by Chris Harman
Christianity emerged as a version of Judaism. Many passages in the gospels suggest that, at first, it hardly differed from some of the other prophetic sects of the time. In places, the gospels echo the Pharisees in calling for obedience to ‘the Law’, echo the Zealots in their call to ‘take up the sword’, and echo the Essenes in their call to abandon the family for a superior way of living. In a passage rarely quoted by today’s Christian advocates of the family, Luke reports Jesus saying, ‘If any man come to me and hate not his father and mother and wife and children and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple’. 119 The accounts of Jesus riding into Jerusalem being acclaimed as ‘king of the Jews’ or driving the money-lenders from the temple bear a remarkable similarity to Josephus’s account of the actions of other prophets. 120
But Christianity had no special reason to prosper as one Jewish sect among many. It took Saul of Tarsus, a Greek-speaking convert from Phariseeism, who lived outside Palestine and worked as a travelling artisan, a tentmaker, to grasp that there was an enormous audience for new religious ideas in the cities of the empire. He consciously set out to reach people half-attracted to Judaism but put off by the stringency of its rules. On conversion, he changed his name from the Hebrew ‘Saul’ to the Roman name ‘Paul’. In the face of resistance from ‘Judaic Christians’ based in Jerusalem, he insisted the new religion had no need of the old circumcision and dietary rules, while an increased emphasis on the resurrection of the dead meant that salvation no longer depended on the victory of the defeated Jews of Jerusalem.
Finally, Christianity incorporated emotive elements from other religious cults which were flourishing at the time. The notion of the redemption of the world by the death and rebirth of a god was already found in many popular religions, such as the Adonis, Osiris and other fertility cults (the rebirth of a dead and buried god signified the onset of spring just as Easter came to symbolise it for Christians). The story of the virgin birth found in the gospels of Luke and Matthew (which contradicts Matthew’s claim to trace Jesus’s ancestry back through Joseph, his father, to the Jewish king David) brought to Christianity an element from the popular Egyptian mystery cult of Osiris, who was supposed to have been born of a virgin cow. The image of the ‘Holy Mary’ bears remarkable similarity to the role played by the goddess Isis in the Egyptian religion, addressed as ‘most holy and everlasting redeemer of the human race … mother of our tribulations’. 121 It does not require much rewriting to make this into a Christian prayer to ‘the mother of God’.
The early Christians, then, took the elements which were already leading Judaism to reap converts, dropped the strict rules which deterred people and added popular motifs from the mystery religions. It was a winning combination. This does not at all mean that the early Christians were cold, calculating manipulators of emotive symbols they did not believe in. Far from it. They were driven to the religious life by greater than usual sensitivity to the insecurities and oppression of life in the empire’s cities. Precisely for this reason they could sense the elements in other religions which would synthesise with their residual Judaism to give some meaning to the anguish of those around them. The New Testament credits the apostles with ‘speaking in tongues’ – in ecstatic speeches which gave expression to their innermost feelings. It was in precisely such a state that they were most likely to synthesise a new religious vision out of elements from older ones.
Who was the audience for the new religion? It was not, in the main, made up of the poorest people in the empire, the mass of agricultural slaves, since early Christianity (unlike the Essenes) did not oppose slavery on principle. Saint Paul could write that a slave should stay with his master, even if they were ‘brothers in Christ’. It was not made up of the peasantry, either, for religion spread outside Palestine through the towns – certainly that is what the Acts of the Apostles tells us.
The audience seems to have been the mass of middling town dwellers. This was a layer well below the ruling-class families who made up only abut 0.2 per cent of the population. 122 The ancient city, like many present-day Third World cities, contained a vast mass of small traders, craftspeople, petty clerks and minor officials – a broad layer merging into the lumpenproletariat of beggars, prostitutes and professional thieves at the bottom and into the very thin stratum of rich merchants and higher officials at the top. This whole layer would have felt oppressed to a greater or lesser degree by the empire, but would usually have felt too weak to challenge it openly. Christianity offered a message of redemption, of a new world to be brought from on high, that did not involve such an open challenge. At the same time it preached that even if its message did lead to individual suffering – martyrdom – this would speed up salvation.
