Part 1
God and Caesar
I will treat of the origin and progress and destinies of the two cities, the earthly and the heavenly, which are in this present world commingled and, as it were, entangled together.
Augustine of Hippo
2
The War of Two Natures
The mystery of the humanity of Christ, that He sunk Himself into our flesh, is beyond all human understanding.
Martin Luther
Even if it were desirable, replied the Good Fairy, angelic or spiritual carnality is not easy, and in any case the offspring would be severely handicapped by being half flesh and half spirit, a very baffling and neutralizing assortment of fractions since the two elements are forever at variance.
Flann O’Brien
In 428, Nestorius, the new patriarch of the imperial capital of Constantinople, denounced what he thought was a worrying trend in popular devotion. Christians might well venerate the Virgin Mary, he thought, but they should not call her Theotokos, God-Bearer or Mother of God. Far better to call her Christotokos, Mother of Christ, which did not raise such alarming theological questions.
Yet this attempt to avoid dangerous innovations was itself seen as a rash challenge to received doctrine, and Nestorius’s intervention began a series of conflicts that tore apart both church and empire. The process was extraordinarily rapid. Within just three years from his appointment, he had become associated with a heresy and stirred up opposition that had divided the church in Constantinople and throughout much of the Eastern world. He had suffered a devastating counterattack, culminating in a general council that came close to causing a schism throughout the Christian world; and he had been denounced, deposed, and utterly defeated. Three years. That time frame indicates the amazingly rapid communications still prevailing within the empire and the easy cultural transmission permitted by the Greek language. The Christian world might stretch from the Atlantic to Persia, but it could still look like a small village.
But the speed with which the crisis evolved suggests that the issues were anything but new. Rather, they were present in the cultural background, just awaiting the correct spark to set them alight, and the fast-moving story suggests the tinderbox atmosphere of church politics in this era. The Nestorian furor was yet another phase in a battle that had been raging for centuries. Participants had long wrestled with the idea of the Word made flesh and developed a whole world of specialized terms and concepts: being and nature, person and substance. But how, in fact, had Christology become so brutally divisive and, ultimately, an empire killer?1
1. Comprehending Christ: c.30–300
GOD AND MAN?
The Gospels allow for many interpretations concerning the nature and identity of Christ. How explicitly did Jesus claim to be one with God? If you take your main picture of Jesus Christ from the gospel of John, then you are more likely to focus on a divine figure. Reading the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) demands that we pay more attention to the human reality.2
Undoubtedly, the idea of Christ as both God and man is ancient in the church. Early in the second century, Ignatius of Antioch wrote in terms that would be quite familiar to later believers right up to the present day. As he wrote, “Jesus Christ Our Lord” was:
Of the flesh and of the spirit,
Born and unborn,
God come in the flesh…from both Mary and God.
But other interpretations were possible, and indeed common. Since apostolic times, many groups had formed their own particular interpretations of the relationship between human and divine. Lists of ancient heresies include many groups holding diverse views on Christology. Of course, the fact that we regard them as heresies and isms means only that they ultimately lost out in the struggle of ideas and became byways of belief rather than the mainstream.3 (See appendix to this chapter: Some Early Interpretations of Christ.)
Some early followers of Jesus saw him as prophet or messiah, but not as a divine figure or an incarnate God. These Jewish-Christian groups were usually termed Ebionites, and it is an open question whether they represented a fossil of the very earliest Jesus movement. As tensions grew between Jews and Christians, the church condemned any views that seemed too close to Judaism. This Jewish issue would often resurface in later theological debates, as thinkers who over-emphasized Christ’s human nature were charged with Jewish sympathies.4
TWO NATURES? THE ADOPTED SON
Other widely held theologies imagined two separate natures, human and divine, but spoke of the divine nature, the Logos, invading and overwhelming the human. Adoptionist teachings proclaimed that Jesus was altogether human, but upon him had descended a divine power who granted him his anointing, his Christship. He acquired Sonship at a specific moment, through a process of divine adoption.5 And however far removed these ideas are from later Christian orthodoxy, they do follow quite logically from reading some parts of the New Testament.
Assuming that Christ became God, when and how was he Godded? Modern Christians see little difficulty in the question, so familiar are they with the doctrine of the virgin birth. This idea is reinforced by stories and paintings of the annunciation to Mary, together with centuries of accumulated Christmas lore, the events surrounding the birth of Emmanuel. Of course, we think, that was self-evidently the moment at which a divine being appeared in the world in human form. But a wide range of early thinkers read the story very differently, and they had good scriptural grounds for their beliefs.
