himself; a Pythagoras might leave a school of followers who spoke of him in an undertone, and statues of a thaumaturge might be credited with the power of working miracles; but no inherited paradigm - not even the death of Hercules or Romulus - can explain how a man who never professed to be more than the Messiah of Israel came to be invoked as the creator and the bearer of salvation to every people under heaven. Adoration must have been inspired by the life of Jesus, or at least by the first accounts of his resurrection; the gradual apotheosis postulated by many modern scholars lacks all precedent, and would have been, if anything, more offensive to the commonsense of gentiles than to the piety of Jews. After all, the claim that Jesus sits at God’s right hand (Mk 14:62; Acts 7:56) was barely intelligible to pagans, but would have caused no perplexity to a reader of the Psalms, the Book of Daniel, or Hellenistic Jewish literature.
As a sect that took its name from its founder, Christianity was easily distinguished from the two groups that are now most often suggested as its prototypes - the Cynics and the rigorists of Qumran. The Cynics in the first century were popular exponents of frugality, who upheld the law of nature by flouting sexual and dietary conventions, by upbraiding the rich and mighty, and by mocking archaic notions of the gods. A wilful vagabond with no companion but his staff and wallet, the Cynic (if there were any such in the Jewish parts of Palestine) might have fallen in unnoticed with the seventy whom Jesus sent to preach in the kingdom of God in Galilee. Nonetheless, there was no place in the Christian communion for this king without a kingdom: there was never a school of Cynicism which lived by a common law, revered its founder, or endeavoured to build a new faith on the ruins of superstition. Numerous parallels have been discovered between the maxims of the sect and those of Jesus; no Cynic, however, was ever heard to say ‘‘Bless them that persecute you,’’ and it was never said of one that ‘‘being reviled he reviled not again’’ (Mt 5:44; 1 Pt 2:23). Cynics defied the emperor, Christians made a boast of loyalty; Cynics pursued simplicity in this life, Christians prayed for a reversal of their fortunes in the next.
The Christians of this age had more in common with the Jewish recusants, possibly a community of Essenes, who settled in the caves about Qumran and left the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls as their memorial. These separatists, like the church of Jerusalem, held all goods in common; like Christ, and in the tradition of the prophets, they denounced the profanations of the Temple while insisting on obedience to the spirit of the Law. Styling themselves the Sons of Light, they claimed that they alone understood the scriptures and denied that more than a remnant of the Jews would be admitted to the kingdom. They seem to have traced their origin to a Teacher of Righteousness who was done to death by a wicked priest, and whose disciples may have suffered crucifixion. Nevertheless, although their writings entertain the hope of both a kingly and a priestly Messiah, the Teacher was not expected to rise again in either role, and there is no evidence of a cult. Nor do the Dead Sea Scrolls show that indifference to religious forms which marks the earliest phase of Christianity: the laborious prescriptions of the Temple Scroll and Damascus Document savor more of Pharisaic righteousness than the law of love enjoined by Christ and Paul.
Whether or not it was they who formed the colony at Qumran, it was the common, though not universal, practice of the Essenes to create their own societies at a distance from the centers of population. Christians, by contrast, lived anonymously in cities (Epistle to Diognetus 5), and there is no trace in our sources of any period when they did not participate in civic life: those who hold that Jesus came to found a band of wandering ascetics must explain why he sent his 70 ambassadors through the cities of Galilee (Lk 10:1), why the most Jewish stratum of his teaching alludes to sacrifice and ostentatious piety at street corners (Mt 5:23 and 6:5), and why the most itinerant of the apostles, Paul of Tarsus, should have thought that it was his task to build up churches in the great cities of Asia, Greece, and Italy. For all that, early Christian morality did not coincide with the civic ideals of paganism, even for those few Christians who were citizens of Rome or of some provincial commonwealth. The New Testament does not enjoin that love of all humanity for its own sake which the Stoics and their Hellenistic overlords called philanthrOpia; members of the church were to live and die for one another, loving their neighbors only as prospective sons of God. Idolatry and polytheism were always to be shunned; Paul deprecated, and others forbade, the eating of meat from beasts that had been sacrificed to idols (1 Cor 8:9; Rev 2:14). While edifying similes might be drawn from martial discipline or athletic competition, the teachers of the church before Constantine were inclined to frown on Christian service in the army or participation even in bloodless games (Tertullian, On the Military Crown, On Spectacles). The Christian magistrate was required to exercise his office with a cumbersome discretion; the conventional, and largely self-serving, practice of euergetism (see Gleason, this volume) or public liberality was deemed inferior to private charities, performed in the sight of God alone, and chiefly for the benefit of those who would not be able to repay.
Abraham, the forefather of Israel, set an example to all believers when he left Chaldaea and sought the unseen city (Heb 8-10); yet Christians did not imitate the Jewish exegete Philo in describing him as a citizen of the world. Even Roman citizenship - which Paul, a Greek of Tarsus and a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin, was not ashamed to plead for his own protection (Acts 22:25) - was of no account when set against the franchise of the heavenly Jerusalem. The price of becoming Roman, for those who were not already so by origin, sank to nothing in 212 when Caracalla granted citizenship to every freeborn person in the empire; the privileges of Christians, on the other hand, were ‘‘bought at a great price’’ (1 Cor 6:20; cf. Acts 22:28) even when they lived in peaceful times. ‘‘My kingdom,’’ Jesus said, ‘‘is not of this world’’ (Jn 18:36), but his people were; prohibited by devotion to the one Lord Christ from offering sacrifices to the emperor, they pre-empted, and therefore challenged, Rome by abolishing the distinctions between barbarian, Jew, and Greek. While the church made no attempt to part slaves from their masters, it taught that all were free in Christ, and ecclesiastical rank was not determined by position in society. This was a religion born in prophecy, and, though the desire to suppress false prophecy would in the end result in the extinction of the living voice, no book in the second century was of more authority than Revelation. Here Rome was personified as Babylon the great whore, and it was widely held that a name associated with the city was connoted by the cipher 616 or 666 (Rv 17:5 and 13:18).
World History
