The World Jesus Entered

The World Jesus Entered The World Jesus Entered A Social and Cultural Introduction to Christianity in Its First Two Centuries Jon Davies Copyright © 2022 by Jon Davies This work is published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International). You are free to: w Share—copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format w Adapt—remix, transform, and build upon the material The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license under the following terms: w Attribution—You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. w NonCommercial—You may not use the material for commercial purposes. w ShareAlike—If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original. Library of Congress Number: 2022900264 ISBN: 978-1-716-05322-1 (paperback) ISBN: 978-1-716-24911-2 (ebook) Published via Lulu.com in Morrisville, North Carolina worldjesusentered.wordpress.com Contents Preface vii Chapter 1. The Jewish World Jesus Entered 1 Chapter 2. The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered 58 Chapter 3. The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered 156 Chapter 4. The Gnostic World Jesus Entered 229 Chapter 5. The Missionary World Jesus Entered 279 Chapter 6. The Heavenly World Jesus Entered 358 Index to Full Citations 431 Index to Scriptures 437 General Index 445 Preface This book came into being because I wanted to read something like it. Many books about the history of the first two centuries of Christianity, or some small aspect of it, exist, but few quite get at it from the cultural and social angle that I wanted to read about. Of course, in researching the book, I found a number of works helpful that actually did eventually manage to do almost what I had been looking for, though usually in a way more exhaustive in a small field than in a way that provided the kind of broader-scope history I was seeking. Notable exceptions would be F. F. Bruce’s New Testament History (New York: Anchor Books, 1972), which covers much the same territory but ends in the first century, and John E. Stambaugh and David L. Balch’s The New Testament in Its Social Environment (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), which also focuses on the social and cultural world of the time. Works with the broader scope, alas, tend to be of three types. One, they assume a standard Catholic or Protestant history, not fully grappling with the early Judaistic origins of the Christian faith and seeing, usually, Paul as the true founder of Christianity insofar as he went to the Gentiles and established a Gentile religion in contradiction to that proffered by others. Much scholarship in recent years has begun to refocus on Paul as a Jew, but it often still sees him as preaching a kind of separate gospel to the Gentiles, a viii Preface view I don’t think is born out in his writings.1 Or two, such broader works assume that the view of Christ as a deity only came about decades later, in the kind of mythmaking that happens after a person dies. This is the view popularized recently by many of the trendiest secular scholars, such as Bart Ehrman or James Tabor.2 Or three, while acknowledging the continued Jewish context of the faith into the second century, they don’t go very deeply into their claims or they have an agenda aimed at converting readers to a particular sect. I wanted a book of the third type without that agenda and with a bit more depth to the claims being made, if indeed they could be made. Numerous pamphlets published by churches of the Jewish Christian tradition exist, the perspective from which I write, but most glide over the history rather superficially, presenting two centuries in twenty-something pages and noting that most of what has come down to us is wrong with only small devotion to what it would have been like to live as a Christian during these times. For this reason, this work features an admitted excess of citations. Although much of this information is common knowledge, I want readers to be able to see to where such information can be gleaned. Where possible, I’ve tried to reference, or even quote, primary documents, but in a work of a general nature such as this, secondary sources are impossible to avoid. 1. A notable and refreshing work that actually attempts to examine Paul within his Jewish milieu is Brad H. Young’s Paul, the Jewish Theologian (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 1995). 2. Philip Jenkins’s Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) makes clear that such trendy accounts are actually nothing new, noting that “modern scholars show little awareness of the very active debate about alternative Christianities which flourished in bygone decades” (13). The expansion of degree programs in religious studies, Jenkins argues, has exacerbated this trend, by swelling the number of scholars looking for obscure and controversial subjects about which to write (16–17). Preface ix As such, what’s here is not something that is terribly unique in terms of the information it covers. Still, the years of research have been very helpful to me, and I hope that by putting all the research together in one spot, the work will prove helpful to others. Originally, I had hoped to cover the evolution of the church in five primary cities or regions (perhaps with others added later) during its first two centuries, a task less often undertaken by scholars and something I still hope to do. What’s here, instead, is the introduction to that work, an introduction that grew much larger than the fifty or so pages I had imagined. In trying to set the context, I found there to be much more to be reviewed than could be covered in a single chapter, if I wanted to provide a fair assessment of what would eventually happen to the faith once delivered. The World Jesus Entered Chapter 1 The Jewish World Jesus Entered One of the first accusations hurled at the newly founded Christian church was that its people were drunk. Such seems a natural reaction to what were events, that Pentecost day, as described in Acts 2, beyond human experience: flames above the heads of believers, a rushing mighty wind, people speaking in languages they did not know and everyone understanding. But there’d been a lot of odd—some would say miraculous—happenings in the previous three and a half years, if we are to believe the writers of the Gospels. Five thousand people had been fed from five loaves of bread and two fishes, and at the end twelve baskets had been gathered (John 6:5–13); another time four thousand were fed from seven loaves (Matt. 15:33–38). The cause of these gatherings had been the reason for the gathering of 120 on the day of Pentecost, a man whom many had come to believe was the Messiah of Israel foretold of in the religious writings of the Jewish people, Jesus of Nazareth. This man, we are told in the Gospels, caused “the lame [to] walk, the lepers [to be] cleansed, . . . the deaf [to] hear, [and] 2 The Jewish World Jesus Entered the dead [to be] raised up” (Matt. 11:5).1 As such, “great multitudes came unto him, having with them those that were lame, blind, dumb, maimed, and many others, and cast them down at Jesus’ feet; and he healed them” (Matt. 15:30). One of the most recent among these miracles was the resurrection of a man named Lazarus, who had been in the grave four days (John 11). And then, there was the resurrection of Jesus himself, something attested to by his followers, including his twelve main disciples, and then by five hundred people who had seen him all at once and by, at the least, his brother James (1 Cor. 15:5–7). The reason this man was put to death has much to do with the early history—the first two centuries of the history—of the religion that bears his apparent identity and what became of it. For the world that he entered was one not unlike the one in which we live in today or that humankind has lived in throughout history. It was a world in which a multitude of stakeholders vied for power, for control of not only peoples but of their minds, and a world in which still others, less fortunate than the rest, strove merely to survive. In the world that Jesus entered, those stakeholders included the Romans, whose empire ruled over the nation into which Jesus was born. Those stakeholders also included the nation of Judea itself, or more specifically, those who attempted to control it. But because Rome was ultimately in charge, those who endeavored to hold sway over the Jewish people ultimately had to do so within the Roman context, by choosing to collude with the Romans; by reacting, in some way, against them; or by finding some kind of middle ground in which Roman authority was tolerated but not endorsed. It was this process around which the Jewish stakeholders each attempted to order the nation. 1. All Bible quotations are from the Kings James Version unless otherwise noted. The Essenes 3 While a Talmudic source (Y Sanh. 29c) denotes that there were twenty-four sects of the Jewish faith when the temple was destroyed in 70 CE, the ancient historian Josephus focuses his descriptions on three of those that were the most common during the first century—the Essenes, the Sadducees, and the Pharisees.2 To these, he adds a fourth group for whom he does not provide a name but who are now commonly known as the Zealots.3 Among such groups the war for the Jewish heart and mind was fought, and central to that fight was the Jewish religion, around which the culture of the Jewish people was based and their history written. That culture and history found form in the books of the Old Testament, which recounted God’s great works for the nation, as well as his dissatisfaction with its actions. Each group, in essence, strove to explain how to answer for the position into which Judea had fallen in relation to Rome and the outside world and also how best to react to that position. As these groups struggled with each other to determine how best to reconcile their theological views and beliefs to the reality of being a subject people, the conflict between them carried over into the newfound Christian religion, resulting ultimately in a faith much unlike the one adhered to by the first generation of followers of Jesus. The Essenes Of the groups mentioned by Josephus, the Essenes, isolationists as they are portrayed as being, were arguably the least influential among the peoples with whom Jesus walked, though that influence on intellectual thinking re. Silouan Thompson, “First-Century Synagogue Liturgy,” Silouan blog, September 15, 2007, https://silouanthompson.net/2007/09 /first-century-christian-synagogue-liturgy/; Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 18.1.2–5. 3. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 18.1.6. 4 The Jewish World Jesus Entered garding Jewish and Christian culture has ironically grown substantially in the past one hundred years, long after the sect died out, for it is from the Essenes that we derive the Dead Sea Scrolls, perhaps the greatest biblical archeological find ever. Rescued from a desert cave in 1946, the Dead Sea Scrolls are the preserved writings of a sect of the Essenes at Qumran, a community on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea.4 The writings present much of the Old Testament and are used now to verify the accuracy of the received text that has come down to our present day. But also among the writings are various manuscripts unique to the community itself. What this discovery has resulted in, however, is a reshaping of much of the history of first-century Palestine. Writers looking to primary documents rather than to documents that have been passed down in various iterations through generations of scribes and storytellers often 4. As with most scholarship regarding first-century Judah or Christianity, not all scholars are in agreement regarding the origin of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Some, such as Rachel Elior, offer alternative explanations, for example, that the scrolls belonged not to the Essenes but to priests who had left Jerusalem. Ofri Ilany, “Scholar: The Essenes, Dead Sea Scroll ‘Authors,’ Never Existed,” Haaretz, March 13, 2009, https://www.haaretz.com/scholar-the-essenes-dead-sea-scroll -authors-never-existed-1.272034. In discussing the Essenes as a sect, I am taking Josephus, a contemporary of the age, as a greater authority. I also take the majority view that the Qumran community fit within the Essene sect, a view that is based in part on Pliny the Elder’s placement of the Essenes along the northwest coast of the Dead Sea. F. F. Bruce, New Testament History (New York: Anchor Books, 1972), 83–84; Karl Radl, “Pliny the Elder, the Jews and the Essenes,” Purity Spiral blog, July 7, 2021, https://thepurityspiral.life/pliny-the-elder -the-jews-and-the-essenes/. That said, it may well be that the documents at Qumran represent not just the work or collection of a single community but the work of several communities placed there in anticipation of Roman action against the Jews in 66–70 CE. John J. Collins, “Dead Sea Scrolls: What Have We Learned?,” HuffPost, October 22, 01, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-j-collins/dead-sea -scrolls-what-have-we-learned_b_1975155.html. The Essenes 5 consider the documents contemporary to the peoples of the time as being more accurate and more characteristic of the thinking of the age. As such, as scholars use the few primary documents available to them, Christianity has, for many, become an outgrowth of Essene teachings, with Jesus’s precursor—John the Baptist—and even Jesus himself as members of the Essene school. The historian Robert Feather, for example, sees Jesus as one who was placed in the Qumran community at age sixteen for education and who graduated at age thirty, choosing “to become an ‘urban Essene’” with his own group of followers.5 Robert Eisenman, in his book James the Brother of Jesus, posits that the Qumran texts are actually those of Jewish Christians (whom he equates with the Ebionites, a Jewish sect that accepted Jesus as a prophet but not as divine) and that early Christianity was primarily a familial order based around the person of Jesus. In Eisenman’s view, Paul and a Gentile-based Christianity wiped Jesus’s family from history to present Jesus as a divine being (born of a perennial virgin), creating a much different faith than that which Jesus—and his family members—presented.6 Placing James within the same camp as the creators of the Dead Sea Scrolls allows Eisenman to quote from the scrolls as if they often represent James’s own thinking. Elizabeth McNamer, who posits some similar positions to Eisenman’s, sees so many parallels between Christ’s early followers and the Essenes—including the proximity of several archeological 5. Robert Feather, “Were John the Baptist or Jesus Essenes?,” Rosicrucian Digest, no. 2 (2007), https://b1e36bcd2b2f667c32cd -4fb9b530a048ee0dcf5bb1a8e57f9.ssl.cf5.rackcdn.com/07_jesus _feather.pdf. 6. Robert Eisenman, James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Viking, 1997). A summary of Eisenman’s views, and some of the problems inherent in them, is available at “Part Two—the Dead Sea Scrolls and Christianity,” MoellerHaus Publisher, http:// www.moellerhaus.com/qumcon2.htm. 6 The Jewish World Jesus Entered sites in Jerusalem—that mere coincidence cannot explain them. For her, the “devout men” mentioned in Luke and Acts are the Essenes—those of the group did not refer to themselves as Essenes—and only the prominence of Jesus’s family prevented Essene practices from completely dictating early Jewish Christian ideas.7 Such theories tend to revolve around two premises. The first sees Jesus primarily as a physical person whose ideas and influences derived wholly from the Jewish community around him—and quite often from just one sect, such as the Essenes. To be sure, Jesus was of Jewish descent and conducted a ministry primarily aimed at the descendants of Israel, and many of the traditions he followed or commented on related to the various sects then current, but if there is a solid core to Christian belief, it follows that what Jesus introduced was also something new, something not derived largely from a single, already existent set of believers (save perhaps the set the Gospels themselves mention—followers of John the Baptist). Christians would say that that new thing derived from Jesus’s tie to the Eternal, to his divinity. Secular scholars, of course, who tend to 7. Elizabeth McNamer, “The First One Hundred Years of Christianity in Jerusalem,” The Bible and Interpretation, June 2009, http:// www.bibleinterp.com/articles/mcnamer.shtml. “Devout” men (and women) are mentioned in Luke 2:5 and Acts 2:5, 8:2, 13:50, and 22:12. McNamer glosses over Acts 10:2 in her article, wherein Cornelius, a Gentile (and obviously not an Essene), is denoted as a devout man. “The idea of a connection between Jesus and the Essenes sounds remarkably modern,” Philip Jenkins notes in his Hidden Gospels, “in that a possible link between Jesus and this sect has often been proposed since the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls. . . . However, the Essenes have fascinated scholars and amateurs since the Enlightenment. . . . The Essenes were old hat long before the finds at Qumran.” Jenkins, Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 45–46. Among those Jenkins mentions who professed similar views long before the Dead Sea Scroll discovery were such notables as Frederick the Great, Ernest Renan, Helena Blavatsky, Francis Legge, and G. K. Chesterton. Ibid. The Essenes 7 be the more likely to tie Jesus’s teachings to a given preexisting sect, don’t accept Christ’s divinity as a premise, so their conclusions are of necessity different from that of a believer. But most secular scholars also fall prey to a second premise that most Christian scholars themselves fall prey to. The second premise sees Paul as creating a religion very different from the Jewish one presented not only by Jesus but by Peter, Jesus’s brother James, and the other early Jerusalem-based apostles. This idea, as I hope to show, is inaccurate, as Paul’s ministry was not one in conflict with Peter and the other apostles but in consort with them. To be sure, the apostles all wrestled with how to incorporate Gentile believers into the Jewish worldview into which they were born, but the most substantial divisions between Jewish practice and Christian practice occurred later, beginning near the end of the first century. Before then, Christianity had a kind of Jewish tinge, one that was largely distasteful to those in power in both the Jewish and Roman worlds, the one for what it lacked in terms of adherence to traditions and the other for what it maintained of those traditions. All this is not to say that scholars who point to similarities of belief and practice between the Essenes and Jesus are completely off base, and it is possible that Jesus and John the Baptist interacted with the Essenes at some point, though it’s doubtful for many reasons that either were an actual member of an Essene community. But the teaching and practices of Jesus and John the Baptist certainly do have elements in common with the Essene sect, as they do with the other sects Josephus mentions. Here is how Josephus describes the Essenes in his Antiquities of the Jews: They teach the immortality of souls, and esteem that the rewards of righteousness are to be earnestly striven for; and when they send what they have dedicated to God into the temple, they do not 8 The Jewish World Jesus Entered offer sacrifices because they have more pure lustrations of their own; on which account they are excluded from the common court of the temple, but offer their sacrifices themselves; yet is their course of life better than that of other men; and they entirely addict themselves to husbandry. It also deserves our admiration, how much they exceed all other men that addict themselves to virtue, and this in righteousness; and indeed to such a degree, that as it hath never appeared among any other men. . . . This is demonstrated by that institution of theirs, which will not suffer any thing to hinder them from having all things in common; so that a rich man enjoys no more of his own wealth than he who hath nothing at all. There are about four thousand men that live in this way, and neither marry wives, nor are desirous to keep servants; as thinking the latter tempts men to be unjust, and the former gives the handle to domestic quarrels; but as they live by themselves, they minister one to another. They also appoint certain stewards to receive the incomes of their revenues, and of the fruits of the ground; such as are good men and priests, who are to get their corn and their food ready for them.8 In The War of the Jews, Josephus provides an even longer description. In it, he imputes to them various ascetic beliefs, rejecting “pleasures as an evil” and eschewing passion—or, it seems, almost all emotion, even under torture. Because they do not marry, they adopt children to teach them their ways (though Josephus points out that there is one order that allows marriage—purely for the sake of 8. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, trans. William Whiston, 18.1.5, Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/848 /2848-h/2848-h.htm. The Essenes 9 procreation). Those of the sect believe oil to be a “defilement.” They do not swear. They do not spit when among others. They wear only white garments. Many are nomads of sorts, traveling from town to town, carrying nothing except, for fear of bandits, weapons. And because they share all things equally among each other, they want for nothing when they arrive at their destination. They do nothing that is not by order of their leaders, save for helping those in need.9 Their daily life in Josephus’s description seems almost monkish. They conduct prayer before sunrise, then do the work assigned to them by their leaders; they assemble to bathe, after which they retire to a closed-off area to eat where only those of the sect are allowed to enter. More work follows and then another meal conducted in the same manner. They devote themselves to study. Some are said to be prophets.10 As for their philosophical and theological teachings, Josephus notes that they believe in the immortality of the soul and the corruption of the physical body. After death, the good go to a kind of paradise that Josephus compares to Greek teachings, and the evil go to a “dark” place of “never-ceasing punishments.”11 Entry into the sect is difficult. One who desires to become an Essene has to live in the manner of the sect for a year, though he is not considered part of the community. If 9. Josephus, War of the Jews, trans. William Whiston, 2.8.2–4, 6, 9, 1, 13, Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files /2850/2850-h/2850-h.htm. 10. Ibid., 2.8.5, 12. 11. Ibid., 2.8.11. Hippolytus of Rome, writing a century later, by contrast, claims that the Essenes “acknowledge both that the flesh will rise again, and that it will be immortal, in the same manner as the soul is already imperishable.” Hippolytus of Rome, The Refutation of All Heresies, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, 9.22, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com /text/hippolytus9.html. 10 The Jewish World Jesus Entered he makes it through that year, he undergoes a purification rite, after which he is essentially in a probationary state for another two years before he is granted full admittance. A new adherent takes an oath to be pious toward God and just toward men. He promises to hurt no one, to hate those who are evil, and to help those who are righteous. He is to show respect to all authorities, because they are placed into their positions by God, and if a follower ever comes into authority, he is not to use his position to enrich himself. He will not lie. He will not steal. He will not reveal the sect’s teachings to others. Even once a new adherent is admitted to the sect, he enters as part of the lowest of four classes of members. These classes do not mix, and if a junior member happens to touch a more senior member, the latter is said to be defiled and must wash himself.12 Josephus notes that the Essenes are strict observers of the law of Moses, and he pays special attention to certain laws regarding hygiene and purity and the Sabbath. Josephus finds curious their practices with regard to defecation, practices any good camper today would be well familiar with—burying their business and afterward washing themselves, though the passage also hints at the kind of ritualistic washing common among the sect of the Pharisees, as does his description of their eating habits. Indeed, later in the passage, Josephus explicitly notes that some keep various purification rites. Furthermore, their strictness is evident in the manner in which the Essenes are said to keep the Sabbath, where not only is food prepared the day before (at least in part, so as to avoid lighting a fire) but not even dishes or chairs are allowed to be moved.13 Those found to have sinned in a serious way are cast out, which can result in death given that a follower is allowed to eat only in the manner prescribed by the sect. 12. Josephus, War of the Jews, 2.8.7, 10. 13. Ibid., 2.8.9. The Essenes 11 Judgments against adherents are made in a court of law with juries of a minimum of one hundred.14 Josephus’s descriptions agree in large part with those given by Pliny the Elder and Philo, though there are seemingly some minor differences and additions. Pliny the Elder, for instance, focuses on a single community, placing them along the west shore of the Dead Sea, near where the Qumran scrolls were found.15 Philo claims, in one location, that they live only in villages, never in the city.16 He also claims that they do not engage in the making of any kind of weapons, and to their occupations as farmers, he in addition notes that they can be craftsmen.17 The manner in which the Essenes reacted to Roman rule, in other words, was to devote themselves so fully to religion that they separated themselves from the society around. This was the reason for withdrawing from urban areas and setting up almost monk-like communities, in great contrast to such groups as the Sadducees, who, as will be shown, were quite involved in politics, being the chief constituents of the upper priestly caste, which was itself controlled by Rome. The Essenes, by contrast, largely withdrew from the Jewish temple, offering their own set of sacrifices that were, in their view, unscathed by the polluting influences of Rome or not offering sacrifices at all, in favor of devoting themselves more fully to living righteously.18 In addition, the Essenes looked to a Messiah—or 14. Ibid., 2.8.8. 15. Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, 5.73. 16. Philo, Every Good Man Is Free, 12.76. Though in Hypothetica, 11.1, he allows for their living in many cities. 17. Philo, Every Good Man Is Free, 12.76, 78. 18. Referencing Philo, Every Good Man Is Free, 12.75, some scholars see the Essenes as not offering sacrifices, though Josephus denotes only that they do not offer sacrifices at the temple, because of differences with regard to their beliefs respecting purification. Elizabeth McNamer, “First One Hundred Years,” for example, sees frequent baptisms, and the concomitant call to live rightly, as replacing sacri- 12 The Jewish World Jesus Entered rather, two Messiahs, one priestly, one kingly—who would deliver Israel from their Roman overseers.19 Certainly the Essene way of life parallels the way of life conducted by Jesus and John the Baptist in some forms, as do some things they taught. John the Baptist lived in the wilderness (Matt. 3:1), as many reckon the Essenes did. Jesus lived a nomadic way of life (Luke 9:58), as did many Essenes. The Essenes looked to a Messiah-like figure (or figures), as did John the Baptist and the followers of Jesus. The Essenes were critical of the temple authorities as were John the Baptist and Jesus, as evidenced in the manner they spoke about the Pharisees and Sadducees (e.g., Matt. 3:6; Matt. 23) and by Jesus’s attack on the temple’s moneychangers shortly before his death (Matt. 21:12–13). But the elaborate and difficult conversion process, the overwhelming devotion to purity, and the extremely strict adherence to Sabbath rules do not find parallels among Jesus’s teaching, nor likely in John the Baptist’s.20 And the fact that the Essenes aren’t explicitly mentioned in the New Testament, if at all, combined with their insularity, suggests that they did not have an especially strong influence or effect on the Jewish people as a whole or the Christianity that derived from the Jewish religion. John J. fice among the Essenes. Albert Baumgarten, by contrast, sees the Essenes as not so much withdrawing from the temple but as having been banned from it—which is actually Josephus’s wording—because of their insistence on certain purification rites (most notably, Baumgarten claims, what constitutes an acceptable red heifer for sacrifice). Albert Baumgarten, “Josephus on Essene Sacrifice,” Journal of Jewish Studies 45, no. 2 (Autumn 1994): 169–183, http://www.academia .edu/950457/Josephus_on_Essene_Sacrifice. 19. L. Michael White, “The Essenes and the Dead Sea Scrolls,” From Jesus to Christ, Frontline, PBS, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages /frontline/shows/religion/portrait/essenes.html. 20. See, for example, Matthew 12:1–8, where Jesus is criticized for breaking the Sabbath, at least according to the rules set out by the Pharisees. The Sadducees 13 Collins sums up the proper place for the study of the Essenes in relation to Christianity nicely: The area of scholarship that has suffered most from wild speculation is the relevance of the Scrolls for Christian origins. . . . The Dead Sea Scrolls are of great interest for early Christianity, because they describe a contemporary Jewish sect that shared similar hopes for the coming of a messiah (or messiahs) and life after death, and had some similar ritual practices. The values of the two movements, however, were poles apart. One was introverted, obsessed with issues of purity, while the other looked outward, even to the Gentile world.21 The Sadducees The Sadducees, as already mentioned, stood in stark contrast to the Essenes. While the Essenes withdrew from the society around them to preserve a religion undefiled by their Roman overseers, the Sadducees adopted many of the customs of their Gentile conquerors—most especially the Greeks, who had preceded the Romans. Our knowledge of the Sadducees is somewhat terse, most information about them being written largely by those who disagreed with them and often largely in contrast to the Pharisees. In fact, some go so far as to claim that the Sadducees were not so much an organized sect as a group described primarily to act as a counter to the Pharisees.22 The Sadducees made up much of the upper class, including much of 1. J. J. Collins, “Dead Sea Scrolls: What Have We Learned?” 22. See, for example, Julius Wellhousen, The Pharisees and Sadducees: An Examination of Internal Jewish History, trans. Mark E. Biddle (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2001), 47. 14 The Jewish World Jesus Entered the upper echelon of priests, and were of “such character that they were concerned much less with caring for the sanctuary [the temple] than for civil matters which were also in their hands.”23 In other words, they were more politicians than religious devotees, but in the Jewish world, the two spheres were not readily separated. Still, as members of a standing nobility, the archpriests who sat among their ranks were very much interested in maintaining their positions, especially since they reserved most of the tithe collected from Jewish temple goers for themselves.24 In fact, during much of the first century, the high priesthood changed frequently and mostly among four families, each of whom would purchase the office from funds that they accrued by their position, in turn driving the regular priesthood, whose funds they deprived, into greater depths of poverty.25 This does not mean, however, that the Sadducees were without beliefs and practices of their own, as little as we know about them. Josephus describes, in both his Antiquities of the Jews and The War of the Jews, a group that is conservative in its interpretation and acceptance of scripture but who also rejects in many ways the active role of God in human affairs. The Sadducees, in contrast to the Essenes and Pharisees, rejected the role of fate in life, believing utterly in free will; rejected the idea that God was concerned with the good or evil of human actions; and rejected the concept of an immortal soul, as well as the resurrection or, in fact, any afterlife in which awaited rewards or pun- 23. Ibid., 43. 24. Ibid., 44; Bruce, New Testament History, 65–66. 25. Martin Hengel, The Zealots: Investigation into the Jewish Freedom Movement in the Period from Herod I until 70 A.D., trans. David Smith (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clarke, 1989), 211–212; Bruce, New Testament History, 63, 67. The Sadducees 15 ishments for men’s actions.26 Acts 23:8 notes that they rejected even the existence of spirit and of angels, though it is possible that what they rejected was not the complete existence of angels but an angelology laid out by the Pharisaic tradition.27 Such views, in part, probably derived from a very rigid and narrow view of scripture, as unlike the Pharisees, they accepted only the written law of Moses and not the oral traditions that the Pharisees claimed also derived from Moses.28 Some go so far as to say that the Sadducees accepted only the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, as scriptural, rejecting the rest of the Old Testament, not just the oral law.29 No matter, the Sadducees’ 26. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 13.5.9, 18.1.4; Josephus, War of the Jews, 2.8.14. 7. Allen Ross, “3. The Sadducees,” The Religious World of Jesus, Bible.org, April 12, 2006, https://bible.org/seriespage/3-sadducees. 28. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 13.10.6, 18.1.4. My use of “accepted” may be too strong; rather, a likely more correct rendering is that the Sadducees did not accept oral traditions as equal to the written law, as interpretation and tradition were certainly part of Sadducean practice as well. See Allen Ross, “. The Pharisees,” The Religious World of Jesus, Bible.org, April 10, 2006, https://bible.org /seriespage/2-pharisees. 29. See, for example, Stephen M. Wylen, The Jews in the Time of Jesus (New York: Paulist Press, 1995), 6, 60, 138. Wylen takes a common stand that the Old Testament at the time consisted only of the Torah and Prophets, with the Writings not yet accepted as canon; however, he also denotes that the Sadducees did not accept apocalyptic interpretations denoted in prophetic books such as Daniel, implying that anything outside the Torah was rejected. Hippolytus and Origen were more direct. The Sadducees “do not, however, devote attention to prophets, but neither do they to any other sages, except to the law of Moses only,” wrote Hippolytus (Refutation of All Heresies, 9.24); Origen (Against Celsus, 1.59) noted, the “Sadducees . . . receive the books of Moses alone.” Both quoted in Joe Heschmeyer, “What Bible Did the Sadducees Use?,” Shameless Popery, July 27, 2011, http:// shamelesspopery.com/what-bible-did-the-sadducees-use/. James Alan Montgomery states that the Sadducees did not reject the Prophets and the rest of the Old Testament so much as depreciated them in comparison to the first five books. James Alan Montgomery, The Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect: Their History, Theology, and Literature (Phila- 16 The Jewish World Jesus Entered views were not popular, and as Josephus notes, they were “able to do almost nothing of themselves; for when they [became] magistrates, as they [were] unwillingly and by force sometimes obliged to be, they addict[ed] themselves to the notions of the Pharisees, because the multitude would not otherwise bear them.”30 How a sect from which derived much of the higher Jewish priestly class came to conclusions so demonstrably different from those of the people they oversaw relates to the way in which this particular sect came to power, which in turn relates to their interactions with the nonJewish world around them, beginning most especially with the Greco-Macedonian Empire and the Hellenization it inspired in the various provinces that it conquered. Greek ways appealed to certain Jews, and this attraction soon spelled doom for the Jewish priesthood as it had existed from the time that the Jewish people had returned to Jerusalem under the Persian king Cyrus the Great. Around 180 BCE, the high priest Onias was forced to flee by his brother Jason, who, by way of a bribe for the office, had curried favor with the king of the Seleucid portion of the former Greek empire (which had been split into four parts after the death of empire’s founder, Alexander).31 When a new delphia: John C. Winston, 1907), 187. For a view that the Old Testament canon was set long before the first century CE, see Ernest L. Martin, Restoring the Original Bible, esp. chap. 12, http://www .askelm.com/restoring/res013.htm. 30. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 18.1.4. 31. Onias would later be murdered, and his son would flee to Egypt, where he would set up an alternative temple that would exist until near the time of Rome’s destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE. Jewish people had earlier migrated to Egypt during the destruction of their first kingdom, as recorded in  Kings 5:6, and in various other waves, most especially during the Ptolemaic period, after Alexander the Great’s conquest of Judea in 332 BCE. “Egypt Virtual Jewish History Tour,” The Virtual Jewish Library, under “The Hellenistic Period— Ptolemic Period,” https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/egypt-virtual -jewish-history-tour. This alternative Jewish community played a role The Sadducees 17 king, Antiochus, took power, Jason went further, offering more money in exchange for the opportunity to make Jerusalem into a center of Greek culture—a polis—as Antioch in nearby Syria was, a move most of the inhabitants of Jerusalem supported. The monetary messenger, however, a priest named Menelaus, offered Antiochus yet another bribe, which was duly accepted, and Menelaus became high priest in Jason’s stead. But Menelaus was not from the family of Zadok and, thus, was not qualified to be high priest. Furthermore, he recovered the bribe money from the temple treasury. These actions tempered the mass’s enthusiasm for the Hellenization project. Jason’s attempt to regain the power Menelaus had seized brought Antiochus’s armies to Judea and the temple around 166 BCE, and continued disorder kept them from leaving for any sustained length of time. A fort, with its accompanying soldiers, was placed in Jerusalem near the temple to keep order. The temple’s treasury was raided. And the Jewish faith itself was outlawed—no more Sabbath, no more circumcision, no more temple worship in the manner prescribed by Jewish scripture or tradition. In its place was substituted the worship of Zeus. Pagan customs were brought into what remained of the temple (Antiochus having pillaged many of its furnishings) and swine offered on its altar. Thus arose the Hasmonean family and their eventual leader Judas Maccabee. This priestly family fled Jerusalem for the surrounding hills. From there, they conducted raids against the Seleucid troops. Within three years from the time that Antiochus took control of the temple, he was forced to rescind his edict against the Jewish religion. The both as an origin of some converts in early Christian times and likely as the place to which Jesus’s parents fled soon after Jesus’s birth. See Matthew 2:13–15. 