Apostle

by Tom Bissell

  Mark and Matthew were both attempting a gloss on Psalm 22 of the Septuagint. Many heterodox Christians regarded the passage as an indication that the spirit that inhabited Jesus had left him to die on the cross. Proto-orthodox Christians, on the other hand, understood the words as spoken by a deity who felt forsaken by the burden of taking humanity’s sin onto himself, of reconciling the world to himself. John and Luke, too, mention that at the moment of Jesus’s death a “spirit” was given up, which provided Adoptionists with more theological ammunition. Whereas Luke’s last words seem fixated on making the dying Jesus out to be a respectable, innocently persecuted man, John’s last words subtly and beautifully portray both the despair of Jesus’s death and its glorious, painful accomplishment. Either way, the lack of a coherent intra-scriptural explanation for the meaning of Jesus’s death, much less the makeup of his being, would bedevil Christian theology for centuries.

  V.

  The Lamb of God, the Son of Man, the Word, the Way: as early as can be figured, Christians have thought about Jesus metaphorically. In the early third century, Origen argued that allegory and metaphor were profoundly important Christian tools in interpreting the meaning of scripture. In his Homilies on Genesis, Origen dismissed literalist interpretations of the stories in Genesis as “silly” and described the “stupidity” of literalist Christians as “heavier than the sand of the sea.” To him, the story of Noah’s ark was an allegory for how to survive within a church surrounded by a hostile world.

  Prior to Origen, Christian theology was in a tenebrous place. The prominent second-century Christian writers whose work has survived were primarily polemicists. Origen was particularly instrumental in deepening early Christianity’s understanding of Jesus, to whom he referred as “the image of [God’s] being,” employing a term—hypostasis—with great importance to Hellenistic philosophy but that also helpfully appears in the Letter to the Hebrews. (Hypostasis literally means something like “underpinning” but can mean “beingness” as well.) Origen additionally crafted one of the most brilliant metaphors in the history of Christian apologetics to explain how God and man could coexist in one being: Metal and fire coexist within the tip of a red-hot iron, do they not? Origen loved and worshipped Jesus but was also unsure whether Jesus and the Holy Spirit were as powerful as God. He wrote openly of the Holy Spirit’s being subordinate to Jesus. In Origen’s view, Jesus Christ was born before all earthly creatures but was not co-eternal with the Father.

  Today, historians of religion refer to such a belief system as subordinationism, which envisions a Trinity of divine but hierarchical beings, with God the Father typically sitting on top and a subordinate and less powerful Son (and Holy Spirit) below him. The vast majority of early Christians, including Origen and most of the authors of the New Testament, were either subordinationists or had strong subordinationist leanings. When Origen died of injuries sustained during torture in the persecution led by the emperor Decius in the mid-third century, many Christian thinkers still regarded him as their North Star. But his subordinationist views on the relationship between Jesus Christ, God, and the Holy Spirit were deemed controversial later in the third century, and Origen’s many admirers were forced to back away from (and, in some cases, denounce) one of the most learned, optimistic, and brilliant theologians to ever call himself a Christian. Consequently, most of Origen’s work was destroyed. Of his 574 homilies, only 21 survive in their original Greek.

  The Christianity of the first, second, and early third centuries was not about maintaining theological union among many. It was about accepting the reality of theological federalism. Different Christians in different places used different texts and believed different things. Christianity at this time was largely concerned with principles rather than details. The works that became the New Testament were not selected for the clarity—much less the consistency—with which they explained who and what Jesus was. But a Christianity whose theological details remained in debateful flux had little chance of intellectual or institutional survival.

  As the scholar Edward R. Hardy writes, “The history of theology can be written in large part by the explanation of a series of technical terms.” Christianity holds up a Galilean prophet and transforms him into the Son of God while promising salvation eternal. Its scriptures, unfortunately, speak of such weighty matters confusingly. In the second, third, and fourth centuries, terms sprang up, some hijacked, some coined, some still trailing the contextual tatters of other disciplines behind them: hypostasis, trinitas, substantia, ousia, homoousios, prosopon, persona, homoiousios. This is the language of theological Christianity, yet few of these words appear in scripture.

  Of the many concepts Christian theologians projected into scripture, none was more significant than the Trinity, which has no scriptural basis beyond that which has been detected by desperate exegetical bird dogs. The first Christian to formally propose a formula for the Trinity, and coin the term trinitas, was Tertullian. This occurred roughly 170 years after the death of Jesus. A dour if rigorous thinker, Tertullian displayed little of his contemporary Origen’s curiosity, having come of age in Carthage, in North Africa, the indigenous religions of which were often violently resistant to Christianity. (“With our faith,” Tertullian wrote, “we desire no further belief. For this is our primary faith, that there is nothing which we ought to believe besides.”) Prior to Tertullian, other Christians had used Trinitarian language but not with much philosophical consistency. In Tertullian’s formulation, the Trinity comprised “three persons [personae], one substance [substantia].” To indicate a Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that shared an underlying being while maintaining distinct individual personas, Tertullian used consubstantialis, or “of the same substance.” This idea was within range of Origen’s idea of Jesus’s being the hypostasis of God, but it was not quite the same thing. Nor was substantia quite the same thing as the Greek equivalent of “substance,” ousia, which was a more conceptual, abstract word. Ousia, which derives from the Greek “to be,” transmits a sense of identity; substantia, significantly, does not.

