The Future of Faith

by Harvey Cox

  The third insight illuminated by the recent research on early Christianity has to do with the Roman Empire. It is now apparent that it was never merely the “background.” In one way or another it preoccupied Christian thinking. The first Christians understood themselves as an essentially anti-imperial movement, one whose vocabulary, organization, and rituals created an alternative to those of the Roman Empire, whose imminent collapse they expected. This expectation is signaled in the book of Revelation:

  Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!

  It has become a dwelling place of demons,

  a haunt for every foul spirit, a haunt for every foul bird,…

  Alas, alas the great city, clothed in fine linen,

  in purple and scarlet,

  Adorned with gold, with jewels, and with pearls!

  For in one hour all this wealth has been laid waste!

  (18:2, 16–17)

  This is an invective against Roman rule, written probably around 120 CE by a man named John, living as a political exile on the craggy island of Patmos. “Babylon” here is a code word for the city of Rome, capital of the empire, where the emperors decked themselves out in purple and scarlet.

  During the past century fundamentalists have made the imminent “end of the world” a central feature in their preaching. They insist we are living in the “last days” before the battle of Armageddon occurs and the universe itself dissolves in flames. The Left Behind series of novels spells out this scenario in grisly detail. But their plotline is a gross distortion of the biblical texts. For the early Christians, including John of the book of Revelation, what was about to end was the imperial world of Rome, not God’s physical creation. Jesus had taught that God’s Kingdom would come on earth.

  Early Christianity was a fiercely anti-imperial movement, and for good reasons. Representatives of the Roman Empire had crucified Jesus, hounded his disciples, and sent the next generation of his followers into the arena with the wild beasts. But this anti-imperial attitude did not last very long. Gradually the empire came not only to surround the Christians; it got inside them. Christians from the more privileged classes first became enamored of the empire, and then became its fawning imitators. This often happens in situations of oppression. The victims first fear, then admire, and then sometimes emulate their persecutors. Some of the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps began to wear bits of their captors’ uniforms and imitated their swaggering abuse of the inmates when they were accorded the shameful privilege of assisting guards.

  Something like this seems to have seized certain leaders among the Christians, and it produced one of the most ironic reversals in history. Roman legionnaires had executed Jesus as a threat to the imperium when the pro-Roman crowds in Pilate’s courtyard shouted, “We have no king but Caesar.” The Palestinian rabbi had sparked a movement that threatened both the Roman rulers and their collaborators, the priestly elite in Jerusalem. Paul raced from city to city in the doomed empire establishing “assemblies” (the Greek word is ekklesiai, a political term meaning gatherings of citizens) that would be ready when “Babylon” collapsed and the Reign of God began. Christians called Jesus “Lord” (kyrios) and “peacemaker,” both titles claimed by the Caesars.

  By the late third century, however, some Christian leaders were casting envious eyes on the power and efficiency of the imperial bureaucracy and the authority of its military. In the fourth century, as the empire became nominally Christianized, the church also became imperialized, blurring the essence of Christianity almost beyond recognition. Not only did some Christians reverse their opposition to the empire; they allowed their religion to be used as an ideology to shore it up as it staggered toward decline. In short, all the alleged main features in the profile of early Christianity that I first learned—its unity, its apostolic authority, and its relationship to the empire—have proven to be far wide of the mark. In retrospect, all this now seems obvious. How could my own teachers have missed it?

  Those teachers did their best by the lights they had, but they nonetheless succeeded in painting a highly distorted portrait. They were not aware of the diversity among the early Christians, the lateness of the invention of inherited apostolic authority, or the centrality of the empire. But it would be ungrateful of me to blame them for not teaching me what they could not possibly have known. They were simply passing on an old set of ideas for which there was little counterevidence at the time. Now, however, in the decades since I was a seminarian, that has changed. Four developments in historical research have radically altered our understanding of the first centuries of Christianity, producing the more accurate portrayal I have just described.

  The first was triggered in 1946 when a young boy looking for some stray sheep chanced upon a whole library of ancient texts stashed in a cave near Nag Hammadi in Egypt. For some years these invaluable codices meandered through the hands of a series of shady middlemen and greedy antiquities dealers. The best known of the documents by far is the Gospel of Thomas, first published in 1959. When a consensus among scholars agreed that it was just as old as any of the gospels in the New Testament, maybe even older, it exploded a bombshell in early Christian studies. It undermined notions about a unified or uniform early Christianity. It meant the belief, which had lasted for centuries, that one could make a distinction between authentic and inauthentic, “orthodox” or “heretical” versions of early Christianity now had to be jettisoned. These distinctions had all been invented considerably later.

