The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason

by Charles Freeman

  28. Quoted in Vermes, The Changing Faces of Jesus, p. 105.

  29. Sanders, Paul, p. 2.

  30. Quoted in K. Armstrong, A History of God (London, 1993), p. 115.

  31. For an analysis of Marcion’s thought, see Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition (Chicago and London, 1971), vol. 1, pp. 71–81. It is important to stress the resilience of the Marcionites, as Marcion has been largely obliterated from the Christian tradition. If his approach to Christianity had been adopted, as it might well have been, and the “Old Testament” discarded, European culture would have been severely impoverished—but on the other hand, Christianity might have avoided the debilitating conflict with Judaism over “ownership” of the scriptures (see chap. 10) and been deprived, as Marcion hoped they would, of the model of a warlike and vengeful God that has been particularly influential at specific periods of Christian history. There would also not have been such backing for the destruction of idols, which was to include both pagan and, in the Reformation, Christian art. It was the Greek Septuagint, rather than the Hebrew Bible known to Jesus, which was adopted by Christians.

  32. The argument has to be a complex one (one can as easily find statements in Matthew supporting the Gentiles), but it is the central thesis of D. Sim in his The Gospel of Matthew and Christian Judaism (Edinburgh, 1998), one he argues convincingly.

  33. Quoted in Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 1, p. 24. Sim, in The Gospel of Matthew, leaves himself, of course, with the problem of fitting Matthew’s community back into mainstream Christianity, as Christian Judaism withered and Gentile Christianity prevailed; see his chap. 7: “The Fate of the Matthean Community.” Peter, too, has somehow to be transferred to the Gentile world. Luke achieves this through a message from God in which Peter is commanded to accept the Gentile Cornelius as a Christian and then persuades the other Apostles that the Church should be open to Gentiles (see Acts of the Apostles 10).

  10

  1. There is evidence from Lystra itself that these two gods were, in fact, worshipped together in the city, so the story is plausible. S. Mitchell gives a number of cases of the association between Zeus and Hermes in this very area. At Kavak in the territory of Lystra, a relief has been found showing Hermes accompanied by the eagle of Zeus, while in Lystra itself a stone has been found showing Hermes with a second god, arguably Zeus. A number of other examples have been found in Asia Minor, but, as Mitchell suggests, the concentration in the Lystra area is “highly suggestive and confirms the historical precision” of the episode. It is also interesting that Paul and Barnabas are acclaimed in the local language, Lycaonian (Acts 14:11), as Greek gods, an indication of the superficial adoption of Greek culture by the native peoples of the area. Mitchell goes on to suggest that Paul is referring to this same incident when, in Galatians 4:14, he reminds the Galatians that they welcomed him as “angel of God.” S. Mitchell, Anatolia: Land, Men, and Gods in Asia Minor, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1993), p. 24.

  2. See the article on the Gospel in B. Metzger and M. Coogan, eds., The Oxford Companion to the Bible (Oxford and New York, 1993), and J. Court and K. Court, The New Testament World (Cambridge, 1999), especially chap. 5, “John and the Community Apart.” There has been much argument over whether John drew on the Synoptic Gospels or wrote independently of them. The scholarly consensus (in so far as such a thing is possible in this area) at present seems to be that he did know of them. The other “signs” are Jesus’ healing of an official at Capernaum, his cure of a cripple at the pool, the feeding of the five thousand, the walking on water, the giving of sight to the blind man and the raising of Lazarus.

  3. The concept of a son from God the Father means something very different in a Greco-Roman context from what it means in a Jewish one. As G. Vermes puts it:

  In Hebrew or Aramaic “son of God” is always employed figuratively as a metaphor for a child of God, whereas in Greek addressed to Gentile Christians, grown up in a religious culture filled with gods, sons of gods and demigods, the New Testament expression tended to be understood literally as “Son of God,” spelled as it were with a capital letter: that is to say, as someone as the same nature as God.

