‘‘TheoS” is Greek for ‘‘god.’’ ‘‘Logos’’ means ‘‘order, reason, word.’’ Theology is ordered, rational discourse on the nature of divinity. As such, theology was not native to any ancient religion, pagan, Jewish, or Christian.
Theology began not in temples or around altars, but within the ancient academy. It was in this sense a ‘‘secular’’ subject, a special branch of philosophy, and philosophy was quite distinct from traditional Greek cult. The ways in which philosophers conceived the nature of divinity coordinated with their views on the nature of time, matter, cosmos, reason, and so on. ‘‘God’’ as a concept was a part of a larger, ideally coordinated and rational system.
Again thanks to Alexander, these Greek intellectual ways of thinking were imported on a grand scale: Hellenistic cities had gymnasia, and gymnasia had philosophy among the subjects - literature, rhetoric, mathematics, music - of their curriculum. Rome spread this culture westwards. As a result, educated urban elites from one end of the Roman world to the other shared a common literary culture mediated by this sort of education.
Philosophical thought (especially in those forms that owed most to Plato) complicated traditional religiousness in interesting ways. ‘‘God’’ in such systems tended to be radically stable and transcendent, immaterial, perceptible only through mind. Though the source of everything else (in the sense that all else was contingent upon him, or it), ‘‘god’’ was in no active sense its creator. Defined as ‘‘perfect,’’ theos was also necessarily immutable, since change (within this system) implied imperfection. While lower gods with visible bodies might seem more involved with time, the highest god, their ultimate source, lay beyond both time and matter.
Revered ancient poems and dramas that conveyed the gripping stories of gods and men clashed directly with these philosophical modes of conceiving divinity. Young men of the urban elite encountered both literatures, philosophical and narrative, in the course of their higher education. Those of an intellectual bent might resolve the tension between the two ways of conceiving divinity through allegory. Allegory could relate narrative to the categories of theology by reading beyond what the text merely said (say, that the god Chronos devoured his children) to divine its deeper, intellectual meaning (here, that time divides into sub-units). Traditional cult - the worship due the lower gods, for those who thought this way - in any case continued, financed precisely by these same elites.
Hellenistic Jews, themselves educated in these literatures, applied the principles of paideia to their own ancient epic of divine/human interaction, the Bible. They were obliged in their efforts by having their text available to them in Greek. Thus, when God created with a ‘‘word’’ (Ps 32[33]:6: Hebrew davar), he made the heavens with his logos. When God announced his name to Moses (Ex 3:14), the Hebrew ehyeh (‘‘I am’’) became, in Greek, ho on, ‘‘the being’’ - a sound philosophical response. Diaspora Jews produced a tremendous out-pouring of literary and philosophical creations, based on their readings of the Bible. Biblical theology properly so-called commenced with their work.
The LXX or Septuagint was the Bible for Christians as well as for Jews in the Western Diaspora. For the first century of the movement, Christians whether Jewish or gentile had no other texts that they considered sacred scripture. By the turn of the late first/early second century CE, we begin to find Christian authors who define their views of God, of Christ, and of their own communities through allegorical readings of select biblical texts (Epistle of Barnabas). The social provenance of these biblical texts - a bulky collection of scrolls, not an individual ‘‘book’’ - was the synagogue, and we do not know how copies of these books came to travel into non-Jewish communities. The intense interest in biblical hermeneutics on the part of outsiders, however, gives us an intriguing measure of the availability of the LXX by the early second century CE: in the Hellenistic period, Jewish texts did not command gentile interest in nearly the same way (Momigliano 1971: 74-96). What we do know is that, by the mid-second century, forms of Christianity had captured the allegiance of members of that tiny articulate minority, the erudite pagan urban elite. These formerly pagan intellectuals applied their commitment to systematic rational thought and their individual convictions about the Christian message to the Greek text of the Jewish Bible. An eruption of intra-Christian theological dispute ensued.
