Any institution that distances itself from mainstream society has to create its own support systems. As with the pagan “mystery religions,” a ritual of initiation was important, and for this reason the earliest sacrament to receive a form still recognizable today was baptism, firmly in place by the end of the second century. Baptism, which effectively separated Christians from non-Christians, was normally effected after three years of preparation, though many delayed the sacrament much longer than that in the hope of shortening the period between the cleansing of sins and death. (Infant baptism was practised from the end of the second century, but in the third century theologians such as Origen could find no reason for it, as it implied that babies were sinners—which they could hardly be when only a few days old.) The Eucharist was celebrated by those baptized, although it only was much later in Christian history, in the Middle Ages, that the doctrine of transubstantiation was fully elaborated, to be rejected in its turn by the Protestant churches. Christians could only marry other Christians, and it is in fact probable that Christianity spread within kinship or household groups that already had links with each other. Within the communities Christians evolved a strong structure of social support for their members. “We Christians hold everything in common except our wives,” wrote Tertullian in the late second century. It is known that the church in Rome was supporting some 1,500 poor in the middle of the third century, while the community in Antioch was providing food for around 3,000 destitute in the early fourth century. As Christianity grew, this pattern of providing care within the community, backed as it was by specific exhortations of Jesus recorded in the Gospels, was to be extended to the sick and destitute beyond the immediate community.
One of the legacies of Paul was the need for Christians to define the boundaries between themselves and the outside world they so vigorously rejected. (The Book of Revelation, whose author by tradition was the Apostle John of the Fourth Gospel, was vituperative in its condemnation of the Roman empire, symbolized in chapters 17 and 18 as “Babylon, the mother of all the prostitutes and all the filthy practices on the earth.”) It could be argued, as Paul had done, that the coming of the kingdom was so imminent that a commitment to Christ was enough; the only question now was one of waiting until the coming. As late as the fourth century, Macrina, the sister of Basil of Caesarea, made a vow of perpetual virginity because the human race no longer needed perpetuation in view of the return of “her true promised love, Christ.”11 Some insisted, however, that Christian commitment required withdrawal from every kind of material and psychological comfort, even to the extent of leaving city life and social relationships to live in the desert, and facing martyrdom if required. Yet this was not practicable or attractive for the majority of Christians, who could hardly break completely with the pagan world. A compromise response was to create a Christian household, the conversion of the head leading to that of the family and their slaves. Tertullian believed that the traditional structure of the Roman household, with its wealth, slaves and customary obediences, of women to men, children to parents, was ideal for this, although the world was still to be treated as a potential source of contamination, particularly through the lure of sexuality. He worried endlessly as to how far a Christian should collaborate with a world full of idols. 12 It was a common and enduring problem, which appears to have caused tensions within Christian communities. One Christian of the late second century, for instance, complained that his fellow Christians were “absorbed in business affairs, wealth, friendship with pagans, and many other occupations of the world.”13 He, presumably, had rejected them.
It was as a result of the urgent need to define its boundaries and beliefs that Christianity developed sophisticated notions and structures of authority. Authority and Christianity are so intertwined that it is possible to forget how revolutionary a development this was for the Greco-Roman world, where allegiance to a number of different cults could be comfortably sustained. However, the psychological and emotional pressures on many of the early Christians must have been considerable. They had to live up to the demands made on them for moral perfection while isolating themselves from their traditional cultural backgrounds, whether in the Jewish or the Greek world. Jews were already distinguished by their own language, territory, dietary laws and practices such as circumcision, but Christians had no such distinguishing signs. Other religious groups were already adopting Jesus as a divine or semi-divine figure—the influential Gnostics saw him as a teacher able to give gnosis, “knowledge,” to those souls trapped in an evil body, while the followers of theos hypsistos saw Jesus as “an angel of God,” and the Jewish sect the Ebionites as a man who had been elected by God as “a Son” (the moment of election could be either his baptism or his resurrection). So Christians were losing control even of their ownership of Christ.
The development of Christian authority was a twofold process in which a canon of sacred texts, the Old and New Testaments, emerged alongside an institutional structure in which bishops held authority within their communities and also, eventually, claimed the absolute right to define and to interpret Christian doctrine through the scriptures and church councils. The concept of a text that contained spiritual “truths” was accepted in Judaism and in traditional Egyptian religion, but it was new to the Greco-Roman world (there are only a few examples of revered texts, such as the book of the prophecy of the Sibyl used by the Roman Senate at times of crisis). The idea that stories about God and his actions (muthoi) could be frozen in written form and interpreted to make statements of “truth” ( logoi) was alien to the Greeks, and there was to be some resistance to it in early Christianity. It is not until about 135 that we find Christians accepting that written texts had greater authority than the oral traditions surrounding the life of Jesus that had been passed on from generation to generation and could therefore develop, like Greek myths, to meet changing needs.14 Once the concept of a sacred text was generally accepted, the Old Testament based on the (Greek) Septuagint could be adopted more or less entire. The differences between the Septuagint and the original Hebrew version of the scriptures were eventually resolved by Jerome, who separated the so-called Apocrypha, the books found in the Septuagint but not in the Hebrew scriptures, from the rest. The adoption of the Old Testament had the added advantage of giving Christianity an ancient history, thus countering those who derided it as a religion without roots.
