by Tom Holland
The rabbis, rather than dignify the Gentiles who would rob them of their patrimony with a direct rebuttal, opted instead to hold their noses and maintain a dismissive hauteur. “Let a man always flee,” as one of them sniffed, “from what is repellent.”74 Nevertheless, even in their mightiest strongholds, even in the yeshivas, a rising tide was lapping at their feet. The danger signs had long been there to see. Christians were hardly a novelty in Mesopotamia. Indeed, they had originally arrived on its borders around the same time as the first emergence there of the rabbis themselves. Though Paul, back in the age of the apostles, had travelled westwards—to the cities of the Greek world, and to Rome—other missionaries had soon begun to turn their gaze towards the rising sun. The roads of the Fertile Crescent, after all, were quite as open as the sea-lanes of the Mediterranean. Already, by the time of the founding of the Mesopotamian yeshivas, in the early third century AD, there had come to exist, a mere two weeks’ journey north of Sura and Pumpedita, a formidable stronghold of Christian sages—and one that lost nothing in comparison to the schools of the rabbis.
Like Harran, its immediate neighbour, Edessa lay on the fault-line between the rival empires of Rome and Persia; but unlike Harran, which positively revelled in her idolatrous reputation, Edessa was famed among Christians everywhere as the “Blessed City.” Christ Himself, so it was said, had penned a missive to one of her kings. The very document itself was still to be found in the city’s archives: sure proof against scepticism. Nor was that all. Edessa laid claim to an even more sensational souvenir of Christ’s correspondence: His only known self-portrait, painted and sent by Him, so it was said, in response to a royal fan-letter. No wonder, given these indubitable marks of divine favour, that Christians should have believed that Edessa was destined never to fall. Certainly, the protective sympathy extended by her rulers towards the Church had enabled the city to become a veritable hot-house of Christian scholarship. The hymns, and the prayers, and the translations written there would serve to make Syriac, the language spoken by the Edessans, the lingua franca of the entire Christian Near East.
As the rabbis hunkered down inside their own schools, the influence of Edessa was already palpable in the streets that stretched beyond their walls. All very well for the rabbis to meet this challenge with an icy show of silence—but that hardly served to make it go away. A Christian, after all, was likely to have none of the compunctions about converting a Jew that a Jew might have about converting a Christian. Increasingly, in the competition between the two faiths for proselytes, it was clear which one was winning.
Yet mortal though the enmity between the rabbis and the leaders of the Gentile Church had certainly become, it was haunted by paradox. Relations between these two implacable rivals were shaped by a truth that neither could possibly acknowledge: both, in their struggle to define themselves, had need of the other. The more that Christians scorned the Jews as a people unchanged from what they had ever been, clinging blindly and obdurately to the wreckage of a superseded faith, so the more, ironically enough, did it serve to burnish the rabbis’ self-image. Here, from their bitterest opponents, was confirmation of their own most prized conceits: that they were the guardians of a timeless law; that there was no hint of novelty attached to their current project; and that the ancient prophets—Daniel, Abraham, Adam—had all been rabbis exactly like themselves. Christians, however, were not the only ones to have given their foes an involuntary boost. The rabbis, by refusing to engage in open combat with the Christian heretics, were effectively declaring that the minim no longer ranked as even faintly Jewish—and not to rank as Jewish was, of course, to a rabbi, a truly terrible fate. This, however, was not at all how the minim themselves saw things. The only effect of Jewish scorn on a Gentile bishop was to boost his self-confidence, and flatter his pretensions. “Do not marvel,” Christ had declared, “that I said to you, ‘You must be born anew.’ ”75 To the Gentile Church, the sense of itself as a daughter sprung from the womb of a withered and unregenerate mother had become a precious conceit. Just as the rabbis had every interest in dismissing Christians as bastard and unwanted spawn, so did Christians have no less an interest in casting the faith of their Jewish contemporaries as the failed parent of their own. Both, though, were wrong. The relationship between the rival faiths, that of the rabbis and the bishops, was not one of parent and child. Rather, it was one of siblings: rival twins, doomed like Romulus and Remus to mutual hatred, yet bred all the same of the identical womb.76
