The Faith Instinct

by Wade, Nicholas

  In Sanders’s view, Jesus’ interest in gentiles was secondary to his interest in Jews, being perhaps related to the idea that if Israel was to regain its former greatness, it would help if gentiles worshipped the same god. The writers of the four gospels believed in the mission to the gentiles, yet do not cite much support for it. “What is striking is that the evangelists had so few passages that pointed towards success in winning Gentiles to faith,” Sanders notes.187

  After his death the leadership of Jesus’ movement passed into the hands of his brother James and the apostle Peter. Many scholars have pointed to deep differences between the beliefs of the Jesus movement and those of what might be called the Christ movement, which after 300 years eventually became the dominant form of Christianity in the Roman empire. The Jesus movement remained restricted to Jews who followed the Torah’s rules. They believed Jesus was a human prophet, not a god, born of human parents; they had no use for the concept of the virgin birth. Their sacred text was a version of Matthew’s gospel translated into Aramaic but without the passages on the virgin birth.

  Adherents of the Jesus cult became known as Ebionites. A closely related sect known as the Nazarenes survived until at least the fourth century. The idea of Jesus as a human prophet, sent by a single god, is strongly reminiscent of Islam. Indeed, the Qur’an refers to Christians as al-Nasrani, an archaic term used by East Syrian churches. The Ebionites were condemned as heretical by the victorious Christ movement and slowly faded from the historical record. “We do not know when they ceased to exist,” writes the religious historian Barrie Wilson. “Perhaps, some speculate, they were absorbed into Islam, which shares some of their views of Jesus—as human, teacher, and prophet.”188

  The Christ movement, in contrast, saw Jesus as a divine being whose death and resurrection, as in the mystery cults prevalent in the Roman empire, was celebrated by symbolic consumption of the god’s sacrificial body. Jews expected the prophesied messiah of the Hebrew bible to be a human prophet with the temporal role of evicting the Roman occupiers. But in translating the word messiah into Greek—both mashiah and christos mean “anointed”—the framer of the Christ movement made Jesus into a god who was heir to a heavenly kingdom, not an earthly one.

  The framer was presumably Paul, from the internal evidence of the New Testament documents. Unlike the Jesus movement, which was directed to Jews, required strict observance of Jewish laws and operated in Aramaic, Paul addressed his Christ movement to the Greek-speaking gentiles of the Roman world. He dropped the requirements of circumcision and observance of Jewish law. Paul in his letters refers very little to Jesus’ life or teachings. His most important statements, such as those concerning the eucharist and resurrection, are based on his personal revelations and not from information about Jesus from those who had known him. “But I certify to you, brethren,” Paul tells the Galatians, “that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man. For I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ.” 189

  During the first three centuries A.D., many different religions and brands of Christianity competed with one another. Christianity slowly displaced the mystery cults that were its rivals, helped by the fact that the Christ movement had adopted the cults’ central idea of a sacrificial god and grafted it onto the ancient religious heritage of Judaism. The Christ movement prevailed over the Jesus movement, many of whose members perished in the siege of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, and all the other early brands of Christianity, until it was chosen as the state religion of the Roman empire by Constantine and Theodosius.

  Just as the victors usually write the history books, it was the inheritors of Paul’s Christ movement who shaped the New Testament to support their version of Christianity. Many documents about Jesus and his followers were in circulation during the first three centuries of the Christian era. The Gospel of Peter seems to have been one of the most popular, to judge by the number of surviving fragments.190 But like many other documents, it was rejected by the compilers of the official record.

  Their selection of books apparently did not become final until the mid-fourth century A.D. when the list of books now in the New Testament was first mentioned by Athanasius, the patriarch of Alexandria, in a letter of A.D. 367. If these books had been arranged in order of their date of composition, the letters of Paul would have come first, given that all the authentic ones were written before A.D. 70, and the four gospels, all of which were written after A.D. 70, would follow. But that would have given the impression, which the compilers of the New Testament presumably sought to avoid, that Paul shaped Christianity as a religion for gentiles and loosely tied it to the person of Jesus, an orthodox Jew interested only in making a minor adjustment to Judaism. By placing the lives of Jesus first, the compilers lent support to the official story, that Jesus was the founder of Christianity who sent his disciples and apostles to preach the gospel to Jew and gentile around the world.