The idea of the virgin birth is unquestionably present in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, but elsewhere in the New Testament the idea leaves not a trace. Among Paul’s epistles, Galatians speaks of God sending his Son, “born of a woman,” but neither here nor elsewhere does Paul suggest anything unusual about Jesus’ conception or birth. Although Paul could have written explicitly “of a virgin,” instead he uses the word for woman, gyne/gynaikos. Two of the gospels, Mark and John, make no reference to a birth story for Jesus, and neither did the hypothetical lost gospel Q. Nor do early alternative gospels like Thomas. Even in Matthew and Luke, the virgin birth idea never reappears after the initial chapters: it is not mentioned in Luke’s sequel to his gospel, the book of Acts. And although some would argue that Revelation refers to Mary and her child, the text is open to debate, and in any case, it does not speak of a virgin birth. In the New Testament, at least, no apostle or Christian preacher ever tries to convince an audience by stories of Jesus’s miraculous conception or birth, or of a manger surrounded by angels or kings. Ignatius definitely believes in the virgin birth, but otherwise the idea makes little impact on the so-called apostolic fathers, the Christian thinkers from the period between about 90 and 140.
Reading Mark, John, or Q, in the absence of the Christmas stories, we would assuredly think of Jesus’ baptism, rather than his birth, as the moment when he acquired divinity. Let us for instance read the account of Mark that is, according to scholarly consensus, the oldest surviving full gospel; but imagine that we come to this without the assumptions that we have from any previous reading. The text begins with the theme of preparing the Way, the term that the first Jesus followers used for their new faith. We hear of the mission of John the Baptist, and then Jesus himself appears to be baptized, without any description of his antecedents or any suggestion that they were at all out of the ordinary. At that point, the Spirit descends on him like a dove, and then he flees into the wilderness, presumably to confront the astonishing new reality he has encountered. John’s gospel offers a very similar sequence. The difference there, of course, is that the text begins with the famous prologue describing the Incarnation, the Word becoming flesh. We are used to reading this as a Christmas story, of the Word being born in a Bethlehem manger, and that is a perfectly possible interpretation—but not the only one. Someone could even understand the “word becoming flesh” in terms of a divine figure materializing in the Judean wilderness in the guise of a thirty-year-old man, ready to begin a spiritual mission; and that is roughl
y how early Gnostic Christian believers did take it. Or else, we could read the prologue as describing what is about to happen to Jesus when he emerges from the Jordan.
For many early Christians, Jesus was a good or holy man, but only at the moment of his baptism in the Jordan was he suddenly overwhelmed by the power of divinity, the Logos or Holy Spirit. Early in the second century, the influential Gnostic thinker Cerinthus popularized this idea of Jesus’ being possessed by a divine force at his baptism. The crucifixion would then have marked the moment that the power of Christ abandoned the man Jesus. According to the second-century gospel of Peter, Christ on the cross cried out “My Power, my Power, why have you forsaken me?” According to the orthodox church father Irenaeus, writing around 180, Cerinthus
represented Jesus as having not been born of a virgin, but as being the son of Joseph and Mary according to the ordinary course of human generation, while he nevertheless was more righteous, prudent, and wise than other men. Moreover, after his baptism, Christ descended upon him in the form of a dove from the Supreme Ruler, and that then he proclaimed the unknown Father, and performed miracles. But at last Christ departed from Jesus, and that then Jesus suffered and rose again, while Christ remained impassible, inasmuch as he was a spiritual being.
Irenaeus further explained that, according to the Gnostic view,
This Christ passed through Mary just as water flows through a tube; and there descended upon him in the form of a dove at the time of his baptism, that Savior who belonged to the Pleroma [the Fullness of divinity].
Other New Testament passages also support views of Christ that fall well short of what became standard orthodoxy, although they point to the Resurrection, rather than the baptism, as the moment when Jesus acquired Godhood.6
We can even argue that the mainstream church kept alive this ancient fascination with Christ’s baptism long after its official theology rejected the idea that this marked the moment at which he became divine. Although the idea is speculative, what we know as the date of Christmas may preserve memories of a time when some Christians made a special celebration of the baptism of Christ—rather than his birth—as the key moment in his life.
When we look at church calendars, it is puzzling that modern Christians celebrate Christmas in midwinter, whereas the early church located Christ’s birth in May. (No sane Judean shepherd would have been out on the hills watching his flocks in December.) But other possible explanations exist for this winter celebration. Late in the second century, we know that Egyptian Gnostic followers of Basilides commemorated Jesus’ baptism as especially holy, and they celebrated it on January 6. Over the centuries, the Orthodox churches used the midwinter date to commemorate the birth of Jesus rather than his baptism, and January 6 marks the feast of the Epiphany. For Western churches, this is the day on which the Magi reputedly visited Jesus in the stable, proclaiming the manifestation of Christ’s glory as a newborn child. Over the centuries, though, other Christian cultures combined the celebration of Christ’s birth with a remembrance of his baptism in the Jordan. Eastern Orthodox churches celebrate Epiphany as the festival of Christ’s baptism. In the ancient church of Ethiopia, Jesus’ baptism is the focus of the feast of Timqat or Epiphany, which is still one of the greatest festivals of the liturgical year. Timqat is the local Amharic word for “baptism.”7
Adoptionist doctrines survived through the third century, and they revived powerfully in the 260s through the influence of Paul of Samosata, bishop of Antioch. Paul held that Mary was the mother of the man Jesus, on whom the Logos descended at his baptism.