And there were still places, to the disgust of both rabbis and bishops, where a strong sense of this endured. Three centuries on from the supposed arrival in Edessa of Christ’s letter, and there were few better spots from where to gauge the potentially infinite variety of human belief than “the Blessed City.” To stand on its citadel and gaze around at the horizon was, for a Christian sage, to be conscious of just how various was God’s creation. To the east was the empire of the Persians; to the west, that of the Romans. On the margins of the first, in Khorasan, it was the habit of “a single man to take many wives”; on the margins of the second, in Britain, “many men together take a single wife.”77 The glory of the Christian faith, so it seemed to the scholars of Edessa, was that it provided all of humanity with a means of transcending such differences of custom: of giving people, no matter where they lived, one common identity as the children of Abraham. Yet what was the Christian faith? To lower the gaze from the distant horizon, to look down into the teeming warren of Edessa’s streets, was to doubt that there could be any single answer. There were some Christians walking the city who followed the doctrines of Marcion, and others who denied that Christ had suffered on the cross, and others yet who believed that the four earliest gospels should be read in the form of a single digest. To be sure, there was no lack of Christians either who were proud to account themselves members of a worldwide, orthodox Church—and yet their traditions were no less fiercely local for that. In every Christian community, not just Edessa, the cast of what people believed, and how they behaved, might be influenced by much more than their bishop. The festivals that were held in a city’s streets, the languages that were spoken in its markets, and the stories that were shared around its evening fires: all might serve to influence the character of its Church. This was why, in Edessa and in cities across Mesopotamia, it mattered a very great deal that the Jews were people of flesh and blood, and not mere faceless bogeys. They might be neighbours, colleagues—even friends.78 The Christians of the East, almost without realising it, bore the unmistakable stamp of this. Certainly, to visitors from other Churches, they were liable to appear quite disconcertingly Jewish.
In Mesopotamia, for instance, Christians still refused to eat meat that had not first been drained of all its blood, exactly as prescribed by the Torah.79 They celebrated the resurrection of Christ on a date arrived at by a specifically Jewish method of calculation.80 Even the title by which they habitually addressed their priests—rabban—sounded similar to, and had the same meaning as, rabbi. Granted, none of this implied any sense of kinship between Jewish and Christian leaders. Quite the contrary: the rabbis’ and priests’ consciousness of what they shared only made them all the more determined to draw rigid dividing-lines between their two faiths. Yet, in reality, those dividing-lines were often blurred. In Edessa, for instance, the mutual obsession of Jewish and Christian scholars with one another’s labours bore a particularly spectacular fruit: for the first translation of the Old Testament into Syriac was most likely made, not by Christians at all, but by Jews, who then subsequently converted and made a gift of their work to the Church.81 Yet in truth, to many Jews, it was not always apparent that an acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah did necessarily require them to stop being Jewish. Likewise, among the ranks of Christians, there were many who persisted in obeying the Torah and who regarded Paul, not as a saint, but rather as “a renegade from the Law”82—the heretic of heretics. Some, indeed, saw no contradiction in hedging their bets even more comprehensively by invoki
ng both the One God of the Jews and the Trinity of the Christians simultaneously. “By the name of I-Am-That-I-Am, the Lord of Hosts,” as one particularly all-inclusive curse ran, “and by the name of Jesus, who conquered the height and the depth by his cross, and by the name of his exalted father, and by the name of the holy spirits forever and in eternity …?”83 Well, then, might those who sought to patrol the dividing-line between the two faiths have been appalled. “It is monstrous to talk of Jesus Christ, and yet to behave as a Jew.”84 This assertion had been made by a celebrated saint of the early Church, Ignatius, a man supposedly appointed bishop of the great Syrian city of Antioch by Simon Peter himself; and yet it might just as well have been made by a rabbi. Jewish and Christian leaders alike, both had the same frontier policy: to create a no-man’s land. Both were equally threatened by an open, porous border.