  Some scholars contend that Thomas and the other texts need not be taken seriously, since they are all infected by “Gnosticism.” But Karen King, in her book What Is Gnosticism? demonstrates that this term is so imprecise and contradictory that it is simply too vague to be of any use. There are similarities and differences between the various documents used by different early congregations. Many of these ancient works contain both passages that were later classified as “orthodox” and others later dismissed as “Gnostic.” Of the Nag Hammadi texts she writes, “Whereas we might have expected these works to solidify the ancient distinction between orthodoxy and heresy, instead [they show] that distinct varieties of Christianity developed in different geographical areas, at a time when the boundaries of orthodoxy and heresy were not yet fixed.”3 King does not stop with these historical observations. She rightly points out how often the language of “orthodoxy” and “heresy” has been wielded by those in power (or seeking power) against those they wish to dominate or exclude and warns against using such language in “the increasingly pluralistic and multicultural globe we inhabit.”4

  The second new development, the one that exposed the myth of apostolic authority, was more the result of connecting dots than of the discovery of new sources. Until only a couple decades ago historians and New Testament scholars belonged to different circles and did not talk with each other enough. This was due in part to the traditional separation between ministers preparing for pastoral work in seminaries and faculties engaged in the historical study of religious antiquity. The assumptions on which the scholars in these fields proceeded differed from each other. After all, the books of the New Testament studied in seminaries were thought to be “inspired” or at least canonical, but the sources the historians worked with were not. The biblical scholars knew that neither Paul nor the other apostles had passed on any “apostolic authority,” that they had in fact warned against it. But many historians understandably relied on ancient writers they still somehow thought of as “historians,” even though they wrote on papyrus in the first few centuries. Twentieth-century scholars sometimes innocently accepted the portrayal of the “earliest Christianity” as it was framed by writers who lived immediately afterward, as though they were the somewhat roughhewn forerunners of modern historical scholars. After all, they must have known, since they lived close to the events they recorded.

  But this is where the problem arose. As we have seen, these early Christian “historians” were neither critical nor neutral. They were not even histor
ians. They were churchmen who aspired to become the leaders of the next generation of Christians. They were anything but disinterested, and they had an agenda that was not particularly hidden. Looking for a potent way to establish their own authority, they seized upon a very compelling idea. They claimed to have inherited their right to rule from the first disciples, and that they themselves possessed “apostolic authority,” because they formed a part of what they began to call the “apostolic succession.” This was a self-justifying fiction. But fiction calcified into fact and lasted for a long time. It was still in circulation when I first studied the history of Christianity. The undoing of this long-established fable only began when, so to speak, the historians and the biblical scholars began to have coffee together and both had to cope with the new evidence from Nag Hammadi. Comparing notes, they concluded that authority based on an alleged “apostolic succession” should be understood as an invention of later arrivals, and that authority in early Christianity was actually far more protean and diffuse.

  Fortunately, the current generation of biblical scholars and the historians of early Christianity now drink coffee together more often. In fact, many of them are now the same people. Increasingly, scholars study both canonical and noncanonical texts, and both scrutinize the shards and grave inscriptions constantly being turned up by the archaeologists. The picture of early Christianity students now learn is a far different one from the one I heard about. But how much difference has that made?

  Unfortunately, once they are established, some myths—especially myths that give certain people power over others—often survive for a long time after convincing evidence against them is widely known. This is the case with apostolic authority and succession, which still provide the basis for governance particularly (but not only) in the Roman Catholic Church. Like Wile E. Coyote in the “Road Runner” cartoons, who continues to walk out onto the air after he has come to the edge of a cliff, rulers in many realms, not just the religious one, continue to wield their scepters long after the myths supporting their authority have been cut away. I saw this in action during a conversation I once had with Pope Benedict XVI when he was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. I return to this informative chat in a later chapter.

  The third development that came after my seminary days and that has made a crucial difference in our knowledge of the Christianity of the first few centuries, is the emergence of what is called “people’s history.” The thrust of this method is straightforward: most of what we have usually called “history” has actually concerned itself with the elites and the leaders, not the vast majority of ordinary people. This is especially true of most histories of the first two or three centuries of Christianity. They have focused on the theologians who wrote the treatises and the bishops who argued about questions of authority and have therefore presented a truncated, indeed mutilated, “history” that leaves out 95 percent of those who actually constituted the Christian movement.

  To help correct this long-standing misrepresentation, “people’s history” widens the scope of investigations to include not only documents, but games, toys, graffiti, inscriptions on coffins, what we can learn from dishes, house furnishings, and plates, and even the detritus from ancient garbage pits, where archaeologists now say some of the juiciest bits of evidence can be exhumed. When combined with what can be learned about the first Christian centuries from studies of tax law, prostitution (Jesus talked about both taxes and prostitution a lot), and the organization of the Roman military, a much fuller sketch appears.

