by Tom Bissell
By the mid-60s, several hammers had fallen on the Jerusalem church. James the brother of Jesus, the Jerusalem church’s leader, was killed by Temple authorities around 62. The Jewish revolt against Rome began four years later, and Jerusalem itself was largely destroyed in 70. According to Eusebius, “after the martyrdom of James and the capture of Jerusalem which instantly [sic] followed,” the surviving members of Jesus’s original circle of followers, including his brothers, fled across the river Jordan “and settle[d] in a town in Peraea [Jordan] called Pella.” The historicity of the Pella flight is disputed, but it is known that many Jewish Christians took refuge in various cities and towns within Jordan and Syria following the Jewish revolt against Rome. Some Jewish Christians evidently remained there after Simon, according to tradition, led the church back to Jerusalem in the mid- to late 70s.
The first Christians, all of whom were Jews, did not refer to themselves as Christians. They were apparently known to outsiders as Nazarenes and initially referred to themselves as “followers of the Way.” The phrase appears many times in Acts (“so that if he found any who belonged to the Way”; “He had been instructed in the Way of the Lord”; “some stubbornly refused to believe and spoke evil of the Way”) and may be related to certain sayings of Jesus’s that stressed the importance of traveling through narrow gates rather than wide ones: “For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life; and there are few who find it” (Matthew 9:14).
The astonishing speed with which “Nazarene” or “Nazorean” vanished from Christian use is puzzling, though its Semitic roots were never fully extirpated: even today, the word for “Christian” in Arabic is Nasrani. Yet for those Christians living only a few hundred years after Jesus, “Nazarene” had become a confusing, vaguely threatening term. The fourth-century bishop Epiphanius, for instance, related the story of the Jerusalem church’s flight to Pella after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and described the descendants of those Christians as belonging to a sect he called Nazoraioi, or “Nazarenes,” all of whom he regarded as apostates, despite his admission that “all Christians were called Nazarenes once.” In other words, incredibly, the Christians Epiphanius recognized as having clear historical ties to the original followers of Jesus were condemned by him as heretics. Not every church father was as unkind to the Nazarenes as Epiphanius, and some, such as Jerome, showed measured interest in the sect. The great historical irony is that the Nazarenes, as best as can be reconstructed, were, aside from their continued observance of Mosaic Law, proto-orthodox Christians and, according to Jerome, did not regard the Pauline mission as a mistake, even though many other—indeed, probably most other—Jewish Christians did.
What likely poisoned the Nazarenes’ reputation were various schismatic developments within Jewish Christianity itself. In time, there would arise in Jordan and Syria—where the Nazarenes had fled and taken root—Christians known as Ebionim or Ebionites, which means “the poor.” This was a term used in Psalms for the persecuted; it was also an apparently accurate descriptor of these Christians’ perceived liquidity. According to Epiphanius, the Ebionites had become impoverished by money-sharing practices similar to those depicted in Acts. Epiphanius did not believe any of this and, like Tertullian before him, attributed their beliefs to their teacher, a man named Ebion, who, unfortunately for this thesis, did not exist.
While Christians calling themselves Ebionites held varying beliefs, a large group of them appear to have used a gospel known by multiple names in antiquity, from The Gospel of the Ebionites to The Gospel According to the Twelve Apostles, which was narrated by the apostles themselves and of which no complete copy survives. These Ebionites appear to have denied the virgin birth and been largely vegetarian, going so far as to eliminate “locusts” from the canonical gospels’ itemization of John the Baptist’s diet by changing the Greek word’s first letter, thus turning “locusts” into “honey cakes.” These were the most anti-Paul and radical Jewish Christians, and eventually their beliefs drifted into something that barely resembled Christianity at all.