The key point of debate among all these contesting Christian theologians - as, indeed, among pagan and among Jewish theologians - was the relation of the High God to matter. As these Christian thinkers defined that relationship, so too did they define the figure of Christ, the revelatory status of the LXX, and the relationship of Jews and Judaism to their own movement (Fredriksen and Lieu 2004). Three prominent second-century Christian theologians, considered together, can give us a sense of the scope of these issues. All three defined the High God, or ‘‘the Father,’’ according to the criteria of paideia. Accordingly, all three agreed that only a lower god, and certainly not the High God himself, could be the immediate author of material creation. All three identified the High God as the father of Jesus Christ. All three held that the LXX, interpreted correctly, with spiritual understanding, could provide knowledge of revelation. And all three agreed that Jewish religious practice, which enacted the precepts of these scriptures - keeping the Sabbath, the food laws, circumcision, the holy days, and so on - exposed the
Jews as fundamentally unenlightened readers. In the view of these gentile Christian theologians, this intrinsic Jewish inability to read ‘‘spiritually’’ explained why the Jewish people had failed to grasp the essentially Christian, gentile significance of their own text.
The earliest commentaries both on Genesis and on the Gospel of John came from the church of the first theologian, Valentinus (fl. 130). The second, Marcion (fl. 140), first conceived the idea of a ‘‘new testament’’ as an authoritative collection of specifically Christian texts comprising a gospel and the letters of Paul. But only the third, Justin Martyr (fl. 150), was deemed ‘‘orthodox’’ in the perspective of the church that won Constantine’s support in the fourth century. In consequence, only Justin’s writings have survived. to the manuscript find at Nag Hammadi, fourth-century Coptic translations of some of Valentinus’ originally Greek texts have been recovered. The Antitheses, Marcion’s great work contrasting Jewish scriptures (‘‘Law’’) with Christian, especially Pauline writings, has been utterly lost. Marcion’s other great idea, however, though repudiated in his own lifetime, eventually ‘‘won.’’ Christians did develop a ‘‘new testament,’’ a separate canon of specifically Christian writings. But even here, Marcion lost, because his opponents’ New Testament was linked to and combined with the Jewish Bible or LXX (which Marcion had rejected: see Edwards, this volume), in its turn conceived as superseded and ‘‘old.’’
Sharing a common cosmology from paideia, these three gentile Christian theologians differed in their assignment of moral value both to the lower god who made matter and, accordingly, to matter itself. For Valentinus as for Marcion, this lower god was the chief character in Genesis and, accordingly, the god of the Jews. Both saw him as the cosmic opponent of the High God, Christ’s father, and thus of Christ. Thus matter itself, the chief medium of this lower god, was morally derelict. Justin also saw this lower god as the deity described in Genesis (Trypho 56). And this heteros theos, as Justin calls him, is thus properly the god of the Jews. But Justin also identifies this same lower deity with the pre-Incarnate Christ, the framer of material creation. For Justin, then, the moral valence of matter shifts from negative to positive, because Christ is its author. Consequently, Justin’s Christ truly does take on flesh; the Christ of Valentinus and Marcion, matter’s opponent, only ‘‘seems’’ to (cf. Phil 2:5-11). Justin also takes the redemption of the flesh, the resurrection of the believer in the last days, as the measure of salvation, whereas Valentinus and Marcion see salvation in terms of the soul’s escape from the material cosmos. Their theological differences are all variations on a theme. That theme, however, is set not by the Bible or by the Christian message (howsoever construed), but by the philosophical problem of relating the changeless and perfect High God to cosmos, thus to time and matter.
Much more bound these thinkers together than drove them apart. But they did not see things this way. Trained in philosophy, dedicated to intellectual rigor and systematic reflection, they concentrated, with precision, on their differences. As a result of their debate, characteristic of this stratum of learned Christian writers, the old word for ‘‘philosophical school,’’ haeresis, took on new meaning: heresy. What had once implied ‘‘choice’’ now meant ‘‘error.’’ Diversity was lamented and delegitimated. Eventually, once one group finally had legal power, in the fourth century, such diversity would be outlawed.
World History