  A number of Greek Christians had already begun to employ ousia to describe their ideation of the Trinity, but the word was first used in heterodox Christian circles and initially feared for that reason. Also, neither ousia nor substantia appears within the New Testament. The paradox of primitive Trinitarian thinking was already pronounced—three beings defined by their omniscient, infinite nature sharing the same “substance” or “essence” defied logic in any language—but scripture’s refusal to provide a vocabulary to talk about what it seemed to be positing presented Christian thinkers with a more or less insuperable problem. Thus, as Christianity journeyed into its fourth century, numerous ideas about Jesus remained within the pale of serious Christian discussion. Subordinationism, meanwhile, continued to field a strong body of support. Without coming to agreement on how Jesus fit into this jigsaw of divinity, Christianity was in danger of becoming another mystery cult vestigially attached to Judaism.

  Some Christians regarded the persecutions of Decius, Valerian, Diocletian, and Galerius, which occupied discrete chunks of the mid-third to early fourth centuries, as proof that internal theological divisions had caused the faith to lose the support of God. But these persecutions, as bad as they were in some areas, were unevenly enforced and most gravely affected Christians in the East, leading to lasting divisions between young and old, between eastern and western believers, and between those who had renounced their faith under torture and those who gladly accepted the lash. Despite Christianity’s theological disarray, the persecutions established the degree to which faith had developed a sturdy framework of hierarchical administration. The future emperor Constantine, whose father, Constantius, had skillfully navigated a complicated system of imperial governance instituted by Diocletian, took intrigued note of Christianity’s organizational sophistication. Also significant was that Constantine’s father had come to regard Christians positively and did little to enforce the Diocletianic pe
rsecution in his areas of administration, which might have further influenced his son’s eventual openness to the faith.

  That Constantine dreamed he saw Christian portents in the sky on the eve of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312, foretelling his victory, as Eusebius later reported, is unknowable. The Christian version of the story does not emerge until a decade after the fact, and coins minted under Constantine’s rule held pagan images until 320. But there is no question Constantine believed the battle’s favorable outcome was due to the auspices of the Christian god. Constantine’s attraction to Jesus Christ seems to have been real, but he probably viewed him as a potential deliverer of order rather than as a guarantor of personal salvation. (The man himself had an unsurprisingly sordid personal life.) Imagine Constantine’s surprise, then, to discover that the seemingly rising faith on which he had staked his rule was rife with internal divisions, all of which became more severe under the spotlight of imperial power.

  In 318, five years after Constantine’s Edict of Milan, which granted Christians the right to practice their faith unmolested, a respected presbyter in Alexandria named Arius began teaching his subordinationist formulation about Jesus: “Once he was not.” Arius believed Jesus Christ was not co-eternal with but rather a creation of God the Father, whose will he enacted on the earth. In this belief, Arius had the backing of numerous passages of the gospels, certain lines within Paul’s letters, and the work of greatly esteemed theologians such as Origen. What would later be called Arianism had much going for it, not the least of which was its philosophical coherence. Arianism’s one glaring problem was that a Jesus subordinate to God was and always would be sideways polytheism.

  Constantine was forced to focus on Christianity’s internal divisions, especially with regard to Arianism, after he became sole emperor in 324, by which time a unified church had become central to his success as emperor. In 325, Constantine arranged transport for hundreds of bishops and presbyters from around his empire, Arius included, and ferried them all to an imperial residence in Nicaea in modern-day Turkey. In so acting, Constantine placed the theology of the church and the goals of the empire on contiguous tracks for the first time.

  At the General Council of Nicaea, Arianism was the main point of discussion, according to the few (and no doubt somewhat distorted) accounts we have of what went on there. Christians had never before gathered together to find theological common ground, and the Arian faction, which was internally divided, found itself outnumbered. (Arius was of too junior a position to formally participate.) Even so, no one could agree on terms. The historian Eusebius, who was sympathetic to Arius, petitioned the council to adopt as a general statement of faith a creed (or confession of faith) that he claimed was used in his native Caesarea:

  We believe in one God, Father, Almighty, the maker of all things visible and invisible.

  And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God, God of God, Light of Light, Life of Life, unique Son, first-born of all creation…

  We also believe in one Holy Spirit….

  [A]nd so I am convinced, and so I have held, and will stand for this faith till death, anathematizing every godless heresy.