The poorer artisans and tradespeople could certainly be attracted to such a message – especially since, like the Jewish synagogue, it brought them into a social milieu which could help them cope with some of the material uncertainty of this world without necessarily having to wait for the next. There were also some better-off people who were attracted. One study identifies ‘40 persons’ sponsoring ‘Paul’s activities’, ‘all persons of substance, members of a cultivated elite’. 123 Such people could finance the preaching of the apostle and provide the early Christian groups with meeting places in their houses. 124 Paul went out of his way to woo them: ‘It is significant that Paul, although he knew the majority of his converts came from among the poor, personally baptised only people from the higher strata’. 125 Christianity may have been a religion which appealed mainly to the poor, but from very early on it tried to combine this with an appeal to those who were richer. As time went on, it even attracted some people of real power and wealth who felt discriminated against by the senatorial elite – wealthy traders, independent women of wealth, freedmen (ex-slaves and children of slaves) who had prospered, and officials in the emperor’s own household who came from lowly backgrounds. 126
The New Testament was compiled in the second and third centuries from earlier writings which expressed the changing beliefs of Christianity as the sect expanded. This explains the contradictions to be found on virtually every page. Yet these contradictions helped it to appeal across class lines. There was the sense of revolutionary urgency, of imminent transformation, that came from the experience of the Jewish rebels in Palestine before the destruction of Jerusalem. The most bitter resentment could find an outlet in the vision of the apocalypse, which would witness the destruction of the ‘whore of Babylon’ (easily understood to mean Rome) and the reign of the ‘saints’, with the high and mighty pulled down and the poor and humble ruling in their place. Yet by projecting the transformation into the future and into a different, eternal realm, the revolutionary message was diluted sufficiently to appeal to those whose bitterness was combined with a strong fear of real revolution. The trader or workshop owner with a couple of slaves had nothing to fear from a message which preached freedom in the brotherhood of Christ rather than in material terms. The rich merchant could be reassured that the ‘eye of the needle’ was a gate in Jerusalem which a camel might just find it possible to get through. 127 The well-to-do widow or independent wife of a rich Roman could be attracted by biblical passages in which Paul insists women and men are ‘one’ in the sight of God, while the Christian husband could be reassured that in this world his wife had to service him, ‘That the head of every woman is man’. 128
The Christian message provided consolation for the poor. It provided a sense of their own worth to those of the better off who were despised for their humble origins. And it provided a way in which the minority of the rich who were revolted by the world around them could discharge their guilt while keeping their wealth.
The very growth of what was initially a small sect brought about more growth. Like Judaism, Christianity provided a network of contacts for any artisan or trader visiting a city. Its weekly gatherings provided the poor with a sense of prestige from mixing with those wealthier than them, and the weal
thier with a chance to exchange business news with each other. Growing within the framework of the trade routes and administrative centres which held the Roman Empire together, over time it became the shadow of that empire – except that through the trade routes it could spread to regions which the empire rarely or never touched (Armenia, Persian Mesopotamia, Ethiopia, south Arabia, even southern India).
The growth of the religion was accompanied by its bureaucratisation. The first apostles preached without anyone exercising control over what they said, and relied upon the willingness of local supporters to provide them with food and lodging as they went from city to city. But as the number of preachers and supporters grew, collecting funds and administering the group became a major preoccupation in each city. So too did the danger of ‘false prophets’ who abused people’s hospitality.
The solution for the local groups was to centralise fundraising and administration in the hands of ‘deacons’ who were overseen by ‘presbyters’ and bishops. ‘Within two generations’, writes Chadwick in his history of the church, a hierarchical organisation had grown up with ‘bishops, presbyters and deacons at the top’ rather than apostles and prophets. 129 At first, election of the bishops was in the hands of ordinary Christians. But it was not long before the preachers alone had a say. At the same time meetings of bishops began to determine what was correct doctrine and who was entitled to preach it.