  The Changing Faces of Jesus (London, 2000), p. 3. See also, from Vermes’ book, pp. 32–34 on John’s concept of “the Son” and pp. 183–85 on the Synoptic Gospels’ approach to the concept. It is important to be aware of these conceptual shifts that took place as Jesus came to be seen through Greek rather than Jewish eyes. The relationship between Christ and the logos was, of course, a complex one, as logos had so many different meanings. On the other hand, as Jaroslav Pelikan has noted, the diversity of meanings could allow the word to be used creatively as a principle of creation, rationality, of speech (“the Word”) and of revelation. It could also be used to give philosophical respectability to the Son of God, whom pagans such as Celsus were to deride as degraded by his crucifixion. In some instances the logos was even described as an angel, that is, taking on a “Christian” role totally independent of the Platonic tradition. See J. Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 1 (Chicago and London, 1971), pp. 188–89 and pp. 197–98, for the relationship between the logos and angels. The great issue of later centuries was that of how the divine logos could suffer on the cross.

  4. I have deliberately not used the term “anti-Semitism,” as it was coined in the nineteenth century in a specific racist context. Opposition to Judaism was in this period rooted in theology, not race. The whole question of anti-Judaism/anti-Semitism and Christianity is enormously contentious, particularly in light of the Holocaust. With Christianity’s roots so deeply embedded in Judaism and Jesus himself a Jew, the development of Christianity as a religious movement separate from Judaism was bound to be difficult. It was inevitable that Christians would draw and defend boundaries between themselves and orthodox Jews, and that Jews would do the same to a religion which rejected their Law: witness the many lashings administered to Paul. The process of disentangling Christianity from this past has been a tortuous one and continues to this day. I have drawn heavily here on M. Taylor, Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity (Leiden and New York, 1995); the quotations all come from chap. 4, “Symbolic Anti-Judaism.” Taylor in her turn pays respect to R. Ruether’s Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York, 1974). For an excellent overview of the issues involved, see G. Stroumsa, Barbarian Philosophy: The Religious Revolution of Early Christianity (Tubingen, 1999), chap. 8, “From Anti-Judaism to Anti-Semitism in Early Christianity?”

  5. Quoted in M. Beard, J. North and S. Price, Religions of Rome (Cambridge, 1998), vol. 1, p. 267.

  6. R. MacMullen, Christianising the Roman Empire (A.D. 100–400) (New Haven and London, 1984), p. 34.

  7. Ibid., p. 37.

  8. Ibid., p. 111.

  9. Stephen Mitchell in his study of Asia Minor, Anatolia, pp. 37–38, notes only a handful of Christian inscriptions from Pontus and Bithynia (an area described by Pliny in A.D. 110 as having many Christians) from before Constantine’s toleration and, interestingly in view of Paul’s mission, only one in Galatia. There are rather more from Phrygia, the home of the Montanists, for whom see further below. A good example of the kind of story told about Christians by outsiders is to be found in the Octavius of Minucius Felix (third century). Christians come from the lowest ranks of the people . . . ignorant and gullible women who indeed, just because of the weakness of their sex, are easily persuaded . . . [These] bands of conspirators [sic] . . . fraternise in nocturnal assemblies and at solemn fasts and barbarous feasts, not through a holy ceremony, but through an unatonable crime . . . Everywhere they also practise among themselves, so to speak, a kind of cult of sensuality; without distinction they call each other brother and sister, and through this holy name even the usual immorality becomes incest . . . In a darkness that is favourable to shamelessness they are consumed by unspeakable passion, as determined by chance . . .

  Quoted in E. W. Stegemann and W. Stegemann, The Jesus Movement: A Social History of the First
Century (Edinburgh, 1999), pp. 405–6.

  10. A full extract from Celsus is provided by MacMullen, Christianising the Roman Empire, p. 37. As an introduction to women in the early church, see the chapter “Women in Urban Christian Communities” in Stegemann and Stegemann, The Jesus Movement. The authors see the originally extensive involvement of women in the early Christian communities as having been eclipsed as traditional Greco-Roman attitudes reasserted themselves.

  11. P. Brown, “Asceticism: Pagan and Christian,” chap. 20 in A. Cameron and P. Garnsey, eds., The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. XIII (Cambridge, 1998), p. 610. The idea of the bride of Christ proves a strong one, and in his Letter XXII Jerome goes so far as to say that one of the benefits of virginity for Eustochium will be that Christ will put his hand through an opening in the wall of her bedchamber and “caress her belly.” Note too the famous sculpture of Teresa of Avila by Bernini in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, where the saint is shown in marble in the act of surrendering herself, some would say sexually, to Christ (the moment draws on extracts from her diary).