  At Constantine’s urging, a newish, non-scriptural, and somewhat disputed word, homoousios (“of one essence,” similar to—but not the same as—the Latin equivalent, consubstantialis, “of one substance”), was introduced into Eusebius’s creed. But enemies of Arius wanted to further isolate the man and his supporters, so the creed had an additional phrase about Jesus Christ inserted into it, “begotten, not made,” and ended with a condemnation of those who “say ‘there was a time when he did not exist.’ ”

  Quite a few of the Christians who chose to publicly accept the new creed were privately unhappy with homoousios, which had hitherto been used in mostly heterodox Christian circles. While the original Nicene Creed*9 solidified the Christian definition of how Jesus and God were the same, it was less successful in accounting for how they were distinct. On top of that, the creed contained no explicit mention of the Trinity. This did nothing to clarify the hitherto ambiguous stature of the Holy Spirit, which the creed mentioned in one sentence. Finally, the Nicene Creed did nothing to challenge Arius’s core point. If anything, it intensified Arius’s core point. How could something begotten not also be made? How could something eternal be begotten?

  A cowed Arius withdrew from church life after his friend Eusebius arranged for him an official pardon, but the debate over Arianism, and “of one essence/substance,” darkened Christianity for decades more. One of the angriest and most vocal opponents of Arianism in all its forms was an ambitious young intellectual named Athanasius, who attended Nicaea under the auspices of his boss, Alexander, the bishop of Alexandria. (Athanasius, who is believed to have coined the term “Arianism,” which he applied liberally to those he disagreed with, later persuaded Constantine to formally excommunicate all self-professed Arians, though that ban was lifted after only two years, again thanks to Eusebius.) What helped Athanasius’s hand after Nicaea was that despite his youth he had already written quite a bit about Christian theology.

  Athanasius, too, lived and taught in Alexandria, though unlike many products of that city’s Christian tradition he resisted any intrusions of Neoplatonic thought into his faith. He was born a few years before 300, just as the Diocletianic persecution began, and had probably seen members of his church tormented, humiliated, and killed. The persecution filled the deserts outside Alexandria with monks, one of whom, the famed ascetic Anthony, Athanasius knew and followed in some capacity, which may explain how quickly he was able to achieve prominence within the Alexandrian church. By the time Athanasius was in his early twenties he had already written a diatribe against paganism, his hatred of which was pronounced even by early-Christian standards. His next book was On the Incarnation, one of the first proto-orthodox works intended to elucidate Jesus’s position within the Godhead.*10

  Athanasius was intent on establishing the eternal nature of the Word, its role in the creation of the world, and its logical continuance in the person of Jesus Christ: “There is thus no inconsistency between creation and salvation; for the One Father has employed the same Agent for both works.” God made us “reasonable” and even lovable creatures, Athanasius goes on, and so, when God discovered us perishing on the earth, his only loving option was to save us, “to bring again the corruptible to incorruption and to maintain for the Father his consistency of character with all. For He alone, being Word of the Father and above all, was in consequence both able to recreate all, and worthy to suffer on behalf of all and to be an ambassador for all with the Father.” This is an interesting piece of theodicy, certainly, but certain questions remain: Why is an all-powerful God not powerful enough to make right what is wrong without the extraordinary intercession of the Son? Athanasius came up with one possible answer: “The death of all was consummated in the Lord’s body; yet, because the Word was in it, death and corruption were in the same act utterly abolished. Death there had to be, and death for all, so that the due of all might be paid.” For a quickly expanding church, this might have seemed an empirically sound position: death for all, and so life for all. Nevertheless, if Jesus Christ redeemed all, why were so many excluded from the grace of his sacrifice by the sheer accidents of parentage and geography? The magical thing Athanasius argued that Jesus Christ had accomplished was not successful even on its own magical terms.

  Finally, Athanasius tackled the contentious question of how human Jesus Christ’s mind was: “The Word was not hedged in by His body, nor did his presence in the body prevent His being present elsewhere as well. When He moved His body He did not cease also to direct the universe by His Mind and might.” A Jesus Christ who wandered the Galilean countryside while simultaneously maintaining the stars’ passage across the sky presents us with a galactic funambulist far beyond anything imagined by Paul or the author of Hebrews.

  Athanasius’s disagreeable and ruthless nature endeared him to few. When Constantine
welcomed Arius back into the Alexandrian church, Athanasius refused to recognize Constantine’s authority; in response, Constantine exiled Athanasius to Trier for a few years to think on his obstinacy. In the late 330s, Athanasius returned to Alexandria and rededicated his public life to addressing Arianism’s mephitic refusal to die. From Athanasius’s perspective, the problems were dire, because the philosophical weakness of the Nicene Creed had led to a revival of Arian thought. Constantius II, who became sole emperor in 351, believed, as did all of Constantine’s sons, that Jesus Christ’s divinity was not equal to that of the Father. This led to several Constantius-sponsored creeds, including one that specifically denounced homoousios and posited a Jesus Christ who had been “begotten before all ages” but was not co-eternal with the Father. These creeds were almost uniformly rejected in the western empire, where Nicene thinking was stronger, in part because the Latin terminology used to describe the Godhead was generally less abstract. In the East, however, the Arian position was strong enough to persuade Constantius to send Athanasius into yet another exile.