The Jews had a long tradition of scholarly interpretation of the scriptures, and their methods were adopted by Christians (the term used for such interpretation, “exegesis,” comes from the Greek word “to explain”). Yet Christian exegetes started out with a very different purpose, seeing the Hebrew scriptures as prophecies of the coming of Christ: for this purpose they found the books of the prophets more fruitful than those of the Law, which were the main areas of study for Jewish scholars. Early Christian exegesis shows considerable ingenuity, but its findings are, to a modern mind, extraordinarily sweeping in scope. Augustine, for instance, was to go so far as to claim that “you will rarely find phrases in the Psalms that do not refer to Christ and the Church.” Christian theologians prided themselves on being able to find meanings in the scriptures that the Jews seemed unable to find and, in fact, saw the skills they possessed as exegetes as another justification for the superiority of Christianity over Judaism.15
It took much longer to complete a canon of early Christian texts (what came to be known as the New Testament), as it involved choosing between a large number of competing texts (including the twenty Gospels already mentioned), which were selected on the basis of their conformity with the evolution of doctrine. The need to define boundaries meant that the process was largely one of exclusion. “The canon was a deliberate attempt to exclude certain voices from the early period of Christianity; heretics, Marcionites, Gnosticism, Jewish Christians, perhaps also women,” writes the Swiss theologian Helmut Koester. “It is the responsibility of the New Testament scholar,” he continues, “to help these voices be heard again.”16 On
the other hand, there still remained considerable diversity and a lack of doctrinal coherence between those Gospels, letters and “revelations” that were selected for the New Testament, and, as we shall see, there proved to be enormous difficulty in using them as an authoritative source for doctrine. Christians themselves had enough problems with interpretation, but non-Christians were also quick to point out inconsistencies, not only between Gospels but between the Old and New Testaments, as well as potentially embarrassing passages, such as the quarrel between Peter and Paul reported in Galatians. Critical analysis of the scriptures by non-Christians did not have to wait until the Enlightenment—it was there from the beginning of Christian history.
While almost all the texts of the New Testament were, as we have seen, written to and for specific, often small, communities faced with particular challenges, they were now assumed to have universal significance and to provide an unrivalled source for doctrine. One result was the gradual rejection of direct revelation. The Montanists, for instance, a Christian sect in Phrygia who claimed to receive messages directly from the Holy Spirit, were formally condemned by synods (local councils) of Asian bishops before A.D. 200. It is perhaps significant that the Montanists had an egalitarian rather than hierarchical leadership structure and that two of their three named leaders were women. The campaign against the Montanists made the bizarre Book of Revelation, reportedly the words of Jesus revealed to John the Apostle, vulnerable—but it was eventually included in the canon, with John given special status as the last of the prophets to be directly inspired by the Holy Spirit. This, in effect, gave the churches control over what was and was not to be accepted as revelation.17
With scripture to draw on and an evolving sense of tradition, the formulation of Christian doctrine gradually took shape. The affirmation of God the Father and Creator, Jesus the Son, whose death and resurrection had raised the possibility of salvation for all who repented, and a Holy Spirit who continued to act as a divine force in the world, formed the core of Christian belief. But the details of such doctrine were blurred, and there were many conflicting interpretations of the status, purpose and relationships between the three divine forces. There was not even a consensus on what salvation meant—the Church Fathers disagreed strongly on who was being saved, from what and for what purpose.18 In short, the diversity of the early Christian experience cannot be overstressed: like spiritual movements in the Greco-Roman world, Christianity fragmented as it spread, and the fragmentation became more pronounced because of the variety of the scriptural and traditional sources on which doctrine could be based. Yet, and perhaps for this reason, the search for authority became more intense and with it came an increasing stress on an institutional hierarchy. An early statement of orthodoxy comes from Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons from 178 to 200. The Adversus Omnes Haereses (to give it the Latin title by which it is normally known, although it was originally written in Greek) is one of the more important documents of the early church. Irenaeus was responding to critics who claimed that the diversity of the scriptures made it difficult to find a coherent message in them and that they should be open to interpretation by individuals. Not so, says Irenaeus. The Apostles knew what the truth was (he assumed that the Apostles were all of one mind), and they passed it down through their successors. Only those in direct succession from the Apostles “have received the sure gift of the truth according to the pleasure of the Father . . . the rest we must regard with suspicion, either as heretics or evil minded.” He was echoed by Tertullian: “wherever it has become apparent that the truth of Christian teaching and faith exists, there will be the truth of the scriptures and of their interpretations and of all Christian traditions.”19 This truth exists only for those in true apostolic succession, in effect, the bishops.
