Jesus Wars
How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years
Philip Jenkins
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Who Do You Say That I Am?
Terms and Definitions
Maps
1 The Heart of the Matter
Part One: God and Caesar
2 The War of Two Natures
3 Four Horsemen: The Church’s Patriarchs
4 Queens, Generals, and Emperors
Part Two: Councils of Chaos
5 Not the Mother of God?
6 The Death of God
7 Chalcedon
Part Three: A World to Lose
8 How the Church Lost Half the World
9 What Was Saved
Appendix: The Main Figures in the Story
Notes
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Acknowledgments
I want to thank all my friends and colleagues at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion for their help and support, particularly Byron Johnson, Tommy Kidd and Rodney Stark.
At Penn State, special thanks to Christian Brady, Baruch Halpern, Paul Harvey, Kit Hume, Gary Knoppers, and Gregg Roeber.
Thanks to Roger Freet, my editor at HarperOne, and to Elyse Cheney, my agent.
Thanks above all others to my wife, Liz Jenkins.
Introduction
Who Do You Say That I Am?
Jesus once asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” They answered that all sorts of stories were circulating—that he was a prophet, perhaps Elijah or John the Baptist come back to earth. “But,” he asked, “Who do you say that I am?”1 Over the past two thousand years, Christians have formulated many different answers to this question. Yes, most believe Jesus was a human being, but at the same time he was also God, one of the three persons of the Trinity. He was both God and man.
But when we have said that, we have raised more questions than we have answered, as the basic belief in Jesus Christ demands combining two utterly different categories of being. Such a transgression of boundaries puzzles and shocks believers of other faiths, especially strict monotheists such as Muslims and Jews. But even those Christians who accept the basic concept probably could not explain it with anything like the precision demanded by early church councils. By those rigorous standards, virtually all modern nonspecialists (including many clergy) would soon lapse into grave heresy.2
The Bible is anything but clear on the relationship between Christ’s human and divine natures, and arguably, it is just not possible to reconcile its various statements on this matter. In the New Testament, Jesus says quite explicitly that he is identical with God: “I and the Father are one,” he declares. “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.”3 John’s gospel reports Jesus’ telling the crowd, “You are from below; I am from above: you are of this world; I am not of this world.” He goes on, “Before Abraham was, I am.” His listeners are appalled, and not just because this seems to be an outrageous boast of extreme old age. The words that Jesus uses for “I am”—in Greek, ego eimi—recall the declaration that God made to Moses from the burning bush. We might better translate it as I AM. Jesus appears to be saying that he is the same eternal God who brought Israel out of Egypt, not to mention creating the world. Not surprisingly, the crowd tries to stone him for blasphemy. For later readers of the Gospels, then, Father and Son must be one and the same.4
But just as we are absorbing that amazing fact, we read on to find Jesus stating that he is distinct from God the Father. “The Father is greater than I,” he says. When Jesus foretells the end of the world, he admits that the exact timing is unknown either to the Son or to the angels, and only the Father knows precisely. If the Son knows less than the Father, the two must be different.5
What does it mean to say that Christ was at once God and man? Certainly the Jesus of the Gospels seems utterly human—he bleeds, he loves, he gets angry, he dies in grotesque agony. Yet somehow we have to reconcile that fact with the doctrine of the Incarnation. The opening words of the gospel of John identify Christ with the Logos, God’s Reason or creative Word:
In the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God…. And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.6
The Word was made flesh, God became man. But how does that Word relate to the man called Jesus? What does the letter to the Colossians mean when it proclaims that all the fullness of God lives in Christ, in bodily form?7
Problems and paradoxes abound. When Jesus arrived in Bethany to find that his friend Lazarus has died, he mourned: he groaned in the spirit, we are told, and he was troubled. Jesus suffered all-too-human grief, and, as is reported in one of the most famous verses of the whole Bible, “Jesus wept.”8 Incidentally, the source of that verse is John’s gospel, the same text that reports Jesus’ speaking the hair-raising language of I AM. But think that text through. Jesus wept, so Christ the anointed wept—and, therefore, are we to believe that God, the creator and source of all being, really wept? More sensationally, how, in fact, had Christ suffered on the cross—had God really died? These paradoxes were not concocted by later Christian theologians, working long after the supposedly straightforward beliefs of the apostolic age. As early as 110, while the New Testament was still under construction, the great martyr-bishop Ignatius of Antioch proclaimed Christ as “God come in the flesh.” Ignatius addressed believers, whose hearts were kindled in “the blood of God.” God weeping is one thing, but bleeding? Even faithful Catholics who accept that the communion wafer is Corpus Christi, the Body of Christ, dare not make the leap that would proclaim it the Body of God. God and Christ are different.9
Through the first four centuries of Christianity, believers tried many ways of resolving these problems of Scripture and logic. Different churches—leading thinkers and scholars—varied in the stress they placed on Jesus’ humanity or his divinity, and without exercising too much ingenuity or text twisting, they found biblical passages that supported all these opinions.10 Some early Christians thought that Christ was so possessed by Godhood that his human nature was eclipsed. In that sense, we should think of Christ as a manifestation of God walking the earth, clothed in human form as a convenient disguise. The Word took on flesh as I might put on an overcoat. So, are we to believe that Christ’s sufferings, all the tears and blood, were a kind of playacting or illusion? Others saw Jesus as a great man overwhelmed by God-consciousness. Somehow, the Spirit of God had descended on him, with his baptism in the Jordan as the likely moment of transformation—but the two natures always remained separate. Christ, from that perspective, remained chiefly human. Some thought the two natures were merged, indissolubly and eternally; others thought the connection was only partial or temporary.
