by Tom Bissell
Those writing in the closest time to James—which provides, of course, no guarantee of historical accuracy—note that he was famous for his asceticism and devotion to the Temple. As Paul’s letter to the Galatians establishes, he was in the habit of sending out envoys to other Christian communities to make sure proper Jewish ritual was being followed. He appears to have had friendly relations with the Pharisees of Jerusalem (in the gospels, Jesus’s frequent sparring partners) and, according to Hegesippus, not only wore priestly (that is, Jewish) robes but prayed in the Temple’s Court of the Priests, where unauthorized intrusion was punishable by death. Contrast this with Paul, who is shown in Acts to undergo ablutions when he entered the Temple, only to be seized by an angry Jewish mob shortly thereafter. At one point in Acts, the Sanhedrin seize and stone to death a Greek-speaking Jewish Christian named Stephen, but afterward its members decide to leave James and the apostles alone. Whether the Stephen story has any factual basis is debatable, but many scholars believe the story accurately reflects tensions within early Christianity. If the Sanhedrin really did decide not to act against Christians under James’s guidance, it could mean a few things. Among the most interesting: they were not perceived as having broken covenant with the Law.
IV.
The identity of Philip is less contentious than that of James, and its ramifications are not nearly as seismic; as a question, however, it is no more settled. Philip was one of only four apostles who came to Jesus with a Greek name.*3 This was not that unusual: by the time Philip would have been alive, Hellenism had been woven into Palestine’s cultural fabric for more than 350 years. Greek culture entered Palestine thanks to Alexander the Great, who defeated the forces of Persia’s Darius III in 333 BCE. According to the scholar Martin Hengel, Alexander’s many but impermanent military victories in the Near East were the beginning of what we now know as “Hellenism,” a coinage of nineteenth-century classical scholarship. Building on Alexander’s victories, agents of classical Greek culture helped create “a common Greek cultural consciousness,” which especially flowered in Greek-conquered lands rife with ethno-tribalism. Rudely introduced to the wider world and shown that their own cultures were comparatively weak, many subjugated Greek subjects were eager to discover this new way of being and thinking. Nevertheless, the arrival of Hellenism in Palestine was viewed as traumatic by many Jews, who had been content with Persian rule for centuries. The Persians had, among other things, allowed the Jews to return home after their exile under the Babylonians, the hated destroyers of the Davidic dynasty.
After Alexander died in 323 BCE, his squabbling generals battled one another for control of the massive empire they had helped bring to heel. Over two chaotic decades, Palestine was marched on or occupied at least half a dozen times by hostile armies, most of them Hellenist in character. In 301 BCE, Palestine fell under the rule of the Ptolemies, a Hellenist dynasty founded by a Macedonian who reinvented himself as a pharaoh and ruled out of Egypt. The Ptolemies would turn out to be some of the least meddlesome rulers Palestine’s people would ever have, though their taxes were exploitatively high. Under Ptolemaic rule, the Torah was first translated into Greek, and many Jews came into familiarity with Greek ways of learning and thinking. Greek became Palestine’s lingua franca, at least in trade, and its means of accounting the world’s weights and distances were quickly standardized.
Ptolemaic rule depended on a Hellenized Jewish intelligentsia, whose appreciation for a more secular, inclusionist worldview had hitherto been unknown in a land of prevailing monotheism.*4 Schools, organizations, and academies promulgating Hellenism rose up all around the eastern Mediterranean. This cultural blending was not mandated or forced by the Ptolemies; Palestine was important to them only because it supplied a buffer from their enemies in Syria. In any case, as wares and merchants from the Mediterranean world began to trickle into a region long isolated by geography and tribalism, many Jews were intrigued and fascinated by what they found. Those who took up Hellenism most fervently were upper-class and aristocratic Jews, and many viewed Hellenism’s cosmopolitan challenges as the best path for the closed, hermetic, Temple-state world of Judaism to take.