This process was hastened by a great controversy over Christian doctrine – the question of ‘Gnosticism’. It arose from an issue of interpretation which must seem obscure to anyone without religious belief – where evil came from. But it had profound practical consequences. Christian theology held that there was only one god, who had created everything. This meant he must have created evil as well as good – a disturbing conclusion for believers who always bracketed ‘God’ and ‘good’ together. The response of orthodox Christianity has usually been to try and dilute the problem by placing lots of intermediaries between God and evildoing (fallen angels, demons, disobedient humanity). When this does not carry conviction, it declares that the very fact God knows the answer to this problem while we do not shows how much greater is his understanding than ours.
There was, however, a more logical answer. This was to say that there was a continual struggle in the universe between two principles, one of good and one of evil. This was the answer posed, at least partially, by the Gnostics. Spirit, they said was good, the material world and the human body were evil. Christians could only be pure if they freed their souls of bodily concerns. This was not a completely original conclusion – it is implied by many passages in the New Testament. But it had implications which were bound to worry the church authorities. If the mind alone was pure, then the only good Christians were those who turned their backs on the material world – ascetics who starved themselves and lived in rags. This was hardly the recipe for winning the whole of humanity to the gospel, or for raising funds from rich people for the local church. Worse, however, some Gnostics came to an even more radical conclusion. If the mind was pure, then it did not matter what the body did, since anything it did was impure. Their slogan became ‘to the good, everything is good’. It permitted them to live as luxuriously as they wanted, to despoil the goods of others (especially the rich) and, most horrifying of all to the church elders, to engage in free love.
The struggle over the issue raged through the Christian congregations for decades and was only resolved by the bishops asserting that they alone, as successors to the apostles, could pronounce on issues of doctrine. 130 The argument erupted again in the third century when a Syrian, Mani, began to build a religion (‘Manichaeism’) from elements of Gnostic Christianity, Buddhism and Persian Zoroastrianism. For a time it even won over Augustine of Hippo, later the dominant figure in mainstream Christian thought.
In the struggle against such ‘heresies’ the church bureaucracy moved on from controlling administration to controlling the doctrine which the organised churches were allowed to follow. In doing so, it made it more difficult for contradictions in the Bible to provide a focus for rebellious sentiments which might upset wealthy elements aligned with Christianity.
If Christianity was the slightly dissident shadow of the Roman Empire, the church hierarchy was turning into a shadow bureaucracy – a second empire-wide administrative structure standing alongside the first. But it was a shadow bureaucracy which could provide services to the population of the cities that the empire could not. Its ‘intense sense of religious community’ enabled it to remain moored in every town through the crisis of the late third century. 131 ‘During public emergencies such as plague or rioting, the Christian clergy were shown to be the only unified group in the town able to look after the burial of the dead and to organise food supplies … To be a Christian in 250 brought more protection from one’s fellows than to be a Roman citizen’. 132
By this time there were only two things which could disrupt the growth of the church’s following and influence – repression from the state or dissent from within.
Apologists for Christianity always make much of its survival in the face of persecution and repression. Martyrs who died for their faith are saints as much as those who supposedly worked miracles. But the repression of the church in its early years was intermittent. The few supposed Roman Christians of the time suffered under Nero as scapegoats for the burning of Rome. But that wave of repression did not outlast his own early demise. From time to time other Christians were imprisoned or even faced execution at the hands of hostile provincial governors, usually for refusing to take part in imperial cults. But much of the time the imperial authorities tolerated the parallel organisation that was growing beneath them, with third-century emperors like Alexander Severus and Philip the Arab even favourable to the church.
