by Tom Bissell
Beside me, a young Indian man was scanning that day’s Chennai Chronicle, the water from his hair plinking loudly on the newspaper. I read the gossip page over his shoulder about some reality television star’s recent impregnation by an English soccer player. It was comforting, somehow, to know Indian gossip pages were as abominable as everyone else’s. He turned to the local news. Last night, an Indian filmmaker’s daughter had fallen to her death only a few blocks from my hotel. The article made clear that falling off roofs was a problem for partying Indians. It had happened before and would happen again. The young man turned to world news. President Obama, who recently visited the country, had told the Indian Parliament that India was not emerging; India had emerged.
The world outside the window of the hair-removal clinic looked neither emerged nor emerging. It and its rivers of floating garbage looked devastated, Noachian, especially when a small car floated by the window, down the street, turning slightly clockwise, its two male passengers smiling hopelessly. My Lord, I thought. My God.
* * *
*1 Some traditions record this look-alike disciple not as Thomas but as James son of Alphaeus, who (as we have seen) has his own complicated and potentially fraternal relationship to Jesus. According to Mark, Jesus was a tekton, like his presumed father Joseph. A tekton could denote anyone who worked with his hands, but Christian tradition evolved in such a way that tekton became synonymous with “carpenter.” This tradition affected Thomas, whose symbol became the carpenter’s square rule, though later Indian legends depict him as an architect of some kind. Thomas the carpenter might thus have grown out of the heterodox notion that he and Jesus were twins believed to have worked the trade of their earthly father. Two pseudonymous infancy narratives about Jesus are credited to Thomas and James, and these texts might have their origins in the hope that “Judas Thomas” and James, as Jesus’s brothers, would be regarded as convincing eyewitnesses to his boyhood.
*2 Most scholars reject John as having any familiarity with Matthew, so Doubting Thomas was probably not the former’s attempt to vivify the latter’s mention of doubt among the Eleven. It is, however, highly likely that both stories grew out of the same core tradition—that some among Jesus’s earliest followers doubted his resurrection.
*3 The Book of the Resurrection, which is attributed to Bartholomew, provides the reason for Thomas’s absence from the locked room in John: Thomas was raising from the dead his own son, whom he promptly installs as a bishop in his local church. From there, Thomas travels back to his fellow disciples on a cloud. A more sophisticated Christian exegete such as John Chrysostom explained Thomas’s absence by saying that God had arranged for him not to be there. The offering of his wounds was part of Jesus’s plan to prove the reality of his resurrection, though one would think that Jesus’s not being dead would stand as an equally persuasive piece of evidence.
*4 The second-century anti-Christian writer Celsus was apparently aware of Paul’s teaching on this issue, to which he issued a stern, professorial rebuttal: “All animals have a single common nature; this nature passes through changes and subsists in many different forms, returning in the end to what it originally was; yet no product of matter is immortal.”
*5 There are some extremely old stone crosses in Kerala, where Thomas is supposed to have begun his missionary activity. A few are older than many extant Hindu sculptures in the same region. However, they do not date back to the first century.
*6 And not just Indian Christians. The scholar Robert Eric Frykenberg, after summarizing some of the legends behind Thomas’s missionary activity, writes that it is “entirely plausible to conclude that such events might have involved the Apostle Thomas himself.”
*7 These modest success stories eventually gave rise to the medieval legend of Prester John, who was said to rule a fantastical Christian kingdom in the middle of the Orient replete with a fountain of youth, a mirror that allowed the viewer to gaze upon any region in the world, and the palace of the patriarch of all Thomas Christians.
*8 Greek overtook Aramaic as Christianity’s lingua franca shockingly quickly. Many later Greek- and Latin-speaking Christians thought poorly of Jesus’s linguistic descendants. When Jerome tried living in Chalcis among Syriac-speaking monks, he referred to their language as “barbarous gibberish,” even though Syriac was widely spoken among Christians outside the Roman Empire. Indeed, Syriac served as the literary and liturgical language of most “Eastern” Christians, whether Syrian, Babylonian, Persian, or, later, Chinese and Indian. It remains the liturgical language of several Christian sects today, including Lebanon’s Maronite Church.