  The New Testament’s book of Acts records the disagreement between the leaders of the Jerusalem church, who wanted recruits to obey Jewish law in all respects, and proselytizers such as Paul who understood the new cult’s great potential in the world outside Judaea if it could only break free from the ethnic barriers, such as circumcision and the rigorous Jewish dietary laws, that restricted it to Jews. The author of Acts also implied that the differences between the two movements were patched up, which seems not to have been the case given the very different directions taken by Paul and the Jesus movement. But by implying a resolution, the book of Acts helps to graft Pauline Christianity onto the Judaic rootstock of the Jesus movement.

  Because the writers of the New Testament took such care to integrate their work with Judaic belief, it is hard at this remove to appreciate the Greekness of Christianity. All the books of the New Testament were originally written in Greek. Jesus (Iēsous) is the Greek form of Yeshua or Yeshu, his name in Aramaic. Because Greek was the lingua franca of the eastern Roman empire, all early church services outside Judaea took place in Greek, even in Rome. Followers of Jesus were first called Christians in the Hellenistic city of Antioch. The Hebrew Bible was read and referred to in its Greek translation, the Septuagint. Only around A.D. 200 did Roman congregations start holding services in Latin, retaining even then such Greek phrases as kyrie eleison—“Lord have mercy.”

  Not only was the culture of early Christianity Greek but several of its central beliefs have little or no counterpart in Jewish thought. They were, however, perfectly familiar in the Greco-Roman world of the first two centuries A.D. One is the worship of a mother and child, as in the ancient cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis. She is often shown as suckling her infant son Horus, who was conceived by a virgin birth. The Isis cult was popular throughout the empire, particularly in Rome during the first century B.C. The church in Egypt co-opted the cult, plagiarizing its iconography to depict mother and child in the now familiar image of the virgin and Jesus.

  In the world of early Christianity, the Egyptian church—now known as the Coptic church—was very large and its patriarchs in Alexandria rivaled those of Constantinople and Rome for influence. It was they who pressed for a stronger role for the virgin in Christian worship and theology. “The Egyptian patriarchs, Theophilus and Cyril, led the Greek world,” writes the historian Peter Brown. “The Council of Ephesus in 431, in declaring that Mary was the Theotokos—‘She Who gave birth to God’— ratified the fervour of the Copts, who had worshipped her as such, suckling the new-born Jesus. This prototype of the most tender scene in medieval art was a Coptic adaptation of Isis suckling the infant Horus.”191 The figure of Isis and Horus “is so like that of the Madonna and child that it has sometimes received the adoration of ignorant Christians,” noted the anthropologist James Frazer.192

  A prominent feature of several popular mystery cults of the time was the theme of a god who dies and is later resurrected, as in the cults of Dionysus or of Attis and Cybele. The common idea, presumably inherited from the dawn of agricult
ure, was of a vegetation god who dies in autumn and must be resurrected in the spring with appropriate ritual. Followers of Dionysus, the god of wine, would tear apart a live bull—or occasionally a person—and eat the flesh raw, in commemoration of the killing and resurrection of the god. As for Attis, he was born of a virgin—his mother Nana conceived by placing a ripe pomegranate in her bosom—and his death and resurrection were celebrated at a spring festival at which his followers shed copious amounts of blood through self-mutilation.193

  Mithraism, a religion with a large following among Roman army officers, included among its rites “sacred meals not unlike the Christian eucharist and offers souls away through the seven planetary spirits which bar the ascent to the Milky Way after death,” writes Chadwick.194

  A follower of any of these mystery cults, whether of Adonis, Isis, Mithras, Dionysus or Attis, would have recognized many familiar elements in Christianity, such as the virgin birth, the death of the god, the springtime resurrection festival, and the symbolism of the eucharist in which celebrants consumed bread and wine that were taken as representing the body and blood of the sacrificial god.