In 200 BCE, the Ptolemies withdrew from Palestine due to pressure from the Seleucid monarchy, which, like the Ptolemaic monarchy, had its roots in Alexander the Great’s military command structure. The Seleucids saw Hellenism as the answer to Palestine’s tribal backwardness. Jerusalem would be no longer a religious city-state but a Greek polis. For the first time, thanks to the obtuse Seleucid tyrant Antiochus IV Epiphanes, Greek culture was forcibly imposed on Palestine’s Jews under the name of “reform.” At one point, the Seleucids effectively outlawed strictly interpreted Judaism. Some Jews were force-fed pork, others attempted to hide their circumcision markings, and the Temple itself was briefly, and disastrously, consecrated in the name of Zeus and Baal, the god of the Philistines. The Seleucids underestimated the intensity with which average Jews would respond to all this. In every other land in which Hellenism had taken root, divinities were fluidly subject to cross-cultural trade, substitution, and augmentation. Judaism was the first religion Hellenism had encountered that insisted on proclaiming its truth as antagonistic to all others and which sometimes punished its apostates with death.
In 168 BCE, a group of Jewish revolutionaries led by Judah Maccabee succeeded in winning autonomy from the Seleucids, leading to eight decades of Jewish independence. In 63 BCE, the Romans conquered Palestine and ended Seleucid rule, but the prolonged, mutually fascinated, and often unhappy contact between Jewish and Greek culture had left a deep mark on both: not for nothing is synagogue a Greek rather than a Hebrew word.
In some ways, Jesus himself was a reflection of, and a response to, Hellenism. The recently opened world of Jewish thought gave his followers a new vocabulary, one that allowed them to imagine him as God; this, in turn, led an entrenched and newly radical Jewish conservatism to reject him along the same lines. The historical irony is that Jesus himself was, probably, a culturally conservative Jew. The Seleucids and the Maccabees and Jesus all arrived at the fault line between Hellenism and Judaism from different directions—and, one way or another, all were destroyed by it.
V.
By the first century CE, even Palestinian Jews outside the intelligentsia had begun to bestow upon their children Greek names. The apparent popularity of the name Philip, which means “lover of horses,” might be traced to Alexander the Great’s father, Philip of Macedon.
The traditional view of Philip the apostle is that he was a Hellenist, which is to say a Greek-speaking Jewish believer. Philip was also one of two apostles, along with Peter, specifically noted by early Christians to have enjoyed a wife and children. In the Gospel According to John, we are told Philip is from Bethsaida, “the city of Andrew and Peter.” Philip’s occupation is never mentioned by John, but tradition has generally assumed that Philip was a fisherman like Peter and Andrew. Given the modest soil in which most sects (and cults) have initially grown, it would make sense, sociologically speaking, that many of Jesus’s first followers were friends from the same area and employed in the same line of work.
John is the only gospel to depict Philip’s calling—to provide Philip, in fact, with any activity at all. The day after meeting Peter, John writes, “Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, ‘Follow me.’ ” Philip immediately chases down his friend Nathanael of Cana, whom he tells, “We have found him about whom Moses in the Law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.” Who, many commentators have wondered, is “we”? And why was Philip looking for “him about whom Moses in the Law and also the prophets wrote”? One traditional argument holds that Philip might initially have been a disciple of John the Baptist’s and was in search of the charismatic leader the Baptist supposedly promised was near.
Philip does not appear again until John’s sixth chapter, shortly after Jesus has gone to Jerusalem and angered the Temple authorities by healing a lam
e man on the Sabbath. The act causes enough commotion that Jesus is dogged on his return to Galilee by a “large crowd.” Jesus asks Philip where they can buy enough bread to feed these enthusiasts. Philip replies they do not have nearly enough food to feed the crowd. Andrew quickly points out a little boy with five loaves of barley bread and two fish, which Jesus proceeds to multiply “as much as they wanted.”