18 The Jewish World Jesus Entered Hasmoneans came to power, with Judea becoming completely independent from the Greek empire about twenty years later. However, the issues with the priesthood did not abate. The Hasmoneans, with the aid of the Seleucid rulership they opposed but also compromised with during the twenty-year struggle for Jewish independence, took for themselves not only kingship of Judea but also the high priesthood, though they too were not of the high priestly line of Zadok. And though they proved good at maintaining power, their personal morality often left something to be desired (one of the Hasmonean rulers was killed by his own sons). In the end, they proved to be nearly as open to Hellenizing influences as priests like Jason and Menelaus had been, building out a sector of Jerusalem to the west of the temple that resembled a Greek community for the rich and aristocratic. From this noble class, centered around the Hasmonean dynasty, the Sadducees would largely derive. The lack of legitimacy for the high priesthood, along with the compromising ways of those who had freed the Jewish people from their Greek overlords as well as personal riches gained in the process, led, in time, to the formation of various other sects such as the Essenes and, as we will see, the Pharisees and the Zealots, each of whom saw themselves as restoring a better understanding of the Torah and the priesthood. The popularity of these sects, most especially of the Pharisees, would lead one of the Hasmonean kings, Alexander Jannaeus, to encourage his wife, Alexandra Salome, who would succeed him to the throne, to incorporate them into the government council, known as the Sanhedrin, a body that hitherto had welcomed only those of the Sadducean disposition. The maneuver proved disastrous, as after Salome’s death, the struggle for power between her two sons, Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II, would encourage the intervention of Rome, at the appeal, The Sadducees 19 in part, of the Pharisees, who wished to abolish the Hellenistically inspired monarchy altogether. The intervention of Rome did not have the quite the effect that those who had called for dispute resolution were hoping. Once Rome put its preferred people in power, the Jewish leadership, including the high priest, became mostly figureheads. In fact, Rome itself would eventually elicit direct control over who held the high priestly office through its appointed governors of Judea. What had been a set of factions fighting for political power within the nation of Judea thus would be reduced to merely rival religious factions. While Hyrcanus II would return as high priest after Roman intervention, the Romans eventually appointed Antipater, from a family of Jewish converts and an ally of Hyrcanus II, as prefect of Judea, and about two decades later, one of his sons, Herod, would be named king of the province. Because he was not a Hasmonean, the Pharisees supported his rule; nevertheless, to shore up power, Herod married a Hasmonean and appointed her brother Jonathan as high priest, a decision he would quickly regret when Jonathan gathered a certain amount of popular support. Herod had him murdered and from then on appointed and deposed high priests as befit his needs. Because Herod distrusted his family—putting his wife and three of his sons to death for apparent plots against him—he did not clearly designate which of his three remaining sons should be king after his death in 4 BCE. Rome split the kingdom into three—Idumaea, Judea, and Samaria; Galilee and Perea; and parts of Syria and Lebanon—placing each son as a ruler over one of them. Archelaus, the son placed in charge of Judea, however, proved so cruel, especially toward the Pharisees, that Rome removed him in 6 CE, and thereafter, Judah became a Roman province, with a Roman prefect serving as its governor. As such, until about 50 CE, as al- 20 The Jewish World Jesus Entered luded to earlier, Rome, through its local governor, chose the high priest.32 Thus the Sadducees, as the aristocrats from whom the high priest was generally drawn, were dependent on Rome for whatever power they held, and the office of high priest, though a religious one, became in many ways secular and political. Meanwhile, the Pharisees, to whom we turn next, also largely supported Roman rule, as it was more sympathetic to their cause than most of the old-time Jewish aristocracy. As Jesus spread his teaching, therefore, he came into the middle of this conflict. While he seems to reserve most of his ire for the Pharisees (and their allies, the scribes), the Sadducees were not left without criticism. In one of the few Gospel passages that directly single out the Sadducees for critique (Matt. 22:23–30), the Sadducees ask Jesus a hypothetical question with regard to the resurrection: If a woman were to become a widow seven times, which would be her husband when she rises back to life? Jesus’s answer, that those who are resurrected are as the angels in that they do not marry, is prefaced with this statement: “Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God” (Matt. 22:29). Jesus here criticized the Sadducees for their usage of the scriptures and their rejection of God’s intervention in human affairs. A passage in Matthew 8 may hint at a similar critique. There, Jesus heals a leper but tells him to reveal himself 32. Histories of the events surrounding the Hasmonean and Herodian dynasties described in the previous paragraphs abound, most of them based in Josephus’s accounts in War of the Jews and The Antiquities of the Jews. Karen Armstrong’s Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths (New York: Knopf, 1996) provides a nicely crafted short synopsis, to which I am particularly indebted. Chapters 2 and 3 of Philip Neal’s Judaism—Revelation of Moses or Religion of Men? (Hollister, Calif.: York Publishing, 2010) and chapters 1–3 and 5 of F. F. Bruce’s New Testament History also provide useful synopses. The Pharisees 21 to no one until he shows himself to the priest. Jesus tells the man to give an offering, as commanded in the law, but what’s interesting about the direction to see the priest is the reason Jesus gives it is to be “a testimony unto them” (Matt. 8:2–4). If the Sadducees doubted God’s interaction with mankind, evidence of a miracle—let alone one performed by the one thought by some to be the Messiah— would have been a great witness to the falsity of the understanding and teaching of much of the priestly class. Not that it mattered. As Acts 4:7 denotes, even after Jesus’s apparent resurrection and the healing of a lame man by two of Jesus’s apostles, the priests would ask, “By what power, or by what name, have ye done this?” The letter of James the brother of Jesus unto the twelve tribes scattered abroad—at the very least, a metaphor to the church as spiritual Israel, a concept that caught on quite early among Jesus’s followers after his death—may also take a subtle swipe at the Sadducees, insofar as they were largely affiliated with the aristocratic class. In reprimanding the church for its inattention to the poor, its favoring of certain well-off people over others who were not so well off, James asks, “Do not rich men oppress you, and draw you before the judgment seats? Do not they blaspheme that worthy name by the which ye are called?” (James 2:6–8). The reference here to judgment seats and coercion to blasphemy suggests that James is referencing the Sanhedrin, over which the Sadducees, through the office of the high priest, had ultimate sway. The Pharisees While the Sadducees came out of a tradition that accepted much of Greek culture and concerned itself heavily with politics—the physical power and material blessings that came with the upper echelons of the priesthood—and while 22 The Jewish World Jesus Entered the Essenes, in reaction, separated themselves from the temple community to forge a purified community of their own, the Pharisees represented a middle ground between these two positions: concerned with purity, as an extension of temple purification, but not immune to the quest for political power, as the earlier narrative on the history of the Sadducees shows. In his Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus describes the Pharisees this way: They live meanly, and despise delicacies in diet; and they follow the conduct of reason; and what that prescribes to them as good for them they do; and they think they ought earnestly to strive to observe reason’s dictates for practice. They also pay a respect to such as are in years; nor are they so bold as to contradict them in any thing which they have introduced; and when they determine that all things are done by fate, they do not take away the freedom from men of acting as they think fit; since their notion is, that it hath pleased God to make a temperament, whereby what he wills is done, but so that the will of man can act virtuously or viciously. They also believe that souls have an immortal rigor in them, and that under the earth there will be rewards or punishments, according as they have lived virtuously or viciously in this life; and the latter are to be detained in an everlasting prison, but that the former shall have power to revive and live again; on account of which doctrines they are able greatly to persuade the body of the people; and whatsoever they do about Divine worship, prayers, and sacrifices, they perform them according to their direction; insomuch that the cities give great attestations to them on account of their entire virtuous conduct, both The Pharisees 23 in the actions of their lives and their discourses also.33 Elsewhere, Josephus notes that the influence the Pharisees held over the people of Judea was so great that if they opposed a king or a priest, their opinion held sway; as such, he calls them a “cunning sect.”34 Josephus also notes how they “delivered to the people a great many observances by succession from their fathers, which are not written in the laws of Moses.”35 How is it that a sect that enjoined on people “heavy burdens and grievous to be borne,” as Jesus called these added observances (Matt. 23:4), could also hold such popularity among the masses? Certainly, Josephus provides one clue—that they were respected for their virtue, both in conduct and speech. How they came to hold such positions of respect is also the story of how the Jewish religion was transformed into rabbinical Judaism, for it is from the Pharisees that what we know as Judaism descends.36 In other words, the Pharisees ultimately won the battle for the hearts and minds of Jewish believers, a battle that at the time of Jesus was still ongoing, even if it would not begin to draw to an end until after the Herodian temple’s destruction in 70 CE. Just as the Sadducees were associated with the upper priestly class, the Pharisees were associated with another facet of the Jewish religious order: the scribes. Scribal authority came about gradually, as priestly authority waned, most especially after the destruction of Solomon’s temple 33. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 18.1.3. 34. Ibid., 13.10.5, 12.1.4. 35. Ibid., 13.10.6. 36. For more on this common claim, see Shaye J. D. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1987), 226–27. 24 The Jewish World Jesus Entered and the Jewish exile during the Babylonian captivity. Without an organized priestly caste to teach and elaborate on scripture and to make decisions based on it, those who copied and studied the scriptures began to have more influence.37 After a segment of the Jewish people returned from Babylon and the priesthood began again to take on the duties of the sacrificial system, the scribes began to fill in as teachers, and when the upper priestly caste turned heavily toward the ideas and concerns of the Jewish people’s eventual Grecian conquerors, it was to the knowledgeable scribal class that those who objected to the corrupt priesthood would turn.38 As with many of the stakeholders among the Jewish peoples, the scribes were a varied lot. Certainly, among them were priests themselves, but also among them were a good many laypeople. All that was required to become a scribe was education, but as the historian Joachim Jeremias notes, “It was knowledge alone which gave their power to the scribes.”39 Once a man studied long enough to be ordained into “the company of scribes,” he “was authorized to make his own decisions on matters of religious legislation and of ritual.”40 Scribes could serve on the Sanhedrin, the Jewish council or court, at one time open only to the priesthood, and the Pharisaic faction on that court was made up of scribes.41 When someone was needed to fill a position of authority in the Jewish community, the learned scribe was the preferred choice.42 The scribes, thus, were 37. Neal, Judaism, 26–27. 38. Neal, Judaism, 29–30, 34; Cohen, From the Maccabees, 23–24, 161. 39. Joachim Jeremias, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus: An Investigation into Economic and Social Conditions during the New Testament Period, translated by F. H. And C. H. Cave (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969), 235. 40. Ibid., 235–236. 41. Ibid., 236. 42. Ibid., 237. The Pharisees 25 the wise men, the sages, the learned professionals among the Jewish people, and as such, their views were respected and adhered to, even sometimes more than the law written out by Moses—the Torah itself—though their teachings were all based in the Torah or interpretations of it.43 But as Jeremias puts it, the real key to their power was not that they were “guardians of tradition in the domain of religious legislation” or the fact that this enabled them to hold “key positions in society, but rather the fact, far too little recognized, that they were the guardians of a secret knowledge, of an esoteric tradition.”44 They were holders of knowledge about the “cosmic topography” (for example, the angelology rejected by the Sadducees) and other apocalyptic secrets, as well as the sole holders of knowledge about the oral law; in addition, as men versed in Hebrew among a Jewish population that in many cases knew only Aramaic and had no access to translations of the scriptures, they sometimes were the only holder of scriptural knowledge.45 As such, the scribes were the major authority when it came to religious understanding, an authority that they guarded by keeping it oral, rather than writing it down, passing along such information only to those who underwent their religious training.46 As historian Julius Wellhousen notes, “Only a few could comprehend the content of [their] jumble of regulations, and to execute them in practice was completely impossible for the majority.”47 As scribal authority came to encompass more and more of Jewish life, the scribes took on greater power. Again, as Wellhousen notes: 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. Ibid., 236. Ibid., 237. Ibid., 238–241. Ibid., 241. Wellhousen, Pharisees and Sadducees, 14. 26 The Jewish World Jesus Entered In their sometimes not entirely unreasonable creations, they constantly held the highest object in view, the extension of the sovereignty of the law over an ever greater realm of reality. Sacredness would be communicated from the root, which was holy, to the most extreme branch which was by nature not the least sacred. More consistently and consciously than ever, everything common was drawn into the spiritual realm and one element of profane life after the other was incorporated into the dominion of the law. So it was in public life, but no less also in personal life. On every occasion, individuals were reminded of the Torah; whoever took seriously its fulfillment was occupied with it day and night. It governed every aspect of conduct and very nearly, one can say, overpowered one’s own moral judgment.48 The Pharisees encompassed a larger array of people than did the scribes, however. While the scribes imposed their extension of the Mosaic law on to the people and gloried in their authority, the Pharisees were those who lived by that extension of the laws, often as a matter of pride: “Pharisaic communities were mostly composed of petty commoners, men of the people with no scribal education, earnest and self-sacrificing; but all too often they were not free from uncharitableness and pride with regard to the masses, . . . who did not observe the demands of religious laws as they did, and in contrast to whom the Pharisees considered themselves to be the true Israel.”49 Much of the basis of the difference between the Pharisees and Sadducees lay in their interpretation of which laws applied to the general populace and which applied to 48. Ibid., 11. 49. Jeremias, Jerusalem, 254–55, quote on 259. The Pharisees 27 priests in the conduct of their duties. The Sadducees “held that priestly laws were limited to the priests . . . in conformity with the text of Scripture,” while the Pharisees took the “rules of purity and rules on food [that the Torah laid down] for the officiating priests alone” and “made these rules a general practice in the everyday life of the priests and in the life of the whole people.”50 Such ideas expanded the law and were aimed at putting “‘a fence around the Torah,’ to make rules that would keep the religion pure and the people holy” so that they would not violate the actual, written law.51 But they were also based in the concept that every man is a priest, taking literally the words of Exodus 19:6: “You shall be unto me a kingdom of priests.” As such, “everyone at his own table at home was like a Temple priest at the table of the lord in the holy sanctuary.”52 Applying purity laws to every lay person made those who were Pharisees into a “peculiar people,” as Exodus 19:5 said Israel was to be—separate from other nations. As the scholar Jonathan D. Brumberg-Kraus puts it, such “‘Jewish xenophobia’ was a natural response to Roman colonial occupation and the threat of assimilation in the dominant Hellenistic culture.”53 But Pharisees also separated from those who did not adopt similar purity ordinances. In this sense, the Pharisees were not unlike the Essenes, who were in origin similar, dating to Maccabean times.54 As with the Essenes, entering a Pharisee commu50. Ibid., 266, 265. 51. Solomon Landman, with Benjamin Efron, Story without End—an Informal History of the Jewish People (New York: Holt, 1949), 74, quoted in Neal, Judaism, 32. 52. Jacob Neusner, Invitation to the Talmud: A Teaching Book (Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1998), 40. 53. Jonathan D. Brumberg-Kraus, “Were the Pharisees a Conversionist Sect? Table Fellowship as a Strategy of Conversion,” 00, http://www.academia.edu/5834767/Were_the_Pharisees_a _Conversionist_Sect, 7. 54. Jeremias, Jerusalem, 247, 259. 28 The Jewish World Jesus Entered nity involved a time of probation, shared meals, and following prescribed leaders (most often, scribes) in addition to Pharisaic law.55 One key difference, however, lay in the manner in which the Pharisees interacted with the rest of the Jewish people and with the temple worship itself. While the Essenes withdrew from the Jerusalem temple rites, the Pharisees fashioned and shaped them. And because of the great influence of and respect for the scribes, the ways of the Pharisees effected the culture of the rest of the Jewish population. This is how the Pharisees could be seen as being a conversionist sect, even as they emphasized their separation from the general population: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make on proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves,” Jesus complained with regard to them (Matt. 23:15). Such proselytizing was not so much an attempt to convert Gentiles to Jewish ways as it was to convert Jews to Pharisaic ways.56 The main means to achieve this was through rules surrounding “table fellowship”—“the gathering together [of Pharisees and their invitees] to eat properly tithed food in a state of ritual purity, and the procedures for acquir55. Ibid., 251–52. 56. This is not to say that the Jews were not themselves, to an extent, a conversionist sect at the time. “Instead of being absorbed by the pagan religions,” George Holley Gilbert notes of the Jews of the diaspora, “they carried on in the Roman period a most zealous and successful propaganda.” He goes on to note several examples of conversions in kingly households and, if we are to believe the many accounts in Acts, rightly observes that “in the synagogues of the Dispersion, where Paul preached, there was always a gentile contingent.” George Holley Gilbert, “The Hellenization of the Jews between 334 BC and 70 AD,” American Journal of Theology 13, no. 4 (October 1909): 531. Shaye J. D. Cohen notes that while “several writers from the city of Rome refer to the eagerness of the Jews to win gentiles to their side[, t]here is not evidence for an organized Jewish mission to the gentiles.” Cohen, From the Maccabees, 56–57. The Pharisees 29 ing food and maintaining households or other spaces fit for such gatherings.”57 Brumberg-Kraus explains well how these seemingly opposing gestures—separation and conversion—could be joined in the same act: The very behaviors of tithing, purity laws, and table fellowship that separated a Pharisee from other Jews were the same behaviors that engaged other Jews in these behaviors. Tithing and the observance of purity rules not only “cemented ingroup commitment in the ritual context” of table fellowship, that is, promoted the group’s separatist consciousness. Members of the in-group also “upheld them outside the ritual context” in ways that necessarily engaged non-Pharisees to assume the same behaviors. In other words, they were a means of “outreach.”58 Adoption of Pharisaic customs, thus, even if one was not a strict believer in Pharisaic ways, would allow one to have business or social dealings with others who would otherwise be off limits. In other words, non-Pharisees essentially became Pharisees through the customs to which they subjected themselves in order to have relations with those who were Pharisees.59 The application of temple purification rules to one’s personal table also meant that Pharisaic ways would maintain their hold after the destruction of the temple. Not dependent on temple worship in Jerusalem to embody their views, the Pharisees were well positioned for the synagogue-based religion that would become Judaism. Pharisaic ways would also act as a major means of distinguishing the Jewish people from the Gentile world around 57. Brumberg-Kraus, “Were the Pharisees a Conversionist Sect?,” 1. 58. Ibid., 12. 59. Ibid., 17. 30 The Jewish World Jesus Entered them and from their Roman overseers, based around rituals intended to keep the Jewish people pure and separate, even while allowing the Jewish people to live among Gentile populations. The absence of a Jewish high priesthood, caused by the reign of outsiders, not only did not pose a problem for the Pharisees because the priesthood was taken as being personal, it also fed into Pharisaic authority insofar as there was no competing aristocracy to vie for power in defining Jewish customs. The distinctions between the Pharisees and the ideals that Jesus espoused are well documented in the New Testament. The Pharisees, and their instructors, the scribes, come under particular criticism in Matthew 23 and Luke 11. As Joachim Jeremias points out, the passage in Luke 11 is clearer in separating the issues that Jesus takes with the Pharisees from those that he has with the scribes, though the two passages raise similar criticisms.60 The scribes are criticized chiefly for laying burdensome laws on the people (Luke 11:46) and keeping secret the understanding of the scriptures, which they do not in fact understand (Luke 11:5). The Pharisees, meanwhile, are criticized chiefly for their hypocrisy—namely their attention to tithing and purification rites while ignoring the deeper significance of such practices: being pure in thought and heart and having loving discernment (Luke 11:39–42). Both the Pharisees and scribes are criticized for being too focused on their outward appearance and on garnering favor from people for their seeming righteousness, the Pharisees for their love of the “uppermost seats in the synagogues, and greetings in the markets” (Luke 11:43), and the scribes similarly for their love of “greetings in the markets” and “the highest seats in the synagogues,” as well as their love of stately dress (Luke 20:46). 60. Jeremias, Jerusalem, 253–254. The Pharisees 31 The focus on the differences between the Pharisees’ actions and Jesus’s teaching, however, has tended to obscure many of the beliefs and practices that the followers of Jesus had in common with the Pharisees. In some ways, one could even argue that the virulence of Jesus’s teachings against those of the Pharisees was because the beliefs of the followers of the two sects, to start, were more similar than those between Jesus’s followers and other Jewish sects of the time. The errors into which the Pharisees had fallen were, thus, in Jesus’s view, more subtle and, as such, more serious. After all, the Pharisees were not pursuing worldly political power in the same way in which those who made up the Sadducees largely had; rather, their power rested in their supposed spiritual closeness to God. Indeed, Jesus even drew several of his followers from Pharisaic circles, including Nicodemus (John 3:1) and possibly Joseph of Arimathea (John 19:18).61 Nicodemus, in fact, in his nighttime visit to see Jesus confesses that “‘we’ [certain of the Pharisees] know that thou art a teacher come from God” (John 3:). Jesus’s following among such leaders, however, was muted during much of his ministry, for as John notes, “Among the chief rulers also many believed on him; but because of the Pharisees they did not confess him, lest they should be put out of the synagogue” (John 12:42). If we are to believe John, the reason for this had to do chiefly with maintaining their powerful positions and popularity among the masses, “for they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God” (John 1:43). In fact, John goes so far as to claim that this was the main reason the chief priests and Pharisees had Jesus put to death: “If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on 61. I am indebted to the 2009 article “Were All the Pharisees Unbelievers and Haters of Jesus? “ at Let Us Reason Ministries, http://www .letusreason.org/Biblexp108.htm, for its quick summation of Christian believers among the Jewish leadership at the time of Jesus. 32 The Jewish World Jesus Entered him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation” (John 11:48). Nevertheless, in Acts, we see several references to priests and Pharisees as followers of Jesus, likely emboldened in part by belief in Jesus’s resurrection, as were many of Jesus’s followers. Acts 6:7, for example, tells us that “a great company of the priests were obedient to the faith” (these could have been Sadducees or, if lower-echelon priests, more likely Pharisees). Acts 18:8 denotes that the ruler of a synagogue in Corinth, Crispus—likely a scribe or a Pharisee, if in keeping with who generally held authority within synagogues—became a believer, along with his household. In fact, the controversy over circumcision that so greatly divided the early Christian church was in large part stirred up by Pharisees who had chosen to follow Christ (Acts 15:5). If Pharisaic views had not infiltrated so much of the Jewish world that even those among the Jewish people who came to follow him wrestled with what constituted the law, the so-called law of Moses would not likely have been as much of an issue, for Jesus, in his teaching, often made clear that many of these “laws” were “traditions of men” (see, for example, Mark 7:8–9). While Jesus did not accept many of the tenets of the Pharisees, many passages suggest that he engaged with the Pharisees in their practice of table fellowship, socializing with them on their turf as they held to their traditions. Such instances are used as teaching moments in the Gospels. While some Pharisees were likely attempting to convert Jesus to their ways, as made plain in scriptures in which Jesus and the Pharisees criticize one another for their table manners—that is, their washing or lack thereof—they likely also had an interest in his views, even if in part chiefly to condemn him (see specifically Matt. 15:2, 11–12; Mark 7:1–5, 8). Jesus accepted an invitation to dine, for example, from the Pharisee Simon the leper, which became an occasion for Simon to condemn Jesus for The Pharisees 33 socializing with sinful women and for Jesus to teach Simon about forgiveness (Luke 7:36–50). Jesus also used an occasion at a Sabbath meal at the house of a Pharisee to show that healing was a permissible act during holy time (Luke 14:1–6). And in perhaps one of the best examples of the debate over table fellowship, in Luke 11:37–40, Jesus confronts the Pharisee who has invited him to sup regarding the tradition that the Pharisee tries to force on him: “And as he spake, a certain Pharisee besought him to dine with him: and he went in, and sat down to meat. And when the Pharisee saw it, he marvelled that he had not first washed before dinner. And the Lord said unto him, Now do ye Pharisees make clean the outside of the cup and the platter; but your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness. Ye fools, did not he that made that which is without make that which is within also?” Such differences over washings before meals, the manner in which one was to keep the Sabbath, or the people with which one associated, however, can be held up against some very real parallels in belief—most notably with regard to the resurrection and the priesthood of believers. Both beliefs were central teachings for early followers of Jesus, just as they were for the Pharisees, drawing them together in certain disputes and allowing them to transition to a time when the Jerusalem temple was no longer a physical setting around which the Jewish people could gather. It is no accident that Paul used the resurrection as the main point of contention between his Jewish accusers not only to defend himself but to claim an identity as a Pharisee, as he does before the Sanhedrin a couple of years before his appeal to Rome: “But when Paul perceived that the one part were Sadducees, and the other Pharisees, he cried out in the council, Men and brethren, I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee: of the hope and resurrection of the dead I am called in question” (Acts 3:60). As many scholars have noted, Christianity was a “resurrec- 34 The Jewish World Jesus Entered tion faith”: “The resurrection [was] at the heart of the biblical and pre-biblical proclamation of the earliest Christians.”62 Or as Paul himself noted in his first letter to the Corinthians, “If Christ be not raised, your faith is in vain. . . . [And] if in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable” (1 Cor. 15:17, 19). So, too, the teaching held importance to the Pharisees, for as Josephus noted, in a passage already quoted, it was “on account of which doctrines [i.e., the resurrection and afterlife] they [were] able greatly to persuade the body of the people.”63 The hope that such teachings provided to the general populace, in other words, were pivotal to the very popularity of the sect and its other ideas. And as the Pharisees took literally the words of Exodus 16:9, that the Jewish nation was to be a nation of priests, and then applied that concept to their notions of how best to fulfill the law, followers of Jesus would eventually apply the same scripture (and others) to themselves and use that as a basis for their teachings and beliefs. Thus, John, in Revelation 5:10, would say that Jesus had made his followers into “kings and priests.” Peter, in his first letter, would call believers a “royal priesthood” (1 Pet. :9), doing so in the context of comparing them to the temple itself: “Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ” (1 Peter :5). Paul also would on more than one occasion compare Jesus’s followers to the temple. “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God?” he asks the 6. Sean McDowell, “Did the Apostles Have a Resurrection Faith?” Sean McDowell Blog, January 7, 2016, http://seanmcdowell.org/blog /did-the-apostles-have-a-resurrection-faith. See also McDowell’s The Fate of the Apostles: Examining the Martyrdom Accounts of the Closest Followers of Jesus (New York: Routledge, 2015), which discusses the subject in detail. 63. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 18.1.3. The Zealots 35 Corinthians (1 Cor. 3:16). And to the Ephesians, he writes of Jesus Christ as the chief cornerstone of a “building fitly framed together . . . unto an holy temple in the Lord: In whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God” (Eph. :0–). Furthermore, the sacrificial system of the temple is replaced by one in which the followers of Christ are themselves the sacrifice, as Paul notes, for example, in his letter to the Romans: “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service” (Rom. 1:1). Such teachings meant that those of the Jewish nation who followed Jesus, as well as those who would come to believe from outside the Jewish nation, were not dependent on worship at the physical temple. They were the temple, and the sacrifice, and the priest; and the chief priest was Jesus himself, risen and no longer among men. Likewise, for the Pharisees, each person’s house was a type of the temple, and each head of household the priest thereof. Thus, when the temple was destroyed, unlike other Jewish sects whose worship was dependent on actual sacrifices at an actual temple, both Pharisees and Christians were well situated to transition to a post-temple spirituality and thus their sects would become the basis for the two main faiths that would emerge afterward: rabbinical Judaism and Christianity. The Zealots The destruction of the temple, however, would in large part be brought upon by the fourth sect that Josephus talks about as being present in the first century: the Zealots. Josephus uses the term “Zealot” fairly narrowly to refer to the politico-religious party that opposed Roman rule during the Jewish War of 66–70 CE, but the term has come 36 The Jewish World Jesus Entered to be applied more broadly to a wide scattering of Jewish groups actively opposed to Roman rule on similar ideological grounds.64 More often Josephus refers to these parties, in the period leading up to the Jewish War and during the period in which Jesus would have been preaching, as simply “bandits” or “robbers” or followers of a “fourth sect of Jewish philosophy.” His description of them in Antiquities of the Jews reads like this: Judas the Galilean was the author. These men agree in all other things with the Pharisaic notions; but they have an inviolable attachment to liberty, and say that God is to be their only Ruler and Lord. They also do not value dying any kinds of death, nor indeed do they heed the deaths of their relations and friends, nor can any such fear make them call any man lord. . . . [I]t was in Gessius Florus’s time that the nation began to grow mad with this distemper, who was our procurator, and who occasioned the Jews to go wild with it by the abuse of his authority, and to make them revolt from the Romans.65 By denoting Judas the Galilean as the creator of the sect, who was prominent as a resistance leader in 6 CE, and proclaiming that the sect’s eventual popularity was due to the actions of Gessius Florus, who was Roman procurator of Judea in 66 CE as the Jewish War began to unfold, Josephus essentially ties the fourth sect to the Zealots, even though he doesn’t use their name in the passage. Understanding who Judas the Galilean was and what he did then is key to understanding what the Zealots stood for. Josephus gives us some key components in his description above. For one, he notes, the Zealots had Pharisaic no64. Hengel, Zealots, 403–404. 65. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 18.1.6. The Zealots 37 tions—that is, in religious matters they were like the Pharisees. Just as the Pharisees emphasized the separateness of the people of Israel from other nations, and even their own sect from those who were less devout, less “pure,” than their own, so did the Zealots. In fact, it is quite likely that “the party founded by Judas came originally from the radical wing of the Pharisees and continued to have close links with the Shammaites.”66 The occasion for the start of Judas’s movement was the imposition of a tax and the accompanying completion of a census by the new Roman governor of Syria, Sulpicius Quirinius, whose rulership Judea fell under. Key to Judas’s reasoning was the idea that his countrymen “were cowards if they would endure to pay a tax to the Romans, and would, after God, submit to mortal men as their lords.”67 There was, here, a social aspect to such a refusal, stemming from the effect such taxes had on the poor, especially on peasant farmers who could lose land when unable to pay their debts;68 this would in turn lead to greater popularity for the Zealots as time went on. But a more pivotal reason for such a refusal was religious and ideological, as hinted at in Josephus’s words: that submitting to Roman taxation constituted submitting to ungodly foreign rulers. For the Zealots this was unconscionable, for it meant accepting a pagan master; it meant, in their interpretation, breaking the first commandment of the law—that one shall have no other gods. It was thus in this interpretation, as Martin Hengel notes, when “God was uncompromisingly recognized as the only Lord of Israel that tribute paid to a 66. Hengel, Zealots, 377. See also Wellhousen, Pharisees and Sadducees, 17. 67. Josephus, War of the Jews, 2.8.1. 68. Hengel, Zealots, 335. See also Pheme Perkins, “Taxes in the New Testament,” Journal of Religious Ethics 12, no. 2 (1984): 183, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40014983; Bruce, New Testament History, 39–40. 