  Given that Jews are strictly forbidden to taste blood, which must be drained away before an animal can be eaten, it would have been strange indeed for Jesus, an observant Jew, to recommend that his disciples should drink his blood, even symbolically.195 Indeed in a very early description of the eucharist, that of the Didache, also known as “The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,” no such symbolism is indicated nor is any connection made with Passover or the resurrection. Celebrants are told simply to give thanks “for the holy vine of thy servant David which thou has made known to us through thy servant Jesus” and similarly for the broken bread.196 The Didache, known to the early church fathers but excluded from the New Testament canon, was lost for many centuries and rediscovered only in 1873. It is so unlike other Christian literature that scholars have not known how to date it. But its strangeness may arise from its early date: it seems to come from or reflect a period before Christianity had taken its final form.

  What then is the origin of the communion rite or eucharist? The earliest description in the New Testament appears in the apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Paul, a Jew born around A.D. 5 in Tarsus in present-day Turkey, was doubtless familiar with the several mystery cults then popular in the Roman world. He was a forceful advocate of spreading Jesus’ message to non-Jews in the world outside Judaea, as the Roman province was then known.

  His seven authentic letters in the New Testament were probably composed between A.D. 49 and 55, and several decades before the four gospels which scholars generally agree were all written after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in A.D. 70.197 Paul had met in Jerusalem with members of the Jerusalem church who knew Jesus, including the apostle Peter, and might be expected to have heard from them of the eucharist service. But he attributes his knowledge of it directly to Jesus: “For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you,” he writes in introducing his account of how the eucharist should be conducted.198 Since Paul never met Jesus, he implies the information was imparted in a personal vision, perhaps similar to the one on the road to Damascus in which Jesus instructed him to cease his persecution of Christians.

  Some scholars suggest Paul’s phrase means that he was handing on his account through the authorization of the church, or that he meant just to emphasize its authenticity. But the simplest construction is that he means he received the account through direct revelation. If so, the rite was an idea of his own which the gospel writers later followed. They did not, however, use Paul’s unfortunate name for the rite—kuriakon deipnon or “lordly meal”—which was apparently the same phrase as used for sacred meals in the mystery cults.199 They called it instead the eucharist, a Greek word meaning thanksgiving.

  At the very least, the early church had two versions of the eucharist. In one, there was a simple benediction for food and wine, similar to Jewish blessings, and an invocation of Jesus. In the other, the mystery cults’ central idea of a sacrificial and resurrected god is elegantly fused with the conventional benediction, generating a powerful rite attractive to both cultists and Christians.

  It is perhaps possible to catch a glimpse of another element under construction in the case of the resurrection. The Didache might be expected to mention the redemptive resurrection of Jesus but does not do so. The earliest document in the New Testament to describe the resurrection is again a Pauline epistle, his first letter to the Corinthians. He says that Jesus, after his resurrection, “was seen of Cephas [the apostle Peter], then of the twelve: After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep. After that, he was seen of James; then of all the apostles. And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time.”200 The letter was probably written in A.D. 49 or 52.

  Paul, certainly on his own behalf, is describing a vision of a spiritual resurrection, and he makes no distinction between the form of his own experience and those he attributes to others. But by the time of the gospels, two decades or more later, the spiritual resurrection described by Paul had been solidified into a bodily resurrection, possibly to quench objections from Jews who criticized the idea. The treatments of the resurrection in the gospels bear some indications of being later additions to the main texts.