  12. P. Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York, 1988; London, 1989), pp. 78–79. See also G. Stroumsa, Barbarian Philosophy, chap. 6, “Tertullian on Idolatry and the Limits of Tolerance.”

  13. Beard, North and Price, Religions of Rome, pp. 295–96.

  14. This preference for oral tradition and debate appears strange to the modern world. Plato, however, had made the point that a written word is static. “If you ask them [written words] anything about what they say, from a wish to know more, they go on telling you the same thing over and over again forever.” In other words, an intellectual debate cannot be carried on with the written word. This is perhaps the point to be recognized here. In The Tyrant’s Writ (Princeton, 1993), Deborah Steiner stresses how the written word often stood for authority in the ancient world, perhaps a point of interest in this context. One of the early Christian Platonists, Clement of Alexandria, appears to have been heavily influenced by this aspect of Plato’s ideas and to have shown “considerable reluctance” to write anything down. In the opinion of Raoul Mortley, his decision to write down his thoughts “marks the beginning of the Christian commitment to documentary history” (Mortley, From Word to Silence [Bonn, 1986], vol. 2, p. 39). The shift from debating Christian doctrine orally to a consideration of it through the comparison of written statements is discussed by R. Lim, Public Disputation, Power, and Social Order in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and London, 1995). See also Robin Lane Fox, “Literacy and Power in Early Christianity,” chap. 9 in A. Bowman and G. Woolf, eds., Literacy and Power in the Ancient World (Cambridge, 1994).

  A reminder of how many oral traditions about Jesus and his family must have disappeared can be found through the art that survives. See D. Cartlidge and J. K. Elliott, Art and the Christian Apocrypha (London and New York, 2001).

  15. Augustine, Ennarrationes in Psalmos, 59:1. The methods used to interpret the Bible form an enormous subject. See, however, as an introduction, the relevant chapters in J. Rogerson, ed., The Oxford Illustrated History of the Bible (Oxford, 2001), and in P. R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans, eds., The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1979); the article “Interpretation, History of,” in Metzger and Coogan, eds., The Oxford Companion to the Bible; and Stroumsa, The Barbarian Philosophy, chap. 2, “The Christian Hermeneutical Revolution and Its Double Helix.” It was assumed by the Christian exegetes that the mind of God remained unchanged and that he knew from the earliest book in the Bible that Christ would appear on the earth. It was also assumed that the Bible, despite the variety of texts, had an inner consistency. Once this was accepted, it was “only” a matter of spotting the relevant references. One method is termed “typology,” which consists of making a direct link between a happening or symbol in the Old Testament and an equivalent in the New. So the story of Noah’s ark is seen as a “type” for baptism, and any wood as a “type” for the cross. More sweeping is allegory, used extensively by Origen and Augustine. It involves what often appears to be quite arbitrary linking of any person, event or object in the Old Testament to objects in the New and the use of imagination to find symbolic meaning within almost any verse of the Bible.

  16. In the “Epilogue” to B. Pearson, ed., The Future of Early Christianity: Essays in Honor of Helmut Koester (Minneapolis, 1991), p. 472. See H. Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Development (London, 1999), for his views on the importance of integrating what survives of the “apocryphal” Gospels with the canonical Gospels.

  17. See Metzger and Coogan, eds., The Oxford Companion to the Bible, p. 103. The Montanists are covered in Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 1, pp. 97–108. It was Hippolytus of Rome, a contemporary of Tertullian, who put forward the idea that direct prophecy had ceased with John. The Book of Revelation was and remains part of the New Testament to this day. D. H. Lawrence, however, saw it as “the Judias Iscariot of the New Testament,” and it remains an uneasy amalgam of extravagant terminology and wild imagery. It has had its uses within the church, however. Its description of the heavenly Jerusalem as a city of precious stones allowed it to be used to support the opulence of church building in the fourth century; see further p. 207. More positively, Richard Bauckham has commented that, despite modern readers finding it “baffling and impenetrable . . . yet this is a book that in all centuries has inspired the martyrs, nourished the imagination of visionaries, artists, and hymn writers, resourced prophetic critiques of oppression and corruption in state and church, sustained hope and resistance in the most hopeless situations.” From the introduction to “Revelation” in J. Barton and J. Muddiman, eds., The Oxford Bible Commentary (Oxford, 2001), p. 1287.