38 The Jewish World Jesus Entered foreign ruler could be seen as worshipping an idol. Anyone paying taxes to the emperor ceased to be a true Israelite and could only be regarded as ‘a gentile and a tax collector.’”69 While the Pharisees considered unclean those who did not adhere to their concepts of purity, the Zealots took separation many steps further, making purity into a political matter that affected not only the temple or the temple of one’s home but the entire nation. To submit to anyone but God, to any ruler outside of God’s chosen people—in the land given to them by God—was to be a sinner, an idolator. With such an interpretation of the law, there was no countenancing Roman governance. In fact, in the Zealot view, much of the reason for the Jewish people’s subjugation to foreign powers was their very willingness to submit to them. While many devout Jews expected God to bring a kingdom and a full restoration of Israel, the Zealots, as inspired by Judas, “rejected a purely passive and quietistic kind of hope and believed that God would only bring about his kingdom and with it the kingdom of his people in the world if Israel acknowledged his absolute claim to rule here and now, with no reservations whatever.”70 This demanded action, as when God who backed up Elijah as he killed the prophets of Baal in 1 Kings 18:40, or as when God stayed a plague and commended Phinehas for his slaying of a fornicating and idolatrizing couple in Numbers 25:7–8. Such actions would result in the actual manifestation of the kingdom of God. The example of Phinehas’s zeal held particular importance to the Zealots, and the fact that he killed an Israelite man who coupled with a non- 69. Hengel, Zealots, 139. 70. Ibid., 93. The Zealots 39 Israelite woman demonstrated the dangers of the Jewish people mixing with foreigners.71 The call to action, in turn, leant urgency to the concept of Messiah—the promised deliverer of Israel. That Messianism was associated with the Zealots is evident from, as the historian S. G. F. Brandon puts it, the “existence of various Messianic pretenders who seem to have had Zealot connections.”72 Gamaliel, in his speech to the Sanhedrin regarding the new Christian movement, in Acts 5:36–37, for instance, raises the examples of Zealots Theudas and Judas of Galilee, denoting the eventual inefficacy of their movements. And those Messianic claims became fairly explicit in the cause of Manahem, the son of Judas the Galilean, during the Jewish War, as he united the “robbers,” sacked Herod’s armory, and “returned in the state of a king to Jerusalem.”73 The Zealot movement may have been the cause of radicals, but it gained in popularity as the first century progressed, as is evident by the fact that much of the nation was willing to take up arms against Rome in 66, and it would have had quite a degree of influence on the thinking during the years of Jesus’s ministry some forty years earlier—and very well may have led some into following Jesus himself. As Martin Hengel notes, “The imminent expectation and hope of the time of salvation formed the presupposition and the framework within which Judas the Galilaean and his successors were able to come to the fore. . . . For this reason, it is possible to assume that this imminent expectation was very widespread and prevailed as the fun71. Ibid., 377, 396. 72. S. G. F. Brandon, Jesus and the Zealots: A Study of the Political Factor in Primitive Christianity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), 59. 73. Josephus, War of the Jews, 2.17.8. See also Hengel, Zealots, 293. 40 The Jewish World Jesus Entered damental mood in the Jewish population of Palestine at the time.”74 The prospect of a Messiah even reached as far as Egypt, as is indicated by the occasional concern with the end of the world and the gathering of the Jewish people in the writings of the first-century Alexandrian Jew Philo.75 The Gospels, too, suggest that Messianic expectations were fairly widespread and affected the thinking of the people in the first century. Stories such as that of the wise men from the East who come to see the “King of the Jews” are built on this foundation, for as Matthew denotes, “When Herod heard these things, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him” (Matt. :1–3).76 So too are the accounts of the aged Simeon and Anna coming to or staying in the temple until the time that they would see the Messiah who would redeem Jerusalem (Luke 2:25–38). Much also has been made of the fact that one of Jesus’s disciples, Simon, was himself at one time a Zealot—or at least was called such by Luke (Luke 6:15; Acts 1:13).77 S. G. F. Brandon, in particular, builds much of his argu74. Hengel, Zealots, 310. 75. John J. Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora (Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000), 137. 76. While some may discount the truth of the story, the fact that Herod called the chief priests and scribes to ask where the Messiah would be born, and even more so the idea that Jerusalem had been troubled, could have been easily disputed by those with living memory of the events at the time the Gospel, or its antecedent, was written and as such likely would not have been placed into the account were there not some truth to it. For a summary of some who have questioned the authenticity of the account and a discussion of the possibility of its historical veracity, see Gordon Franz, “The Slaughter of the Innocents: Historical Fact or Legendary Fiction?,” Associates for Biblical Research, December 8, 2009, http://www.biblearchaeology.org /post/2009/12/08/The-Slaughter-of-the-Innocents-Historical-Fact -or-Legendary-Fiction.aspx#Article. 77. In Matthew 10:4 and Mark 3:18, he is called Simon the Canaanite, though Matthew and Mark’s chosen word is possibly just a Hebrew equivalent of the Greek word Luke uses. Charles Spurgeon, “Simon the The Zealots 41 ment in Jesus and the Zealots on this supposition, claiming that Jesus’s followers were, if not actually Zealots, very closely aligned to the group.78 Other scholars, however, see Canaanite? Or Simon the Zealot?,” Jesus.org, http://www.jesus.org /life-of-jesus/disciples/simon-the-canaanite-or-simon-the-zealot.html. 78. Brandon goes so far in his argument as to claim that the reason for the disappearance of Jewish Christians was in fact that they were Zealot sympathizers, if not actual Zealots, who thus perished, or at the least, were marginalized, with the destruction of the temple. The Gospels, which he sees as being written after the temple’s destruction, were in many ways written in reaction to that destruction, with Mark being written first, very soon after 70 CE, for Gentile Roman readers who would have hesitated to convert to a sect committed to the destruction of the empire and begun by a man executed by the Roman Empire for sedition. As such, Mark obfuscates the Zealot leanings of the Jesus movement, an obfuscation that is less evident in Matthew and Luke, which Brandon sees as being written ten or fifteen years later, when Roman-Jewish antipathy had somewhat cooled. Thus, in Mark, in order to suggest the superiority of the gospel to the Gentiles preached by Paul and Jesus’s connection to it, Gentiles are shown as having a more natural understanding of Jesus’s real mission than Peter, the apostle to the Jews, who is repeatedly shown up as too narrow-mindedly Jewish to comprehend. Meanwhile, Matthew and Luke, writing later, with the former specifically aiming at the Jews, share more of the Zealot-sympathizing actions of Jesus’s disciples and make Jesus into a general pacifist. In positing such positions, Brandon takes the rather standard view that Pauline Christianity was very different from Jewish Christianity even in the early years of the Christian sect, a view that is not necessarily accurate, as discussed later in this chapter. Brandon’s positions also depend on a couple of ideas that are not as widely accepted and that fail to address other concerns. He rejects, for instance, the idea that (Jewish) Christians fled Jerusalem before or during the period of the temple’s destruction, a flight posited by many early Christian historians, such as Eusebius (Church History, 3.5.3); the many problems with Brandon’s thesis are listed in the appendix to Ray A. Pritz’s Nazarene Jewish Christianity (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1988), 122–127. Brandon’s claim that Mark was written in part to discredit Peter also discounts not only the idea that Mark was the author of the book but also that he gathered his account largely from Peter himself, as testified to by Papias, Clement of Rome, and Eusebius (Eusebius, Church History, 2.15.1, 3.39.15). Finally, there is the issue that Jesus included a tax collector, Matthew, among his disciples (Matthew 9:9, 10:3), a move that Zealots would have dia- 42 The Jewish World Jesus Entered Luke’s use of the term as simply meaning that Simon was a man full of zeal, not a man connected to the political party.79 They base this rendering on Josephus’s very narrow explicit use of the term to refer to a specific party of rebels during the actual Jewish War from 66 to 70 CE, though as already noted, Josephus clearly draws a connection between the Zealots of the war and rebel movements going back at least to Jesus’s time. Regardless, the Gospel writers do show that many of the disciples themselves had Messianic expectations that converged with many of the ideas of the Zealots. That many of the disciples were looking for a Messianic figure and that they were expecting an earthly king and kingdom centered around Judea is clear from accounts of their calling, the kinds of questions they asked Jesus, and their initial reaction to his death. Simon the Canaanite may have been a Zealot at one time, but other disciples, too, were drawn to Jesus because of his supposed Messianic characteristics. This was certainly the appeal for Andrew and his brother Simon Peter. “We have found the Messias,” Andrew tells Peter when he first comes to tell his brother about Jesus (John 1:41). Later, when quizzed by Jesus about his supposed identity, Simon Peter himself would declare Jesus to be the Messiah (Matt. 16:13–16). Likewise, the disciple Nathanael, on meeting Jesus and being told elements of a private conversation he’d had with his brother Philip, declares him “the King of Israel” (John 1:48–49). The disciples’ Messianic expectations were largely centered around a physical kingdom and restoration of Israel, in line with the thinking of the Zealot party. This is evident metrically opposed and that thus would have been a source of great contention among, if not disillusionment of, the disciples were they essentially a Zealot front. 79. Spurgeon, “Simon the Canaanite?” The Zealots 43 in some of the conversations that the disciples have with Jesus—and specifically in the types of questions they ask Jesus. When Jesus talks about the destruction of the temple, for example, they ask him, “When shall these things be? And what shall be the sign of thy coming, and the end of the world?” (Matt. 4:3). Thus, they equate Jesus’s kingdom and the end of the age with the destruction of the temple. As John Gill, in his commentary, puts it, it is likely that the disciples were thinking of Jesus as a Messiah in the flesh and that he would continue with them: Wherefore this coming of his, the sign of which, they inquire, is not to be understood of his coming a second time to judge the world, at the last day; but of his coming in his kingdom and glory, which they had observed him some little time before to speak of; declaring that some present should not die, till they saw it: wherefore they wanted to be informed, by what sign they might know, when he would set up his temporal kingdom; for since the temple was to be destroyed, they might hope a new one would be built, much more magnificent than this, and which is a Jewish notion; and that a new state of things would commence; the present world, or age, would be at a period; and the world to come, they had so often heard of from the Jewish doctors, would take place; and therefore they ask also, of the sign of the end of the world, or present state of things in the Jewish economy.80 Likewise, the disciples argued over rulership positions in Jesus’s kingdom, as when John and James requested to sit on the right and left hand of Jesus (Mark 10:35–37) or 80. “Matthew 4:3,” John Gill’s Exposition of the Bible, Bible Study Tools, https://www.biblestudytools.com/commentaries/gills -exposition-of-the-bible/matthew-24-3.html. 44 The Jewish World Jesus Entered when at the Passover the disciples argued over who was the greatest (Luke 22:24). Jesus’s arrest and death, thus, were moments of great misunderstanding and disappointment for the disciples. That misunderstanding and disappointment persisted throughout Jesus’s final Passover evening. In the story preserved by the four Gospel writers, the misunderstanding centers around Peter, who serves as a type for the emotions experienced by all of the disciples, likely a result of Peter’s own repeated recounting of the night’s events to those to whom he preached. After the meal and a hymn and Jesus and his disciples’ walk to the Mount of Olives, Jesus tells them that “all ye shall be offended because of me this night” (Matt. 6:31; Mark 14:7), but Peter says that he will never be offended by Jesus—never desert him—that in fact he will even go to prison and die with him (Matt. 26:33; Mark 14:29; Luke 22:33). All the other disciples say the same (Matt. 26:35; Mark 14:31). Initially, when the disciples see that Jesus is about to be arrested, they react as one would expect rebels defending their supposed Messiah to act, asking, “Lord, shall we smite with the sword?” and Peter actually does so, cutting off the ear of Malchus, a servant of the high priest (Luke 22:49, John 18:10). Jesus’s reaction, however, is not as the disciples would expect of the Messiah: he heals Malchus and tells the officers of the chief priests and Pharisees to let those who are with him leave, an opportunity the disciples take, much to their own shame and consternation, as they fail to live up to their promise (Luke 22:51; John 18:8; Mark 14:50). This disappointment continues into the days following Jesus’s execution. A little over a week earlier, Jesus had entered Jerusalem riding on a donkey as people proclaimed him the king of Israel (Luke 19:30–38; John 12:12–18). People’s expectations must have been high, and most especially those of the disciples, as they recently had seen The Zealots 45 Jesus perform the impossible, raising a man named Lazarus from the grave after he had been dead four days (John 11:1–45). Shortly thereafter, Jesus entered the temple and chased out the merchants who bought and sold there (Matt. 21:12–13), a move that would have appealed to believers concerned about the purifying of the temple, such as the Zealots.81 Thus, just as Jesus seemed to be on the verge of taking hold of the kingdom he had been promising was to come, he was arrested and killed. The disappointment of the disciples seems palpable when the resurrected but asyet-unidentified Jesus confronts Cleopas and another man on the way to Emmaus, and they tell him, after recounting Jesus’s crucifixion, “But we trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel” (Luke 4:1). Despite the odd events that have happened, the disciples appear to be on the verge of returning to normal life, as they do when they take up their old jobs fishing (John 1:1–3). As both Brandon and Hengel point out, it seems unlikely that Jesus would have been put to death by the Romans unless he at least appeared to be some kind of threat to the government akin to that posed by the Zealots. Whether or not the Roman government itself saw Jesus in this light, Jewish religious authorities certainly did, enough that they 81. S. G. F. Brandon reasons that Jesus, in his cleansing of the temple, likely had helpers, such as his disciples and/or Zealots, because temple police would have interceded, whereas Martin Hengel denotes, “The Temple guard and the priests did not dare to proceed against Jesus because, in his actions, he was covered by the great mass of pilgrims at the feast. We may presume that the great number of people present, who had come together from every part of the country, also shared Jesus’ concern that the Temple should be purified of its desecration by the profane trade in sacrificial animals, particularly as this was fully in accordance with the Pharisaical ideas about the holiness of the place.” Brandon, Jesus and the Zealots, 9, 333; Hengel, Zealots, 216. 46 The Jewish World Jesus Entered were able to persuade the Romans to execute him.82 And indeed, certain parallels to the Zealots might have been disturbing to local officials, concerns that would have only been heightened by Jesus’s actions at the temple and by the large following he had garnered, a following, we are told in John 6:15, that would have attempted to “come and take him by force, to make him a king,” had he not fled from followers at critical junctures. Also likely contributing to these concerns was Jesus’s connection to Galilee, where he spent much of his life and ministry and from which he drew most of his disciples.83 Such may have been part of the basis for Pilate’s question of Jesus in Luke 23:6: “Are you a Galilaean?” As Hengel points out, “Galilee was the centre of resistance to foreign rule from the very beginning.”84 Judas the Galilean’s followers were sometimes simply called Galileans,85 and it was in Galilee that the Zealot movement drew a large share of its followers. Such concerns were likely a reason for the tax question the Pharisees and Herodians posed to Jesus, whether paying tribute to Caesar was lawful (Matt. 22:15–22; 82. Brandon makes much of this point in light of Pontius Pilate’s actions, questioning the biblical account, which emphasizes Pilate’s hesitance to go through with the execution. Brandon, Jesus and the Zealots, 324. That Pilate may have been hesitant, however, and yet gone through with the action is still entirely possible, given that shortly earlier, he had attempted to bring “images of Caesar that are called ensigns” into Jerusalem by night and had aroused a great deal of Jewish animosity and protest. Josephus, War of the Jews, 2.9.2–3. As such, he may have been looking to appease the Jewish religious establishment and avoid further trouble. As noted earlier, John 11:48 makes explicit reference to the Pharisees and chief priests worrying about Jesus’s following resulting in the Romans attacking Judea and deposing the current rulers. 83. Jesus was known as a Galilean. John 7:41, 52. Towns from which several of the twelve disciples were drawn included Cana and Bethsaida, both in Galilee. John 1:44, 21:2. 84. Hengel, Zealots, 56. 85. Ibid. The Zealots 47 Luke 20:19–26). Deriving from the Pharisees as the Zealots did, the former group would also have been against paying taxes to Rome, in line with the resentment held by the Jewish people in general; the Herodians, by contrast, as supporters of the current regime, would have had no such reservations. Thus, Jesus’s answer would promise to alienate one group or the other, the Jewish people or the Romans. In either case, the answer was sure to play into the Jewish authorities’ desire to delegitimize Jesus’s movement. Either Jesus would lose his popular following or he would prove a revolutionary worthy of arrest. That the latter was the expected result is established in Luke 20:20, which denotes that the authorities posed as “just men” so that “they might deliver him unto the power and authority of the governor,” this after spying on him to create a case against him. Jesus’s answer—“render . . . unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s, and unto God the things which be God’s” (Luke 0:5; Matt. :1)—in a way, turned the question inside out, for the Zealots also objected to the use of Caesar’s image, even minting their own coins during the Jewish War of 66–70 CE.86 By denoting that the money belonged to the Romans to begin with—that is, was something certain Jews felt it improper to use—Jesus essentially denoted that the question was moot, providing an answer that could be read two ways: as a support for economic boycott—condemning, or at least showing up the hypocrisy of, those who used such coins—and as a legitimation of the government in charge.87 But while Jesus’s Messianic pretensions may have confused the Jewish people, including his own disciples, and possibly even the Romans, the understanding among the disciples of the purpose of Jesus’s ministry was trans86. Adela Yarbro Collins, Crisis and Catharsis: The Power of the Apocalypse (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984), 126. 87. Ibid. 48 The Jewish World Jesus Entered formed after his final departure from them. No longer was Jesus seen as much as a political revolutionary as he was a spiritual one. The New Testament presents us with a Jesus who is primarily a teacher of the way of peace, who has no pretensions toward forming a worldly state of his own and seeking power for himself. Even if kingship is his ultimate destiny, that kingship is one in the distant future and connected to a spiritual pretext. We see his focus on spiritual matters and his lack of desire for worldly office in the Gospels even before we see him begin his ministry. Thus, immediately after his baptism by John, which predates the start of his preaching, he goes into the wilderness to fast—to draw closer to the Father—and faces temptation by Satan, whose offerings include “shewing him all of the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them” and promising, “All these things will I give to thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me” (Matt. 4:8–9). Satan’s temptations—to give into physical desires and needs, to take on physical power, and to save his own life—mirror those that Jesus will face during the ministry that follows. Jesus chooses, rather, to stay on a spiritual path, remaining loyal to God. Thus, the preaching that follows attempts to stir others toward this same journey. In his most famous sermon, Jesus tells people essentially to treat others by the golden rule—even their enemies. Speaking to a crowd largely of Jewish descent, Jesus would have been providing a message quite different from that espoused by the Zealots: But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you. And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloak forbid not to take thy coat also. Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him The Zealots 49 that taketh away thy goods ask them not again. And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise. For if ye love them which love you, what thank have ye? for sinners also love those that love them. And if ye do good to them which do good to you, what thank have ye? for sinners also do even the same. And if ye lend to them of whom ye hope to receive, what thank have ye? for sinners also lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil. Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful. (Luke 6:27–36) This focus on the manner in which people treat one another as emblematic of how to show the rule of God over one’s self rather than a focus on purifying the land and the nation for God by removing foreign peoples by force made Jesus and his teachings, his popular following notwithstanding, different from the Messianic pretenders that pre- and postdated him. Hence, Jesus could talk, as the Zealots talked, of placing God’s kingdom first, as he does in the same sermon: “Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matt. 6:31–33). But that kingdom for him was one based in a spiritual context. That was why, when Jesus was asked by Pilate about his supposed interest in subverting the state with a kingdom of his own, Jesus could reply, “My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, 50 The Jewish World Jesus Entered that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence” (John 18:33–34). This same spiritual message would become the message that the apostles themselves would pass on. The New Testament shows a transformation in their line of thought as the church took shape, both in the book of Acts and in the letters from the apostles that are preserved. Even in Acts 1:6, as the disciples gathered for one of the last times before Jesus’s final departure, they were still focused on a physical kingdom, asking him, “Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?” But by the time that Paul wrote to the Romans, likely in the late 50s CE, any Zealot-like pretension that Jesus had come to depose the Roman Empire and put the Jewish people in charge had long passed from the views of those who were Jesus’s followers. “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers,” Paul wrote to the Romans. “For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation” (Rom. 13:1–). Paul even went so far as to denote that Christians should pay taxes—“tribute to whom tribute is due”—because government officials act as God’s ministers (Rom. 13:6–7). Such statements weren’t limited to Paul, whose audience was in large part non-Jewish and whose following of Jesus came later than the original twelve disciples. Peter, the same man who had cut off the high priest’s ear in defense of Jesus, similarly tells followers in his first letter: “Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake: whether it be to the king, as supreme; Or unto governors, as unto them that are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well” (1 Pet. :13–14). Even if one were to accept the idea that the Gospels and Peter’s letter were written many decades after the begin- The Zealots 51 ning of the church and Jesus’s ministry—and not by Peter or the namesakes of the various Gospels—as many scholars do, and that by this time the church had an interest in hiding its (and Jesus’s) initial Zealot-like leanings, there are reasons to accept the presentation of Jesus in the Gospels as being true to his actual self. Many scholars see Paul’s Christianity as something different from that which Jesus or his disciples espoused, which was much more heavily Jewish in pretensions.88 And while early Christianity certainly was more heavily Jewish in its actual practices, as we would think of them today, the idea that Jewish Christian believers essentially disappeared after the temple’s destruction in 70 CE because such believers were aligned with the Zealots or that the temple’s destruction radically transformed such believers from a largely political sect to a largely spiritual one, more in keeping with the church founded by Paul, is problematic. Paul’s letters, many of which are generally accepted as being written a decade or more before the temple’s destruction, present us with a man who constantly reaffirms the unity of Jewish and Gentile believers, even as he criticizes certain Jewish believers who insist on adherence to the practice of circumcision and to the Mosaic oral traditions, even for Gentiles. Yet his criticism of Peter, the apostle to the Jews (Gal. 2:7–8), is 88. Much of this argument derives for the Tubingen School of biblical scholarship, of which Ferdinand Christian Baur was the founder. Scholars of this school “embraced a conflict and tension model of history that viewed the record of earliest Christianity as the outworking of a clash between two rival parties. On the one hand there was the Jewish-Christian party championed by Peter. On the other hand there was Paul who represented a Gentile-Christian party, a new broader Christianity, which rejected the practice of circumcision and a narrow Jewish interpretation of the Law.” Bauer’s ideas led him to claim that very little of the book of Acts was of historical merit. Stephen Haar, Simon Magus: The First Gnostic? (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), 11. 52 The Jewish World Jesus Entered muted in all but one passage in Galatians, a passage that is used frequently by scholars to point to an intellectual rift between the two—a rift that the letter does not truly support. The passage appears in Galatians 2. After recounting his conversion and his eventual acceptance into the church and the ministry, Paul explains how he went to Jerusalem to communicate with them “the gospel which [he] preach[es] among the Gentiles” (Gal. :). The fact that he notes that he did so privately lest he should have run in vain denotes, as John Gill’s commentary puts it, not any doubt with regard to himself, as if he had entertained any doubt of the doctrines he had preached, and needed any confirmation in them from them [which were of reputation in Jerusalem]; for he was fully assured of the truth of them, and assured others of the same; or that he questioned the agreement of the apostles with him; or that his faith at all depended on their authority; but with regard to others, and his usefulness among them. The false teachers had insinuated that his doctrine was different from that of the apostles in Jerusalem, and so endeavoured to pervert the Gospel he preached, and overthrow the faith of those that heard him; and could this have been made to appear, it would in all likelihood have rendered, in a great measure, his past labours in vain, and have prevented his future usefulness.89 This becomes clear in the next verses, wherein Paul recounts how one of his companions, Titus, a Greek, was be89. “Galatians :,” John Gill’s Exposition of the Bible, Bible Study Tools, https://www.biblestudytools.com/commentaries /gills-exposition-of-the-bible/galatians-2-2.html. The Zealots 53 ing compelled by some to be circumcised. Paul calls those doing the compelling “false brethren” (Gal. :4), essentially setting those people apart from those of reputation he had come to see, including Peter, James the brother of Jesus, and John, all of whom Paul says extended to him the “right hands of fellowship; that [Paul, along with his companion Barnabas] should go unto the heathen, and they unto the circumcision” (Gal. :9). The story then takes a disruptive turn. Paul meets Peter in Antioch sometime later. Here, he notes that Peter is “to be blamed” for the dissension that was occurring in the church with regard to whether the Gentiles needed to be circumcised (Gal. 2:11). The reason Paul gives is that Peter leaves off eating with the Gentiles once certain people come from James—that is, from Jerusalem—and separates himself to eat only with those “of the circumcision” (Gal. 2:12). Barnabas and other Jewish Christians do likewise (Gal. 2:13). The act here likely ties to Pharisaical table fellowship—that is, the Jewish Christians, in order to be accepted by those who were of a Pharisaical mindset or caste, adopted part of the purification rites that certain Jews insisted on, most specifically in this case, separation from those who were not circumcised. Paul then asks Peter this question: “If thou, being a Jew, livest after the manner of Gentiles, and not as do the Jews, why compellest thou the Gentiles to live as do the Jews?” (Gal. :14). An important thing to note here is that Peter was not generally living by the various rules these Jewish people of a Pharisaical mindset followed. In other words, he and Paul were in agreement with regard to the teaching of the gospel, the “liberty which [they had] in Christ Jesus” (Gal. :4). Both “lived after the manner of Gentiles” (Gal. :1). The issue brought to light in this instance was that Peter and certain others “dissimulated” at times to satisfy segments of the Jewish population, something even Paul did in taking a Na- 54 The Jewish World Jesus Entered zirite vow (Acts 21:23–26), whether to protect themselves, to avoid confrontation, or to further the spread of the gospel among the Jewish people. Paul’s relationship with Peter is further documented in his first letter to the Corinthians. Here, he writes of various schisms in the Corinthian church, schisms caused by the parishioners preferring one teacher to another. Certainly, this denotes that there were differences of emphasis—and as such, even perhaps differences of understanding among those who listened to those spreading the gospel—but Paul’s view is not one that pits Peter against himself. Instead, he emphasizes how they speak the same thing, even as those in the Corinthian church should (1 Cor. 1:10–17). Thus, even if the Gospels, the book of Acts, and 1 Peter were all written after the temple’s destruction, a claim that cannot be wholly confirmed, the acceptance of Gentiles into Christian fellowship was not a Pauline creation that the writers of these books tried to shoehorn in but one that truly stemmed from the early years of the church predating Paul’s adoption into it.90 As such, Jewish Christians were not aligned with the Zealots or the Pharisees, and while they wrestled with how best to incorporate Gentiles into worship, from fairly early on, probably within the first decade of the church’s history, they did not believe in spreading a gospel that was aimed solely to the Jewish people. They were not separatists or political radicals. Thus, we can take the account of Peter’s baptizing of the Gentile Cornelius in Acts 10 and of the council in Acts 90. For another discussion of the apostles’ early pre-Pauline acceptance of Gentile believers and Paul’s interaction with them and continuing Jewish leanings, see Paula Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 187–189. The Jewish World Jesus Entered 55 15 regarding what traditions to bind on the Gentiles as reflective of the reality of the early church.91 w w w w The church’s incorporation of Gentiles was not something that arose without any foundation in Jesus’s ministry—or without any precedence in the Jewish religion. Certainly, Jesus’s preaching was primarily to the descendants of Israel and primarily in Judea and Galilee, and even primarily to the Jewish settlements within those regions, as he himself noted when he said, “I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. 15:4).92 Similarly, when he sent out his twelve disciples, during his life, he told them, “Go not in the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not: But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. 10:5–6). But even these strictures would not remain forever. If the mission in Luke 10:1 is any indication of Jesus’s purpose for these missions, it seems that Jesus wanted the disciples to go where he was likely to later travel himself. Once he was no longer to walk among them, the mission was to become much more widespread, as he told his disciples before his final leave taking: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations” (Matt. 28:19). In fact, even in the earlier commission, Jesus had acknowledged that Gentiles would play a role: “And ye shall be brought before governors and kings for my sake, for a testimony against them and the Gentiles” (Matt. 10:18). 91. For further exploration and defense of the book of Acts as a historical work, see A. T. Robertson, Luke the Historian in the Light of Research (New York: Scribner’s, 1920). 92. Settlements of largely Greek and Gentile residents were scattered throughout the Jewish regions at the time, but the itinerary given for Jesus in the scriptures does not include these cities. See Gilbert, “Hellenization of the Jews,” 56–57. 56 The Jewish World Jesus Entered As the Gospels make clear, Jesus himself even had scattered dealings with Gentiles. In Luke 7:1–10, for example, Jesus agrees to heal a centurion’s servant. The centurion, Luke tells us, has heard of Jesus—no doubt also of the various miracles that he had performed—and attempts to contact him through the Jewish elders, who in turn talk of him as one who “loveth [their] nation” and built them a synagogue. In another passage, in Matthew 15:21–28, Jesus agrees to heal a Canaanite woman’s daughter, even after he initially tells her his mission is to no one but Israel. In both cases, Jesus remarks on the person’s faith as a reason for their answered appeal. Indeed, as John 12:20–21 shows, wherein some Greeks travel from afar and request to visit Jesus, Jesus’s fame, especially as he neared the end of his life, had begun to spread beyond the Jewish people. Part of this may have stemmed from appreciation for his cleansing specifically of the Gentile court of the temple, which the Jewish authorities had allowed to become a marketplace, thus interfering with the worship of the non-Jewish God fearers who could not enter into the temple’s other courts.93 If we are to believe Eusebius, Jesus’s fame spread among Gentiles both far to the east of the Holy Land and far to the west. In the East, Eusebius recounts, Abgar, the king of Edessa, or Osroene, in upper Mesopotamia, modern-day northern Iraq, wrote to Jesus asking for healing and offering protection from the Jewish people.94 While in the West, the Roman emperor Tiberius (14–37 CE) tried to have Jesus proclaimed a god by the Senate following his resurrection.95 Although both Eusebian accounts are likely simply legends, Herod’s curiosity with regard to Jesus and desire to see him, as denoted in Luke 23:8, shows that knowledge of him had reached the upper echelons of government. No 93. Bruce, New Testament History, 189–190. 94. Eusebius, Church History, 1.13. 95. Ibid., 2.2. The Jewish World Jesus Entered 57 doubt, a ministry that attracted multitudes would have also attracted interest from people abroad. Furthermore, Jesus’s own actions and statements with regard to Pharisaical teachings on purity and separation, as seen in the incidents earlier discussed wherein Pharisees invited Jesus to eat with them, show that Jesus had no similar dogma that would have constituted a permanent separation of Jewish people from non-Jewish. As such, the world Jesus entered and that would shape the Christian church over its first two centuries was not just a Jewish one but one that included multiple nationalities. Of particular note would be those nations that held sway over the Jewish people—at the time of Jesus, that would have been the Romans, but before them came the Greeks, and before them the Persians and the Egyptians. One also needs to consider the people local to the land of Palestine itself, over whom the Jewish people had in recent times exerted control—the Idumeans and the Samaritans. That the Christian church was a polyglot affair is evident from its very first meeting: when Peter rises to speak, he does so miraculously in every person’s own tongue, Acts 2:7–8 tells us. Among them are “Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians” (Acts :9–11). It is to this varied selection of people, and their place in the world Jesus entered, that we turn next.  