Having been anointed by the Holy Spirit he received the title of the anointed [Christos], suffering in accordance with his nature, working wonders in accordance with grace. For in fixity and resoluteness of character he likened himself to God; and having kept himself free from sin was united with God, and was empowered to grasp as it were the power and authority of wonders.
At the time, the view was denounced as Ebionite and Jewish, because it put so much emphasis on Jesus’ human nature. It matters for later debates because Paul became the ancestor of Two Nature theories about Christ.8 And while the church of Antioch rejected Adoptionism, its theologians always insisted on emphasizing the human reality of Christ, in addition to the divine.
ONE NATURE? CHRIST AS GOD ALONE
Other early believers stressed Christ’s divinity to the point of all but denying his humanity: Christ had one nature, and it was God’s. And these Christians, too, could find support in Scripture and in ancient tradition. In one version of this view, Christ only took human form as a guise in which to visit the world, and his appearance and sufferings were a matter of illusion—hence the name Docetists, from the Greek word dokein meaning “to seem.” Already in the New Testament era, the Epistles of John condemned those who denied that Christ had come in the flesh. Some Docetists turned for scriptural support to the hymn recorded in Philippians 2, in which Christ takes the form or shape (morphe) of a slave, and was born in human form, in human likeness. That hymn is so ancient that already by 60 or so, Paul seems to be quoting it as a well-known text. It predates any of the four Gospels as we have them.
That belief in Christ as illusion had massive implications for church practice and devotion—if Christ was immaterial, for instance, then believers could receive only a symbolic benefit from the Eucharist. That belief set Docetists apart from the emerging church and was one of the main grounds on which Ignatius of Antioch denounced them early in the second century: he called them “atheists and infidels.” But similar ideas enjoyed a long history in Syria and the East, where they were consecrated through their inclusion in many alternative gospels. This theology also became part of the new religion founded by Mani, who preached a radical conflict between light and darkness, spirit and matter. From that antimaterial point of view, it was monstrous to suggest that Christ had a bodily form, or (as Mani mockingly said) that he was “born of blood and flesh and women’s ill-smelling effluent!” In the West, one of the strongest advocates of Christ’s real, material nature was the African Tertullian, writing around 200. In his work De Carne Christi (“Of the Flesh of Christ”), he argued that none of the doctrines of Christianity made sense unless we accepted the real physical nature of the Incarnation: “God must have flesh, in order to have a real death and real resurrection.” Although he never used the exact phrase, his work is best remembered for the justification he offers for his faith in the Incarnation: I believe it because it is absurd!9
Mainstream churches fought repeatedly against One Nature beliefs through the second and third centuries. From about 200, the main controversy involved the view that Christ had a human body but no identity or personality separate from that of the one united God. Father, Son, and Spirit were just modes of one reality, three names for one substance, and it made no sense to speak of a Trinity. This was the theory proposed around 220 by one Sabellius, although his ideas were so controversial that we have virtually no record of his actual words. According to this view, Christ was one with the Father, to the extent that it was the Father who suffered on the cross. In terms of later theories about the identity of Christ, this represented an extreme version of One Nature belief. The Sabellian idea appealed to Christians who retained the Jewish horror of any departure from strict monotheism and who worried about making Christ a second and distinct God.10
KEEPING CHRIST HUMAN
Memories of these debates were very much alive in Nestorius’s time. The names and labels served as convenient code words to stigmatize enemies. If someone emphasized the single nature of Christ too strongly, his critics would denounce him (outrageously) as a Sabellian. Someone who veered too far the other way, overstressing the two separate natures, ran the risk of being labeled a follower of Cerinthus or Paul of Samosata. By the late third century, the Western church had evolved a formula designed to avoid both extremes. In Latin terms, Jesus Christ was one persona (person) in whom are the two substantiae, substances, of divinity and humanity.11
> In light of later assumptions about the course of Christian doctrine, it is worth stressing just what the different sides were assuming about the divinity of Christ. For many modern readers, claims about Christ’s divinity represent a later distortion of his original claims. According to this view, the earliest church saw Jesus as a man, and only later and retroactively was he promoted to Godhood. This elevation was associated especially with the Roman Empire’s conversion to Christianity and events like the Council of Nicea in 325. Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code argues that Nicea was the moment at which Jesus became God, as a result of power plays in the empire and church: he owed his Godhood to majority vote.
But for at least a century before that, the reality of Christ’s divinity was scarcely at issue, and certainty in this belief grew with the increasing dominance of the canonical four Gospels. The more popular Matthew and Luke became as standard accounts of Jesus’ life, the harder it was to get over the powerful stories of his miraculous conception and birth. Memories of these accounts permeated the minds of readers approaching Mark and John to the point where they assumed that these works, too, must have had some kind of birth story. Battles erupted not over the divinity of Jesus Christ, but rather involved questions of what, if any, human elements remained within him. Already by 200, those Jewish-Christian movements that had seen Jesus as a purely human figure were becoming rare and isolated. The real struggle involved a very different issue: how could Christ be kept human?
2. The Fourth Century
Jesus Wars Page 6