However, by the late third century the church had attained a degree of influence which meant it could no longer be ignored. The emperors had the choice of destroying the parallel organisation or cooperating with it. Maximus felt it was time to clamp down on a network of influence that reached right into the imperial bureaucracy. Diocletian, emperor after 284, went further. He was persuaded that Christianity threatened the unity of the armed forces and responded by knocking down the cathedral opposite his imperial palace in Nicodemia, issuing an edict for the destruction of all churches, ordering the arrest of all clergy and threatening the death penalty to anyone who would not sacrifice to the gods. There was a wave of persecution in the eastern empire.
However, it was too late for such measures to be effective. The ruler of the west, Constantius, took only token measures to enact Diocletian’s decrees, and his son Constantine opted to win the church to his side in his battle for supremacy in the western empire in 312. He began to regard himself as a Christian – he had been a sun worshipper – and the Christians certainly began to regard him as one of themselves. They were not worried by Constantine’s own behaviour, although he had a son drowned in a bath, executed his wife, and put off being baptised until his deathbed in order to ‘sin’ freely. With the persecution over, the Christians were now in a position to persecute non-believers and dissident groups within their own faith.
The years of the final winning over of the empire were also years in which new heresies affected whole sections of the church. But once the imperial administration had thrown in its lot with the church bureaucracy, any threat to that bureaucracy was a threat to itself. Having embraced Christianity, Constantine was soon deposing and exiling bishops who would not abide by his rulings. 133 His successors followed the same path, creating havoc as they backed one side and then another, so that the Egyptian bishop Athanasius was removed and reinstated five times. Only the emperor Julian abstained from the controversy. He tolerated all forms of Christian worship in the hope that the rival groups would destroy each other while he set about reviving Paganism.
This final phase of the Christian takeover of the empire also saw the birth of the important phenomenon of monasticism. The very succes
s of the church led to continual dissidence from people who felt it had abandoned its original message of purity and poverty. Bishops were now powerful figures, living in palaces, mixing much more with those who ran the empire than with the lowly people who filled the churches. A movement began, initially in Egypt, of people who felt they could only earn redemption by following a path away from the earthly success of the bishop. They would leave the towns for the desert, where they would live on bread and water brought to them by sympathisers, dress in rags and reject any sexual activity. Known as anchorites , these hermits believed that by deliberately entering upon a life of suffering they were saving themselves from sin, in much the way that Jesus had saved the world. Their behaviour earned the respect of other believers, who felt they were closer to the message of the gospels than the well-housed bishops.
The movement was potentially subversive. It threatened to throw up heresies in which prophets could use the words of the gospels to unleash hatred against the empire and the rich. Yet it was not long before it had become incorporated in the existing system. Some of the hermits were soon congregating close to each other for reasons of convenience, and it was only a short step from this to accepting that their sacrifice should involve labouring together under strict discipline. Basil of Caesarea turned this into a discipline of ideas as well as labour, subordinating individual self-sacrifice to a higher authority. It was not long before his successors were directing their fervour into physical force against those with different Christian ideas. 134
However, monasticism had another longer-term consequence. With their large, religiously fervent labour forces, the monasteries had a degree of protection from the disorders that accompanied the decline of the empire in the west. They became havens in which scholars could find security as the empire collapsed around them. While secular libraries burned, some monastic libraries survived, their keepers regarding it as a religious duty to copy by hand page after page of sacred – and sometimes profane – texts. At the same time the monasteries also became places where those lacking religious enthusiasm could pass a time protected from the chaos of the world, with ordinary peasants increasingly doing much of the labour and leaving the monks free to pursue a life of prayer and scholarship, or plain idleness. In any case, what had begun as islands of religious devotion, intended as a rejection of a corrupt society, became a powerful force in the post-imperial west within a couple of centuries. The network of religious establishments, sustained by the surplus from the exploitation of their own labour forces and coordinated by the hierarchy of bishops with the pope at the top, became a powerful participant in the scramble for wealth and privilege across western Europe for the next 1,000 years.