Chapter 2 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered The four sects that Josephus describes as being the most consequential or popular among the Jewish people—the Essenes, Sadducees, Pharisees, and Zealots—all had their origin, to an extent, in a reaction to the peoples who invaded the land of Judea. These peoples, likewise, would have influence over the Christian church that would emerge from the Jewish milieu. Of these, arguably, the most significant to hold direct sway, at least in Jesus’s day, were the Greeks and the Romans, whose empires had most recently controlled Palestine—indeed, the Western world. But both of these nations, too, drew on and amalgamated portions of the cultures around them as they attempted to maintain their hold over the subject populations. While the Roman Empire ruled Judea during the time of Jesus, Greek culture still dominated the Mediterranean, especially its eastern half. Indeed, the Romans had drawn much of their own culture—philosophy, theology, the arts— from the Greeks. Greek was the common language as well as the language of education, of reading and writing, and the Greek concept of education dominated the lands the Greeks had once conquered. In religion, the Greek gods became Rome’s own gods under different names—Zeus be- The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered 59 came Jupiter, Hades became Pluto, Aphrodite became Venus.1 In philosophy, the popular schools of Stoicism and Epicureanism derived from Greek ideas.2 But Greek culture itself was a syncretic one, drawing many of its ideas from other peoples, such as the Egyptians and the Persians. Pliny the Elder tells us, for example, that many important Greek thinkers, including “Pythagoras, . . . Empedocles, Democritus, and Plato, crossed the seas [to lands controlled by Persia], in order to attain a knowledge thereof. . . . Returning home, it was upon the praises of this art [magic] that they expatiated—it was this that they held as one of their grandest mysteries.”3 Although Pliny rails against the popularity of what he calls magic, he also acknowledges that it “amalgamated with itself; the three other sciences which hold the greatest sway upon the mind of man”—namely, medicine, religion, and astrology (or divination)—and he denotes that “the two arts— medicine . . . and magic—were developed simultaneously [in Greece]: medicine by the writings of Hippocrates, and magic by the works of Democritus, about the period of the Peloponnesian War, which was waged in Greece in the year of the City of Rome 300 [ca. 450–400 BCE].”4 But ideas of magic, he says, stemmed from Persia, via the religion of Zoroastrianism, and first spread to Greece through the 1. Arnaldo Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians (Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 178–179; Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 98, 99. On the Grecian god Apollo’s adoption by Rome, see Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem, 102. 2. Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem, 265. 3. Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, ed. John Bostock and H. T. Riley (London: Taylor and Francis, Red Lion Court, Fleet Street, 1855), 30.2, Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper /text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D30 %3Achapter%3D2. 4. Ibid., 30.1–2. 60 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered Hellenistic writer “Osthanes, who accompanied Xerxes, the Persian king, in his expedition against Greece.”5 This reference to armed forces draws into focus much of the way in which information was shared across kingdoms and lands. Before Alexander turned Greece and Macedonia into a two-continent-spanning kingdom, Greek men were often mercenaries, serving in the armies of Assyria, Babylon, and Persia.6 As such, Greeks soldiers both shared Greek culture with and took on elements of the cultures of those alongside whom they fought. The same process played a role in the Jewish diaspora, as Jewish soldiers in Hellenistic armies adopted Greek customs and language and then brought those things to Judea on their return from service and war, while still others stayed in the regions in which they had served, bringing along with them Jewish customs and ideas.7 As discussed in chapter 1, the emergence of the various sects of the Jewish religion of Jesus’s day was in large part a reaction to Greek cultural hegemony. While some, such as the largely upper-class Sadducees, proved more open to Greek ideas, and others, such as the largely lower-class Essenes and Pharisees, tried to separate themselves from outside influences, all nevertheless were affected, whether consciously or not. The Greek language became a common tongue, just as the Aramaic language of Persia had, so much so that often the common Jewish person did not know Hebrew.8 In turn, the Greek translation of the Bible, the Septuagint, became commonly 5. Ibid., 30.2. 6. Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974), 12–13. 7. Ibid., 16–17. Jewish customs and ideas also spread in the forced diaspora that occurred after the Babylonian invasion. See George Holley Gilbert, “The Hellenization of the Jews between 334 BC and 70 AD,” American Journal of Theology 13, no. 4 (October 1909): 528–529. 8. Philip Neal, Judaism—Revelation of Moses or Religion of Men? (Hollister, Calif.: York Publishing, 2010), 29. The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered 61 enough used that Jewish writers such as Josephus quoted from it, as would the Christian church.9 Martin Hengel traces other common Jewish ideas—even among those opposed to foreign influences—to Greek concepts as well. Take, for example, the idea that anyone, with the proper education, could become a teacher of the law, that one did not necessarily have to be a descendent of the priestly caste, a prescription that allowed for the rise in the authority of the scribes. Hengel traces this to the time of the Maccabees and the growing Hellenistic influence on Judea. To offset the increasingly Greek-influenced upper priesthood, certain teachers turned ironically to the Greek ideas of education for the masses, forging schools for children and scribes, that rather than teaching Homer and other classics of antiquity taught the Torah.10 Even the separatist Essenes may have forged their communities around the Greek laws of associations: They begin with the particular honour paid to the person of the founder, continue with the rules laid down for precedence, for the community officials and the full assembly (which was basically responsible for all decisions), with the testing of initiates and the others by which they are bound, common meals, the administration of community finance, to which everyone contributes and in which everyone shares, with ethical regulation and a thoroughgoing system of association law with punishment and the right of exclusion, and end with a common burial place. In particular “the legal position of the assembly of members corresponds completely, ac9. Crawford Howell Toy and Richard Gottheil, “Bible Translations,” Jewish Encyclopedia, sections “The Influence of Hellenism” and “The Septuagint,” http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/369 -bible-translations. 10. Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism, 78–83. 62 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered cording to the Community Rule, with that of the Hellenistic association.”11 As it was with the Jewish people who unconsciously or consciously adopted customs of the Greeks, with the first toehold of foreign influence being travelers in and with the military, so it was with the Greeks, in the years before Alexander’s empire, who adopted concepts and ideas from the Persians, Egyptians, and others. Men like Osthanes brought home strange ideas, and others followed suit by going east to study the ideas in further detail, adopting some of them, and introducing them to Greece on their return. Pliny complained of the pernicious influence of the Persian magi on Greek ideas, but Egypt too had its influence, beginning with the service of Greek mercenaries in the Egyptian army in 670 BCE and continuing into the time of Persia’s control of Egypt and eventually Greece’s own domination of the land.12 In fact, many of the preAlexandrian Greek intellectuals visited Egypt “for the purpose of their education, . . . [as] Egypt was regarded as the educational centre of the ancient world.”13 Among those who went to Egypt was Thales, who “was initiated by the Egyptian Priests into the Mystery System and science of the Egyptians,” gleaning from them lessons in astronomy, land surveying, and engineering, among other things.14 Another student of the Egyptians and their priests was Pythagoras, who took from them the concept of the transmigration of 11. Ibid., 244. 12. George G. M. James, Stolen Legacy: Greek Philosophy Is Stolen Egyptian Philosophy (New York: Philosophical Library, 1954), 33–34, http://www.jpanafrican.org/ebooks/eBook%20Stolen%20Legacy.pdf; also available at http://www.sacred-texts.com/afr/stle/stle08.htm. 13. Ibid., 34. 14. Ibid.; Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, ed. R. D. Hicks (1925; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 1.1, Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc =Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0258%3Abook%3D1%3Achapter%3D1. The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered 63 the soul, previously unheard of in Greece, as well as various principles of medicine, diet, music, mathematics, and geometry.15 Plato, too, along with Euripides, is said to have visited and learned from the Egyptians, among others.16 The cultures of the ancient world were, as cultures are today, a mix, to one degree or another, of various national influences, adopted and adapted for each set of peoples. The Greeks may have spread their culture far and wide through the predominance of their vast empire, but they had gleaned much of that culture from peoples they’d been in contact with all along. And when the Romans took over, they adopted and adapted much of this culture for their own. Indeed, part of what made Rome so powerful, beyond its military prowess, was its ability to wed customs and ideas already in use by conquered peoples to its own political ends. As Greek culture was already in play in much of the world that Rome came to dominate, many of the Greek ideas were adapted to Roman needs, so much so that what we often take for granted as Western ways of thinking— the emphasis, for example, on logic and rhetoric—really derive from the Roman Empire’s adoption of Greek concepts.17 For the Greeks, this emphasis on argument was, most especially “a tool of political persuasion,”18 politics, especially in relation to religion, also being a focus that the Romans would have as their empire spread. For both Romans and Greeks, in the years leading into Jesus’s time, faith in the gods was in decline, or at least in a transitional state, most notably among the upper classes. By the fifth century BCE, Greek philosophers were increas15. James, Stolen Legacy, 34; Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 8.1. 16. James, Stolen Legacy, 35; Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 3.1. 17. Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem, 98. 18. Ibid. 64 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered ingly turning toward monotheistic ideas and against the use of idols in worship.19 Building on that, astrology “after the end of the third century [BCE] . . . became more and more the spiritually dominant force among the educated. The collapse of old Greek religion in the fifth and fourth centuries BC . . . and its relegation to a mere belief in fate had inevitably to culminate in astrology, for here there was apparently a possibility of gaining a glimpse into the mysterious working of fate.”20 Thus, by the time the Romans came to dominate the Mediterranean, the upper classes turned increasingly to Greek philosophy rather than religion. As Arnaldo Momigliano puts it in his book on early syncretism: “If there was something no one with any education would care to deny in Rome, it was the validity of philosophic argument. In the age of Caesar, philosophy had become part of Roman education in a more intimate way than Greek myths had become Roman through Greek poetry—or its Latin equivalent.”21 This was helped in part by the fact that the Greek city of Athens, which had once been the center of philosophical inquiry, lost much of its intellectual significance in the wars it lost to Rome between 185 and 85 BCE, thus making Rome along with other cities, such as Alexandria in Egypt, of more importance to such pursuits.22 The masses, who continued to adhere to the customs of the local gods, of course, didn’t necessarily 19. John J. Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora (Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000), 158–159, 201. 20. Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism, 236. See also Frederick Clifton Grant, “St. Paul and Stoicism,” Biblical World 45, no. 5 (1915): 270. 21. Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians, 62. 22. Troels Engberg-Pedersen, “Setting the Scene: Stoicism and Platonism in the Transitional Period in Ancient Philosophy,” in Stoicism in Early Christianity, ed. Tuomas Rasimus, Troels Engberg-Pedersen, and Ismo Dunderberg (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 2010), 2–3. In fact, four schools of philosophy closed in Athens during the First Mithridatic War of 89–85 BCE. Engberg-Pedersen, “Setting the Scene,” . Epicureanism 65 concern themselves with philosophical discussions (and even among the upper class religious devotion, in various iterations, waxed and waned), but formerly Greek philosophical ideas nevertheless became popularized enough that they filtered into the common beliefs, as can be seen by gravestones referring to such concepts as the soul or fate.23 As Martin Goodman, in his book Rome and Jerusalem, puts it, “In the towns of Roman Spain, a schoolboy might be unwittingly educated in the basics of Stoic and Platonic notions about the world soul and its relation to the individual through study of the speech of Anchises to his son Aeneas in Vergil’s epic poem.”24 With the gods providing only a vague outline of acceptable human behavior, Greek philosophy also came to be a mainstay of Roman moral thinking.25 Goodman sketches four main thrusts of Greek philosophy that would come to dominate Roman thinking, if not explicitly, then certainly through the Greek educational system that Rome adopted, as exemplified in Goodman’s schoolboy illustration. These philosophies were Epicureanism, Skepticism, Stoicism, and Cynicism. Epicureanism The first philosophy Goodman mentions, Epicureanism, focused around the philosopher Epicurus’s “dictum that ‘pleasure is the beginning and end of living happily.’”26 While modern readers might think that such a dictum would lead to licentious living, perhaps because of statements like that of Paul’s in 1 Corinthians 15:32 (“if the dead rise not[,] let us eat and drink; for to morrow we die”) or 23. 24. 25. 26. Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem, 100. Ibid. Ibid., 268. Ibid., 265. 66 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered because early Catholic theologians disparaged Epicureans as gluttons and drunkards, in practice, an Epicurean lifestyle could be quite ascetic, for if the one’s purpose is to live happily, such happiness requires that one also avoid pain—or anything that might easily result in pain, not only a life devoted to an unpopular cause but also a life devoted to public service, let alone one devoted to excess of any sort.27 As Epicurus himself wrote: When therefore we say that pleasure is the end we do not mean the pleasures of profligates and those that consist in high living, as certain people think, either not understanding us and holding to different views or willfully misrepresenting us; but we mean freedom from pain in the body and turmoil in the soul. For it is not protracted drinking bouts and revels nor yet sexual pleasures with boys and women nor rare dishes of fish and the rest . . . all the delicacies that the luxurious table bears . . . that beget the happy life but rather sober calculation, which searches out the reasons for every choice and avoidance and expels the false opinions, the source of most of the turmoil that seizes upon the souls of men.28 Although the popularity of Epicureanism was already waning by the first century CE, its ideas would still perme27. Ibid., 265–266; F. F. Bruce, New Testament History (New York: Anchor Books, 1972), 42–43. On early Catholic views, see Robert Hanrott, “Epicureanism after Epicurus—the Influence of Epicurus on Western Thought,” Epicurus Today: Moderation, Enjoyment of Life, Tranquility, Friendship, Lack of Fear, http://epicurus.today /epicureanism-after-epicurus-the-influence-of-epicurus-on-westernthought/. 28. Epicurus, letter to Menoeceus, in Norman Wentworth DeWitt, St. Paul and Epicurus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1954), “Appendix,” http://epicurism.github.io/epicurism.info/etexts /stpaulandepicurus.html. Epicureanism 67 ate much of the Greco-Roman world at all levels of society into the second and third century, enough that Epicureanism, if we are to believe scholar Norman W. DeWitt, would have an effect on the acceptability of the Christian message.29 Among the various similarities between Christianity and Epicureanism was that of method: the dissemination of information and teaching to their various communities of followers via letters.30 But even more important was the message, the values that the two ways of thinking espoused: “Both preached the deceptiveness of the worldly prizes of wealth, fame, and power. Both preached the golden rule. Both declared it more blessed to give than to receive. Both exalted love and goodwill and both declared that the true friend will die for his friend.”31 In short, the teachings of Epicurus introduced a code of ethics, a set of values, that included such ideas as “gratitude, cheerfulness, and sweetness and dignity” that Christianity would mirror, so much so that “so far as the moral teaching was concerned, the task of the Apostles was not so much to furnish a new content of ethics as to revolutionize the motivation of conduct.”32 This difference in motivation, of course, was foundational to the differences between the message that Jesus brought and the one that Epicurus spread. The former focused on spiritual salvation and a future kingdom and had as its driving force the pleasing of a personal god. The latter placed as its driving force simply pleasure—for one’s self in this life: “the memory of pleasures past, the enjoyment 9. Norman W. DeWitt, “Epicureanism and Christianity,” University of Toronto Quarterly 14, no. 3 (April 1945): 254. See also Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem, 266; Renée Koch Piettre, “Paul and the Athens Epicureans: Between Polytheisms, Atheisms and Monotheisms,” Diogenes 205 (2005): 54. 30. Piettre, “Paul and the Athens Epicureans,” 49; DeWitt, “Epicureanism and Christianity,” 55. 31. DeWitt, “Epicureanism and Christianity,” 55. 32. Ibid., 253, 254. 68 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered of pleasures present, and the hope of pleasures to come.”33 The gods were to be revered, and there was joy to be had in that, but they were a rather distant concept—Epicureans were not atheists, as they were often attacked as being, just as Christians were often accused of the same. Rather the universe ran of its own volition.34 Norman DeWitt goes so far as to claim that much of Paul’s discourse in his letters was in response to Epicurean teachings, transforming them where appropriate to a Christian spiritual context and attacking them where they derived from or were too concerned with the physical world: “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit,” Paul once wrote, “after the tradition of men” (Col. :8).35 Indeed, Paul would have had a good deal of familiarity with Epicurean teachings, having been raised in Tarsus, where “philosophers of opposing tendencies ruled it alternately,” and having spent much time in Antioch of Syria, where Epicureanism remained popular.36 Skepticism While Epicureanism espoused many values similar to those espoused by the Christian faith that would emerge in the first century, while holding to a different set of reasons for those values, Skepticism drew into question the idea that one could come to any sort of conclusion about anything at all. Two schools of Skepticism emerged in the third century BCE—one based around Plato’s Academy and one based around the teaching of the Greek philosopher Pyrrho. The former was turned toward Skepticism by Arcesilaus, the 33. DeWitt, St. Paul and Epicurus, “Preface.” 34. Piettre, “Paul and the Athens Epicureans,” 48; DeWitt, St. Paul and Epicurus, chapter 1, under “Theology”; Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem, 98–99, 268. 35. DeWitt, St. Paul and Epicurus. 36. Piettre, “Paul and the Athens Epicureans,” 53, 55. Skepticism 69 sixth successor to Plato at the Academy. From Plato’s dialogues, Arcesilaus came to the view that “nothing can be known with certainty, either by the senses or by the mind,” and as such we “should suspend judgment” about the truth of any proposition.37 Pyrrho’s followers came to similar conclusions, that because “things are equally indifferent, unmeasurable and inarbitrable, . . . neither our sensations nor our opinions tell us truths or falsehoods. Therefore, for this reason we should not put our trust in them one bit, but we should be unopinionated, uncommitted and unwavering, saying concerning each individual thing that it no more is than is not, or it both is and is not, or it neither is nor is not.”38 Skeptics, then, “were constantly engaged in overthrowing the dogmas of all schools, but enunciated none themselves.”39 In the century before Jesus’s birth, Aenesidemus revived Pyrrhonian Skepticism at Plato’s Academy.40 As part of his discourses, he proposed ten modes, or arguments, that essentially put forward an intense relativism wherein “no perspective can be rationally preferred to any other with respect to real natures, or essences.”41 One cannot know, for example, whether the world appears the same to one’s self as it does to the animals (mode 1), or to another person (mode ), or to two different senses within the same person (mode 3), or whether it is the same at different times or locations (mode 5).42 The end of such intense scrutiny was a kind of happiness based around a “freedom from disturbance” caused by too much rational37. Harald Thorsrud, “Ancient Greek Skepticism,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2.a.i, 2.a.iii, https://www.iep.utm.edu/skepanci/. 38. Aristocles apudEusebius, Praeparatio evangelica, 14.18.1–5, trans. by Long and Sedley, 1F, quoted in Thorsrud, “Ancient Greek Skepticism,” 3.a. 39. Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 11.74. 40. Thorsrud, “Ancient Greek Skepticism,” 3.b.i. 41. Ibid., 3.b.ii. 42. Ibid.; Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 11.79, 11.83. 70 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered ization.43 One cannot know what one cannot know—in fact, one simply cannot know—so one need not worry about it. Skepticism did not play a large role in the Jewish world.44 And while its ideas do not appear to have directly impacted early Christian thought,45 their presence may be alluded to in the scriptures. Perhaps, the most telling example of this may be when Pilate interviews Jesus, and after the latter claims, “For this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice,” Pilate responds, in Skeptic fashion, “What is truth?” (John 18:37–38). Paul also talks of “casting down imaginations and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God” ( Cor. 10:5) and elsewhere, as already mentioned, disparages philosophy (Col. 2:8). On the whole, the entire concept of Christian belief and of Jesus’s own teaching contradicts the basic idea that Skeptics advanced—that ultimate knowledge, or truth, is unobtainable. Just as John, in his Gospel, wrote that Jesus told Pilate that he bore the truth, so John, along with Paul, portrays Jesus as being the source of knowledge and truth and, in fact, the essence of truth itself. Later in the same Gospel, Jesus claims that those who become his disciples “shall know the truth, and the truth shall make [them] free” (John 8:3), as opposed to the Skeptic concept that the understanding of the inability to establish truth would set one free. Paul, similarly, in his first letter to Timothy, 43. Thorsrud, “Ancient Greek Skepticism,” 3.b.iii. 44. Kaufmann Kohler, “Skeptic,” Jewish Encyclopedia, http://www .jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/13794-skeptic. 45. Augustine, in the fourth century, can be given credit for “Reconceiving Skepticism in a Theological Framework,” in the form of being open to new ideas (reserving judgment) and questioning how one “knows” God. “Ancient Skepticism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 5.1, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-ancient /#AugReConSkeTheFra. Stoicism 71 tells his correspondent that their savior wills that “all men . . . come unto the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. :4). But Jesus not only provides knowledge of the truth for these authors—he becomes the truth to the extent that he even surpasses knowledge, at the least in the physical sense. In John 14:6, for example, John denotes Jesus as proclaiming, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” For Paul, knowledge of the physical world links to knowledge beyond the physical, as he writes to the Romans, “For the invisible things of him [God] from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead” (Rom. 1:0). For the writer of Hebrews, the step between this physical knowledge and knowledge of the eternal is faith. “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for,” he writes, “the evidence of things not seen. . . . Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear” (Heb. 11:1, 3). Hence, the early Christians asserted that the physical world was not only knowable but that the “ultimate reality” could be known through it via faith. This step of faith, however, came through action, action endorsed by the founder of their faith, Jesus—who claimed not only to be the truth but to be the ultimate example of the proper way of life—even as Paul wrote in his letter to the Ephesians, that he wished for them to come “to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge” (Eph. 3:19). Such love, Paul wrote, would help believers come to “be filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:19), even as John wrote that “God is love” (1 John 4:8). Stoicism Skepticism was in part a reaction to another popular philosophy, Stoicism, which perhaps achieved its greatest ac- 72 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered ceptance in Rome during the first two centuries CE and which was another example of Greek philosophy merging with and borrowing from sources further east.46 In contrast to Skepticism, Stoicism rested, in some ways, on a foundation of materialism—that the world was knowable and that everything that exists is physical in nature, traceable back to a singular universal divinity.47 This is not to say that the Stoics believed that all that one senses is real or true, for they acknowledged that one can misperceive the world. However, knowledge could be gained over time, through a collection of impressions, as one moved toward the perfection achieved by the highly idealistic (and mostly theoretical) figure of the Sage, who was in a sense in tune with the divine.48 The Stoic view of knowledge thus was highly empirical.49 One basis on which Stoic views lay was the idea that “a divine force shape[d] and constitute[d] all things, including man.”50 For Stoics, people’s destinies were fixed by fate. Accepting that fate—the will of the divine, or “nature”—rather than kicking against it, was where virtue lay, and in that virtue came happiness, for no longer would any kind of trouble bother a person (since such trouble 46. On popular acceptance in Roman times, see Thorsrud, “Ancient Greek Skepticism,” intro and .a.ii; Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem, 98, 66; Engberg-Pedersen, “Setting the Scene,” 1; Ronald Nash, “Was the New Testament Influenced by Stoicism?,” Christian Research Institute, http://www.equip.org/article/was-the-new-testament-influenced-by -stoicism/. On the syncretic origins of Stoicism, see Frederick Clifton Grant, “St. Paul and Stoicism,” 73. Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, was a Phoenician who came to Athens via a colony of Cyprus, a fact that would have significance in the spread of Gnostic ideas, as discussed in chapter 4. 47. Nash, “Was the New Testament Influenced by Stoicism?”; Massimo Pigliucci, “Stoicism,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2.b, https://www.iep.utm.edu/stoicism/. 48. Pigliucci, “Stoicism,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1.a. 49. Ibid. 50. Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem, 268. Stoicism 73 was already fated).51 One Stoic compared this idea to a dog tied to a cart: the dog can run with the cart or let itself be dragged. Either way, the cart moves—but in first case, the dog is happy, and in the other, tortured; in the former reaction is virtue.52 With the pursuit of virtue as their main focus, Stoics were known for their lack of emotion (or more precisely, their rejection of “wrong” emotions) and their attentiveness to self-control and the mastery of their desires and their mind.53 Things one would usually consider “good”—wealth and health—were, in fact, of no value when it came to virtue, yet a Stoic might well still acknowledge their utility, so long as such blessings did not impinge on knowledge about what was truly important.54 Paul’s claim in Philippians 4:11–12 (“I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know how both how to be abased, and I know how to abound”) echoes a similar idea, and many have drawn parallels between Stoicism and the new religion that emerged in the first century. Stanley Stowers, for example, in his paper on “Jesus the Teacher and Stoic Ethics,” sees Jesus, as portrayed in the Gospel of Matthew, as a kind of Sage figure who embodies, in his teachings, such Stoic concepts as “the idea of a universal ethic for individuals based on divine law; the demand for perfection; [and] the so-called criterion 51. Ibid., 67; Nash, “Was the New Testament Influenced by Stoicism?”; David Davidson, “How Ancient Thought Agreed (and Disagreed) with the Early Church,” Logos Talk, October 24, 2013, https:// blog.logos.com/2013/10/the-stoics-and-the-early-church/. 52. Wayne A. Meeks, The Moral World of the First Christians (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), 48. 53. Frederick Clifton Grant, “St. Paul and Stoicism,” 70–7; Stanley Stowers, “Jesus the Teacher and Stoic Ethics in the Gospel of Matthew,” 1, https://brown.edu/Departments/Early_Cultures /events/documents/Stowers.pdf; Davidson, “How Ancient Thought Agreed.” 54. Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem, 267. 74 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered of ‘interiority’ or ‘intention.’”55 In the case of the latter idea, one’s right actions were not enough to establish one’s moral uprightness; one had also to have the right motivation and way of thought (“virtue,” the Stoic philosopher Cleanthes held, “is a harmonious disposition, choice-worthy for its own sake and not from hope or fear or any external motive”),56 even as Jesus criticized the Pharisees, who “outwardly appear[ed] righteous unto men, but within . . . [were] full of hypocrisy and iniquity” (Matt. 3:8). For the Stoics, “All [virtuous] actions promote the harmony of the spirit dwelling in the individual man with the will of him who orders the universe,”57 just as for Jesus, those who would enter into life keep the commandments and those who would enter into the kingdom of heaven do the will of the Father (Matt. 19:17, 7:21). And as Jesus could tell people to “be . . . perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect” (Matt. 5:48), so the Stoic philosopher Archedemus could advise others “to perfect all appropriate actions in one’s life.”58 Other biblical scholars point to similarities between Paul’s thoughts and those of the Stoics. Runar M. Thorsteinsson, for example, sees “Stoicism as a Key to Pauline Ethics in Romans.”59 John Herman Randall Jr. “attributed the strong social emphasis of Paul’s moral philosophy to Stoicism.”60 And although Frederick Clifton Grant, in his article on “St. Paul and Stoicism,” largely argues against biblical scholars such as Percy Gardner, J. Weiss, and B. W. Bacon who posited that Paul drew much, if not the ma55. Stowers, “Jesus the Teacher,” 6, . 56. Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 7.89. Compare also Matthew 5:27–28, regarding action versus thought in Jesus’s teaching. 57. Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 7.88. 58. Ibid., quoted in Stowers, “Jesus the Teacher,” 7. 59. See Thorsteinsson’s article by the same name in Stoicism in Early Christianity, ed. Tuomas Rasimus, Troels Engberg-Pedersen, and Ismo Dunderberg (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 2010), 15–38. 60. Nash, “Was the New Testament Influenced by Stoicism?” Stoicism 75 jority, of his teaching from Stoicism, even Grant acknowledges that “the effects of Stoicism were in the air. The general culture and thought of the times, to which Stoicism, as well as other movements contributed may have influenced him,” affecting “the form of Paul’s thought and his vocabulary.”61 While one might quibble with whether Paul and other Christians drew their actual ideas from Stoicism, the possibility that Christian writers such as Paul drew on Stoic principles to relate to their Gentile audiences is no stretch. As Troels Engberg-Pedersen notes, “If a Christian writer felt the need to articulate and buttress his own message in philosophical terms, then for the author of the earliest among such Christian writings it would be more natural to look to Stoicism as the best vehicle.”62 Paul, for one, came from Tarsus (Acts 21:39), a stronghold of Stoicism, in addition to Epicureanism, and was, we know from scripture, familiar with some of its ideas.63 And in Rome itself, where Stoic philosophy likely appealed most to an educated minority but drifted down in its concepts to the masses, the Stoic philosophers Seneca, Musonius Rufus, and Epictetus were all at one time or another active such that some readers of Paul’s letter to the Romans would have been familiar with them.64 Seneca, in fact, would have been the imperial counselor in Nero’s government at the time that Paul wrote.65 Thus, it would have made sense for Paul, in writing to an audience that included Gentiles familiar with such ideas, to draw on them, at least for comparison and clarity, in his discussion of the way of Jesus. In fact, Paul’s familiarity with the Stoics is shown in his quotation from the poet Aratus, a student of Stoicism, in Acts 17:28, while 61. 6. 63. 64. 65. Frederick Clifton Grant, “St. Paul and Stoicism,” 76, 79. Engberg-Pedersen, “Setting the Scene,” 1. Frederick Clifton Grant, “St. Paul and Stoicism,” 73. Thorsteinsson, “Stoicism as a Key,” 19. Ibid.; Nash, “Was the New Testament Influenced by Stoicism?” 76 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered he was visiting Athens: “As certain of your own poets have said, For we are also his [the divine one’s] offspring.”66 That early Christians could have referenced Stoic thought when attempting to explain certain biblical ideas would not have been too difficult, since the two ways of thinking shared many conceptions, a fact that the many biblical scholars who have drawn parallels between Jesus or Paul and the Stoic philosophers no doubt picked up on, even if at times taking their claims to unjustified extremes. David Davidson, in an article on the similarities and differences in the two ways of thought, outlines four particular likenesses:67 ○ An emphasis on hardship. Even as Paul could tell the Romans that “we glory in tribulation” (Rom. 5:3), so Seneca could say, “When everything seems to go hard and uphill, I have trained myself not merely to obey God, but to agree with His decisions.”68 ○ A sense of man’s depravity. As Paul could say, “The carnal mind is enmity against God” (Rom. 8:7), or as Jesus could say, “There is none good but one, that is, God” (Matt. 19:17), so Seneca could say, “The evil that afflicts us is not external, it is within us, situated in our very vitals; for that reason we attain soundness with all the more difficulty, because we do not know that we are diseased.”69 66. Riemer Faber, “The Apostle and the Poet: Paul and Aratus,” Spindleworks, February 8, 2013, http://spindleworks.com/library /rfaber/aratus.htm. 67. Davidson, “How Ancient Thought Agreed.” 68. Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, trans. Richard Mott Gummere, vol. 3, letter 96.2 (Loeb Classic Edition, 1925), https:// en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius. 69. Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, trans. Richard Mott Gummere, vol. 1, letter 50.3 (Loeb Classic Edition, 1917), https:// en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius. Stoicism 77 ○ Inner freedom from the world. As Jesus would tell his disciples, “These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation” (John 16:33), so the Stoic philosopher Epictetus could say, “Demand not that events should happen as you wish; but wish them to happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.”70 ○ Aversion to excess. As Paul could say, “But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified” (1 Cor. 9:7), so Seneca could write, “For although the body needs many things in order to be strong, yet the mind grows from within, giving to itself nourishment and exercise. Yonder athletes must have copious food, copious drink, copious quantities of oil, and long training besides; but you can acquire virtue without equipment and without expense. All that goes to make you a good man lies within yourself.”71 But as with the Epicureans, Christian morality rested on a different motivation than that of the Stoics. The latter, on the whole, did not believe in life after death.72 As such, the reason for any particular action was based solely on finding the most pleasure out of this physical life. To renounce as one’s main pursuit such things as wealth, fame, power, and health had more to do with accepting one’s fate and rejoicing in it, no matter where one’s status ultimately fell. Although Paul could write something similar in Phi70. Epictetus, The Enchiridion, trans. Thomas W. Higginson, sec. 8 (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1948), Project Gutenberg, https:// www.gutenberg.org/files/45109/45109-h/45109-h.htm. 71. Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, trans. Richard Mott Gummere, vol. 2, letter 80.3 (Loeb Classic Edition, 1920), https:// en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius. 7. Davidson, “How Ancient Thought Agreed.” 