*9 He might also be related in some way to Caspar (also known as Gaspar, Gathaspa, Jaspar, and Jaspas), one of the “three wise men from the east,” who, in the Gospel According to Matthew, uses a star to seek out the birth of Jesus. (The names of the Magi are not provided by Matthew, however, and apparently derive from a Greek manuscript probably composed in Alexandria around 500 CE.) A question not often asked: What on earth are these thuriferous and presumably Zoroastrian wise men from Persia even doing in the New Testament? The scholar Martin Hengel refers to the Magi’s prominence in Matthew as a vestigial mark of Hellenistic respect for “the mysterious, age-old wisdom of barbarian peoples…from whom answers were sought to questions of life which remained inaccessible to rational thought.” In later Christian stories, Thomas became a kind of guided missile toward these archetypal wisdom lovers. John Chrysostom approvingly noted the legend that has Thomas coming across the Magi in Persia and baptizing them.
*10 In various legends, Thomas assumes care of Mary’s holy girdle as she is being taken up into Heaven from the Mount of Olives. In one version of the legend, Peter expresses some surprise that Thomas has been so honored with Mary’s garment, for Thomas was “always unbelieving” in life. Today Mary’s girdle is supposedly housed in Prato, Italy.
*11 Until the Middle Ages, Thomas’s feast day was typically celebrated, by Christians as early as Jerome, on December 21. As Glenn W. Most points out, July 3 is literally “as far from Jesus’ birthday as the calendar permits.” Most believes this feast day shift indicates a possible calendrical squelching of the ancient belief that Thomas and Jesus were twins, as December 21 and December 25 might have been too temporally close for Orthodox comfort.
*12 Which was largely destroyed by German troops during World War II—on December 21, Thomas’s former feast day!
CHRISTOS: ON JESUS CHRIST
* * *
ANOINTED ONE • “RECONCILING THE WORLD TO HIMSELF” • ANOTHER JESUS • ADOPTIONISM • LETTER TO THE HEBREWS • LAST WORDS • “ONCE HE WAS NOT” • THE CREED • ON THE INCARNATION • JULIAN THE APOSTATE • “THE SUN IS NOT PRIOR TO ITS LIGHT” • THE BEST MINDS
I.
The moral teachings of a man named Jesus are not, and never have been, the defining component of Christianity. Some of what Jesus had to say was striking, certainly, but other ancient ethicists said similar things. Jesus compelled his followers to turn the other cheek, but, as Socrates told Crito, “We should never take revenge and never hurt anyone even if we have been hurt.” Putting aside any question of their originality, Jesus’s moral teachings were often highly impractical. As the scholar Paula Fredriksen notes, “No normal human society could long run according to the principles enunciated in the Sermon on the Mount.” This is probably why, to be considered a Christian by most Christians, you must accept that Jesus was the Messiah; that he rose from the dead; that he was, at the same time, both man and God; and that his death had immense cosmic significance.
All of these postulations are somehow contained in the roomy word “Christ,” a transliteration of the Greek word christos, which is itself a literal translation of the Hebrew word meshiah. In its original Jewish context, meshiah meant “anointed one.” Neither a mystical nor a cosmic appellation, meshiah is applied liberally to kings throughout Jewish scripture—even to the pagan Cyrus in Isaiah 45:1—and hinged on what one scholar describe
s as “the continuing approval of the people.” For the everyday Greek speaker of the first half of the first century CE, christos was the word used for “ointment.” How these Jewish and Greek concepts fused and came to stand for the inexplicable presence of an intervening God among his earthly creations was, unsurprisingly, a complicated process.