  For example, although the bishops of the early church may have become progressively more fawning toward the empire, there are serious questions about whether the common people shared their sycophancy. Just as the bishops were increasing their support, revolts were breaking out all over the realm. Maintaining a far-flung army required higher and higher taxes, and people found more and more clever ways to avoid paying them. Laws were difficult to enforce. Tribal peoples from the north, whom the Romans called “barbarians,” streamed in. The emperors were overthrown and replaced. The paradox, of course, is that when the ship of state, like Melville’s Pequod, eventually sank beneath the waves, the church, like Queequeg’s coffin, bobbed to the surface. The papacy eventually became, as philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) once wrote, “nothing other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.” The result of this rediscovery of the church’s complex relationship with the empire is, as we will see in a subsequent chapter, that Christians who constitute the new majority in the global South have become highly wary of their relationship to today’s world empires.

  In addition to missing the contribution now made by “people’s history,” there is another reason why my own teachers missed the centrality of empire in early Christian history. Their blind spot was the result of an old, if impossible, American axiom: “Do not mix religion with politics.” They favored a Jesus who was a strictly “religious” figure, albeit badly misunderstood, they said, by some of his contemporaries as a dangerous subversive. They told us that the early Christians had utterly no interest in earthly politics, but lived in daily expectation of a “second coming” that would either lift them from this sordid world or bring heaven down to earth. They attributed the persecution and execution of Christians to attacks by rival “religions,” such as the Jewish priests, pagan rulers, and the custodians of the emperor cult. The mostly unspoken implication was that, although Christianity in our day might indeed have social, even perhaps political, “implications,” these were decidedly secondary to its primary spiritual mission.

  Actually, however, Jesus’s enemies understood him all too well. He was, in truth, a real threat to the empire. What my teachers misunderstood is that the separation we make today between “religion” and “politics” is a modern conceit. It did not obtain in first-century Palestine. Religion was political, and politics were religious. When Jesus told his disciples to pray for the coming of God’s Kingdom “on earth as it is in heaven,” it was all too evident to the current rulers that, if this really were to happen, they would be displaced. The “world” that would end would be their Roman world. The imperial officials in Jerusalem and their local collaborators did not make a mistake when they executed Jesus as a subversive. He was one, and—from their perspective—they took the necessary measures.

  We have already indicated how the biblical book of Revelation should be read as an anti-Roman diatribe. But as scholars today become more aware of this anti-imperial quality in early Christianity, it has helped explain some other puzzling parts of the New Testament. For example, generations of biblical teachers have overlooked the fact that, in the famous account in the Gospel of Mark of Jesus freeing a young man from demons, the collective name of those demons is “legion,” which everyone who originally heard the story would have recognized as a squadron of occupying Roman troops. Both the boy and their homeland were occupied by foreign bodies from which they needed to be liberated. Earlier teachers had not noticed the symbolism in the fact that the exorcised demons invade a herd of pigs, who then hurl themselves over a cliff to destruction, but the Jewish peasants of Galilee did not eat pork, but raised swine only for sale to the troops. This is only one example of how the lens of empire studies is helping us to understand the Bible better.

  The execution of Jesus did not end the threat. During the next decades his movement, now including both Jews and Gentiles and spreading rapidly throughout the known world, continued to pose a danger to the empire. The practice of “horizontal” and reciprocal sharing of financial resources among the nascent Christian assemblies undercut the top-down patronage pyramid through which the Romans cemented their influence. The Christian refusal to participate in the emperor cult was persecuted not because it was “religious,” but because it was treasonous. Doing obeisance at the altar of the divine emperor, far from a merely symbolic gesture, was the key ritual of the ideology through which Rome ruled. It is undeniable that from the outset Christianity was
both anti-imperial and counterimperial. Why, then, did so many thoughtful scholars allow the modern democratic concept of church-state separation to color their reading of ancient history?

  This happened because the separation of religion from politics, which began in the late eighteenth century, not only became an integral element of the modern mind; it also became a lens through which modern scholars viewed other eras. A product of the Enlightenment and the modern revolutions, it sank in as a mainstay of the modern mentality. But our newly clarified understanding of the deeply antagonistic relationship of earliest Christianity to empire and then its subsequent embrace of that empire is important for Christianity today for two reasons.

  First, the two eras bear a striking similarity. Again today, as in those first centuries, Christians live in a culturally polyphonic world in which their faith is spreading rapidly. Like then, some Christians now live at the center of a powerful empire (the American one); others, on its edges. The comparative study of empires allows us to comprehend better the convoluted process by which an anti-imperial movement degenerated into the religious ideology of the very empire it had opposed, and how, contrary to the equalitarian practice of Jesus, the church imposed an imperial structure on itself. Consequently the early history serves as a cautionary tale. It warns us to be aware of analogous tendencies today in which Christian rhetoric and American imperial interests can be so easily blended.