In the twelfth chapter of John, we find one of the gospel’s more interesting and mysterious interludes. The time is Passover. Jesus has just raised Lazarus from the dead and ridden into Jerusalem on the back of a young donkey to the exultant “shouting” of Jerusalem’s citizens. The Pharisees, watching Jesus, tell one another, “Look, the world has gone after him!” Others have turned up at the Passover festival, including those to whom John refers as “some Greeks.” These men approach Philip and tell him they wish to see Jesus. Philip consults with Andrew, and after that the Greeks are taken to meet him.
It is unclear whether these Greeks are God-fearing Gentiles (pagans who have taken a hedged-bets interest in the god of the Jews) or actual converts to Judaism.*5 Gentiles were not allowed into the Temple any deeper than its outer court, where women and Jews employed in professions that left them perpetually “unclean” (tanners, for instance) were also relegated. Nothing in Jewish scripture recommended the exclusion of Gentiles from the Temple; it was, rather, indicative of priestly suspicion of the wider world. The rituals and ablutions required for entrance into the Temple would not have surprised Greek God fearers, who had likely cleansed and purified themselves in any number of pagan temples, but the ethnic nature of their exclusion would have come as a great, and unfamiliar, shock.
Whatever the precise religious beliefs of John’s Greeks, they regard Jesus’s intermediary as Philip, a nonentity in the synoptic gospels. Are we to suppose they have approached Philip because of his Greek name? Do they know him from some previous encounter? Or is the author of John making a theological point by allowing Jesus to react welcomingly to some curious Greeks, thereby showing that Jesus is not for Jews alone?
The last time Philip figures in John’s gospel is during the Last Supper, when Jesus announces, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” This statement has since become one of the bases of Evangelical Christianity: only through Jesus is salvation possible. Another explanation for this sentiment—which has echoes in Matthew, Luke, and especially Acts, though its framing is less severe—is that John is putting into Jesus’s mouth harsh, polemical statements traceable to the particular situation out of which John’s gospel was written. When Philip tells Jesus, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is sufficient for us,” Jesus instantly chastises him: “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? If you know me, you will know my Father also.” Philip appears to speak for those in the gospel’s intended community who do not yet understand what faith in Jesus means.
In Acts, a certain Philip, traditionally called Philip the Evangelist, plays an important role in the growth of the church. This Philip comes to prominence shortly after the apostles are flogged in the Temple, at a time when “the disciples were increasing in number” and two groups of Christians are attacking each other “because their widows were being neglected in the distribution of food.” The Twelve, whom Acts pointedly neglects to align with either faction, deal with the food distribution crisis by agreeing that there is too much work and too few people to do it. After noting, somewhat imperiously, “It is not right that we should neglect the word of God in order to wait on tables,” the Twelve instruct their fellow Christians to pick “seven men of good standing” to deal with the food crisis; one of the men selected is Philip. Now, is this Philip the apostle Philip, one of the Twelve? Many early Christian writers (Eusebius, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Polycarp) believed Philip the Evangelist and Philip the apostle were one and the same; today, however, most Christians have abandoned this belief and regard the Philips as different men. The question is whether Luke, the author of Acts, believed they were the same person. Given that he does nothing to differentiate them, it appears Luke believed they were. Whatever the case, Philip the Evangelist travels to Samaria to preach, where he has an encounter with “a certain man named Simon” whose use of magic has previously “amazed” the Samaritans. Simon Magus—as he has come to be known, though Acts never refers to him in this way—accepts Jesus, after which Philip baptizes him. When news of the Samaritans’ acceptance of Philip’s ministry reaches Jerusalem, Peter and John make the seventy-mile journey to visit Philip. As the two apostles are laying their hands on the people, Simon Magus offers Peter and John money for the same ability.*6
Philip moves on, at angelic order, to Gaza. On the way, he encounters a treasury minister, and eunuch, from Ethiopia, whom he swiftly baptizes—the first recorded Christian ministry to a non-Semite. Philip is “snatched away” by the Lord and eventually ends up in Caesarea, where Paul later visits him and his daughters. Philip does not appear again in Acts. According to legend, he left Caesarea shortly after Paul’s visit and moved to Hierapolis with his prophetess daughters, who would themselves go on to play a role in later Christian legends, often as virgins martyred to preserve their chastity.