For even the most proto-orthodox-minded early Christians, the philosophical conundrums posed by Jesus Christ were profound. How could the divine descend into the human while remaining unaffectedly divine? Exactly what part of Jesus was divine? How could the Son of God also be God? What use was Jewish scripture in describing or anticipating Jesus Christ? Why was Jesus Christ necessary, and what did his death actually accomplish? How can God’s love for us (or his son) be expressed through torture? In the first and second centuries, not everyone who posed these questions came to similar conclusions. Some who considered themselves sincere, right-thinking Christians believed that Jesus Christ was not and had nothing to do with the god of the Jews; that he was solely human; that he was solely God; that the “god” inside him was merely a spirit sent to the earth by God; that he was never really crucified; that he was crucified but did not suffer.
That Jesus’s original followers never called him “Jesus Christ” while he was alive is a near certainty, or as close to a certainty as conjecture about the first century allows us. When exactly Jesus became “Jesus Christ” in the minds of his followers is not known, but it happened very early in the Christian tradition, as Paul’s letters confirm. The synoptic gospels almost always precede Christos with the definite article: “the Christ.” For John and Paul, it is less of a title and more akin to a proper name.
Difficult philosophical questions arose once Jesus became Jesus the Christ, much less Jesus Christ. The first, which the gospel writers endeavored mightily to answer, was how worshipping Jesus Christ maintained continuity with the god of the Jews. The second, which carried Christian thinkers deep into the third century, was whether God and Jesus Christ were one God. The third, which occupied Christian thinkers until the fifth century, was exactly how God and Jesus Christ were one God. It says much about Christian tenacity that these questions were eventually answered to the satisfaction of most Christians—and much about the opacity of scripture that the answers were so long in coming.
II.
The earliest chronological mention of Jesus’s death occurs in 1 Thessalonians, which was written by Paul around 50 CE, probably in Corinth. In this epistle, Paul assures his audience that they have “suffered the same things from your own compatriots as they did from the Jews, who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out.” That the Jews, rather than the Romans, are identified by Paul as having been chiefly responsible for the death of Jesus means that corporate Jewish guilt was resonantly part of the Jesus tradition from the beginning. Yet Paul also writes how those in Thessalonica who “grieve” after “those who have died” must take heart, for “since we believe that Jesus died and rose again…God will bring with him those who have died.” This is a frankly astounding thing to declare about someone who had died less than twenty years before. Martin Hengel has written that within the first twenty years after the death of Jesus more happened in Christology “than in the whole of the next seven centuries.” This is debatable, but Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians is obviously reflective of this early Christological earthquake.
If Paul’s own testimony is accurate, he understood Jesus, a little over a decade after Jesus’s death, as the single-named entity “Christ,” “the Son of God,” and as one who had “died and rose again.” According to 1 Thessalonians, Paul had already been all over Greece and Macedonia preaching this Jesus, and he included in his preaching an ominous promise that “the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night,” which Paul believed would happen relatively soon. Where Paul picked up these ideas remains an open question—perhaps the open question. As one scholar writes, “The origin of the cult of Christ…is the secret of the earliest Palestinian community.” In 1 Corinthians, Paul claims to preach the same message as the apostles (“we proclaim and so you have come to believe”) while using the occasion to take a shot at the apostles (“I worked harder than any of them”). What seems evident is Paul’s ideas about Jesus were probably not the creation of Paul alone.
One of the most startling Pauline insights into the precise role of Jesus Christ occurs in 2 Corinthians, when he writes, “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself.” What exactly this means has challenged theologians for two thousand years. Other aspects of Paul’s letters are even more mysterious. In Romans, he cites an early hymn that Jesus was “declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead.” Needless to say, the suggestion that Jesus was not yet fully divine until his resurrection is far from the beliefs of what later became Christian orthodoxy. In Philippians, Paul quotes another early Christian hymn in which we learn that Jesus, “though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited.” In 1 Timothy, Paul (or a follower of Paul) cites yet another early Christian hymn, which proclaims, “There is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself as a ransom for all.” Jesus might have been only in the form of God? Jesus mediates between God and humankind? Had Paul given voice to these views in the fourth rather than the first century, he would have been condemned as a heretic.