78 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered lippians 4 about being content in whatever state he was, this same Paul would also claim, in 1 Corinthians 15:19, that misery awaited anyone who had hope in this life only. For Christians, hope in an age to come was a major basis for the denial of the self in the present. “He that loseth his life for my sake,” Jesus would tell his disciples, “shall find it” (Matt. 10:39). And elsewhere, as quoted in chapter 1: “Take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink, or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? . . . But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matt. 6:31, 33).73 Cynicism The Stoics were related to another school of philosophy that some scholars have related to Christianity, Cynicism, which emerged many decades earlier and from which Stoicism ultimately derived.74 While both systems of thought were concerned with doing what was “natural,” Cynicism was “an anti-society philosophy and was not one that everyone—or even a significant fraction of people—could follow if society was to properly function.”75 Whereas Stoics viewed such things as wealth and health as less important to the true worth of one’s life, Cynics actively eschewed 73. For more elaboration on this point, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, 218–219, quoted in Derek Rishmawy, “Jesus Wasn’t a Stoic (or the Difference between Socrates and Christ),” Reformedish, August 26, 2013, https:// derekzrishmawy.com/2013/08/26/jesus-wasnt-a-stoic-or-the -difference-between-socrates-and-christ/. 74. James Fieser, “Hellenistic Philosophy,” from The History of Philosophy: A Short Survey, September 1, 2017, sections B and D, https:// www.utm.edu/staff/jfieser/class/110/3-hellenistic.htm; “Stoicism and Cynicism: Lessons, Similarities and Differences,” Daily Stoic, https:// dailystoic.com/stoicism-cynicism/. 75. “Stoicism and Cynicism.” Cynicism 79 such values. The former practiced a kind of asceticism of the mind, accepting without grudging lesser fates as they occurred, while the latter put such asceticism into physical practice. F. Gerald Downing, one of the primary expounders of the theory that much of early Christian thinking, indeed of the thinking of Jesus himself, can be connected to Greek Cynicism, denotes the basic difference this way: Stoics and Cynics both expect to encounter harsh circumstances, and hope to cope with them. . . . But . . . [while a] Stoic will expect troubles to confront him[,] a Cynic will initiate such confrontations. A Stoic may take on some hardship as part of his education, or to test out the progress of his inner resolve. A Cynic is essentially pragmatic, and enacts his or her commitment openly by openly looking for trouble all the while (at least in theory).76 Scholars like Downing, who see similarities between early Christianity and Cynicism, point to several parallels between Jesus and Cynic prognosticators. The latter were often preachers of a sort as well and were not uncommonly found wandering the city streets performing “‘shameless’ public behavior” and using “offensively bold speech.”77 Although Jesus probably did most of his preaching in synagogues and the temple, he, too, could be found preaching in other public locations in a manner that was offensive to some.78 Both Jesus and the Cynics engaged in 76. F. Gerald Downing, Cynics, Paul, and the Pauline Churches: Cynics and Christian Origins II (New York: Routledge, 1998), 143. 77. Paul Rhodes Eddy, “Jesus as Diogenes? Reflections on the Cynic Jesus Thesis,” Journal of Biblical Literature 115, no. 3 (1996): 452. 78. Jesus notes that he “ever taught in the synagogue, and in the temple” in John 18:0. Indeed, Jesus’s synagogue preaching is documented frequently throughout the Gospels, a few examples of which include Matthew 4:23, Luke 4:16, and John 6:59. Examples of preaching in other places include a plain (Luke 6:17), the desert (Luke 9:10– 11), and houses (Luke 11:37, Luke 14:1); examples of bold speech in- 80 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered “social critique,” the Cynics “warning against the seduction of wealth and material possessions” and Jesus proclaiming such things as, “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?” (Matt. 6:5).79 Cynics rejected possession of all but the most minimal property, often choosing to live as homeless itinerants.80 Scholars who see a link to Jesus would point to his statement in Matthew 8:20 (“The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath nowhere to lay His head”) as evidence of his own itinerant lifestyle.81 Likewise, they see Jesus’s instructions to his disciples in Luke 9:3–4 to “take nothing for your journey, neither staves, nor scrip, neither bread, neither money; neither have two coats apiece. And whatsoever house ye enter into, there abide, and thence depart” as being similar to the kind of missionary journey that Cynics took. As F. Gerald Downing writes: People who followed these varied injunctions, or others at all close, would have seemed to be kinds of Cynic. Cynics varied in their shabby dress, itinerancy, and ways of obtaining food. They did not adopt a uniform practice from which those following the gospel injunctions would be distinguished. . . . It would be enough for some shabbily dressed clude not only his frequent correction of the Pharisees, as exemplified in the woes of Matthew 23, but also the account John 6, which notes that after Jesus denoted that followers would have to eat his flesh (verse 52), many ceased walking with him (verse 66). 79. Eddy, “Jesus as Diogenes?,” 461. 80. Downing, Cynics, 153. 81. Garner Ted Armstrong disputes the idea that Jesus was a homeless vagrant, pointing out that in the context, Jesus was traveling through Samaria, where no locals would take him in. Garner Ted Armstrong, The Real Jesus, chapter 3, “Why Jesus Had No Place to Stay,” Herbert W Armstrong Library, https://www.hwalibrary.com/cgi-bin /get/hwa.cgi?action=getbklet&InfoID=1327364150. Cynicism 81 wanderers, with or without sandals, with or without staff, with or without begging-bag, deliberately to attract attention and invite a following by public address and/or other activity, for them [Jesus’s disciples] to be discerned as Cynic.82 As his instructions to his disciples show, Jesus’s own parallels with the Cynics would have also led people, namely non-Jews, to find similarities between early Christians and the Cynics. And this is essentially the point of F. Gerald Downing in his book on Paul, the Pauline churches, and the Cynics. The lack of conformity to societal expectations was common, Downing notes, to both Cynicism and early Christianity: “The breach with social convention that becoming a member of the Christian movement entailed, a movement flaunting the slogan ‘neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free, no male and female,’ and engaging in a public life-style to match could only have appeared as some sort of Cynicism in the towns of first-century Galatia.”83 Such mistaken identity is something Downing sees Paul as playing up in his attempt to be all things to all people to win them to salvation (1 Cor. 9:20–22): Paul was a Jewish Christian; but one who was nonetheless content—better, determined—for the most part to appear in a very well-fitting and entirely appropriate Cynic guise. . . . For “pagan” citizens of the Hellenised towns Paul’s habitual ascetic practice, and some major elements of what he shared in words, will have looked and sounded Cynic—so much and so clearly, this could not have been unawares, even though it may well also have been quite natural.84 82. Downing, Cynics, 153. 83. Ibid., 23. 84. Ibid., 266. 82 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered So too, Paul and his fellow Christians, in playing the part of imitators of God, mimicked the goals of such Cynic philosophers as Diogenes and Pseudo-Heraclitus.85 So as Paul could tell the Corinthians, “But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory” ( Cor. 3:18), the Cynics would claim to imitate God in their adherence to asceticism and the limiting of their physical needs.86 To further the link between this Greek philosophical school and this religion originating in Jewish culture, some scholars point to the geographic sphere in which Jesus largely taught and the pervasive influence of Cynicism in general. Cynicism was a widespread phenomenon in the eastern part of the Roman Empire, with itinerant Cynics spreading their message throughout cities and possibly also at times into the countryside. And their influence spread well beyond those who adopted their philosophy wholesale to men like the Stoic philosopher Seneca and Platonist biographer Plutarch.87 Students learning in Greek in school would have also met Cynic philosophers in their reading.88 Lower Galilee, including the towns of Gedara and Sepphoris, the latter just miles from Nazareth, seems to have been a place of particular Cynic connection.89 “Why should not the craftsman Jesus, who grew up in the neighbourhood of Sepphoris,” asks Martin Hengel, “have made contact with Cynic itinerant preachers, especially as he himself spoke some Greek? . . . [Certain a]ffinities between Gospel tradition and Cynic religious and social criticism go right back to Jesus himself.”90 85. Ibid., 206. 86. Ibid. 87. Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem, 268. 88. Downing, Cynics, 305. 89. Ibid.; Eddy, “Jesus as Diogenes?,” 457. 90. Martin Hengel, The “Hellenization” of Judaea in the First Century after Christ (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1989), 44. Cynicism 83 But for all the seeming convergences between Christ’s followers and the Cynics during the first century, the similarities and conceivable influence are likely overstated. Indeed, while some non-Jews may have at first mistaken the Christian message for some variant on Cynic themes, even Downing himself has to admit that the two diverged in key ways that would have eventually rendered differences obvious. Cynics, in their radical view of what is natural, came to believe and promulgate the idea that “enacted laws and customs of civic societies were corrupt, artificial, false, inauthentic: opposed to nature, not its expression.”91 By contrast, Jesus himself and letters from Paul and Peter all at times affirmed Roman authority and law, as recounted in the previous chapter—Jesus in telling the Pharisees to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s (Matt. 22:15–22; Luke 20:19–26), and Paul and Peter in encouraging followers to submit to government officials (Rom. 13:1–7; 1 Pet. :13– 14), not just for the sake of peace but because such powers are actually ordained by God himself. And even as each of them remained skeptical toward many of the customs introduced by Jewish scribal tradition, as affirmed, for example, in Peter’s statement that “we ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:9), they also, including Paul, held up the value of the biblical law. Thus, Jesus, in his famous Sermon on the Mount, would say in introducing much of the theme for the message: Mark A. Chancey questions the idea that cities in lower Galilee, such as Sepphoris, were particularly diverse rather than primarily Jewish in his The Myth of a Gentile Galilee (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); see especially pp. 58, 78, and 181. Philip Jenkins is similarly dubious about the claim, given its clear agenda to tie Jesus more closely to the Hellenistic world. See Philip Jenkins, Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 186. 91. Downing, Cynics, 61. 84 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. (Matt. 5:17–19) Indeed, the next several verses are devoted not to doing away with the law but with expanding it, adding a spiritual component to the physical letter. So while Jesus may have been skeptical of the hypocritical way in which the law was being put into practice and applied, his own attitude toward the law was actually very positive. Likewise, Peter, nearly a decade after Jesus’s death, was still abiding by the biblical food laws, a custom that would seem likely to have fallen away quickly were the disciples opposed to law as something artificially constructed by society the way the Cynics were. Indeed, Peter’s reaction to the vision he receives in Acts 10, telling him to rise, kill, and eat a number of unclean animals, would not have been possible, had Peter not continued to observe such laws. “Not so, Lord,” he says, “for I have never eaten any thing that is common or unclean” (Acts 10:14). Even after the vision, so bound to the law is Peter that he remains unclear about its meaning—not likely if Peter had seen the biblical law as being easily put aside—until he is called away to meet with certain Gentiles who have been called into the Christian sect. Only then does Peter grasp what the vision means (“I should not call common or unclean any man”—Acts 10:8). Similarly, Paul, in Romans 7:12, would denote that “the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and Cynicism 85 good,” claiming that the shortcoming that brings him to death is in himself: “For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin” (Rom. 7:14). Paul sees his deliverance from the death that disobedience to the law brings coming not by an abdication of the law but by his faith in Jesus (Rom. 7:24–25). These are hardly the words of some Cynic who is critical of law. Indeed, Paul Rhodes Eddy, in a skeptical critique regarding some who have taken Downing’s ideas to extremes, notes many problems with the idea of Jesus being some kind Cynic philosopher, among them the fact that “Jesus does not display the Cynic’s radical commitment to freedom at any cost, nor the fundamental antipathy toward social law and convention. His few challenges to the Jewish law are predicated upon an unyielding commitment to the ‘weightier’ things of that very law.”92 Similarly, P. Coutsoumpos notes that “even if there are some similarities between a Cynic outlook and Paul’s preaching and teaching, the Cynic marketplace approach was not well suited to someone who has in mind the formation of permanent community.”93 Downing, himself, draws the line between Paul and the Cynics in his own work in two other matters: sexual license and faith. In the case of the first, crediting Mark Plunkett for the idea, he reads the Corinthian church as having mistaken Paul’s teachings as akin to those of the more radical Cynics.94 As such, Paul’s letter, which condemns, for instance, the church’s reaction to a man who has taken up sexual relations with his stepmother (1 Cor. 5), becomes a corrective, essentially denoting that Christians are not 9. Eddy, “Jesus as Diogenes?,” 463. 93. P. Coutsoumpos, “Paul’s Teaching of the Lord’s Supper: A Socio-historical Study of the Pauline Account of the Last Supper and Its Graeco-Roman Background” (PhD thesis, University of Sheffield, 1996), 138. 94. Downing, Cynics, 30–31. 86 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered adherents to such a philosophy. In the case of the second, Downing quotes the work of A. J. Malherbe, noting that Paul “differs radically from [the Cynics], however, in that his confidence is not in himself, but in God’s power.”95 Although it is useful to note some of the parallels between Cynicism and early Christianity, because it is possible that some Gentiles mistook one for the other and because Cynic ideas likely had some impact on Christian teachings as the religion developed over the centuries following Jesus’s death, the emphasis on Jesus as a Cynic, as Paul Rhodes Eddy writes, obscures a more easily apparent and likely thing Jesus would have been taken as among his audience, beyond a prophet: a Jewish sage.96 Indeed, one of Jesus’s major rhetorical forms, the parable, has no Cynic equivalent and is most identified with Jewish culture.97 His connection to the sage would also come to be of some importance as he would eventually be identified with the Old Testament personification of Wisdom,98 a link that would also prove important in Christianity’s relation to yet another Greek philosophical system: Platonism. Platonism Although Stoicism was the philosophy most in favor at the start of the first century CE, Platonism, based on the ideas of the fifth- and four-century BCE Greek philosopher Plato, would find itself at the height of popularity by the end of the second as Christian philosophers began to formalize beliefs regarding the nature of the Father and Son and the 95. Malherbe quoted in Downing, Cynics, 140. 96. Eddy, “Jesus as Diogenes?,” 460. 97. Ibid., 461. 98. See, for example, 1 Corinthians 1:24: “But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.” Platonism 87 identity of Jesus.99 As such, Platonism’s influence on Christianity would be more heavily metaphysical in nature than practical. This is not to say that Plato’s ideas did not themselves have moral implications that would in turn affect what Christianity would become. Unlike the four GrecoRoman philosophies discussed so far, Plato’s concepts of virtue were rooted in ideas that rested on the concept of an immortal soul (“the soul through all her being is immortal”).100 For Plato, what humans ultimately desire is “the good and the beautiful, the possession of which would constitute happiness for them.”101 However, happiness in this life is necessarily transitory—and thus, imperfect.102 As such, humans must look beyond themselves to find the ultimate good and beautiful. The ultimate was, for Plato, to be found only in the divine sphere, in the perfect One from which all other things derive. “What is that which always is and has no becoming,” Plato wrote in Timaeus, and what is that which is always becoming and never is? That which is apprehended by intelligence and reason is always in the same state; but that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is. Now everything that becomes or is created must of necessity be created by some cause, for without a 99. Engberg-Pedersen, “Setting the Scene,” 1, 3; Carl Korak, “The Influence of Philosophy on Early Christianity,” personal paper, January 26, 2012, 2. 100. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. by Benjamin Jowett, Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1636/1636-h/1636-h.htm#linkH_4 _0002. 101. Dorothea Frede, “Plato’s Ethics: An Overview,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, December 6, 2017, 4.1, https://plato.stanford .edu/entries/plato-ethics/. 102. Ibid., 4.2. 88 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered cause nothing can be created. The work of the creator, whenever he looks to the unchangeable and fashions the form and nature of his work after an unchangeable pattern, must necessarily be made fair and perfect; but when he looks to the created only, and uses a created pattern, it is not fair or perfect.103 For Plato, in other words, the One holds the perfect, neverchanging forms of the universe; as these forms take material shape in the physical world around us, they enter the temporal world and thus lose their perfect form. The heavenly stars present one level of order, the planets another, and the earth yet another. Each move away from the One was a descent of sorts away from the perfection found in the One, from the stars to the planets to the earth.104 Thus was the plight of the human being, the soul imprisoned in a body, or as Plato puts it in Phaedrus: The soul in her totality has the care of inanimate being everywhere, and traverses the whole heaven in divers forms appearing—when perfect and fully winged she soars upward, and orders the whole world; whereas the imperfect soul, losing her wings and drooping in her flight at last settles on the solid ground—there, finding a home, she receives an earthly frame which appears to be selfmoved, but is really moved by her power; and this composition of soul and body is called a living and mortal creature.105 103. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Benjamin Jowett, Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/157/157-h/157-h.htm#linkH_4 _0010. 104. Alan Knight, Primitive Christianity in Crisis (Antioch, Calif.: A.R.C. Research, 2003), 13. 105. Plato, Phaedrus. Platonism 89 The human goal, thus, was to ascend from the material, disordered realm toward the ordered realm of the One to reclaim one’s divine origin in the stars. “If a human being was able to live a righteous life and learn to love,” as Carl Korak puts it in a paper on philosophy’s influence on Christianity, “this divine soul would return to the heavenly realm. If not, it would continue to ‘pass into a woman’ to be reborn in the flesh (reincarnation). In this model, the soul has fallen into the sensible world.”106 Such ideas were still relevant in the first century CE, as the work of such Platonic philosophers as Plutarch shows. For Plutarch, God alone is, and to know oneself aright is to acknowledge that “we possess no share in genuine being,” for we are caught in ceaseless change, becoming and passing away, like a succession of countless births and deaths. Being is eternal, unified, unchanging. Human life is temporal, multiple, constantly changing. . . . The good life is one that leads from our common plight of multiplicity and change to “genuine being.” The goal toward which every successful life aims, for Plutarch and the other Platonists, is to be like God.107 The goal of becoming like God would not have been a strange one to first-century Christians; it was, in fact, the central component of Christian calling. “Beloved, now are we the sons of God,” John would write to fellow Christians in his first letter, “and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he [God] shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:). Similarly, Paul would write that “the sufferings of 106. Korak, “Influence of Philosophy,” 10. 107. Meeks, Moral World, 43. 90 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God” (Rom. 8:18–19). “As we have borne the image of the earthy,” Paul would write elsewhere, “we shall bear the image of the heavenly” (1 Cor. 15:49). The primary difference between Plato’s view of becoming like God and the Christian idea would have been that for Plato, the ascent to the heavenly was a return of the soul to a prior state in the stars, carried on usually over generations, whereas the ultimate rebirth of the Christian as a son of God was, in fact, the one-time creation of a “new creature” ( Cor. 5:17). Jesus alone bore record of a preexistence. “In the beginning was the Word,” John would write at the start of his Gospel account, “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Likewise, for Paul, Jesus had, “being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men” (Philip. :6–7). Christians, by contrast, as men, had never seen God (John 1:18); it was Jesus, in John’s reckoning, “the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him” (John 1:18). Thus, Jesus would tell those around him, “Yet a little while am I with you, and then I go unto him that sent me. Ye shall seek me, and shall not find me, and where I am, thither ye cannot come.” Jesus alone had seen God, had been with God, and thus could return to God. The ultimate destiny of a Christian was to wait for another day, as had those who had come before. “These all,” the writer of Hebrews noted of the various Old Testament patriarchs, “having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise: God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect” (Heb. 1:39–40). Platonism 91 It was the identity of this Jesus who alone had seen the heavenly Father and his relation to that Father that would, in fact, become the source of much contention among Christian thinkers during the course of Christianity’s first several centuries. In Plato’s ideas, such thinkers would find a means toward harmonizing seeming contradictions in the nature of God—namely, how God could be one, even though existing as Father and, as Christians would contest, as Son. To do this, late second-century believers such as Clement of Alexandria and Origen would come to see Platonic theories as useful for understanding and interpreting scripture. Clement, for example, would claim that “philosophy was given to the Greeks directly and primarily, till the Lord should call the Greeks. For this was a schoolmaster to bring ‘the Hellenic mind,’ as the law, the Hebrews, ‘to Christ.’ Philosophy, therefore, was a preparation, paving the way for him who is perfected in Christ.”108 Origen would go even further, tying his allegorical interpretation of the Bible specifically to Plato’s ideas. In “the expulsion of the man and woman from paradise, and their being clothed with tunics of skins (which God, because of the transgression of men, made for those who had sinned),” Origen would see “a certain secret and mystical doctrine (far transcending that of Plato) of the soul losing its wings, and being borne downwards to earth, until it can lay hold of some stable resting-place”109 Thus, as scholar Robert M. Berchman, puts it, The raw materials of Philo, Clement & Origen’s intellectual experience were contained in their 108. Clement of Alexandria, The Stromata, or Miscellanies, 1.5, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com /text/clement-stromata-book1.html. 109. Origen, Contra Celsus, 4.40, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, Early Christian Writings, http://www .earlychristianwritings.com/text/origen164.html. 92 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered Bibles, and the symbolic systems used to organize and make sense of these, were Platonic. Platonism(s) provided the interpretive grid and symbotic system whereby they grasped and made comprehensible their scriptures. The Platonic philosophy provided the active synthesizing forms of thought for the neutral content, at least philosophically of divine revelation, and thereby provided the primary forms of organizing doctrines of being, how it is known, and how this knowledge correlates to revelation dialectically.”110 In Plato’s thinking, the One was so perfect, so unchanging, that the One had no direct connection to the transitory world perceived by the senses. That world, rather, had been created by an intermediary, often termed the demiurge.111 This creator modeled the universe on the perfect forms of the One, bringing order, as best he could, out of disorder, so that the temporal would be based on the intemporal. Plato explained why in Timaeus: Let me tell you then why the creator made this world of generation. He was good, and the good can never have any jealousy of anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all things should be as like himself as they could be. This is in the truest sense the origin of creation and of the world. . . . Wherefore also finding the whole visible sphere not at rest, but moving in an irregular and disorderly fashion, out of disorder he brought or110. Robert M. Berchman, From Philo to Origen: Middle Platonism in Transition (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1984), 15. 111. Knight, Primitive Christianity in Crisis, 13–14. A useful outline of Plato’s ideas about the creation and organization of the universe can be found at Marc Cohen, “Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus,” 006, https://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/timaeus.htm. Platonism 93 der, considering that this was in every way better than the other. The idea that a God outside the realm of the physical had used an intermediary to create the world paralleled certain Old Testament passages, enough that some Jewish thinkers, wanting to relate Greek philosophy to their own faith tradition, postulated just that. Indeed, the creation account in Genesis leaves plenty of room for such an interpretation. In Genesis 1:1–2, God creates “the heaven and the earth,” but the earth starts in state of being “without form, and void”—that is, in disorder—from which God places things into order, every kind after its kind (Gen. 1:21, 24–25). The Hebrew term used for God throughout the chapter, and indeed throughout much of the Old Testament, is elohiym, a uniplural noun, suggesting more than one present, an idea picked up most clearly in Genesis 1:26, translated into English in the King James Version and similarly in many other versions as, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Other Old Testament passages suggested some kind of secondary figure somehow related to God or as presented as God as well, passages that would later be cited by Christian writers as pointing to Jesus. Psalm 110:1, for example, referenced in Peter’s Pentecost sermon in Acts 2:34 and by Jesus himself in Matthew 22:44, mentions two Lords: “The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand.” Daniel 7, written much later, too, seemed to reference two called the “Ancient of Days,” one whose “garment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like the pure wool” sitting on a throne (verse 9) and another “like the Son of man” who “came with the clouds of the heaven” coming to the first (verses 13 and 22). Further, other passages referenced God as creating via a secondary figure—his word or wisdom. “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made,” wrote the author of Psalm 33:6. “The Lord possessed me in the 94 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered beginning of his way, before his works of old,” writes the author of Proverbs about wisdom: I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth: While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world. When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth: When he established the clouds above: when he strengthened the fountains of the deep: When he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth: Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him. (Prov. 8:22–30) In addition to the wisdom figure, Old Testament scriptures often referenced an “Angel of the Lord,” a kind of chief angel whose name or presence was often synonymous with God, as in Judges 2:1: “And an angel of the Lord came up from Gilgal to Bochim, and said, I made you to go up out of Egypt, and have brought you out of the land which I sware unto your fathers; and I said, I will never break my covenant with you.” If this were simply an angel, or messenger from God, the usage of “I” here, rather than the third person, seems odd, given that the “I” implies that the angel himself, rather than God, made the covenant, something that the Lord takes claim for in Exodus 19:5 among other locations. Other references to the angel of the Lord wherein said references also seem to refer to God include Genesis 16:7–13 (when Hagar first leaves Abraham’s house with her son Ishmael), Genesis 22:11–18 (when Abraham Platonism 95 is stopped from sacrificing Isaac), and Judges 6:11– (when Gideon is first told to go to battle against the Midianites). With such scriptures at hand, it was natural, as Larry Hurtado postulates in One God, One Lord, that a number of Jewish groups worked with the idea of God having such a chief agent who was second only to God in rank. This is important because it means that, wherever the idea may have come from originally, by the Greco-Roman period it was widely shared and cannot be described as the exclusive property of any one type of Judaism. . . . [B]oth Diaspora Jews, such as Philo, and Palestinian Jews were familiar with the idea, though they employed it in varying ways according to their purposes.112 Such groups did not necessarily have to be of the sort that were influenced by Greek philosophy. As Alan F. Segal points out, the mere fact that so many Jewish thinkers found parallels in scripture to Greek philosophy “attests to the pervasiveness and antiquity of the problem of God’s appearance and His different aspects” and to traditions of a kind of second God or an assistant to God “well before the birth of Jesus.”113 That being said, the link between some Jewish thinkers and Platonism would become well established in the centuries before Jesus’s birth and in the decades soon after and, in turn, would help lend to the identification of this secondary figure with Plato’s demiurge. Much of this linking stemmed from the fact that Jewish thinkers wished to present themselves intellectually as every bit the equal— 112. Larry Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998), 18. 113. Alan F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism (Leiden: Brill, 1977), 43. 96 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered or greater—than their conqueror Greeks. To that effort, men like the second-century BCE writers Aristobulus and Artapanus and first-century CE thinker Philo claimed that Greek ideas actually derived from Moses.114 Aristobulus, for example, claimed that “portions of the Pentateuch were rendered into Greek before the entire work was translated in the days of Ptolemy Philadelphus and that these portions were used by the Greek philosophers Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato and formed the basis of their philosophical teachings.”115 Artapanus “identified Moses with Musaeus and with Orpheus,” two mythic Greek thinkers.116 Philo, writing of how the “sacred Word” leads mankind to the knowledge of opposites making up the whole, would say that this “leading principle of [the] whole philosophy” of “Heraclitus, that great philosopher who is so celebrated among [the Greeks] . . . is in reality an ancient discovery of Moses.”117 Philo’s thinking in particular would play a key role in the establishment of later Christian thinking with regard to the nature of God but also exhibits some of the ways in which some Jewish thinking of the first century mirrored ideas found in Plato. In his commentary on Genesis 9:6, for example, Philo would write: Why is it that he speaks as if of some other god, saying that he made man after the image of God, and not that he made him after his own image? . . . 114. Marian Hillar, From Logos to Trinity: The Evolution of Religious Beliefs from Pythagoras to Tertullian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 41. 115. Martin McNamara quoted from introduction to “Aristobulus,” Early Jewish Writings, http://www.earlyjewishwritings.com /aristobulus.html. 116. Hillar, From Logos to Trinity, 41. 117. Philo, Who Is the Heir of Divine Things, 43.214, Early Jewish Writings, http://www.earlyjewishwritings.com/text/philo/book17 .html. Platonism 97 Very appropriately and without any falsehood was this oracular sentence uttered by God, for no mortal thing could have been formed on the similitude of the supreme Father of the universe, but only after the pattern of the second deity, who is the Word of the supreme Being.118 In writing about Genesis 2:7, Philo posits the creation of two individuals, a human fleshly man (bound to the world of the sensible) and a heavenly prototype (within the realm of ideas), echoing Plato’s concepts of a soul bound to a body and a soul wholly connected to reason and intellect, to which all should aspire: What is the man who was created? And how is that man distinguished who was made after the image of God? . . . This man was created as perceptible to the senses, and in the similitude of a Being appreciable only by the intellect; but he who in respect of his form is intellectual and incorporeal, is the similitude of the archetypal model as to appearance, and he is the form of the principal character; but this is the word of God, the first beginning of all things, the original species or the archetypal idea, the first measure of the universe. Moreover, that man who was to be created as a vessel is formed by a potter, was formed out of dust and clay as far as his body was concerned; but he received his soul by God breathing the breath of life into his face, so that the temperament of his nature was combined of what was corruptible and of what was incorruptible. But the other man, he who is only so in form, is found to be unalloyed without any mixture 118. Philo, Questions and Answers on Genesis, book 2, sec. 62, trans. W. D. Yonge, Early Jewish Writings, http://www.earlyjewishwritings .com/text/philo/book42.html. 98 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered proceeding from an invisible, simple, and transparent nature.119 For Philo, the Garden of Eden, or Paradise, in which man is placed is not a literal garden but “a symbol of wisdom, for that created man is a kind of mixture, as having been compounded of soul and body, having work to do by learning and discipline; desiring according to the law of philosophy that he may become happy; but he who is according to God’s own image is in need of nothing, being by himself a hearer, and being taught by himself, and being found to be his own master by reason of his natural endowments.”120 The fleshly man, thus, works to attain happiness, while the heavenly man lives only in the realm of intellect.121 All of these Jewish thinkers lived in or near Alexandria, where an allegorical method of reading the biblical scriptures became fashionable, in keeping with the manner in which many Greek philosophers had come to read Greek mythological works such as the Odyssey.122 Reading mythological stories as allegories for various emotions and natural phenomena rather than as actual gods prone to humanlike shortcomings (dishonesty, lust, violence) allowed Greek philosophers to explain away the troubling aspects of those stories.123 It also helped such philosophers explain new modes of thinking about the gods. By the first century CE, Greek intellectuals had long posited that there was re119. Philo, Questions and Answers on Genesis, book 1, sec. 4, trans. W. D. Yonge, Early Jewish Writings, http://www.earlyjewishwritings .com/text/philo/book41.html. 120. Ibid., sec. 8. 121. For more on this passage, see Kenneth Schenk, A Brief Guide to Philo (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 78. 122. Hillar, From Logos to Trinity, 43. 13. Dennis R. MacDonald, “Alexandria and Allegory,” Bible Odyssey, https://www.bibleodyssey.org/places/related-articles/alexandria -and-allegory. Platonism 99 ally only one god, or one great god above all the others.124 That idea, one that Plato himself had accepted, stemmed back at least to the sixth-century BCE Greek philosopher Xenophanes who posited that “one god is the greatest among gods and men” and that “he ever abides in the selfsame place without moving” and “sets all things astir By the power of his mind alone.”125 In fact, monotheistic sympathies may have already been in play two or three centuries earlier in the time Homer, who himself would call Zeus “father of gods and men.”126 The commonality of such ideas among Greek philosophers made it easier for Jewish thinkers in Alexandria and elsewhere throughout the Jewish diaspora to adapt Grecian philosophy to their own monotheistic beliefs, which in turn allowed later Christian thinkers to adapt such Jewish thinking, one that had already integrated Greek philosophy, to their own reading of scripture and conceptualizing of the nature of God. But allegorization, including that which integrated Greek philosophical ideas, wasn’t the only way in which Jewish thinkers read the scriptures. Other thinkers, most especially those traditionally ascribed to Palestine, read scripture in a generally more literal, or typological, way. H. H. Milman in his commentary on volume 2 of the seventeenthcentury British historian Edward Gibbons’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire argues that John’s usage of the term “the Word” at the start of his Gospel could not have been referencing the Platonic idea of a demiurge standing between God and man that had become popular among Alexandrian Jews because John “was a Jew, born and edu124. John E. Stambaugh and David L. Balch, The New Testament in Its Social Environment (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), 130; John J. Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem, 158. 125. Robert M. Grant, Gods and the One God (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), 76. 126. Ibid., 77. 100 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered cated in Palestine; he had no knowledge, at least very little, of the philosophy of the Greeks, and that of the Grecizing Jews: he would naturally, then, attach to the word logos the sense attached to it by the Jews of Palestine.”127 The idea that he had little knowledge of diaspora Jewish thinking by the time that he was writing his Gospel is perhaps unlikely, given that by the time that he was completing his Gospel he had likely already traveled for a significant time outside Palestine and had settled in Ephesus, which itself featured a Hellenized Jewish diaspora community. There, as the letters that bear his name make plain, various alternative views of Jesus’s divinity and relation to the Father were already finding adherents.128 “For many deceivers are entered into the world,” John wrote in his second letter, “who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist” ( John 7). Though John is addressing Gnostic doctrines here (discussed in chapter 4), those teachings themselves were based in syncretistic 127. Edward Gibbons, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 2, chap. 21, part 2, note 20, Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg .org/files/5717/5717-h/5717-h.htm#Blink1HCH000. 128. The tradition that John settled in Ephesus can be found in Eusebius, Church History, 3.23.6, and Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 3.3.4, among others. Irenaeus notes that John wrote his Gospel while in Ephesus. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 3.1.1. Most contemporary scholars date John’s writings to the late first century, though some question whether the author John is the same as the apostle John. Other possible writers include John the Elder—an older presbyterian in Ephesus who may be the same person as John the apostle—and a Johannine school of writers, both of which likely would have known and dealt with John the apostle. For a writer who thinks John the author to be John the Elder, see Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2006). John A. T. Robinson discusses the traditional dating of the Gospel of John in detail and provides his own rationale for an even earlier date (40 to 65 CE), with John the apostle as author. John A. T. Robinson, Redating the New Testament (Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1976), available online at https://richardwaynegarganta.com/redating-testament.pdf. Platonism 101 ideas that had come out of the merging of Jewish, Greek, and Eastern religious and philosophical traditions. Still, Milman has a point insofar as John’s claims with regard to Jesus would likely not have been coming from Greek philosophy vis á vis Jewish intellectuals, as Alan Segal, Larry Hurtado, John A. T. Robinson, and other biblical scholars have also pointed out, but rather from ideas that were more widely spread throughout the Jewish world, even outside Hellenism.129 Milman, in fact, goes on to assert, The evangelist adopts this word [logos] without previous explanation, as a term with which his contemporaries were already familiar, and which they could at once comprehend . . . the one attached to the word logos by the Jews of Palestine, the other by the school of Alexandria, particularly by Philo. The Jews had feared at all times to pronounce the name of Jehovah; they had formed a habit of designating God by one of his attributes; they called him sometimes Wisdom, sometimes the Word.130 Given that the Jews had long used attributes of God to refrain from using his actual name, it was natural for John to “personif[y] that which his predecessors . . . personified only poetically; for he affirm[ed] ‘that the Word became flesh.’ . . . It was to prove this that he wrote.”131 Or as John A. T. Robinson puts it, it is “much more likely that Philo and John shared a common background in the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament, to which Philo gave a philosophic twist entirely absent from John.”132 Thus, as Daniel Boyarin points out in his article “The Gospel of the 129. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven; Hurtado, One God, One Lord, esp. 18; Robinson, Redating the New Testament. 130. Gibbons, Decline and Fall, vol. 2, chap. 21, part 2, note 20. 131. Ibid. 132. Robinson, Redating the New Testament, 255. 102 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered Memra” (the Jewish term for the concept of logos), “what marks the Fourth Gospel as a new departure in the history of Judaism is not to be found in its Logos theology at all but in its incarnational Christology.”133 Larry Hurtado agrees: “The early Christian innovation . . . was not to write texts in which Jesus was pictured in some imaginary scene receiving obeisance. The innovation was in modifying more characteristic Jewish cultic practice by accommodating Jesus into their devotional pattern, joining him with God as a recipient of their cultic devotion.”134 I have already pointed to various Old Testament scriptures that referenced a secondary figure alongside God (or God the Father, as New Testament Christians would come to call him). For early Christians, that secondary figure came to be identified with Jesus insofar as the preincarnational Jesus became the one with whom humanity had largely interacted throughout its history. The one who became Jesus became the creator: “For by him,” Paul would write of Jesus, in his letter to the Colossians (Col. 1:16), “were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him.” Likewise, John would write in his Gospel, “All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:3). He became the one with whom Abraham and Moses dealt directly. The author of Hebrews, for example, would identify him as Melchizedek, the king of Salem, to whom Abraham gave tithes in Genesis 14:18–20: 133. Daniel Boyarin, “The Gospel of the Memra: Jewish Binitarianism and the Prologue to John,” Harvard Theological Review 94, no. 3 (2001): 261. 134. Hurtado, One God, One Lord, xii. Platonism 103 For this Melchisedec, king of Salem, priest of the most high God, who met Abraham returning from the slaughter of the kings, and blessed him; To whom also Abraham gave a tenth part of all; first being by interpretation King of righteousness, and after that also King of Salem, which is, King of peace; Without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually. (Heb. 7:1–3) Likewise, John would quote Jesus as saying to the Jews, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Jesus was I am” (John 8:58), recounting God’s words to Moses in Exodus 3:14, “I am that I am.” This same “I am” claimed to be “the God of [Moses’s] father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Ex. 3:6) and is also called “the angel of the Lord” earlier in the same chapter of Exodus as he appears to Moses in the burning bush that is not consumed (Ex. 3:2). Another name for him in the Old Testament is the Rock, as in Deuteronomy: “I will publish the name of the Lord: ascribe ye greatness unto our God. He is the Rock, his work is perfect: for all his ways are judgment: a God of truth and without iniquity, just and right is he. . . . Of the Rock that begat thee thou art unmindful, and hast forgotten God that formed thee” (Deut. 3:3–4, 18). Paul would later also identify this Rock who worked among the children of Israel in the wilderness as Jesus: All our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea; And were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea; And did all eat the same spiritual meat; And did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ. 104 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered But with many of them God was not well pleased: for they were overthrown in the wilderness. . . . Neither let us tempt Christ, as some of them also tempted, and were destroyed of serpents.” (1 Cor. 1:1–5, 9) For the early Christian martyr Stephen, Jesus became the figure denoted as the second Ancient of Days in Daniel 7, when he said, “Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God” (Acts 7:56). And so it was that John (1:18) could claim that “[n]o man hath seen God at any time” (except in vision), even though Old Testament scriptures had in fact referenced Moses and others as seeing him in various locations (usually in the guise of the angel of the Lord). “Thou canst not see my face,” God told Moses at one point when he requested to see the Lord in his glory, “for there shall no man see me, and live”; nevertheless, God offered to show Moses his backside: “I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by: And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen” (Ex. 33:0, –3). The idea that seeing God would destroy a man is repeated throughout the Old Testament. Such is Gideon’s fear in Judges 6:22–23: “And when Gideon perceived that he was an angel of the Lord, Gideon said, Alas, O Lord God! for because I have seen an angel of the Lord face to face. And the Lord said unto him, Peace be unto thee; fear not: thou shalt not die.” Samson’s father says something similar in Judges 13:22, after seeing an angel: “We shall surely die, because we have seen God.” The implication is, as John would write, that the one who such people saw was in fact the one who would become “the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father” and as for the Father, previously unseen and gener- Platonism 105 ally undifferentiated in most people’s reckoning, the Word had “declared him” (John 6:18). For the early Christians, Jesus became the means by which and through which God was worshipped. This becomes clear if one translates the Greek word pros in John 1:1, usually translated “with” in this passage, instead as “unto” or “to,” as in “toward.” This is, in fact, the way pros is translated 75 percent of the time throughout the New Testament (“with,” meanwhile, is the translation in less than 6 percent of uses): “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was toward [or pointed toward the] God, and the Word was God.”135 Missing in most translations is the word “the,” which appears before the first usage of “God” in the passage, so that the Word in fact points toward “the God.” As such, John’s goal in the introduction to his Gospel becomes much clearer: John “is concerned to identify Christ with the God revealed to the Hebrew people in their Scriptures. He wishes to show that God is using the same Mediator that He had used before in His dealings with His earthly people. The God Who appeared to Adam, to Abel, to Noah, to Abraham, to Jacob, to Samuel, to David and to all the prophets is now come in flesh to finish the revelation He had begun.”136 In the New Testament, in Bible translator A. E. Knoch’s rendering, Christ is the Image and Expression of the Deity. . . . He is not Himself the Deity. . . . The office of Mediator demands that our Lord be the God of our souls, a manifestation of the Deity in terms within the scope of our comprehensions, in sights and 135. I am indebted to A. E. Knoch, Christ and Deity (Almont, Mich.: Concordant Publishing Concern, n.d.), 10–14, available at https://s3.amazonaws.com/unsearchablerich/booksonwebsite/ %C2%A9CPC+Christ+and+Deity.pdf, for this insight. 136. Knoch, Christ and Deity, 14. 106 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered sounds suited to our sensations. We must see God! We must hear God! That is impossible absolutely. It is realized relatively in the One Mediator. In Him we see, not Himself merely, but His God. Through Him we hear, not His words, but His Father’s. . . . Though like the Deity, His essential excellence lies in self-effacement and subjection to His God and Father. He is not a mere man or absolute Deity, but the Mediator between them.137 Because Jesus is the perfect expression of the Father, the one great God—the stand-in for the Father, the one who points toward the Father—he is worshipped as if he is God, as indeed, John says, he is God. Worshipping the Son is worshipping the Father, because the Father has handed over all authority to the Son; it is through the Son that men have access to the Father. The apostles John, Matthew, Peter, and Paul would all essentially claim similar things in their writings. Paul, for example, in Philippians 2:9–11, would write that “God also hath highly exalted him [Jesus], and given him a name which is above every name: That at the name of Jesus every name should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” For Paul, it was through Jesus that the one true God’s glory was shown in the human sphere: “To God only wise,” Paul wrote to the Romans, “be glory through Jesus Christ for ever” (Rom. 16:27). Jesus was the means through which men had access to God: “[Y]e are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s” (1 Cor. 3:23). Paul’s counterparts Peter and Matthew, with their focus on a gospel to the Jews, would write similar things. In Peter’s first letter, believers are told that when they “call 137. Ibid., 26. Platonism 107 on the Father,” it is through Jesus that they do so—“[w]ho by [or through] him [Jesus] do believe in God, that raised him from the dead” (1 Pet. 1:17, 1). This same God, Peter says, “gave him [Jesus] the glory; that your faith and hope might be in God” (1 Pet. 1:1). For Peter, “God in all things [is] glorified through Jesus Christ” (1 Pet. 4:11). Similarly, Matthew in his Gospel, recounts Jesus saying that men come to know God only through the Father’s will and, in turn, if it so be the Father’s will, through the Son through whom the Father reveals himself: “All things are delivered unto me of my Father: and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him” (Matt. 11:27). John, in trying to establish Jesus as God’s Word in the flesh for his readers, would write parallel things in his Gospel. In John 6:44, John notes that Jesus had said, “No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him.” It is via the Father’s will that Jesus worked, and only through God-revealed-in-the-flesh Jesus’s work that anyone could come to know the Father, the ultimate and great God. Thus, when one worshipped the Son, one was worshipping the Father, for the former was the perfect image of the latter and the means toward the latter. So even as Peter could note that the Father “judgeth according to every man’s work” (1 Pet. 1:17), John could note that “the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment to the Son, that all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father” (John 5:–3). In John’s reckoning, “He that honoureth not the Son honoureth not the Father which has sent him” (John 5:3). Worship of the one went with worship of the other—that is, it was through the mediator Son that the Father was worshipped. “He that believeth on me,” John quoted Jesus as saying, “believeth not on me, but on him that sent me” (John 1:44). Similarly, 108 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered in his first letter, John would write, “Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father” (1 John :3). “[H]e that has seen me hath seen the Father,” Jesus would say to his disciple Philip, according to John, and thus, as the perfect image of the Father and the only means by which the latter could be known to human beings, the reason for Jesus’s befuddlement at Philip’s question: “[H]ow sayest thou then, Shew us the Father?” (John 14:9). Such then was the reason that Thomas could proclaim, on seeing the risen Jesus, “My Lord and my God” (John 0:8). Jesus, for him, was the Lord, the perfect image of the Father, God himself—the mediator between God and man. This Jesus was thus subordinate to the Father. “For I came down from heaven,” John quotes Jesus as saying, “not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me” (John 6:38). When Jesus’s parents lost him in Jerusalem when he was twelve years old and then found him talking with the teachers in the temple, Luke recounts Jesus as asking, “[W]ist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” (Luke 2:49). Paul, likewise, in describing Jesus’s glory and power denotes, “For he [the Father] has put all things under his [Christ’s] feet. But when he saith all things are put under him, it is manifest that he is excepted, which did put all things under him” (1 Cor. 15:7). Jesus would also note that he came forth from the Father (John 16:8), and other first-century writers would point to him as being begotten by the Father (John 1:18; Heb. 1:5–6, 5:5) or as being the firstborn of creation (Rom. 8:29; Col. 1:15). Likewise, Jesus would note that “as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself” (John 5:6). Taking the Proverbs 8:3–5 passage, which denoted that wisdom was “set up” and “brought forth” before the rest of creation, some, most especially the theologian Arian and his followers in the fourth century CE, would eventually posit that the Word Platonism 109 was actually the Father’s first creation. Other first-century writings, however, posited that the Word had eternally been with God. John, after all, had denoted that Jesus “was with God” and “was God” in the beginning (John 1:1). And he would make similar claims in other writings credited to him. “That which was from the beginning,” he would write in his first letter, “which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life; (For the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and shew unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us;) That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you” (1 John 1:1–3). In Revelation, John would quote Jesus as claiming, “I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending” and “I am the first and the last” (Rev. 1:8, 17). Even more boldly, the author of Hebrews would claim, “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever” (Heb. 13:8). And in comparing Jesus to Melchizedek, one similarity that author would specifically point to was that Melchizedek was “[w]ithout father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life” (Heb. 7:3). Thus, there was room to claim the Word both as a begotten being and as existent from eternity. What exactly “begotten” meant (whether it was akin to “created”) and when exactly that happened (before time, constantly and eternally, or at Jesus’s birth, baptism, or resurrection) would eventually result in much controversy. In the first century CE, however, as James F. McGrath and Jerry Truex claim in their response to Alan F. Segal’s work on the two powers in heaven, there was not significant concern about this subject: [A] clear dividing line . . . between God and creation . . . had not previously been drawn, and the 110 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered space where the line would be drawn was previously occupied by the Logos, whom Philo describes as “neither uncreated . . . nor created.” From the second century onwards, Christians began to see the need to distinguish clearly between God and creation, which ultimately necessitated that a line be drawn on one side or the other of the Logos. And so it was that Arius and other non-Nicenes drew the line between God and the Logos, whereas the Nicenes drew the line between the Logos and the creation.138 A shift in conception of how the Word related to God can be seen as the first generation of Christians passed away, and later Christians, many of them under the influence of Plato, began to hypothesize on the relationship, such that such hard lines had to be drawn. The first stirrings of such thinking can be found in the writings of Justin Martyr, who, as previously noted, conceived of himself as a philosopher and whose “doctrines were formed under the influence of various religious and philosophical trends of his time . . . Jewish biblical exegesis, Judeo-Christian writings, Christian Gnostic doctrines, current Greek religious doctrines, and Middle Platonism.”139 Indeed, Justin’s goal, in his apologies, was to show how Christianity did not significantly differ from paganism in key ways such that Christians should not be seen as enemies of the empire: If . . . on some points we teach the same things as the poets and philosophers whom you honour, and on other points are fuller and more divine in our 138. James F. McGrath and Jerry Truex, “Two Powers’ and Early Jewish and Christian Monotheism,” Journal of Biblical Studies 4, no. 1 (2004), 67, http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi ?article=1111&amp;context=facsch_papers. 139. Hillar, From Logos to Trinity, 138. Platonism 111 teaching, and if we alone afford proof of what we assert, why are we unjustly hated more than all others? For while we say that all things have been produced and arranged into a world by God, we shall seem to utter the doctrine of Plato; and while we say that there will be a burning up of all, we shall seem to utter the doctrine of the Stoics: and while we affirm that the souls of the wicked, being endowed with sensation even after death, are punished, and that those of the good being delivered from punishment spend a blessed existence, we shall seem to say the same things as the poets and philosophers; and while we maintain that men ought not to worship the works of their hands, we say the very things which have been said by the comic poet Menander, and other similar writers, for they have declared that the workman is greater than the work.140 One of Justin Martyr’s primary influences was “Philo of Alexandria, whom he mentions by name three times in the Dialogue of Trypho.”141 But as the scholar Marian Hillar says, “Justin does not adhere to Philo’s doctrines slavishly; he expands the doctrines and concepts of Philo, mixing them with the philosophical interpretations of [pagan philosopher] Numenius and adapts such a mixture to the new Christian mythology.”142 Justin Martyr’s link to Philo’s way of thinking about Plato’s relationship to God is plain in his First Apology. There, Justin Martyr makes similar claims regarding the Mosaic origin of many of Plato’s thoughts: “That you may learn that it was from our teach140. Justin Martyr, First Apology, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, chap. 20, Early Christian Writings, http://www .earlychristianwritings.com/text/justinmartyr-firstapology.html. 141. Hillar, From Logos to Trinity, 138. 142. Ibid., 138–139. 112 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered ers . . . that Plato borrowed his statement that God, having altered matter which was shapeless, made the world, hear the very words spoken through Moses,” after which Justin quotes the creation account of Genesis 1:1.143 In the next chapter of the First Apology, Justin links Plato’s concept of the demiurge as described (though not by name) in Timaeus to the Son of God, by claiming that the serpent on the cross that Moses lifted up to heal the people of Israel from poison asps in Numbers 21, was not only a type of the cross of Jesus but that, in turn, Things which Plato reading, and not accurately understanding, and not apprehending that it was the figure of the cross, but taking it to be a placing crosswise, he said that the power next to the first God was placed crosswise in the universe. And as to his speaking of a third, he did this because he read, as we said above, that which was spoken by Moses, “that the Spirit of God moved over the waters.” For he gives the second place to the Logos which is with God, who he said was placed crosswise in the universe; and the third place to the Spirit who was said to be borne upon the water, saying, “And the third around the third.”144 In such ideas, then, we begin to find the beginnings of a trinitarian doctrine of God, but as trinity scholar Dale Tuggy notes, while “as with the Middle Platonists, Justin’s triad is hierarchical or ordered . . . Justin’s scheme is not, properly, trinitarian. The one God is not the three, but rather one of them and the primary one, the ultimate source of the second and third.”145 In fact, Justin Martyr 143. Justin Martyr, First Apology, chap. 49. 144. Ibid., chap. 50. 145. Dale Tuggy, “History of Trinitarian Doctrines,” sec. 1 (“Introduction”), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford .edu/entries/trinity/trinity-history.html. Platonism 113 wasn’t always completely clear on what this third even was. As Marian Hillar notes, while Justin Martyr saw the “Christ or begotten Logos” as becoming “the man Jesus by being born of a virgin by his own action or the action of the Holy Spirit (Pneuma)[, t]here are contradictory statements in Justin, and he is not clear whether the Holy Spirit (Pneuma) is a third pneumatic being or the same as the Logos Pneuma.”146 That said, Justin’s view that the three were one substance would find their way into the later doctrine of the trinity.147 Thus, as we will see, while the New Testament writers likely largely drew on Palestinian Jewish sources for their concepts of God, we find in Justin’s writings, based in part of Philo’s ideas, the beginning of the application of Hellenistic and Platonic ideas to that discussion, such that the One began also to be three; however, as in the earlier writings, the Father maintained his superior position. The role of the Holy Spirit in the writings of the Christian writers of the New Testament was one quite different from the personified one that would come later. Rather, we see in the New Testament a view of the Spirit much more in keeping with the Old Testament concept of ruwach, something that was seen “not as a substantive being but as an influence or effect of God’s action.”148 This can be seen in the way that the Holy Spirit is addressed (or we could say not addressed) throughout the New Testament. As Larry Hurtado notes, In the earliest observable stages of Christian worship in the New Testament, devotion is offered to God the Father and to (and through) Jesus. The Holy Spirit is certainly often referred to as the agent of divine power in and among believers, and 146. Hillar, From Logos to Trinity, 168. 147. Ibid., 179–180. 148. Ibid., 236. 114 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered as the mode of divine enablement and presence specifically in worship. . . . [W]orship is offered in the Holy Spirit, but it is not so clear that the Spirit is seen as the recipient of worship. . . . [A]t its earliest observable stage Christian worship was more “binitarian,” with devotion directed to God and Christ. Earliest Christian religious experience involved God, Christ and the Spirit; but the devotional pattern was more “binitarian” as to the divine recipients of worship.149 One need only look at the start of Paul’s letters for confirmation. “Grace be unto you, and peace, from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ,” is Paul’s standard greeting, one he uses almost identically in virtually all his letters: Romans 1:7, 1 Corinthians 1:3, 2 Corinthians 1:2, Ephesians 1:2, Philippians 1:2, Colossians 1:2, 1 Thessalonians 1:1, 2 Thessalonians 1:2, and 1 Timothy 1:2. In his letter to the Galatians (1:1), among other places, Paul refers to himself as an apostle “by Jesus Christ, and God the Father,” but never does he call himself an apostle of the Holy Spirit. Other New Testament letter writers make similar claims. James writes that he is “a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ” (James 1:1). Peter writes that he is “a servant and an apostle of Jesus Christ,” one who has “obtained . . . precious faith . . . through the righteousness of God and our Saviour Jesus Christ” ( Pet. 1:1). John writes that believers’ “fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ” (1 John 1:3). Those writers who came shortly after the apostles and New Testament authors used similar greetings, emphasizing only the Father and Son. “Grace to you and peace from Almighty God through Jesus Christ be multiplied,” writes 149. Larry W. Hurtado, At the Origins of Christian Worship: The Context and Character of the Earliest Christian Devotion (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1999), 63–64. Platonism 115 Clement of Rome at the start of his first letter to the Corinthians.150 “[M]ercy unto you and peace from God Almighty and Jesus Christ our Savior” is the way Polycarp greets the church at Philippi.151 Similarly, Ignatius, in all seven of his letters that survive, starts by either denoting that he has as “his own bishop, God the Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ” or that the church belongs to or is blessed by God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.152 The Holy Spirit for such writers was thus something confined more to a motivating force of God than to a personalized being, in keeping with similar uses of the concept in the Old Testament. Thus, in the Old Testament, when the Spirit of God is said to reside in people, it is generally in the context of their having some kind of special connection to God such that they are led by him. Many in the Old Testament, for example, are said to have received wisdom and prophetic insight through receiving God’s Spirit. Pharaoh, in taking to heart Joseph’s advice regarding what to do in the face of seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine, claims of Joseph, “Can we find such a one as this is, a man in whom the Spirit of God is?” (Gen. 41:8). In Exodus 31:3–4, a man named Bezaleel is placed in charge of building the tabernacle of God after having been “filled with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship, to 150. The First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, prologue, trans. J. B. Lightfoot, Early Christian Writings, http://www .earlychristianwritings.com/text/1clement-lightfoot.html. 151. The Epistle of Polycarp to the Philippians, prologue, trans. J. B. Lightfoot, Early Christian Writings, http://www .earlychristianwritings.com/text/polycarp-lightfoot.html. 152. Quote from The Epistle of Ignatius to Polycarp, short retention, prologue, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings .com/text/ignatius-polycarp-longer.html. The other letter six letters can be also be found at Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/ignatius.html. 116 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered devise cunning works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass.” In Numbers 11:5–9, God is said to have taken of the Spirit he placed in Moses and given it to seventy elders called to assist him, such that Eldad and Medad were moved to prophesy, much to Joshua’s consternation. Likewise, God’s Spirit is used to lead men to make various decisions and to take action. In Judges 6:34, for example, it is the Spirit of God that moves Gideon to gather Israel to fight the Midianites and Amalekites. The full power of God’s Spirit is perhaps best summarized in the example of King Saul, who is told by the prophet Samuel, in 1 Samuel 10:6, “And the Spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, and thou shall prophesy with them [prophets of Israel], and shall be turned into another man.” The Spirit of God in the New Testament is noted as having similar transformational power. As the Spirit was given to select people in the Old Testament to perform various works, so it had been to followers of Jesus living in the first century, New Testament writers claimed. Thus, Peter would claim that the prophecy of Joel had been fulfilled on the first day of the new church on Pentecost, when people heard the church talking in tongues: “This is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel; And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams: And on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy” (Acts :16–18). The Spirit was something given to people, as Luke 11:13 would note, quoting Jesus’s words, “If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?” It was also something that then motivated those people to action and gave them special prophetic insights, even Jesus him- Platonism 117 self. It is the Spirit that is said to have driven (or led) “him into the wilderness” to face the temptation of Satan after his baptism and forty days of fasting (Matt. 4:1; Mark 1:12; Luke 11:13). So it was for Jesus’s early followers. It is through the Spirit that the angel of the Lord tells Philip to visit with an Ethiopian eunuch who had questions about the meaning of a passage in Isaiah (Acts 8:26–29). It is the Spirit that tells Peter to go with three men who would lead him to the household of the Gentile God-fearer Cornelius (Acts 10:19). Likewise, the Spirit provides Jesus’s followers with the gift of prophecy, as it would some in Tyre who would warn Paul not to go to Jerusalem (Acts 21:4). It is thus through that Spirit that God performs spiritual works, as Paul wrote in Romans 8:11: “But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you.” Although the Spirit is said to do things in both the Old and New Testaments as one would expect of an actual actor or performer, only rarely in the New Testament is the Holy Spirit mentioned in the context of greetings or fellowship and then not in ways that are generally personal in nature—that is, not in ways in which the Spirit is an object of worship. Peter, for example, denotes that he writes to the “[e]lect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctification [setting apart] of the Spirit, unto the obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ” (1 Pet. 1:). In other words, he writes, the Father chose (John 6:44) for them to become obedient like unto Jesus (2 Cor. 10:5; Eph. 6:5), and it is by the Holy Spirit in them that they are set apart. The Holy Spirit is something the New Testament writers denote as emanating from both the Father and the Son and through which they work and have dwelling in and influence over their human followers—it is a power, an attitude, an essence, a 118 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered mindset, in short, a spirit. Thus, when Jesus promised his followers that he would send the Holy Spirit after his passing away, he denoted, “I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you. . . . And at that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you” (John 14:18, 20). As such, Jesus noted that he would return in the form of God’s Spirit, which would live as an active, motivating force in believers. “If a man love me, he will keep my words,” John quotes Jesus as saying, “and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him” (John 14:3). In fact, as Jesus is the mediator between God and man, so, among New Testament writers, would he be the mediator, that is, the means by which, the Holy Spirit of God is given to men. In his Gospel, John would quote Jesus as saying, “I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; Even the Spirit of Truth” (John 14:16–17). As such, the Spirit comes from the Father through Jesus’s mediation: “The Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my [Jesus’s] name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you” (John 14:6). Such an idea was not limited to the writings of John. Luke, for example, would quote Peter as saying to the New Testament church on its first day of Pentecost, that Jesus, now raised, “being by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, he hath shed forth this, which ye now see and hear” (Acts :33). Likewise, Paul would note that God had shed on his followers the Holy Spirit “abundantly through Jesus Christ our savior” (Tit. 3:4–6). Though Jesus be the mediator through which the Father’s Spirit is shed on his followers, that Spirit, the New Testament writers took care to note, belongs not just to Platonism 119 the Father but also to the Son. Throughout their writings, such early adherents to the faith denote the Spirit as being that of the Father and of the Son—in short, as being the Spirit of God, as the Son is the perfect image of the Father and thus shares in that same Spirit. Thus, Matthew could write that the “the Spirit of the Father” would speak through the apostles when they were sent out (Matt. 10:20), as also John could write that Jesus would send the Spirit “from the Father,” even as it “proceedeth from the Father” (John 15:6). But Peter could call it the “Spirit of Christ” (1 Pet. 1:11), as could Paul (Philip. 1:19; Rom. 8:9), who would go so far as to claim that the Father “sent forth the Spirit of his Son” (Gal. 4:6). It was thus through this shared Spirit that both the Father and the Son could be said to live within believers and those believers live in them, even as John would write, “Hereby we know that we dwell in him, and he in us, because he hath given us of his Spirit” (1 John 4:13). Similar claims are made in the letters of Ignatius, which preserve this tradition when it comes to an understanding regarding the relationship between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Catholic priest Edmund Fortman summarizes those views this way: For Ignatius God is Father, and by “Father” he means primarily “Father of Jesus Christ”: “There is one God, who has manifested Himself by Jesus Christ His Son” (Magn. 8.). Jesus is called “God” 14 times (Eph. inscr. 1.1, 7.2, 15.3, 17.2, 18.2, 19.3; Trall. 7.1; Rom. inscr. 3.3, 6.3; Smyrn. 1.1; Pdyc. 8.3). He is the Father’s Word (Magn. 8.2), “the mind of the Father” (Eph. 3.3), and “the mouth through which the Father truly spoke” (Rom. 8.). He is “His only Son” (Rom. inscr.), “generate and ingenerate, God in man . . . son of Mary and Son of 120 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered God . . . Jesus Christ our Lord” (Eph. 7.). He is the one “who is beyond time the Eternal the Invisible who became visible for our sake, the Impalpable, the Impassible who suffered for our sake” (Polyc. 