VI.
Inside the Church of the Holy Apostles, a cylindrically hefty priest was mopping the floor. That the church’s own priests engaged in janitorial duty was a surprise to me. The priest himself did not seem very taken with the idea either: his frown deepened as he wrung out the mop, gathered up his bucket, and headed for another quadrant of shoe-print-clouded marble.
The church’s nave was large even by the impossible standards of other storied Roman churches. The pillars dividing the nave from its two aisles (almost as wide as the nave itself) were the size of small buildings. Three chapels, each with its own suite of wooden pews, lined both aisles, with two more chapels stashed away elsewhere. The light inside the church had a moon-gray heaviness.
The ceiling’s central vault fresco was by Giovanni Battista Gaulli, a friend of Bernini’s more commonly known by his Genoese nickname: Il Baciccia. According to the art books, he was regarded as a master of the technically demanding vault painting. The Triumph of the Franciscan Order, the vault painting I now looked up at, was completed two years before Gaulli died in 1709 but was apparently regarded by specialists as a minor work. The vault painting above the high altar addressed a theme not often seen in such proximity to a church’s most consecrated site: the expulsion of the rebellious from Heaven. This painting, Fallen Angels, by the fifteenth-century painter Giovanni Odazzi, was ambitious and wizardly. Odazzi’s angels were literally falling out of the painting, producing behind them the optical illusion of a painted “shadow.”
The colossal painting behind the high altar, The Martyrdom of Saint Philip and Saint James, was completed in the early eighteenth century to replace a moisture-damaged fresco. The artist, Domenico Maria Muratori, painted very little after this, and little wonder: The Martyrdom of Saint Philip and Saint James was, at forty-five feet high and twenty-one feet across, reputedly the single largest painting in Rome. In the upper left of the painting, a kneeling, youthful James, wearing blue and pink robes, looks to the heavens while a savage, shirtless Hebrew prepares to brain him with a club. In the painting’s lower right, an old, loincloth-wearing Philip is being pulley lifted into position while a rabble jeers him from the base of his cross. From above, an angel rushes down to place the crown of martyrdom on Philip’s head. Adrift around both doomed apostles is the usual swarm of portly cherubs, while behind them looms an opened porthole into Heaven itself—a swirling maw of pink light.
When I had asked Father Dario about some of the discrepancies concerning the identities of Philip and James, he brushed them aside: “There is only one Philip. He died by the cross. And there were only two Jameses: the brother of John and the cousin of Jesus. One died by the sword. One died by the stick.” Reliably Catholic positions, as was Father Dario’s citat
ion of the verse of the Letter of James that held that “faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” James’s words have long lent Roman Catholics comfort against Protestant opprobrium. The letter, which identifies its author only as “James, a servant of God and of Lord Jesus Christ,” has its difficulties from both a historical and a spiritual perspective. Its concerns are overwhelmingly ethical rather than spiritual; Jesus is mentioned only twice. It contains what one scholar describes as “among the best” Greek in the New Testament; at the same time, it is considered the most overtly Jewish Christian work within the New Testament. “For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point,” James writes, “has become accountable for all of it.” The passage is in direct opposition to an important part of Paul’s message (“For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law”), though we need not assume the author of James had read Paul’s letter to the Romans or was attempting to counter him directly.*7 James’s letter is stridently on the side of the poor, the orphan, the widow, the suffering: “Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up; and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven.” Its occasionally harsh tone (“Even the demons believe—and shudder”) is matched by its moments of forgiving understanding (“For all of us make many mistakes”). Even though James anticipates the end-time to a degree greater than most New Testament works, there is a calm at the core of the text that indicates a certain kind of Jewish Christian understanding. James is a dignified letter about a church succumbing to a marginalized, undignified fate—and awaiting its righteous deliverer.