So was Jesus a Man-bearing God, or a God-bearing man? Between those extreme poles lay any number of other answers, which competed furiously through the first Christian centuries. By 400, most Christians agreed that Jesus Christ was in some sense divine, and that he had both a human nature (Greek, physis) and a divine nature. But that belief allowed for a wide variety of interpretations, and if events had developed differently—if great councils had decided other than they actually did—any one of these various approaches might have established itself as orthodoxy. In the context of the time, cultural and political pressures were pushing strongly toward the idea of Christ-as-God, so that only with real difficulty could the memory of the human Jesus be maintained. Historically, it is very remarkable that mainstream orthodoxy came out so stro
ngly in favor of asserting Christ’s full humanity.
And yet it did just that. When most modern churches explain their understanding of Christ’s identity—their Christology—they turn to a common body of ready-made interpretations, an ancient collection of texts laid down in the fifth century. At a great council held in 451 at Chalcedon (near modern Istanbul), the church formulated the statement that eventually became the official theology of the Roman Empire. This acknowledges Christ in two natures, which joined together in one person. Two natures existed, “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person.”11
We cannot speak of Christ without declaring his full human nature, which was not even slightly diluted or abolished by the presence of divinity. That Chalcedonian definition today stands as the official formula for the vast majority of Christians, whether they are Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox—although how many of those believers could explain the definition clearly is open to debate. But as we are told, Chalcedon settled any controversy about the identity of Christ, so that henceforward any troublesome passages in the Bible or early tradition had to be read in the spirit of those powerful words. For over 1,500 years now, Chalcedon has provided the answer to Jesus’ great question.
But Chalcedon was not the only possible solution, nor was it an obvious or, perhaps, a logical one. Only the political victory of Chalcedon’s supporters allowed that council’s ideas to become the inevitable lens through which later generations interpret the Christian message. It remains quite possible to read the New Testament and find very different Christologies, which by definition arose from churches very close to Jesus’ time, and to his thought world. In particular, we easily find passages that suggest that the man Jesus achieved Godhood at a specific moment during his life, or indeed after his earthly death.
In political terms, the most important critics of Chalcedon were those who stressed Christ’s one divine nature, and from the Greek words for “one nature,” we call them Monophysites. Not only were Monophysites numerous and influential, but they dominated much of the Christian world and the Roman Empire long after Chalcedon had done its work, and they were only defeated after decades of bloody struggle. Centuries after Chalcedon, Monophysites continued to prevail in the most ancient regions of Christianity, such as Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. The heirs of the very oldest churches, the ones with the most direct and authentic ties to the apostolic age, found their distinctive interpretation of Christ ruled as heretical. Pedigree counted for little in these struggles.
Each side persecuted its rivals when it had the opportunity to do so, and tens of thousands—at least—perished. Christ’s nature was a cause for which people were prepared to kill and to die, to persecute or to suffer martyrdom. Modern Christians rarely feel much sympathy for either side in such bygone religious wars. Did the issues at stake really matter enough to justify bloodshed? Yet obviously, people at the time had no such qualms and cared passionately about how believers were supposed to understand the Christ they worshipped. Failing to understand Christ’s natures properly made nonsense of everything Christians treasured: the content of salvation and redemption, the character of liturgy and Eucharist, the figure of the Virgin Mary. Each side had its absolute truth, faith in which was essential to salvation.