Unfortunately for the Nazarenes, “Ebionite” appears to have become the accepted designation for any Jewish Christian after the second century—“a catch-all,” in the words of the scholar Ray A. Pritz, “for Law-keeping Christians of Jewish background.” Somehow, these direct inheritors of Jesus’s message managed to become, by the fourth century, proclaimed enemies of the Christian church—and not only the Christian church. According to Epiphanius, even Jewish children hated the Nazarenes: “The people also stand up in the morning, at noon, and in the evening, three times a day[,] and they pronounce curses and maledictions over them….Three times a day they say: ‘May God curse the Nazarenes.’ ”
The New Testament thus achieves a curious distinction. It chiefly describes the growth and consolidation of a Jewish sect whose original name was forgotten, confused, and finally traduced, its descendants brushed aside as heretics. The Law itself became a powerful taboo for Gentile Christians, thus proving the worst fears James the brother of Jesus held about Paul’s mission.
There are indications of this patently bizarre trajectory found within the New Testament itself. The Gospels According to Mark and John frequently attack any vestigial loyalty to Jewish Law. John’s relatively late composition date—probably the late 80s, possibly the early second century—can be seen by how remote the struggle over the Law now seems to its author. John’s Jesus speaks of “the law of Moses” and, more strangely, “your law.” Perhaps the most telling moment in John’s gospel occurs when Jesus confronts “the Jews who had believed in him.” Jesus tells them, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples….I know that you are descendants of Abraham; yet you look for an opportunity to kill me, because there is no place in you for my word.” On hearing this, the Jews who once believed in Jesus try to stone him, because Jesus has just claimed he existed before Abraham and, thus, the Law itself. This could easily have been interpreted as blasphemy, the penalty for which was, often, stoning. The “Jews” John attacks in his gospel are believers in Jesus. But by the time of John’s final stage of composition, all of those who knew Jesus were dead, and the warmth or tolerance that Christians of different understandings were once willing to show one another was no more.
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*1 A notable exception occurs in the gospels of Matthew and Mark, when Jesus wanders into the non-Jewish territory of Tyre and heals the deranged daughter of a “Syrophoenician” woman whose cutting sense of humor evidently pleases Jesus.
*2 How familiar was Luke with Paul’s letters? Amazingly, this has never been adequately determined. Plausible scholarly arguments have been mounted that Luke (a) knew the letters intimately, (b) did not know them at all, and (c) knew a handful of those familiar to us and possibly some that have been lost.
*3 The word translated in the New Testament as “church,” ekklesia, means “assembly.” Drawn from secular Greek political vocabulary—it was used to indicate a democratic town meeting during the high point of Athenian democracy—the word appears in the gospels only twice, both times in Matthew. It is thus with great caution that scholars speak of a “Jerusalem church,” which creates in the minds of modern readers a number of associations that are semantically untenable and historically misleading. Here it is used to describe nothing more than a community of more or less like-minded believers who share some form of ritual observance. Closer to the end of the first century, there definitely was something that could be described as the Palestinian church, emphasis on church, and it likely descended from Jesus’s original followers in Jerusalem.
*4 This is one of the most historically important admissions Paul made. Throughout his letters, Paul claims there is but one gospel. But in calling Peter the apostle to the circumcised, Paul is acknowledging the existence of another gospel.
*5 The titles he does use, such as diakonos, are disputed, and there is little scholarly agreement about what those who held these titles were expected to do.
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br /> *6 The omnipresent importance of this issue can be seen by how often it comes up in early Christian literature. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul ties himself into a rhetorical square knot trying to find a reasonable position. He says to “flee from the worship of idols” (that is, do not eat pagan meat), because “pagans sacrifice…to demons and not to God.” He then announces, seemingly definitively, “You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons.” Backpedaling mightily, he then says, “If an unbeliever invites you to a meal and you are disposed to go, eat whatever is set before you without raising any question on the ground of conscience.” Paul, for all his gifts, must have been a triumphantly confusing teacher.