3.2). It has been said that for Ignatius Jesus’ “divine Sonship dates from the incarnation,” . . . and that he “seems rather to ascribe the divine sonship of Jesus to the fact that Mary conceived by the operation of the Holy Spirit.” . . . If he did date Jesus’ sonship from the incarnation he did not thereby deny His pre-existence. For he declared very definitely that Jesus Christ “from eternity was with the Father and at last appeared to us” (Magn. 6.1) and that He “came forth from one Father in whom He is and to whom He has returned” (Magn. 7.). . . . While Ignatius concentrated most of his thought on Christ, he did not ignore the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit was the principle of the Lord’s virginal conception (Eph. 18.2). Through the Holy Spirit Christ “confirmed . . . in stability the officers of the Church” (Phil. inscr.). This Spirit spoke through Ignatius himself (Phil. 7.1). Ignatius does not cite the Matthean baptismal formula, but he does sometimes mention Father, Son, and Holy Spirit together. He urges the Magnesians to “be eager . . . to be confirmed in the commandments of our Lord and His apostles, so that ‘whatever you do may prosper’ . . . in the Son and Father and Spirit” (Magn. 13.2). And in one of his most famous passages he declares: “Like the stones of a temple, cut for a building of God the Father, you have been lifted up to the top by the crane of Jesus Christ, which is the Cross, and the rope of the Holy Spirit” (Eph. 9.1). Thus although there is nothing remotely resembling a doctrine of the Trinity in Ignatius, the Platonism 121 triadic pattern of thought is there, and two of its members, the Father and Jesus Christ, are clearly and often designated as God.153 By the time we reach the end of the second century, however, the Alexandrian writers, borrowing much of their thinking from their Hellenistic surroundings, would come to use the Holy Spirit as a replacement for the Platonic concept of the World-Soul and, thus, begin the formative process of denoting God as a formal trinity, three in one, within the Platonic sphere.154 Plato’s idea of a World-Soul was tied to his ideas about creation and the One. In Plato’s words: Such was the whole plan of the eternal God about the god that was to be, to whom for this reason he gave a body, smooth and even, having a surface in every direction equidistant from the centre, a body entire and perfect, and formed out of perfect bodies. And in the centre he put the soul, which he diffused throughout the body, making it also to be the exterior environment of it; and he made the universe a circle moving in a circle, one and solitary, yet by reason of its excellence able to converse with itself, and needing no other friendship or acquaintance. Having these purposes in view he created the world a blessed god.155 For Plato, the cosmos—that is, the physical world—is modeled on the world of forms, which constitute the original 153. Edmund J. Fortman, The Triune God: A Historical Study of the Doctrine of the Trinity (1972; rpt., Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1999), 38–40, quoted in “The Trinity in the Writings of Ignatius of Antioch,” Preachers Institute, October 17, 010, https:// preachersinstitute.com/2010/10/17/the-trinity-in-the-writings-of -ignatius-of-antioch/ 154. Berchman, From Philo to Origen, 133. 155. Plato, Timaeus. 122 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered ideal figures of the universe. As a physical thing, the cosmos has both a body and a soul, and it is put into order, or created, by the demiurge. Humans were forged by this demiurge from the leftovers of the World-Soul.156 This World-Soul, Plato claims, while not the First Cause in itself, is the everlasting work of the One; as such, it is what constitutes the individual soul, the reasoning part, of each person, which is immortal.157 The Greek philosopher Plotinus, writing in the third century, perhaps comes closest to describing how such ideas would become related to the Christian concept of the trinity when he writes of the “triad of the One, Intellect, and Soul, in which the latter two mysteriously emanate from the One, and ‘are the One and not the One; they are the one because they are from it; they are not the One, because it endowed them with what they have while remaining by itself’ (Plotinus Enneads, 85).”158 As Dale Tuggy writes, “Plotinus even describes them as three hypostases.”159 Both Clement of Alexandria, writing at the end of the second century, and Origen of Alexandria, writing in the first half of the third, would use Plato’s ideas extensively in their theorizing about God’s metaphysical nature. Thus, as Robert M. Berchman notes in his book From Philo to Origen, “With Clement we see no distinction between Hellenism and Christianity, Platonism and Christianity. He forges a thoroughly hellenized and Platonized Christianity that affirms the teachings of Jesus as the consummation of Platonic wisdom.”160 Likewise, as Berchman also notes, 156. Marc Cohen, “Plato’s Cosmology.” 157. Pseudo-Plutarch, Placita Philosophorum, 4.7, Perseus Digital Library, http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0094 .tlg003.perseus-eng1:4.7. 158. Tuggy, “History of Trinitarian Doctrines,” sec. 1. 159. Ibid. 160. Berchman, From Philo to Origen, 81. Platonism 123 “Origen’s deity is wholly Platonic. He is immaterial, immovable, simple, unitary, and in no need of magnitude or place. Finally he is non-discernable to the senses. He is a non-material substance.”161 In Clement, the Logos becomes Plato’s demiurge: “The primary difference between God and the Logos is that the Logos is generated and God is ungenerated. However, the Logos is also one and the same thing with the mind (nous) of God.”162 Origen, meanwhile, also borrows many of his concepts of the relation of Jesus to the Father, and even of the universe in general, from Plato’s thinking. For Origen, “God the Father is the absolutely transcendent One above the Logos and the world. The Logos-Son is transcendent but a Unity, an idea of ideas, a form of forms. He is eternally generated by his Father, but he is of the same substance. Since he is generated he exists differently than the Father who created him. In Origen’s proposal God is the first theological and the Logos is the second.”163 Mirroring Plato’s thoughts on the cosmos, Origen even posits a fall from a once higher state for human beings. In Origen’s work, as Berchman reads it, The material realm consists of all entities made from form and matter. This includes all created entities such as rational creatures. These include angels, rational spirits, and human souls. Since they are created these rational creatures are not good essentially. They do, however, possess free-will to choose the good and the moral responsibility to do so. This assumption made it necessary for Origen to postulate the fall of rational creatures away from God, and this fall accounted for the creation of the material world. Those that fell least were 161. Ibid., 277. 162. Ibid., 68. 163. Ibid., 140. 124 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered the angels, and those that fell the farthest were the powers of wickedness.164 Both Clement and Origen had confusing ideas with regard to the Holy Spirit, though both embraced it as part of a trinity of some sort. Indeed, for most Christian writers at the end of the second century, the concept of the Holy Spirit “was an enfant terrible of the Christian faith. For Christian theorists, this term was spoiling the harmony of the duality, and only . . . the authority of faith (i.e., from the testimony of scripture) compelled them to believe in the Holy Spirit as the third individual.”165 Thus, Clement would write in trinitarian-like language, “The universal Father is one, and one the universal Word; and the Holy Spirit is one and the same everywhere.”166 Origen, meanwhile, would posit in very trinitarian language, “that there are three hypostases, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.”167 Still, “the actual status and origin of the Holy Spirit baffled Origen.”168 Thus, because all things were created by the Son, in some places Origen would claim “that the Holy Spirit is the most excellent and the first in order of all that was made by the Father through Christ.”169 Yet in other places, Origen would posit just the opposite: “But up to the present time we have been able to find no statement in Holy Scripture in which the Holy Spirit could be said to 164. Ibid., 134. 165. Hillar, From Logos to Trinity, 236. 166. Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus, book 1, chap. 6, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text /clement-instructor-book1.html. 167. Origen of Alexandria, Commentary on John, book 2, chap. 6, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com /text/origen-john2.html. 168. Fortman, Triune God, 57. 169. Origen of Alexandria, Commentary on John, book 2, chap. 6. Platonism 125 be made or created.”170 As such, for Origen, the Spirit was coeternal with the Father and the Son: “The Holy Spirit would never be reckoned in the Unity of the Trinity, i.e., along with the unchangeable Father and His Son, unless He had always been the Holy Spirit.”171 The three were also coequal: “Nothing in the Trinity can be called greater or less, since the fountain of divinity alone contains all things by His word and reason.”172 Finally, for Origen, the Holy Spirit took on personality, as he reckoned it the third living thing present in such scriptures as Isaiah 6:2–3, with the Son as one of the six-winged seraphims at God the Father’s throne and the Spirit as the other, and Habakkuk 3:2, wherein Origen translates “in the midst of the years make known” as “in the midst of the two living things [the Son and Spirit], . . . thou [the Father] wilt be known.”173 Thus, in Origen’s thoughts, we begin to see the first real inklings of trinitarian doctrine as it would emerge a century later. There is an eternally begotten Son. There are also three coequal and coeternal hypostases. And much in these ideas was made possible by the blending of Platonic theory with scriptural references. In another late second-century writer, Tertullian, we would get the first explicit references to the Holy Spirit as God rather than as simply divine.174 Under the sway of Stoic philosophy, Tertullian would also claim the three are cosubstantial, an idea he would base on the Stoic concept that “all real things are material,” so that while God might be spirit, spirit is simply “a material thing made out of a finer sort of matter.” The Father thus brings the Son into 170. Origen, De Principiis, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, book 1, chap. 3, para. 3, Early Christian Writings, http://www .earlychristianwritings.com/text/origen122.html. 171. Ibid., 1.3.4. 172. Ibid., 1.3.7. 173. Ibid., 1.3.4. 174. Hillar, From Logos to Trinity, 236. 126 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered existence by “using but not losing a portion of his spiritual matter.” The Son, in turn, does the same with the Holy Spirit. Thus there are three who can be called God, composed as they are of divine matter, even as there truly is only one God, the Father.175 But as Marian Hillar points out, it is unlikely that Stoicism was Tertullian’s only source of his ideas about a triune God. Rather, “it is only natural and logical to infer that he was influenced by the surrounding culture with which he was intimately acquainted.”176 These included “the Egyptian concept of the trinity for interpretation of the Christian biblical mythology,” as well as “the Middle Platonic Logos doctrine and the Stoic logical categories.”177 So in fact, while Greek philosophy, particularly Platonism and to some extent Stoicism, had its effect on what the Christian God would become, so too did various other local religions, most particularly those of Egypt, whose ideas had actually filtered into Greek philosophy centuries earlier. As Marian Hillar notes, Triadic speculations are nothing new. We find them in Greek philosophy as well as in Egyptian religion, and in the last one especially was the identity of the three entities. Particularly striking is the agreement of the [pagan philosopher] Numenius doctrine with that presented in the so-called Chaldean Oracles. The reason probably is because both the Numenius doctrine and the Chaldean Oracles have the same source, namely, the Platonic tradition via Xenocrates. This was the current theological doctrine of the second century. Numenius, in turn, influenced the Christian Apologist, Justin, 175. Tuggy, “History of Trinitarian Doctrines,” sec. 3.1., “Tertullian.” 176. Hillar, From Logos to Trinity, 244. 177. Ibid., 244–245. Paganism 127 the Greek philosophers Plotinus and Porphyry, and later Eusebius of Caesarea.178 “Egypt,” Hillar goes on to note, “is the only country in the Mediterranean basin where we find an idea of the divine tri-unity labeled by [Old Testament scholar] Hugo Gressmann as ‘trinitarian monotheism.’”179 Paganism The effect of Egyptian religion on Greek philosophy brings us to another of the non-Jewish influences that would have held sway in the Christian church during the first couple of centuries after its founding: pagan religions. For indeed, while the gods may have been waning in import among the upper and intellectual classes most disposed to adopting philosophical ideas, adoration of the gods re- 178. Ibid., 182–183. 179. Ibid., 289–290. While many second- and third-century Christians were pulled toward a trinitarian view of God in order to explain Jesus’s (and by extension the Holy Spirit’s) divinity such that the trinity would a century later become orthodoxy, formative rabbinical Judaism moved to a much stricter view of monotheism than had previously existed among the many Jewish sects in order to deny the divinity of Jesus as well as various gnostic doctrines. See Segal, Two Powers in Heaven, 27, 39–40, for a fuller discussion of rabbinical interpretations of specific Bible passages sometimes taken to refer to a second divine figure. The likely retroactive dating for such concerns in rabbinic literature is discussed in McGrath and Truex, “Two Powers’ and Early Jewish and Christian Monotheism.” Daniel Boyarin, in “The Gospel of the Memra,” summarizes the phenomenon well: “The lion’s share of the Hellenic thinking of early Christianity—and most centrally, Logos theology—was . . . an integral part of the first-century Jewish world. The following (almost contrary) narrative seems at least equally as plausible: ‘Judaism(s)’ and ‘Christianit(ies)’ remained intertwined well past the first half of the second century until Rabbinic Judaism in its nativist attempt to separate itself from its own history of now ‘Christian’ logos theology began to try to imagine itself a community free of Hellenism.” 128 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered mained integral to the life of regular peoples.180 In fact, during the time of Augustus, there was an actual return to an emphasis on the gods, as “poetry replace[d] philosophy in the discussion about religion.”181 Even in regard to the idea that there was a waxing and waning of popularity of religion versus philosophy, there are reasons to be a bit skeptical.182 In public, virtually all people were believers in the gods, and there is little evidence that the occasional intellectual’s skepticism with regard to their reality had a substantial effect on Roman society itself—even most of the incredulous philosophers participated in religious rites as called for.183 Indeed, belief in the gods served as a major stabilizing force within the Roman world, and thus, Augustus had great reason to portray himself as a “great restorer of temples and rites.”184 Religion reinforced “the existing social order,” giving those with the means the opportunity both to serve the general populace and to enhance their own status among that populace, by paying for various religious buildings, ceremonies, and rites.185 For those with 180. Stambaugh and Balch, New Testament in Its Social Environment, 130. It was not uncommon, Ramsey MacMullen notes, “to find specific distinction made between a theology or point of creed proper for the masses and another reserved for the learned, for initiates, or for believers specially capable of deeper understanding.” Ramsay MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 9. 181. Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians, 62. 182. MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, 64. 183. Ibid., 62, 77; Stambaugh and Balch, New Testament in Its Social Environment, 46. 184. Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians, 72. Among his apparent accomplishments were the restoration of eighty-two temples and certain priestly brotherhoods responsible for various sacrifices and rites, as well as the appointment a flamen dialis, a priestly office that had gone unfilled since 87 BCE. Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians, 180. 185. MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, 57–58. Paganism 129 lesser means, religion offered them the opportunity to enjoy participation in facets of society otherwise limited to the better-off. Roman elites depended on religion to help keep the peace, just as purveyors of religion depended on the Roman world for their faith’s continuing efficacy. As Arnaldo Momigliano puts it, “Traditional practices implied collective responsibility for the prosperity of the country.”186 As such, “‘religion,’” Larry Hurtado notes, “was virtually everywhere, a regular and integral part of the fabric of life.”187 In summary, “the various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world,” as that famous eighteenth-century English historian of Rome Edward Gibbons cynically describes them, “were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.”188 Part of what made the Roman domination of the EuroMediterranean world so effective—and possible—was its very openness, with rare exceptions, to the religions of its conquered peoples. Rather than imposing a single faith, official Roman imperial policy “fully accepted that each ethnic group should have and continue to reverence their own deities.”189 With the exception of adherents to the Jewish faith, this did not mean that these conquered peoples remained closed off from other gods that the Roman world brought to them, nor that the Romans themselves were closed off from local deities whose adherents might have spread into other locations within the empire. The Romans took on, for example, Serapis and Isis from Egypt, Mithras 186. Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians, 88. 187. Larry Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2016), 47. 188. Gibbons, Decline and Fall, vol. 1, chap. 2, part 1, Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5717/5717-h/5717 -h.htm#Alink22HCH0001. 189. Hurtado, At the Origins, 13. 130 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered from Persia, and Sol Invictus from Syria.190 Sometimes, Roman gods and local gods became identified one with another (just as Roman and Greek gods had).191 While soldiers, as well as merchants, likely brought their faiths with them into local areas, the main means of spreading localized faiths into Rome and other places within the empire was probably slavery, as that population remained settled for extended periods of time, even for generations, and often forged enclaves of similarly minded religious folk.192 Religion was a part of any given household’s daily life, much as it remains so for many households in our contemporary world. People were generally born into a family religion with its own peculiar set of household gods, in addition to whatever other “higher” deities the family might worship. As such, special events—be they births, deaths, marriages, memorials, birthdays, comings-ofage—revolved around a household’s particular set of gods and their distinctive traditions and practices.193 But so, too, rather mundane aspects of life might also be affected, such as meals, at which special toasts might be offered.194 The household gods (Lares domestici) were often notable ancestors who were thought to have proceeded to a higher spiritual plane where they could offer protection to the family, including its slaves.195 As such, the family owed these gods special reverence, and many Roman homes 190. “Adopted Roman Gods,” United Nations of Roma Victrix (UNRV.com), https://www.unrv.com/culture/adopted-roman-gods .php. 191. Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians, 123, 143. 192. MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, 114; Hurtado, At the Origins, 17. 193. Vincent P. Branick, The House Church in the Writings of Paul (Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazer, 1989), 44; Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods, 78. 194. Branick, House Church in the Writings, 44; Hurtado, At the Origins, 9; Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods, 47. 195. Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods, 46. Paganism 131 featured a small altar to facilitate offerings and prayers to them on a regular, possibly daily, basis.196 Such familial worship not only provided a sense of unity within the household but also was considered essential to maintaining its health, security, and good fortune.197 For such reasons, breaking from the household cult would have been considered a betrayal of the family. Those who converted to exclusivist religions such as Judaism or Christianity posed problems to family solidarity and protection when they “refused the traditional rites.”198 Indeed, toward the end of the first century CE, Greek and Roman writers, perhaps motivated by a fear of splits within the family, expressed concern about what might have been a growing change in attitudes toward marriage.199 Wives were encouraged to worship only Roman gods and goddesses, not gods from the East or Egypt.200 Plutarch insisted that a husband and wife should share religious beliefs and practices.201 In his “Conjugal Precepts,” he writes, “The wife ought not to have her own private friends, but cultivate only those of the husband. Now the gods are our first and greatest friends, so the wife ought only to worship and recognize her husband’s gods, and the door ought to be shut on all superfluous worship and strange superstitions, for none of the gods are pleased with stealthy and secret sacrifices on the part of a wife.”202 Arnaldo Momigliano believes Plutarch made such comments because he “must 196. Ibid., 46–47. 197. Ibid., 54. 198. Ibid., 46. 199. Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians, 206. 200. Stambaugh and Balch, New Testament in Its Social Environment, 124. 201. Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians, 206. 0. Plutarch, “Conjugal Precepts,” chap. 4 of Plutarch’s Morals: Ethical Essays, trans. Arthur Richard Shilleto (London: George Bell and Sons, 1898), p. 74, sec. 19, Project Gutenberg, https://www .gutenberg.org/files/3639/3639-h/3639-h.htm#Page_70. 132 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered have known that Christianity was one of those cults which both attracted and accepted unaccompanied women.”203 Indeed, women, often with no mention of their husbands as believers, appear to have played foundational roles in Jesus’s own ministry, and early Christianity after Jesus’s death proved no different in terms of its gleaning of new adherents. Luke 8:1–3 notes that Jesus, on his second tour through Galilee, in addition to his twelve disciples, was accompanied by “certain women, which had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities, Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils, and Joanna the wife of Chuza Herod’s steward, and Susanna, and many others, which ministered unto him of their substance.” These same women, along with others, proved, according to the Gospel writers, to be some of the first witnesses of Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection—and were likely also sources of much of the information provided in those accounts.204 Differences in attitudes toward Christianity between family members were substantial enough that Paul would see a need to address what to do about them in 1 Corinthians 7:12–13: “But to the rest speak I, not the Lord: If any brother hath a wife that believeth not, and she be pleased to dwell with him, let him not put her away. And the woman which hath an husband that believeth not, and if he be pleased to dwell with her, let her not leave him.” Similar issues regarding slaves within households undoubtedly also arose, as implied in Paul’s first letter to Timothy. “Let as many servants as are under the yoke,” 203. Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians, 206. 04. On women as witnesses of the crucifixion, see Matthew 7:56, Mark 15:40, and John 19:25. On their visit of the tomb soon after Jesus’s death, see Matthew 27:61, Mark 15:47, and Luke 23:55–56. On their finding the tomb empty after the Sabbath, see Matthew 8:1, Mark 16:1–8, Luke 24:1–10, and John 20:1–2. On Jesus’s appearance to Mary, see John 20:11–18. On his appearance to other women, see Matthew 28:9–10. Paganism 133 Paul wrote, “count their own masters worthy of all honour, that the name of God and his doctrine be not blasphemed” (1 Tim. 6:1). The next verse references, in contrast, slaves who had believing masters, suggesting that this earlier verse was about slaves who did not. Indeed, part of the issue in Paul’s letter to Philemon appears to have been that Philemon’s unbelieving runaway slave Onesimus had been “unprofitable,” but as Paul notes, now that he was “above a servant, a brother beloved,” he might be “profitable to thee and to me” (Philem. 1:11, 16). Although arguments within Jewish households over the deistic status of Jesus would have created tensions, most shared religious traditions (Sabbath, common holidays, eating according to biblical food laws) would at least have continued. In non-Jewish households, given the importance esteemed to the household gods, religious differences, for which cause family traditions could no longer be shared, no doubt posed great threat to a family’s seeming cohesiveness. Such a concern extended outward from the family toward the general society, as noted, for example, in the second-century CE Stoic writer Hierocles work On Duties: Let us then sum up, that we should not separate what is publicly profitable from what is privately profitable, but to consider them one and the same. For what is profitable to the fatherland is common to each of its parts, since the whole without its parts is nothing. And what is profitable to the citizen is also fitting to the city, if indeed it is taken to be profitable to the citizen. For what is of advantage to a dancer as a dancer would also be of advantage to the entire chorus.205 205. Hierocles, On Duties, 3.39.35, quoted in Abraham J. Malherbe, Moral Exhortation, a Greco-Roman Sourcebook (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), 89. 134 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered As such, conversions to Christianity (or, likewise, wholeheartedly to the Jewish faith) among non-Jewish ethnicities were not a threat just to family stability but to societal— be it city, nation, or empire.206 Worship of the gods was considered central to the prosperity and continuing wellbeing of all of these; disserting them could be considered equivalent to treason.207 Indeed, not only were there Lares domestici, there were also “Lares of bridges, crossroads, and other sites,” and in the same way a person might be expected to offer reverence to the household gods to protect the family, people were expected to do proper obeisance to city gods, national gods, and so forth, as they were considered “guardians against such risks as plague, fire, or other disasters. So, refusal to participate in the reverence due these deities could be taken as a disloyalty to your city and a disregard for the welfare of its inhabitants.”208 Thus, Hierocles would go on to write in On Duties: The person who would conduct himself well toward his fatherland should get rid of every passion and disease of the soul. He should also observe the laws of the fatherland as secondary gods of a kind and be guided by them, and, if someone should attempt to transgress them or introduce innovations we should with all diligence prevent him and in every possible way oppose him. For it is not beneficial to the city if its laws are dishonored and new things are preferred to the old. . . . No less than the laws should we also guard the customs which are 206. Ernest L. Abel, The Roots of Anti-Semitism (Rutherford: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975), 74. 207. Paula Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 140–141. 208. Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods, 46, 54. Paganism 135 truly those of the fatherland and are perhaps older than the laws themselves.209 Although Celsus, writing against Christianity in the late second century in his book The True Word, saw Christianity largely as a ridiculous superstition, his main argument against it had to do with its subversion of the social order. He saw Christians as interfering with the good of their individual nations and, indeed, of the empire, by giving up the special customs and gods of their people:210 As the Jews, then, became a peculiar people, and enacted laws in keeping with the customs of their country, and maintain them up to the present time, and observe a mode of worship which, whatever be its nature, is yet derived from their fathers, they act in these respects like other men, because each nation retains its ancestral customs, whatever they are, if they happen to be established among them. And such an arrangement appears to be advantageous, not only because it has occurred to the mind of other nations to decide some things differently, but also because it is a duty to protect what has been established for the public advantage; and also because, in all probability, the various quarters of the earth were from the beginning allotted to different superintending spirits, and were thus distributed among certain governing powers, and in this manner the administration of the world is carried on. And whatever is done among each nation in this way would be rightly done, wherever it was agreeable to the wishes (of the superintending powers), while it would be an act of impiety to get 209. Hierocles, On Duties, 3.39.36, quoted in Malherbe, Moral Exhortation, 90. 210. Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods, 32. 136 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered rid of the institutions established from the beginning in the various places.211 If, indeed, the gods are nothing, Celsus goes on to argue, what trouble is it for a Christian to worship them if it will help society? “What harm will there be in taking part in the feast?” he asks. “On the other hand, if they are demons, it is certain that they too are God’s creatures, and that we must believe in them, sacrifice to them according to the laws, and pray to them that they may be propitious.”212 In the end, Celsus sees Christians as having a choice between two alternatives. If they refuse to render due service to the gods, and to respect those who are set over this service, let them not come to manhood, or marry wives, or have children, or indeed take any share in the affairs of life; but let them depart hence with all speed, and leave no posterity behind them, that such a race may become extinct from the face of the earth. Or, on the other hand, if they will take wives, and bring up children, and taste of the fruits of the earth, and partake of all the blessings of life, and bear its appointed sorrows (for nature herself hath allotted sorrows to all men; for sorrows must exist, and earth is the only place for them), then must they discharge the duties of life until they are released from its bonds, and render due honour to those beings who control the affairs of this life, if they would not show themselves ungrateful to them. For it would be unjust in them, after receiving the good 211. Origen, Contra Celsus, 5.25, http://www .earlychristianwritings.com/text/origen165.html. 212. Ibid., 8.24, http://www.earlychristianwritings .com/text/origen168.html. Paganism 137 things which they dispense, to pay them no tribute in return.213 Such opinions leave little wonder as to why early Christian writers often emphasized their loyalty to government figures, even as they spurned idol worship. “There is no power but of God,” Paul would write the Romans, as referenced in chapter 1 (Rom. 13:1). Likewise, Peter, as also referenced in chapter 1, would admonish his readers: “Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake” (1 Pet. 2:13). Later writers would adopt the same positions taken by the apostles. “Pray also for kings and powers and princes,” Polycarp would write in his letter to the Philippians, “and for them that persecute and hate you and for the enemies of the cross, that your fruit may be manifest among all men, that ye may be perfect in Him.”214 Indeed, in the apologies (defenses of Christianity) written throughout the second century and proceeding into the third, one of the major arguments that Christian writers made against pagan philosophers (and often to kings— both Quadratus and Aristides addressed their apologies to the emperor Hadrian) was that Christians were every bit as loyal to the government as those who worshipped the gods. “To God alone we render worship,” Justin Martyr would write in his First Apology toward the middle of the second century, “but in other things we gladly serve you, acknowledging you as kings and rulers of men, and praying that with your kingly power you be found to possess also sound judgment.”215 Similarly, Athenagoras near the end of the century would write, It is the unjust act that calls for penalty and punishment. And accordingly, with admiration of your 213. Ibid., 8.55. 214. Epistle of Polycarp, 12.3. 215. Justin Martyr, First Apology, chap. 65. 138 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered mildness and gentleness, and your peaceful and benevolent disposition towards every man, individuals live in the possession of equal rights; and the cities, according to their rank, share in equal honour; and the whole empire, under your intelligent sway, enjoys profound peace. But for us who are called Christians you have not in like manner cared; but although we commit no wrong—nay, . . . are of all men most piously and righteously disposed towards the Deity and towards your government—you allow us to be harassed, plundered, and persecuted, the multitude making war upon us for our name alone.216 Around the same time, Theophilus of Antioch would declare to his pagan friend Autolycus, “Wherefore I will rather honour the king [than your gods], not, indeed, worshipping him, but praying for him. But God, the living and true God, I worship, knowing that the king is made by Him. . . . Accordingly, honour the king, be subject to him, and pray for him with loyal mind; for if you do this, you do the will of God. For the law that is of God, says, ‘My son, fear thou the Lord and the king, and be not disobedient to them; for suddenly they shall take vengeance on their enemies.’”217 Later, near the start of the third century, Tertullian would proclaim in his Apology, Do you, then, who think that we care nothing for the welfare of Caesar, look into God’s revelations, examine our sacred books, which we do not keep in hiding, and which many accidents put into the 216. Athenagoras of Athens, A Plea for the Christians, chap. 1, trans. B. P. Praven, Early Christians Writings, http:// www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/athenagoras-plea.html. 217. Theophilus of Antioch, To Autolycus, 1.11, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/theophilus-book1 .html. Paganism 139 hands of those who are not of us. Learn from them that a large benevolence is enjoined upon us, even so far as to supplicate God for our enemies, and to beseech blessings on our persecutors. Who, then, are greater enemies and persecutors of Christians, than the very parties with treason against whom we are charged? Nay, even in terms, and most clearly, the Scripture says, “Pray for kings, and rulers, and powers, that all may be peace with you.”218 Writing on a similar topic, in Against Celsus, how Christians can refuse to serve in the armed forces and yet still claim loyalty to the empire, Origen would declare, And as we by our prayers vanquish all demons who stir up war, and lead to the violation of oaths, and disturb the peace, we in this way are much more helpful to the kings than those who go into the field to fight for them. And we do take our part in public affairs, when along with righteous prayers we join self-denying exercises and meditations, which teach us to despise pleasures, and not to be led away by them. And none fight better for the king than we do. We do not indeed fight under him, although he require it; but we fight on his behalf, forming a special army—an army of piety—by offering our prayers to God.219 That such writers would have to defend their faith as not some kind of subterfuge against the government or society at large makes sense, since worship of the gods pervaded nearly every aspect of Roman civilization—thus its role as a stabilizing social force. Hiding one’s religious 218. Tertullian, The Apology, trans. S. Thelwell, chap. 31, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text /tertullian01.html. 219. Origen, Contra Celsus, 8.68. 140 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered proclivities not to worship the gods would have been difficult if not impossible. Meetings usually featured some kind of invocation to a god.220 Holding a public office generally involved various religious duties, such as sacrifices or prayers or the leading of religious processions.221 Merchants were typically part of associations, which themselves had a patron deity.222 If one were to walk down a street in the Roman Empire, one would not have been able to avoid noticing the many temples, often the largest, most important buildings in a town, dedicated to various gods.223 Roman towns commonly included temples to Apollo, Ceres, Hercules, Isis, Jupiter, Juno, Liber Pater, Mars, Mercury, Minerva, Sarapis, Venus, and Vulcan, in addition to whatever local gods a given area might have had.224 On almost any day of the week, religious celebrations spilled out to public areas: parades to any given deity several times a year, choir singing, music, dancing, the smell of burning sacrifices.225 Periodic festivals further enlarged that scope.226 The object was to make any particular god’s veneration visible, to attract people to the temple itself or to attract patrons.227 Witness this account of a procession in Apuleius’s ancient Roman novel The Golden Ass: Next day they all put on tunics of various hues and “beautified” themselves by smearing coloured 220. Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods, 47. 221. Ibid., 47; Hurtado, At the Origins, 9; Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians, 123; Stambaugh and Balch, New Testament in Its Social Environment, 129. 222. Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods, 47; Hurtado, At the Origins, 9. 223. Hurtado, At the Origins, 10. 224. MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, 1. 225. Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians, 86; MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, 28; Hurtado, At the Origins, 11, 12. 226. MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, 27. 