Horror stories about Christian violence abound in other eras, with the Crusades and Inquisition as prime exhibits; but the intra-Christian violence of the fifth- and sixth-century debates was on a far larger and more systematic scale than anything produced by the Inquisition and occurred at a much earlier stage of church history. When Edward Gibbon wrote his classic account of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he reported countless examples of Christian violence and fanaticism. This is his account of the immediate aftermath of Chalcedon:
Jerusalem was occupied by an army of [Monophysite] monks; in the name of the one incarnate Nature, they pillaged, they burnt, they murdered; the sepulchre of Christ was defiled with blood…. On the third day before the festival of Easter, the [Alexandrian] patriarch was besieged in the cathedral, and murdered in the baptistery. The remains of his mangled corpse were delivered to the flames, and his ashes to the wind; and the deed was inspired by the vision of a pretended angel…. This deadly superstition was inflamed, on either side, by the principle and the practice of retaliation: in the pursuit of a metaphysical quarrel, many thousands were slain.12
Chalcedonians behaved at least as badly in their campaigns to enforce their particular orthodoxy. In the eastern city of Amida, a Chalcedonian bishop dragooned dissidents, to the point of burning them alive. His most diabolical scheme involving taking lepers, “hands festering and dripping with blood and pus,” and billeting them on the Monophysite faithful until they saw reason.13
Even the Eucharist became a vital component of religious terror. Throughout the long religious wars, people were regularly (and frequently) reading others out of the church, declaring formal anathemas, and the sign for this was admitting or not admitting people to communion. In extreme episodes, communion was enforced by physical violence, so that the Eucharist, which is based upon ideas of self-giving and self-sacrifice, became an instrument of oppression. A sixth-century historian records how the forces of Constantinople’s Chalcedonian patriarch struck at Monophysite religious houses in the capital. Furnished with supplies of consecrated bread, the patriarch’s clergy were armed and dangerous. They “dragged and pulled [the nuns] by main force to make them receive the communion at their hands. And they all fled like birds before the hawk, and cowered down in corners, wailing and saying, ‘We cannot communicate with the synod of Chalcedon, which divides Christ our God into two Natures after the union, and teaches a Quaternity instead of the Holy Trinity.’” But their protests were useless. “They were dragged up to communicate; and when they held their hands above their heads, in spite of their screams their hands were seized, and they were dragged along, uttering shrieks of lamentation, and sobs, and loud cries, and struggling to escape. And so the sacrament was thrust by force into the mouths of some, in spite of their screams, while others threw themselves on their faces upon the ground, and cursed every one who required them to communicate by force.”14 They might take the Eucharist kicking and screaming—literally—but once they had eaten, they were officially in communion with Chalcedon and with the church that preached that doctrine.
Battles over Christ’s nature raged far beyond the confines of the church itself, and vicious civil wars still reverberated two hundred years after Chalcedon. So vital did this question appear, so central to the character of faith and the future of Christianity, that partisans on either side were prepared to divide and weaken the church and empire and risk revolutions and civil wars. In the long term, these schisms led directly to the collapse of Roman power in the eastern world, to the rise of Islam, and to the destruction of Christianity through much of Asia and Africa. Apart from Islam, the greatest winner in the conflict was European Christianity, or rather the fact that Christianity, for better or worse, found its firmest bastion in Europe. So much of the religious character of the world we know was shaped by this conflict over the nature of Christ. The mainstream church kept its belief that Jesus was fully human—but at the cost of losing half the world.
If religion shaped the political world, then politics forged the character of religion. When we look at what became the church’s orthodoxy, so many of those core beliefs gained the status they did as a result of what appears to be historical accident, of the workings of raw chance. In the controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries, the outcome was shaped not by obviously religious dimensions but by factors that seem quite extraneous. This was not a case of one side producing better arguments in its cause, of a deeper familiarity with Scripture or patristic texts: all sides had excellent justifications for their positions. All, equally, produced men and women
who practiced heroic asceticism and who demonstrated obvious sanctity. What mattered were the interests and obsessions of rival emperors and queens, the role of competing ecclesiastical princes and their churches, and the empire’s military successes or failures against particular barbarian nations. To oversimplify, the fate of Christian doctrine was deeply influenced by just how well or badly the empire was doing fighting Attila the Hun.
In the long term, the christological debate was settled by one straightforward issue: which side gained and held supremacy within the Christian Roman Empire and was therefore able to establish its particular view as orthodoxy. And that was a political matter, shaped by geographical accident and military success. Just because one view became orthodoxy does not mean that it was always and inevitably destined to do so: the Roman Church became right because it survived. It was all mere chance and accident—unless, of course, we follow a tradition common to Christians, Jews, and Muslims of seeing God’s hand in the apparently shapeless course of worldly history.
However remote these conflicts may appear, they involved all the vital themes that would so often rend the Christian world in later eras, from the Reformation through the Victorian conflicts between faith and learning, and on to our own day. Great councils like Chalcedon were debating such core issues as the quest for authority in religion, the relationship between church and state, the proper ways of reading and interpreting Scripture, the ethics and conduct demanded of Christians, and the means of salvation.
Jesus Wars Page 1