  Direct revelations, especially through the Virgin Mary, continue to be reported and, in some cases (Lourdes and Fatima), accepted as valid by the Catholic Church. Pope John Paul announced in 2000 that the famous third secret of Fatima, for long known only to the popes, had in fact contained a warning from the Virgin Mary of his attempted assassination. The problem here is how to recognize the continuing activities of the Holy Spirit. Is it conceptually possible for the Holy Spirit to make a revelation that conflicts with Christian orthodoxy, or is the validity of any revelation to be recognized because it reinforces orthodoxy?

  18. Jaroslav Pelikan, one of the shrewdest commentators on the evolution of Christian doctrine, surveys the different meanings of salvation in early Christianity in The Christian Tradition, vol. 1, pp. 141–55.

  19. The quotation from Irenaeus is taken from H. Bettenson, ed., Documents of the Christian Church (Oxford, 1943), p. 99. That of Tertullian, from his Praescriptio Haereticorum 19:2, is quoted in J. Rives, Religion and Authority in Roman Carthage from Augustus to Constantine (Oxford, 1995), p. 278. Rives has much of importance to say about church authority in that chapter. The notion of apostolic succession was crucial for the church as it gave a means by which the authority of the church could be passed on from bishop to bishop. For a full discussion, see Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 1, pp. 108–20.

  20. Cyprian, De Unitate 17.428. An excellent discussion of Cyprian’s views on authority can be found in Rives, Religion and Authority, pp. 285–307, from which the quotation and material for the next paragraph is drawn. It is interesting to note that the need to impose authority in terms comprehensible to north African Christians threatened to eclipse the reality of a Jesus executed as a rebel against Roman authority.

  21. Jaroslav Pelikan sums up the approach of Eusebius as follows: “According to the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius, orthodox Christian doctrine did not really have a history, having been true eternally and taught primitively; only heresy has a history, having arisen at particular times and through the innovation of particular teachers” (in The Christian Tradition, vol. 1, pp. 7–8). Eusebius’ view that orthodoxy was established early in church history and simply had to defend itself against the onslaughts of hereti
cs has been particularly influential in the Roman Catholic tradition and still conditions many histories of the Church. However, as Pelikan shows throughout his study, it was diversity rather than uniformity that marked the early development of Christian doctrine.

  22. MacMullen, Christianising the Roman Empire, deals with conversion and John’s prayers at Ephesus; see p. 40 for his discussion of the demons.

  23. Ibid., p. 112. Exorcism has not wholly died out within Christianity in that both the Catholic and the Anglican Churches still have rites of exorcism and even specially appointed exorcists to drive out “demons.”

  24. Quoted ibid., p. 37. Celsus contrasted pagans, who could be accepted into their mysteries if they had “pure hands and wise tongues,” with Christians, for whom sinfulness seemed to be a prerequisite for entry to theirs.

  25. See L. Alexander, “Paul and the Hellenistic Schools: The Evidence of Galen,” in Troels Engbury-Pedersen, ed., Paul in His Hellenistic Context (Edinburgh, 1994). The third-century theologian Origen taught that the “simpleminded” Christians should be told that the resurrection was a literal resurrection of Jesus’ body (while he and other more sophisticated Christians could see it in a more symbolic sense); see chap. 8, note 19 above.

  26. Bettenson, Documents of the Christian Church, p. 9, for the quote from Clement. The quote from Augustine comes from De Doctrina Christiana 2:144.

  27. MacMullen, Christianising the Roman Empire, p. 32.

  28. C. Stead, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity (Cambridge, 1994), p. 14. There is a vast amount of material on the relationship between Platonism and Christianity. Did Platonism corrupt an original “pure” Christianity or was it the “nurse” without which it would not have survived as a respectable participant in a highly competitive intellectual world? No easy answers are to be found in what has been a celebrated debate. A useful overview, with reading list, can be found in A. Le Boullec, “Hellenism and Christianity,” in J. Brunschwig and G. E. R. Lloyd, eds., Greek Thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2000).