Not, of course, that to plug one was necessarily a simple task. Those who lived in the Fertile Crescent could appreciate this better than most. The line that separated the empires of Persia and Rome did not, after all, follow the course of a natural barrier. Instead, it wound across featureless landscape, and divided peoples who more properly belonged together. Only with muscle, and resolve, and ceaseless effort could such a boundary possibly hope to be maintained. That Edessa, which in AD 216 had been formally annexed by Rome, would still remain, three centuries on, a possession of the Roman Empire, bore witness enough to the ability of the Caesars to hold a line.85 Though Kavad, in 503, would put the city under siege, Edessa would not, unlike Amida, fall. Justinian’s great building programme at Dara, a hundred miles to the east, would serve only to hammer home the point. It took might to maintain a border. Might such as only the master of a mighty empire could command.
Two centuries and more before the time of Justinian, however, neither rabbi nor bishop wielded any such power. Great though the moral authority of both had become among the communities which they claimed to lead, it certainly did not extend to the building of watchtowers, to the manning of a frontier. Jews and Christians, though conscious of themselves as peoples with distinct identities, remained unclear where precisely the border between them lay. Jewish Christians and Christian Jews could still mill across it pretty much as they pleased.
Only a man who could lend to the rabbis or the bishops the full awesome power of a Shahanshah, or perhaps a Caesar, could hope to alter that.
But such a prospect, in AD 300, seemed scarcely imaginable.
Forging a New Heaven
To the rabbis, the notion that a Gentile king might end up a Jew was not inherently a ludicrous one. Nero himself, so it was confidently asserted in the Talmud, had been brought to repent of all his viciousness and become a proselyte. Even more startlingly, one of his descendants was supposed to have been a rabbi—and a particularly celebrated one at that.86 The inherent implausibility of all this did not bother the rabbis themselves a jot. Rather, it served, in their opinion, only to render the miracle of Nero’s conversion the more astounding and edifying. After all, if even a notorious Caesar could be brought to follow the Torah, then who was to say what powerful Gentiles might become proselytes in the future?
Christians too, when they surveyed the kingdoms of the world, lived in hope. Memories of how Jesus had communicated with the King of Edessa were cherished precisely because they seemed to suggest that even great monarchs might be touched by the Holy Spirit. Clinching proof of this arrived in AD 301, when a Parthian king named Tiridates III, lord of the ruggedly mountainous and inaccessible land of Armenia, midway between the Roman and Persian empires, accepted Christ as his lord. Not only that, but he promptly ordered his subjects to follow suit. Since the Armenians had hitherto been devout worshippers of Mihr, this raised a good few eyebrows across Iranshahr, where the Zoroastrian priesthood, ever suspicious of interlopers, had already marked down the “Krestayne” as purveyors of witchcraft. There was, however, in this accusation, more than a hint of a grudging compliment. Not even their bitterest enemies could deny the Christians a quite spectacular success rate when it came to healing the sick. Rabbis, fully alert to what they regarded as the sinister potency of Christ’s name, urged invalids to guard against it, no matter what. The salutary tale was told of one rabbi who discovered, heartbreakingly, that his dying grandson had been restored to health by a magician’s whispering of the name of Jesus over the sickbed—and thereby been denied any prospect of eternal life.87 Christians themselves, of course, furiously rejected any suggestion that their powers of healing might owe anything to necromancy. Rather, the ability of their holy men and women to work miracles, to cast out malevolent spirits and even to defy the laws of nature, was due, in their devout opinion, to the precise opposite: a power derived from heaven. The quite unanticipated acquisition of their first royal convert powerfully confirmed them in this view: for Tiridates had been brought to baptism after being cured of possession by demons. Only the name of Christ had been able to work the exorcism. Only the name of Christ had been able to convince the king that he was not, in fact, a wild boar. No wonder, then, knowing this, that Christians should eagerly have scanned the Shahanshah too for signs of lunacy, or any other ailment, and dared to dream.