  Mark, the earliest gospel, seems to have been written after the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. Mark and an inferred lost document, known as Q, are the principal sources for Matthew and Luke, both of which were probably written between 70 and 100. Mark is therefore the second earliest source after Paul for the events of Jesus’ life. Most scholars are agreed, however, that the last 12 verses of Mark, which describe Jesus’ appearance to his disciples after his death, are a later addition. Of its 163 Greek words, 19 do not occur elsewhere in the gospel, suggesting it is by a different author.

  The status of the last 12 verses, Mark 16:9—20, also worried Eusebius, the first historian of the early church and a critic who influenced the selection of books that were to be accepted into the New Testament. The authentic text of Mark seems to end after the first 8 verses of chapter 16, which relate how Mary Magdalene and others visited Jesus’ tomb, only to find it empty except for a young man who told them Jesus had risen and would be seen in Galilee. Eusebius, writing at some time between 290 and 340, was aware that some versions of Mark contained the extra 12 verses and some did not. The latter, he said, were the more accurate. “The accurate copies, at least, fix the end of Mark’s account at the conversation with the young man.... It is in effect at this place that the end has been marked in almost all the copies of Mark’s gospel; the things which follow, which are transmitted by some rare copies, and not by all, could be superfluous....” 201 The tradition of the early church held that Matthew was the earliest gospel, which is why it is placed first in the canon. Eusebius, who would presumably have considered Matthew to be the prime source, may therefore not have realized the significance of Mark’s testimony to the resurrection. For if so striking an event goes unmentioned by the earliest gospel, it has perhaps less credibility in later ones.

  Christianity is a complex set of beliefs and practices. There is little reason to think that all are necessarily drawn from a single religious tradition. The date of Easter coincides with Passover, itself adapted from a spring agricultural festival. The birth of Jesus is celebrated at the winter solstice, the date when devotees of the Roman sun god, Sol Invictus, celebrated the sun’s rebirth.202 Sunday is a day of rest in Christian countries because in 321 the emperor Constantine himself declared it should be so—in honor of Sol Invictus. It seems likely that the early church, with the aim of attracting new followers, may have appropriated some of the beliefs as well as the symbols and ceremonial dates of other religions. The Christian Holy Week and Easter resembled the Attis cult’s Day of Blood and the Hilaria, days marking the death and the resurrection of Attis. B
oth festivals had an all-night vigil with lights and were so similar that pagan critics of the fourth century accused the church of plagiarism.203

  Judaism is a religion that generates an extraordinary degree of cohesion. But it was and is confined by its practices to a single ethnic group. The framers of Christianity saw how a mystery cult adaptation of the Jewish religious tradition could be made to transcend Judaism’s tribal boundaries. They succeeded so well that they captured an empire and defined a civilization.

  Origins of Islam

  Two centuries of scholarship have uncovered much of the historical background of Judaism and Christianity. As described above, the steps by which Judaism was molded from a Canaanite agricultural cult into a state religion are reasonably clear. So too is how Paul fused Judaism with elements of the mystery cults to create a powerful new faith, one so attractive that Roman emperors eventually embraced it as a unifying imperial creed.

  Islam, the third great monotheism, has long resisted such analysis. The Qur‘an is presented as a revelation that is not to be doubted. Islamic history includes an explanation of why the Qur’an has no history—the caliph who compiled the canonical version is said to have ordered all earlier manuscripts to be destroyed. Most scholars believe that the corpus of Islamic historical writings, though of varying reliability, holds the essential facts of Islam. Only recently have a few researchers started from the position that all Islamic writings are suspect as historical accounts and that the historical origins of Islam first must be sought in non-Islamic sources.

  The documentary evidence for the origins of Islam consists of the Qur’an; the interpretations of it, known as Tafsir; the Sirah, or lives of Muhammad that also record the development of the Islamic state; and the Sunna, statements that justify points of Islamic law, together with the Hadith, or sayings attributed to Muhammad. Textual analysis of these documents has lagged behind that of the Old and New Testaments, and Western scholars have differing views on the degree of historical weight that should be accorded to the corpus of Islamic writings.