It was Cyprian, bishop of Carthage from 248 until his martyrdom in 258, who made the firmest and most influential assertion of a bishop’s authority. Cyprian was deeply humiliated in the persecution of 251, when the majority of his flock sacrificed to the pagan gods rather than face martyrdom, but he then found that his priests were readmitting the backsliders to the church. As the persecution waned, he called together his fellow north African bishops, who agreed that any readmission to the church could only take place publicly under the direct authority of the bishop through the rite of baptism, and then only after an admission of guilt. Only those who had stood firm could carry out the baptism: a baptism by anyone, even a bishop, who had buckled under persecution was invalid and would leave the “baptized” one “stained and polluted by the unholy water of heretics and schismatics.” In reiterating, in his De Unitate, “On the Unity of the Church,” that only bishops who had resisted persecution had the right to carry out the baptisms, Cyprian stressed the authority bishops had by virtue of their office. “Does anyone who acts against the bishops of Christ think that he is with Christ . . . he carries arms against the Church . . . he fights against the will of God . . . he is an enemy of the altar, a rebel against Christ’s sacrifice.” 20 Cyprian describes the bishop in similar terms to that of a provincial governor, having absolute authority in his province with his opponents described as rebels. This was a crucial stage in the evolution of church authority in that it adopted a powerful terminology of rebellion with which to describe heretics and was part of the process by which any avenues for the making of doctrine outside the institutional church were closed off. Cyprian assiduously built up support among his fellow bishops (some eighty-seven of them at one African synod he called in 256), even receiving support from as far afield as Cappadocia in Asia Minor.
Cyprian was adamant in his condemnation of any who promoted schism, but one was now in the making. On the issue as to whether those who had themselves lapsed could rebaptize Christians, Cyprian, who, as we have seen, believed they could not, embarked on a bitter conflict with the bishop of Rome, Stephen, who maintained that the lapsed clergy retained the power to baptize. The bishops of Rome, as successors of Peter, who, according to tradition, had been martyred in the city, had already tried to insist on their primacy over other bishops and had been supported by Irenaeus’ assertion in his Adversus Haereses that Rome was the see “with which all must be in agreement.” Yet Rome’s efforts had not as yet met with much success: for example, an attempt in the 190s to tell the Asian bishops on what date they should celebrate Easter had been rebuffed. As a result of Cyprian’s influence, Stephen was isolated. Firmilian, the bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, wrote to him: “Cut yourself off you most certainly have . . . since the genuine schismatic is the person who has made himself an apostate from the communion and the unity of the church. While imagining it was in your power to excommunicate everyone, you have in fact succeeded in excommunicating yourself alone, from everyone else!” While by the third century there is the concept of a single church (“He no longer has God for his Father who does not have the Church for his mother,” wrote Cyprian), which through its bishops, its traditions and the scriptures defines orthodoxy, the reality seems to have been very different. The view put forward by Eusebius of Caesarea in the early fourth century, in what was the first detailed history of the church, that it had always been a monolithic institution with a unified faith, easily defensible from the heresies that pestered it, has little historical backing.21
While Christians looked back to the canon of scriptures and to tradition, they also accepted the continuing activity of God in the world in the form of miracles and portents that were effected through the power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit’s earlier role as a revealer of divine truths was, after the suppression of the Montanists, somewhat in abeyance. The Acts of the Apostles are full of miracles (clearly attributed to the Holy Spirit), and in the early Christian centuries the effecting of miracles became a sign that an individual was favoured by God (who was responsible for the miracle itself). So at Ephesus, where Paul had so ignominiously been driven out for threatening the lucrative worship of the goddess Diana, the Apostle John succeeded where Paul had failed by praying in fron
t of her temple, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, as a result of which half the temple apparently fell down and a mass conversion followed (from the apocryphal Acts of John 38–45). Similarly, in Caesarea in the persecution of 305, when a Christian was executed by drowning, an earth tremor was felt and the body was washed ashore. The whole town was so overcome by this apparently unambiguous sign of the wrath of God that they converted en masse.
Stories of the exorcism of demons are particularly prevalent in early Christianity. Demons (who were believed to be the offspring of intercourse between fallen angels and earthly mothers—they had to have an origin later than the creation of the world as God could not have created anything evil) pervade the world of early Christianity. Far from disbelieving in the pagan gods, the Christians saw them as demons who were very much “alive.” Ramsay MacMullen, in his survey of conversions before the toleration of 312, sees the “driving out of spirits and the laying of hands” on those possessed by demons as an essential part of the Christian drama as acted out for non-believers.22 A story about the ascetic Anthony makes the point well, while also reinforcing Paul’s claim that Christians outperformed the philosophers. A group of philosophers had visited Anthony, who proclaimed that the way to show the fruits of faith was to perform a miracle. He called up some local madmen.
The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason Page 19