*7 Ancient Christians had an equally difficult time grappling with the implications of this divide. In an obvious attempt to sidestep the issue, Clement of Alexandria and Origen argued that the Cephas with whom Paul crossed swords in Galatians was not the apostle Peter at all. While Jerome believed Cephas and Peter were the same person, he agreed with one aspect of Origen’s argument: the debate between Peter and Paul was simulated to smoke out those Christians still ritualistically inclined toward Judaism. The explanation horrified Augustine, who politely but sharply requested that Jerome “provide us with some rules for discerning when lying is expedient and when it is not.” When Augustine’s letter finally reached him (one or more intervening letters between the men have been lost; their epistolary debate seems to have lasted many years), Jerome somewhat breezily admitted he had “dictated to my amanuensis sometimes what was borrowed from other writers, sometimes what was my own, without distinctly remembering the method, or the words, or the opinions which belonged to each.” More lost and delayed letters passed between the two—the contents of which were often made public, to Jerome’s anger and Augustine’s sincere embarrassment—but Jerome, with more than a teaspoon of sophistry, held to his position on Galatians. While he and Augustine closed the matter on fairly good terms, most scholars give the argument to Augustine on merits.
*8 Some scholars have challenged the notion that most first-century Jews automatically regarded Gentiles as ritually impure. As in most mixed societies, the demands of religious mandate were erratically chipped away by the niceties of individual experience. Several books of the Hebrew Bible, in fact, incorporate Gentiles into their apocalyptic scenarios, sometimes subjugating them to Israel but sometimes deigning to include them within God’s salvific plan.
*9 The historian Diarmaid MacCulloch notes that Paul’s belief in the universality of Jesus’s deliverance might have been fed by the fact that Paul was a citizen of the Roman Empire, a civilization whose “sense of racial exclusiveness” was uniquely lax. How Paul became a Roman citizen is yet another of the New Testament’s mysteries, though many suspect that his citizenship derived, in some way, from his father, who might have been a slave who achieved manumission.
*10 As for Paul’s remains, they are today purportedly held within a Roman basilica called Saint Paul Outside-the-Walls.
*11 Paul might have reasoned that a fine way to stay on the Jerusalem church’s good side was to keep the tithes coming. Paul’s agreeableness here resulted in his and the Jerusalem church’s actively working together. One of its representatives, Silas, traveled with him to Greece; at Philippi, according to Acts, they were publicly beaten by local magistrates. Unfortunately, during their travels, Silas apparently encouraged the same careless, end-of-days communalism that had landed the Jerusalem church in such woebegone straits. Later, Paul patiently tries to instruct the Thessalonians out of this mess, urging them with his stolid tent-maker logic “to work with your hands, so that you may…be dependent on no one.” This was his first letter to the church. Apparently, it did little to solve the problem, for the second letter to the Thessalonians is much blunter: “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.”
PHILIP & JAMES SON OF ALPHAEUS
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The Church of the Holy Apostles: Rome, Italy
THE CAPITOLINE • SANTI APOSTOLI • FATHER DARIO • THE LITTLE • MANY JAMESES • LOVER OF HORSES • WAITING TABLES • INSIDE THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY APOSTLES • THE LETTER OF JAMES • THE ACTS OF PHILIP • THE WELL OF THE MARTYRS • A TENNESSEAN
I.
A fine vantage point to see Rome, I was told, was from atop the highest stair of the Victor Emmanuel Monument on the Capitoline Hill. One afternoon, on my way to the Church of the Holy Apostles, I headed up there. Soon spread out before me was a pine-splashed stonescape of dune-brown and sodium-white buildings squatly penitent among the higher domes and cross-topped steeples. Deep rivers of shade filled the narrow streets.