Early critics of Christianity had a field day with the faith’s initial inability to clearly describe the ultimate purpose of God’s earthly visitation. As the anti-Christian philosopher Celsus wrote, “Now what I should like to know is this: What is God’s purpose in undertaking such a descent from the heights? Does he want to know what is going on among men?…[W]hy does he not simply correct men by his divine power?” A Christian might consider it altogether reasonable that Jesus Christ’s mission and purpose took human beings so long to understand, because his nature and intent were so unprecedented. Yet the professional atheist looking to undermine the purported uniqueness of Jesus can point to a wide variety of echoes. One of the most famous is Apollonius of Tyana, a wonder-working, countryside-wandering ascetic philosopher from Asia Minor who was born sometime between 10 and 20 CE. Apollonius had disciples, taught widely but left no writings himself, and was said to have confronted a Roman authority figure (though, unlike Jesus, he lived to tell the tale). Despite the similarities found in stories told about Apollonius and Jesus,*1 particularly when it comes to miracle working, it is not at all clear in which direction primal influence flows. The first life of Apollonius was not written until the fourth century, and though it clearly collated folktales concerning Apollonius, it might also have been informed by Christian stories of Jesus.
One odd story involving Jesus has him turning up in Jerusalem. While walking the city streets, Jesus began calling out, “A voice from the east, a voice from the west, a voice from the four winds, a voice against Jerusalem and the Sanctuary, a voice against bridegrooms and brides, and a voice against this whole people!” According to the story, the “more prominent” people of Jerusalem—the priests and aristocracy, in other words—were upset by Jesus’s words, seeing in them “some supernatural force.” Jesus was dragged before the Roman procurator and whipped “till his flesh hung in ribbons.” During his torture, Jesus made no statement for himself and was specifically noted not to have cried out in pain. When the procurator questioned Jesus, furthermore, he refused to answer beyond wishing further woe unto Jerusalem. The procurator dismissed Jesus, regarding him as a simple lunatic. Jesus wandered the streets of Jerusalem for seven more years. “Those who daily cursed him he never cursed; those who gave him food he never thanked: his only response to anyone was that dismal foreboding.” According to Josephus, in whose Jewish War this story can be found, the strange, tormented m
an known as Jesus the son of Ananus was finally killed around 70 CE, during the Roman siege of Jerusalem, by a stone projectile launched by a war engine.
Jesus the son of Ananus and the Christian Jesus of the Passion narratives have a few things in common. Both are public troublemakers who wish woe on the Temple. Both are dragged by Jewish priests before a Roman authority figure and flogged. Both remain silent about the charges brought against them. These two Jesuses diverge in other ways—their final fates, obviously, are drastically different—but it bears repeating that the gospels, as a literary form, almost certainly came to be as a reaction to the Jewish War, the Roman destruction of Jerusalem’s Temple, and Jesus’s failure to return as (apparently) promised. After 70 CE, figures like Jesus the son of Ananus were likely familiar to Christians and Jews alike. More than that, the types of people who edited the gospels were probably aware of the work of Josephus—as well as the work of, say, Plutarch, in which we can find a crucified rebel being stabbed with a spear to confirm his death, just as John describes Jesus being pierced with a Roman lance to confirm his death. The synoptic gospels describe an eclipse occurring on the day of Jesus’s crucifixion. According to Josephus, an eclipse also occurred when Herod the Great burned the young rebel Matthias alive in punishment. Matthew tells us that after the crucifixion of Jesus, the tombs around Jerusalem “were opened,” apparently by an earthquake, “and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised.” The historian Lucius Cassius Dio reported that the death of Claudius was heralded by the temple of Jupiter opening up and a shower of blood, and Virgil’s Georgics describes how the death of Julius Caesar caused the Alps themselves to rumble.