Yet the challenge they faced remained a fearsome one. Not even the most proficient exorcist among them could doubt the menace and malignancy of their adversaries. Spirits flung down from heaven at the beginning of time still stalked the earth, hunting human prey; nor had Christ’s triumph over them on the cross wholly broken their grip on the empires of the world. The Persians, in their ignorance and folly, still worshipped fire; while in the teeming cities of the Romans, there was barely a square that did not stand filthy with the smoke of sacrifices paid to idols, and with the perfumes of incense burned in their honour. Christians did not deny that idols, images such as the Palladium, might be possessed of an authentically supernatural power; nor did they doubt that the spirits worshipped as gods by idolators truly existed. But to honour them, no matter how ancient the rites might be and no matter how passionately the Roman people might believe them essential to the maintenance of their empire, was akin to feeding the blood-lust of a vampire. An idol might be the loveliest in the world—and yet how did all its beauty serve it, if not as paint on the scabs of a whore?
Paul himself, arriving in Ephesus, a wealthy city on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, had risked a lynching to press home the point: that “gods made with hands are not gods.”88 A bold thesis to push in Ephesus, of all places: for there stood in the city a temple so beautiful that it ranked as one of the seven wonders of the world. Artemis, the goddess enthroned amid its dazzling gold and marble, was a deity no less virginal or powerful than Pallas Athena—but Paul had been nothing daunted. True to form, he had refused point blank, even in the shadow of one of the holiest places in the entire empire, to make allowances for the sensitivities of those who worshipped there, or to compromise in the slightest with their convictions. As a result, not surprisingly, he had provoked a riot and almost been torn to pieces. A few years later, his continued refusal to renounce Christ had resulted in his execution by Nero in Rome.89Peter, and many other apostles, had perished in the same wave of judicial murders. Thereafter, over succeeding generations, many other Christians, prosecuted by the imperial authorities for insulting the gods who had supposedly made Rome great, had likewise opted to pay the ultimate price—and joyously so. After all, by doing so, they could share in the suffering of their Saviour. To be baptised anew in one’s own blood was to be cleansed of every last taint of sin. The souls of those who died for Christ, ascending from the reek and shambles of the killing ground, were assured of eternal life. Nor was that the limit of their rewards—for the more spectacular their sufferings, so the more did they draw attention to the glory of Christ and His earthly Church. Each one perished as a “witness”—martyr, in Greek.
A point, unfortunately, entirely lost on the majority of their audience. Nothing quite like the relish of Christians for dying in the cause of their God had ever been
witnessed before. When martyrs were made “to run the gauntlet of whips, or to be savaged by wild beasts, or to be roasted in iron chairs, so that they were suffocated by the reek of their own flesh as it cooked,”90 the watching crowds were rarely impressed. Why should they be? A god best displayed his power by protecting those who worshipped him, not by demanding their deaths. The Romans knew this better than anyone. Because they had known how to bind themselves—religare, in Latin—to the gods, by offering them their due of sacrifices and respect, the gods had in turn bound themselves to the Roman people, and granted them all their greatness. It was this same bond—this “religio,” as the Romans termed it—that the superstition of the Christians appeared so grievously to threaten.91 The martyrs’ obduracy in the face of death struck the vast majority of their contemporaries as neither admirable nor heroic but as a sickness—the mark of deviant minds. It was also why, amid the agonies of Rome’s near collapse in the third century, the imperial authorities turned on the Christians with an escalating ferocity, in an attempt to appease the self-evidently angry gods, and purge the empire once and for all of the enemy within. “For it was our aim,” as one emperor put it, “to set everything right in accordance with the ancient laws and public discipline of the Roman people, and to ensure that the Christians too, who had abandoned the way of life of their ancestors, be returned to sanity.”92