At the base of the Capitoline Hill was the Piazza Venezia’s forbidding roundabout. Tourists scrambled across the zebra-striped crosswalks, half the cars not bothering to slow down. Via del Corso, one of Rome’s most storied streets, was just beyond the Palazzo Venezia, at the piazza’s northern edge. Down the Corso I went, looking for a cross street called Via Santi Apostoli. I knifed through the quickly forming, quickly closing holes in the crowds, past the tourists licking their gelati into little globes as small and cold and colorful as outer-rim planets and around the Italian businessmen in their fine suits and flowery ties swinging their briefcases like battering rams. The hard right turn I finally took onto Via Santi Apostoli was not unlike stepping from a storm into a cave: the street was silent and empty. On the right, past the café, was a health club and something called the Time Elevator Roma, an Epcot-esque motion-simulated roller-coaster ride through various Roman epochs. The door to Time Elevator Roma was affixed with a bizarre sign, at least by Roman standards: OPEN EVERY DAY.
The small and cobbled Via Santi Apostoli ended at the Piazza dei Santi Apostoli, a long, narrow municipal rectangle bordered by mostly characterless buildings. Santi Apostoli, or the Church of the Holy Apostles, stretched along the piazza’s eastern edge. It was one of Rome’s older churches, founded perhaps as early as the sixth century, but its various reconstructions and restorations had diminished its ecclesiastical appearance. It looked, more than anything, like some minor baronial residence. Behind the roof’s marble balustrade stood statues of the Holy Apostles themselves, but the marble had gone pitted and soot colored, ceding the apostles the tragic look of partially melted snowmen.
The exterior of this handsomely dull basilica suggested little of its impressive pedigree. The great Italian sculptor Antonio Canova had one important early work inside the church and another outside on its portico; Michelangelo had for a time rested here in state before his body’s transfer to Santa Croce in Florence. The original sixth-century church was destroyed by an earthquake in the mid-fourteenth century and abandoned until 1417, when Pope Martin V set out to rebuild Santi Apostoli. Clement XI ordered the church’s next reconstruction in the early eighteenth century. The basilica’s ground-floor arcade featured nine gated arches, all presently closed.
A pink-plastered three-story building next to the church contained both a convent and the offices of Rome’s Franciscan order, whose headquarters the Church of the Holy Apostles provided. The door was open, though the front office was empty and dark. The air was thick with retirement-community smells of intimate negligence: candle wax, plastic flowers, ash. A thin, unsmiling English-speaking nun appeared and asked what I wanted. I told her I had an appointment with Father Dario. What, she asked, was the purpose of my visit? I told her I wished to learn more about the church and its apostolic inhabitants, Philip and James son of Alphaeus, to whom this church had been jointly dedicated fourteen centuries ago. “Are you a historian?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “Usually the historians get their information from us.” With that, she went to summon Father Dario.
It was midwinter, but the church courtyard felt unseasonably warm. An obviously homeless woman seeking charity sat on one of the courtyard’s marble benches. Her thin white socks, having long lost their elasticity, were collapsed little bundles atop her
cheap tennis shoes. Then Father Dario appeared, greeting the homeless woman and me in turn. He was a short pugnacious man in a black V-neck sweater with a black collared shirt beneath it. Violent slashes of black hair marked the backs of his hands and knuckles.
He led me away from the courtyard and into a dark side office distinguished by a wheeled garment rack and a large stained-glass window. The sun passed through the window’s metal-edged panels in diffuse amalgams of color, leaving overlapping quadrangles of red, blue, and orange light on the floor. The sun did not travel far into this room, the rest of which was shadowy until Father Dario turned on his desk lamp.
Father Dario was surprised, he said, when he learned that an American student—I didn’t bother to correct this—had come here to talk to him about Philip and James son of Alphaeus. In fact, he went on, no one had ever come here to discuss the apostles with him.
“Never?” I said.
“No,” he said. “Not once in my six years of service.” With some pride he noted that Philip’s and James’s bodies had been at the Church of the Holy Apostles since 560. “The remains of their bodies,” he quickly clarified. “Minus the liquids.”
He sat at his desk and proceeded to search through its drawers, finally setting out on its tabletop three books, all of which were available for purchase in the gift store: La Basilica dei Santi XII Apostoli, Filippo e Giacomo, Iscrizioni Della Basilica e Convento dei Santi Dodici Apostoli in Roma. They were thin, more like samizdat pamphlets than books.