227. Ibid., 28; Hurtado, At the Origins, 11. Paganism 141 gunge on their faces and applying eye-shadow. Then they set forth, dressed in turbans and robes, some saffron-coloured, some of linen and some of gauze; some had white tunics embroidered with a pattern of purple stripes and girded at the waist; and on their feet were yellow slippers. The goddess, draped in silk, they placed on my back, and baring their arms to the shoulder and brandishing huge swords and axes, they capered about with ecstatic cries, while the sound of the pipes goaded their dancing to frenzy. After calling at a number of small houses they arrived at a rich man’s country estate. The moment they entered the gates there was bedlam; they rushed about like fanatics, howling discordantly, twisting their necks sinuously back and forth with lowered heads, and letting their long hair fly around in circles, sometimes attacking their own flesh with their teeth, and finally gashing their arms with the weapons they carried. In the middle of all this, one of them was inspired to fresh excesses of frenzy; he began to gasp and draw deep laboured breaths, feigning madness like one divinely possessed—as if the presence of a god sickened and enfeebled men instead of making them better! Anyway, let me tell you how heavenly Providence rewarded him. Holding forth like some prophet he embarked on a cock-and-bull story about some sacrilegious act he accused himself of having committed, and condemned himself to undergo the just punishment for his crime at his own hands. So, seizing a whip such as these effeminates always carry about with them, its lashes made of twisted wool ending in long tassels thickly studded with sheep’s knucklebones, he laid into himself with these knotted 142 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered thongs, standing the pain of the blows with extraordinary hardihood.228 In his analysis of this passage, Graham Anderson draws attention to the location (“the doors of a local patron,” Anderson notes) and the spectacle (the way in which the procession functions as advertising of a sort) of the event but most especially to its economic features: by going to “a rich man’s country estate,” they hope to, and eventually do, secure a donation.229 The temples were big business. A city’s economy—indeed, the empire’s economy—centered around the worship of the gods. The temples were home to banks and libraries.230 Meat was generally, in many places, secured from sacrifices that had been offered at the temples.231 Because homes were generally too small to afford large gatherings, rooms at the temples, sometimes rented out, served as banquet halls and meeting venues.232 And the temples were the source of entertainment—musical performances, lectures, theater.233 In fact, theaters often adjoined the temple.234 The temples were the source of much of a city’s employment—and not only in the arts or priesthood. No doubt, those involved in the construction 228. Apuleius, Metamorphoses [The Golden Ass], trans. E. J. Kenney, 8.27–28, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/stream/TheGoldenAss _201509/TheGoldenAsspenguinClassics-Apuleius_djvu.txt. 229. Graham Anderson, Sage, Saint, and Sophist: Holy Men and Their Associates in the Early Roman Empire (London: Routledge, 1994), 180. 230. James W. Ermatinger, Daily Life in the New Testament (Wesport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2008), 78; MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, 11 31. Gunnel Ekroth, “Meat in Ancient Greece: Sacrificial, Sacred or Secular?,” Food and History 5, no. 1 (2007): 254–255. 232. MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, 36, 39. 233. Ibid., 11, 14–23; Hurtado, At the Origins, 11. 234. MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, 18; Hurtado, At the Origins, 11. Paganism 143 trade benefited from the building of such edifices.235 Afterward, the creation and sale of devotional objects employed many of the craftworkers of a city, interference in the trade of which aroused the antipathy of the silversmiths against Paul in Ephesus in Acts 19.236 Avoiding the temple would have been difficult if one were to remain an active member of the community. Jews, of course, were the exception. They, at least those who were serious about their faith, did not participate. They had their own gathering place, the synagogue, which also served as a community center. The early Christians largely were Jews—or proselytes. They fit in neatly. But the pressure to conform to the pagan society around them among those who came later, who chose in fewer and fewer ways to conform to the Jewish mode of life, must have been intense. And in a society where “deities that had originated in one or another location were simply adopted by the people in other places and reverenced under their traditional names, [thus] . . . acquiring a much wider following than in their native habitat,” it would have been natural that “a major transformation or refashioning of the deity,” indeed, of the Christian faith as it was developing out of the worship of YHVH, would occur.237 Indeed, as many intellectuals began to see the various gods as “manifestations of a single godhead,” some Hellenized Jews in Jerusalem came to identify Yahweh with Zeus, the father of 235. Some scholars have postulated that the completion of the Jewish temple left so many construction workers unemployed that it helped lead to the discontent in Jerusalem that eventually resulted in the Jewish rebellion of 66–70 CE. Associated Press, “Discovery May Cause Biblical Rewrite of King Herod,” CBS News, November 3, 011, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/discovery-may-cause-biblical -rewrite-of-king-herod/. 236. Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods, 24. 237. Ibid., 46. 144 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered the gods.238 The eventual effect on Christianity is summed up well by Shirley Jackson Case, in an essay from the early 1900s about the development of Christianity: “When they [non-Jews] came into Christianity they brought the religious heritage of their past with them, contributing it, in so far as it was found valuable, toward the enrichment of the new religion. . . . Indeed it might seem a priori probable that Christianity absorbed the essential elements of paganism more completely than it absorbed Judaism, since it ultimately displaced the former while it grew farther and farther away from the latter.”239 In other words, non-Jewish followers of Jesus likely noticed parallels between the worship of the gods and the worship of YHVH, and in those parallels, they would have begun to apply one system of customs to the other, merging the two into a system from which it would be difficult to sever the separate parts in later historical accounts. One need only look at parallels between what became the Christian faith and the worship of Mithras, Isis, and Sol Invictus. My purpose in these specific examples here is not to argue that one set of customs necessarily derived from the other—I leave that discussion to others in other places—but to show how the two sets of customs could have similar dynamics such that one could have easily mistaken certain beliefs for those of the other, thus lending to their eventual integration. The secretive male-only worship of Mithras, which reached maximum popularity during the first centuries of the Christian era, centered on a hero born of a rock who kills the bull of heaven, after which Mithras ascends to the sky to meet with the sun, with whom he dines on the 238. Stambaugh and Balch, New Testament in Its Social Environment, 44. 39. Shirley Jackson Case, “The Nature of Primitive Christianity,” American Journal of Theology 17, no. 1 (January 1913): 65, 67, https:// www.jstor.org/stable/3154794. Paganism 145 bull. The bull’s carcass is said to have brought life to earth. Parallels between the Mithras cult and the worship of Jesus would have included such doctrines as baptism (a rite practiced in many religions, including that of the Jews) and a shared meal of blood and flesh, or bread and wine or water, similar to a Eucharist.240 In terms of the myth itself, Mithras’s being born of a rock could have been confused with the Christian identification of Jesus as the rock (e.g., 1 Cor. 10:4; 1 Pet. 2:7–8; Luke 20:17; Matt. 16:18), and certainly Mithras’s ascent to the heavens would have paralleled Jesus’s own. Various other parallels (number of companions, the cross, his day of worship, his birthday), accurate or not, have been drawn by writers, some with noticeable agendas, over the millennia, but some of the parallels were of enough concern even to such early writers as Justin Martyr and Tertullian to have merited explicit denouncing.241 Isis was an Egyptian goddess, who along with her husband, Osiris, and her son, Horus, formed part of the Abydos Triad of gods. In the Egyptian mythological stories, Isis reconstructed most of Osiris’s dismembered body (save, unfortunately, his penis) following murder by his jealous 240. General information on Mithras is drawn from Stambaugh and Balch, New Testament in Its Social Environment, 137; and Roger Pearse, “The Roman Cult of Mithras,” http://www.tertullian.org /rpearse/mithras/display.php?page=main. 241. For a skeptical view of the links between the two faiths, see Roger Pearse, “Mithras and Christianity,” http://www.tertullian .org/rpearse/mithras/display.php?page=mithras_and_christianity, and “Mithras and Jesus,” http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/mithras /display.php?page=Mithras_and_Jesus. For an example of authors claiming maximal parallels between the two faiths, see Acharya S and D. M. Murdock, “Mithra: The Pagan Christ,” Stellar House Publishing, https://stellarhousepublishing.com/mithra/. For early Christian concerns about the Mithraic rites being confused with Christian ones, see Justin Martyr, First Apology, chap. 66, on the Eucharist; and Tertullian, The Prescription against Heretics, chap. 40, on the Eucharist, a mark on the forehead, and the resurrection. 146 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered brother, but still being incomplete, Osiris departed to the underworld, where he became its lord. Meanwhile, Isis managed to gather Osiris’s seed to become pregnant with Horus, who would become ruler of the world in Osiris’s stead. Isis was associated with fertility, protection, and creation and was denoted, at various times, as the giver of marriage, sexual attractiveness, language, and civilization. Isis’s popularity among some Egyptians became such that she was the only one worshipped, and other gods were seen merely as aspects of her. That popularity spread into other nations, as far away as Britain. Among the Greeks, she became associated with the goddess Demeter; in Rome, where worship of her was banned until later in the first century CE, she became Ceres or the Queen of Heaven. Depending on where one was, she took on other names too: Minerva, Venus, and Diana among them. Elements of the Isis myth—Osiris’s death and revival, Horus’s “virgin” birth—paralleled aspects in Jesus’s own story, and by the third and fourth centuries, representative aspects of the Isis myth found their way into Christianity, such that depictions of Mary with the infant Jesus would mirror earlier renditions of Isis with her baby Horus.242 The cult of Sol Invictus (Invincible Sun) began to gain its following in Rome in the second century, reaching its zenith in the late third century during the time of the emperor Aurelian, who chose the god as his patron. As such, the god came to be seen as the head of the pantheon of gods (or the central One of which all other gods were an 242. Information on Isis is drawn primarily from Joshua J. Mark, “Isis,” Ancient History Encyclopedia, February 19, 2016, https://www .ancient.eu/isis/; with some help from Stambaugh and Balch, New Testament in Its Social Environment, 135–136; and Grant, Gods and the One God, 34, 69–70, 76, 120–121. On parallels to Christian iconography see Meg Baker, “Isis and the Virgin Mary: A Pagan Conversion,” Thing Theory, 2006, http://www.columbia.edu/~sf2220/Thing/web -content/Pages/meg2.html; and Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods, 85. Paganism 147 expression) and as the protector of the emperor and the empire for the next several decades. But sun worship had long existed in the East (in Greek, the god was Helios) and had had a precursor in Rome in the form of Sol Indigenes.243 Aurelian’s adoption of Sol as god made the religion essentially an official state cult, helping to unify its disparate peoples.244 The sun, while not worshipped in Jewish culture, already had metaphorical ties to YHVH.245 Most often this was in the form of God being “light.” “The Lord is my light and my salvation,” David would write in Psalm 7:1. “The Lord shall be a light unto me,” the prophet Micah would similarly write. When seen in vision, God was often pictured as being like fire. “Then I beheld,” Ezekiel would write one time after “the hand of the Lord God” fell upon him, “and lo a likeness as the appearance of fire: from the appearance of his loins even downward, fire; and from his 243. Information on the cult of Sol Invictus is drawn most especially from “Sun Worship and the Origin of Sunday,” chapter 8 in Samuele Bacchiocchi’s From Sabbath to Sunday: A Historical Investigation of the Rise of Sunday Observance in Early Christianity (Rome: Pontifical Gregorian University Press, 1977), 236–269, particularly 236–238 and 252–267; MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, 84–89; and “Sol Invictus,” Lost History, https://lost-history.com/sol_invictus.php. 244. Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians, 192. 245. Martin Goodman notes in addition how Jewish synagogue buildings of the third and fourth centuries CE sometimes featured the sun in their floor mosaics in a manner similar to that found in Roman imperial propaganda, suggesting perhaps that the monotheistic god of the sun was perhaps equated with the one God of the Jews. Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem, 545–546. Ernest L. Martin claims these were likely Samaritan synagogue buildings rather than buildings belonging to adherents of the rabbinical Judaism that was then emerging. See Ernest L. Martin, The People That History Forgot, especially chapters 2–4, Associates for Scriptural Knowledge, http://www.askelm.com /people/index.asp. To be sure there were many strains of Jewish faith in the years during which rabbinical Judaism was coming into being. Shaye J. D. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1987), 225–226. 148 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered loins even upward, as the appearance of brightness, as the colour of amber” (Ezek. 8:1–). “And his brightness was as the light,” the prophet Habakkuk would write of God appearing to him (Hab. 3:4). More directly, one Psalmist would say, “For the Lord God is a sun and a shield” (Ps. 84:11). Most pertinent to many early Christian writers was Malachi 4:2, which many took to be a prophecy about Jesus. “But unto you that fear my name,” wrote the prophet, “shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings.” Certainly, New Testament writers saw similar parallels between Jesus and light as the Old Testament writers had seen between God and light. Possibly, Luke was alluding to Malachi 4:2 when he wrote, “the dayspring from on high hath visited us” (Luke 1:78); and John’s comments expounding on the idea that Jesus was “the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (John 1:9) were numerous. Comparisons between the sun and Jesus among postapostolic writers were also frequent. For example, Ignatius, in his letter to the Magnesians, when writing about the resurrection of Jesus would use a verb uniquely related to the sun to say “our life has sprung up again by Him and by His death.”246 Similarly, Justin Martyr would claim in his Dialogue with Trypho, “God formerly gave the sun as an object of worship, as it is written, but no one ever was seen to endure death on account of his faith in the sun; but for the name of Jesus you may see men of every nation who have endured and do endure all sufferings, rather than deny Him. For the word of His truth and wisdom is more ardent and more light-giving than the 246. Ignatius, Epistle to the Magnesians, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, chap. 9, Early Christian Writings, http://www .earlychristianwritings.com/text/ignatius-magnesians-longer.html; Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday, 266–267. I am indebted to Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday, 253–254n63, for the postapostolic examples. The Imperial Cult 149 rays of the sun.”247 Alluding to Malachi 4:2, Clement of Alexandria would call Jesus “’the Sun of Righteousness,’ who drives His chariot over all, pervades equally all humanity, like ‘His Father, who makes His sun to rise on all men,’ and distils on them the dew of the truth.”248 He would also call him “the Sun of the Resurrection.”249 The Imperial Cult The prioritization by the state of the cult of Sol Invictus in the late third century highlights another development that would have affected early followers of Jesus: the imperial cult. For indeed, if the reason for prioritizing Sol Invictus was to lend unity and loyalty to the empire, so too was the purpose of the creation of the imperial cult. That cult came into being during the reign of Augustus, in the decades just before and after the birth of Jesus, but its origins also sprang from the eastern parts of the Roman Empire, where the worship of rulers had been common for centuries.250 Whether such rulers were actually considered gods (as in, for example, the ancient Hittite kingdom) or vicars for the gods (as in Assyria, for example), in practice, the honors offered them—festivals, temples, prostrate bowing, but most especially, sacrifices—constituted essentially the 247. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, chap. 121, Early Christian Writings, http:// earlychristianwritings.com/text/justinmartyr-dialoguetrypho.html. 248. Clement of Alexandria, Exhortation to the Heathen, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, chap. 11, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/clement -exhortation.html. 249. Ibid., chap. 9. 250. Ermatinger, Daily Life in the New Testament, 14–15; Stambaugh and Balch, New Testament in Its Social Environment, 131; Case, “Nature of Primitive Christianity,” 70; Lily Ross Taylor, The Divinity of the Roman Emperor (Middleton, Conn.: American Philological Association, 1931), 35; Henry Fairfield Burton, “The Worship of the Roman Emperors,” Biblical World 40, no. 2 (August 1912): 80. 150 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered same thing, especially for one observing from the outside.251 Alexander the Great, upon the Greek triumph over the Persian empire, found the common worship practices among his new subjects useful for his own political ends—indeed, his father, Philip, had already begun the process of deification for the Greek ruler by placing a statue of himself among representations of the twelve Olympian gods.252 The gods, writings in support of Alexander’s divinity claimed, had once been men—they were “simply great dynasties of kings of former times.”253 On Alexander’s death, the various rulers who replaced him took on similar honors.254 Thus, a local ruler was often treated similar to a god, placed on a level far above his subjects such that his word became unquestioned law; such treatment, in turn, lent credibility and loyalty to the government.255 Roman rulers adapted this adoration to their own cause. Early on it was local magistrates and governors, who, taking the place of Grecian kings, readily stepped into the godlike role of their predecessors.256 Eventually, this adoration was transferred to the emperor Augustus, made possible, ironically, at least in part because the killing of Julius Caesar, in an unsuccessful attempt to stave off the death of the Republic, had made Augustus’s predecessor into a martyr worthy of divine worship. Thus Augustus became the son of a god.257 In the Roman West, the idea that a king was 251. L. R. Taylor, Divinity of the Roman Emperor, 2; Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians, 97. 252. L. R. Taylor, Divinity of the Roman Emperor, 19–27; Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians, 98. 253. L. R. Taylor, Divinity of the Roman Emperor, 26–27, quote on 26. 254. L. R. Taylor, Divinity of the Roman Emperor, 25–26, 28–31. 255. Ibid., 1–2; Ermatinger, Daily Life in the New Testament, 14–15. 256. Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians, 98; L. R. Taylor, Divinity of the Roman Emperor, 35. 257. L. R. Taylor, Divinity of the Roman Emperor, 242; Burton, “Worship of the Roman Emperors,” 8; Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians, 182. The Imperial Cult 151 divine had been uncommon. Indeed, Augustus himself was hesitant to claim godship among his countrymen—only in death, the thinking went, could a ruler, if he proved worthy, ascend to the divine ranks, and in fact, such remained the case all the way to the emperor Diocletian at the start of the fourth century.258 Instead, worship of the living emperor in the West revolved around his Genius—his spirit or soul, an “angel” of sorts that accompanied him through life and that would carry on after his body’s decay.259 As such, even the emperor himself might offer sacrifices to his Genius.260 But as with certain kings in the East, who acted merely as agents for or representatives of a god, the actual practice of worshipping an emperor’s Genius might be difficult to differentiate from worshipping the emperor himself.261 Augustus also made his household gods into public ones, furthering the state nature of his personal cult, and took on the title and role of Pontifex Maximus, head of the college of priests of the Roman religion, thus uniting his political office with the religious significance of the post;262 this title would later be applied to the Christian bishop of Rome. In the East, of course, identifying the emperor with a god was no strange change for the peoples under Augustus’s authority. Indeed, subordinate kings and rulers often went out of their way to ensure that Augustus knew of their loyalty by building shrines to him, thus guaranteeing the popularity and ultimate success of the cult—and of the 258. Ermatinger, Daily Life in the New Testament, 15; L. R. Taylor, Divinity of the Roman Emperor, 240; Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods, 81. 259. Stambaugh and Balch, New Testament in Its Social Environment, 131; L. R. Taylor, Divinity of the Roman Emperor, 184, 240–241; Burton, “Worship of the Roman Emperors,” 81. 260. L. R. Taylor, Divinity of the Roman Emperor, 204. 261. Ibid., 203–204. 6. Ibid., 184; Burton, “Worship of the Roman Emperors,” 81; Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians, 181–182. 152 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered governing force to which it was connected. Ephesus, for example, erected two temples to Augustus; later, Smyrna built one for Tiberius, and Miletus built one for Gaius.263 The Jewish king Herod the Great built temples to Augustus in Caesarea Maritima (formerly Strato’s Tower), Sebaste (formerly Samaria), and Panias.264 Such relationships were mutually beneficial. By building such temples, Herod, for example, ensured Augustus would protect his Jewish kingdom, as well as his status as king over it, and in turn Augustus strengthened his empire’s grip over a distant peoples.265 Indeed, statues, temples, priests, games, sacrifices, and ceremonial acts performed in honor of the absent and distant emperor “helped to make him present,” while at the same time they “helped people to express their own interest in the preservation of the world in which they lived.”266 As such, as Arnaldo Momigliano puts it, “Civic religion was ultimately not a matter of truth but of civic cohesion,” or as Lily Ross Taylor puts it, “The imperial cult was primarily an instrument of politics.”267 The worship of the emperor, of course, placed Jews and Christians, who would worship no other than the one God, in a peculiar situation, just as the worship of pagan gods did. Herod may have been devoted to the cult of Augustus, but he was also devoted to the cult of the peoples over whom he reigned. The cities in which he built temples to Augustus were not, one could note, primarily Jewish (though, of 263. Stambaugh and Balch, New Testament in Its Social Environment, 151. 264. Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews, 164; L. R. Taylor, Divinity of the Roman Emperor, 171; Peter Richardson, Herod: King of the Jews and Friend of the Romans (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 185. 265. Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews, 164. 266. Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians, 100. 267. Ibid., 63; L. R. Taylor, Divinity of the Roman Emperor, 237. See also Burton, “Worship of the Roman Emperors,” 86. The Imperial Cult 153 course, Jewish people probably forged a significant portion of the population within them and accepted such action as the price of peace with Rome in Judea proper).268 Panias had been known as a city devoted to the worship of Pan; Sebaste had been the heart of the Samaritan kingdom; Caesarea was a new city built over the highly Hellenistic settlement of Strato’s Tower.269 In the Judean territory and in Jerusalem, the center of Jewish worship, Herod wisely never promoted the Augustine cult.270 Rather, at the Jerusalem temple, sacrifices were offered on behalf of the emperor to the one great God rather than to the emperor himself or his Genius.271 The fact that Augustus was willing to accept such sacrifice in lieu of actual sacrifice to the imperial cult confirms the political motivation for the cult.272 Christians, devoted to the same God but not to the temple sacrifices or, as time went on, other Jewish customs, had to find other ways to demonstrate their devotion, and as previously indicated, that was largely through strict adherence to the civil law. Most of the time, this was sufficient. At some times, however, it was not, just as it was not for the Jewish peoples.273 With worship of the emperor being a kind of “pledge of allegiance” to the empire, when a given provincial governor or those whom he governed 268. Richardson, Herod, 184. 269. Ibid.; L. R. Taylor, Divinity of the Roman Emperor, 171. 270. Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews, 164. 271. Ibid. 272. L. R. Taylor, Divinity of the Roman Emperor, 237; Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians, 102. 273. Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians, 102, notes that “the feeling that the Jews did not deserve their privileges [i.e., exemption from direct sacrifice to the emperor] must have been widespread.” On anti-Semitism in first-century CE Rome, see Samuel Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday, 173–77. For varying views of Jewish customs, positive and negative, among non-Jews in the time of GrecoRoman domination, see John J. Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem, 6–13; and generally Abel, Roots of Anti-Semitism. 154 The Non-Jewish World Jesus Entered took a strong dislike to those in their midst who refused to demonstrate such loyalty, or found it convenient to fulfilling their own political ends (as apparently the emperor Nero, to hide his own role, did in blaming Christians for the fire that devastated Rome in 64 CE), Christians could find themselves the object of severe punishment up to and including death.274 The emperor Trajan’s reply to the provincial governor Pliny the Younger around 111–112 CE with regard to what to do with those who were accused of being Christians perhaps exemplifies the Roman state’s view of how to deal with such peoples: They are not to be sought out; if they are denounced and proved guilty, they are to be punished, with this reservation, that whoever denies that he is a Christian and really proves it—that is, by worshiping our gods—even though he was under suspicion in the past, shall obtain pardon through repentance. But anonymously posted accusations ought to have no place in any prosecution. For this is both a dangerous kind of precedent and out of keeping with the spirit of our age.275 The seriousness with which Christians took the worship of human kings is demonstrated in Acts 12:21–23. There, Herod the Great’s grandson, Herod Agrippa I, is seen as dying in part because he accepted worship from the people as a god rather than devoting himself to the worship of God himself. “And upon a set day Herod, arrayed in royal 274. Stambaugh and Balch, New Testament in Its Social Environment 131; Anderson, Sage, Saint, and Sophist, 165–166; Burton, “Worship of the Roman Emperors,” 90. The accusation against Nero appears in Tacitus, Annals, 15.44, the authenticity of which has been questioned by some scholars. See “Cornelius Tacitus,” Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/tacitus.html. 275. Trajan to Pliny the Younger, Early Christian Writings, http:// www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/pliny.html. The Imperial Cult 155 apparel,” Luke wrote, “sat upon his throne, and made an oration unto them. And the people gave a shout, saying, It is the voice of a god, and not of a man. And immediately the angel of the Lord smote him, because he gave not God the glory: and he was eaten of worms, and gave up the ghost.” One can almost hear Theophilus of Antioch’s words to his pagan friend Autolycus’s question, “Why do you not worship the king?” “Because,” Theophilus replied, “he is not made to be worshipped, but to be reverenced with lawful honour, for he is not a god, but a man appointed by God, not to be worshipped, but to judge justly.”276 Nevertheless, the need to demonstrate loyalty to the empire would eventually have a profound effect on what would become of the religion that grew up around Jesus, for indeed, as the Jewish people lost favor with the empire, most especially after two major rebellions in Jerusalem around 70 and 135 CE, Christians, even while maintaining their faith’s Jewish biblical foundation, would tie themselves more and more closely to traditions that were not of Jewish extraction to emphasize the fact that they were not themselves Jewish. Indeed, by the third century, as the imperial cult became more secularized, Christians would increasingly participate in nonreligious aspects of the imperial cult, even serving as priests performing solely civil duties.277 The syncretic mix of Jewish and non-Jewish traditions that would result from the use of Jewish religious texts by non-Jewish peoples can be seen at least in part in the cultures of the peoples who lived near Judea and who claimed a Jewish religious background as their own even if they were not ethnically direct descendants of Israel—the subject of the next chapter. 276. Theophilus of Antioch, To Autolycus, 1.11. 77. Burton, “Worship of the Roman Emperors,” 90. Burton even speculates that worship of physical kings, such as the emperor, lent credence to non-Jews’ acceptance of the divinity of the man Jesus (91). Chapter 3 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered As Greek and Roman cultures had their effect on the Jewish peoples who had come under their authority, so too Jewish culture had its effect on the peoples in the lands immediately surrounding Judea. In the years between the Greek domination of the area and Roman domination, an independent Jewish nation asserted control over the lands of Idumea to the south and Samaria to the north, conquering them under the rule of John Hyrcanus around 110 BCE; Galilee, to the north of Samaria, would fall under formal Jewish control a few years later. All the peoples in these conquered areas would be converted, to some extent forcibly, to the Jewish faith. In turn, such conversions would prove to have consequences as significant for the politics, religion, and culture of the Jewish world as they had for the converted peoples, and ultimately those effects would have considerable influence on the faith that would come to bear Jesus’s name. From Idumea would come the Jewish kings of Jesus’s time, whose political authority would help determine the course of Jesus’s life and of the early church. Galilee would be home for most of Jesus’s upbringing, the place from which Jesus’s twelve apostles would be drawn, and the location for the majority of his three-year The Idumeans 157 ministry. And from Samaria would come not only a number of early believers in Jesus but also a preacher named Simon Magus, who, if early Christian writers are to be believed, would prove to be a significant source of heresies in the church, including many ideas that would fall within a set of beliefs that would eventually come to be known as “Gnosticism,” the subject of chapter 4. The Idumeans The first of these peoples, the Idumeans, are otherwise known as Edomites, traditionally identified as the descendants of Esau, the brother of Jacob, Abraham’s grandson. Biblical passages about the Edomites are generally unflattering. Esau, the preferred son of his father, Isaac, is described as a hairy outdoorsman (Gen. 25:25, 27) whose shortsighted submission to his desires causes him to sell his birthright to his brother, Jacob, for a mere bowl of pottage (Gen. 25:29–34). Later, Esau marries two local Hittite women, who are said to bring much trouble to his parents (Gen. 26:34–35, 27:46), and later still a daughter of Abraham’s son Ishmael (Gen. 28:9). Adding to the animosity within the family, Jacob and his mother, Rebecca, who favors him, scheme to also cheat Esau of his father’s blessing (Gen. 7). The result causes Jacob to flee for his life, and he loses contact with his immediate family for more than two decades (Gen. 31:38). When Jacob and Esau finally meet again, however, the rivalry appears to have been quelled. Both have prospered, and Esau exacts no revenge, instead welcoming the presence of his long-lost sibling (Gen. 33). Their descendants, however, would not look so kindly on one another. The Edomites would settle in and around the “land of Seir,” to the southeast of the Dead Sea. On Israel’s wandering in the wilderness in Numbers 20, after the nation’s flight from Egypt, the Edomites would deny pas- 158 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered sage to the Israelites through their land, an act that would render to Edom a curse in Numbers 24:18 that it would be possessed by its enemies. Later still, during the reign of Saul, the Israelites would war against the Edomites (1 Sam. 14:47), and his successor David would subdue the kingdom and make it part of his own (2 Sam. 8:14; 1 Chron. 18:13). In the process, David’s general Joab would, 1 Kings 11:15– 16 tells us, smite all the males (2 Chron. 18:12 suggests he killed eighteen thousand), an action that during David’s son Solomon’s reign would result in Hadad the Edomite’s revenge on Israel (1 Kings 11:13–22). Despite this, Edom would for much of the history of the southern kingdom of Judah remain a vassal state, either to Judah or Assyria, with only brief periods of independence. When Nebuchadnezzar brought the southern kingdom of Judah to an end, however, the Edomites would aid in Jerusalem’s destruction (Ps. 137, esp. v. 7; Obad. 11), though their kingdom too would eventually fall to the Babylonians.1 The Jewish prophets Obadiah and Ezekiel (specifically in Ezek. 5:13– 14) would then both write of the vengeance God would take on the children of Esau for their treatment of their brethren. 1. “Edom,” Jewish Virtual Library, https://www .jewishvirtuallibrary.org/edom; Brad Anderson, “Edom,” Places, Bible Odyssey, https://www.bibleodyssey.org/en/places /main-articles/edom. The tradition that Edom actually participated in Jerusalem’s destruction has been questioned by several contemporary scholars. See, for example, Bob Becking, “The Betrayal of Edom: Remarks on a Claimed Tradition,” HTS Theological Studies 72, no. 4 (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/hts.v72i4.3286; Juan Manuel Tebes, “Memories of Humiliation, Cultures of Resentment towards Edom and the Formation of Ancient Jewish National Identity,” Nations and Nationalism 25, no. 1 (2019): 124–145, DOI: 10.1111/nana.12367. Tebes sees the entire Edomite-Israelite relationship as myth. Becking notes that the Babylonians were favorably disposed toward the Edomites; Tebes (p. 141n4) notes that the Babylonians would not conquer Idumea until thirty years after they conquered Judea. The Idumeans 159 The Babylonian kingdom would take most of the Jewish peoples into captivity, transferring them east to the traditional Babylonian territory itself. During this time, the Edomites would move westward and northward into the southern parts of the formerly Judean territory, in part pushed there by Arabic Nabatean peoples from the south, such that when the Jewish people returned to their Promised Land under the Persian rule that would succeed that of the Babylonians, they would find Edomites on much of their former land.2 The Persian king Darius I instructed the Edomites to surrender the villages they had taken from the Jewish peoples, pushing the Edomites back toward Nabatea in the south into what would then become known as Idumea (the Greek word for Edom).3 However, the territory the Jewish peoples would control would be a small segment of what they had possessed at their nation’s zenith, never encompassing the southernmost lands, until the Maccabees a few hundred years later would retake control, attacking, among others, the Idumeans and forcing their conversion to the Jewish faith. The Maccabee kingdom, ruled by what would come to be called the Hasmonean dynasty, although having thrown off the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms then controlling the eastern Mediterranean, would owe much of its independence to Roman aid, such that when the Jewish people too fell into civil war over succession to the Hasmonean throne, the Romans would annex the territory. In the process, one of the Jewish parties, John Hyrcanus, would eventually be recognized again as the legitimate ruler of Judea, but an Idumean by the name of Antipater would become his chief minister, and Antipater’s two sons would be given authority over Jerusalem and Galilee. The . Becking, “Betrayal of Edom.” 3. 1 Esdras 4.49–50; Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 11.3.8. Strabo, Geography of Strabo, 16.2.34, calls the Idumeans Nabateans, suggesting a link between the two peoples, as indeed there would have been given the common Arabic genealogy through Ishmael. The Idumeans 161 latter became the territory of Herod the Great, who would ingratiate himself first to Anthony and then to the emperor Augustus and thus who would eventually be appointed king of all Judea by the Romans. And so it was that an Edomite, whose people had been forced to accept the Jewish faith via war, came to rule the Jewish peoples. The Edomites worshipped a number of gods, as denoted in 2 Chronicles 25:20, when king of Judah Amaziah in a military raid against the Edomites “brought the gods of the children of Seir, and set them up to be his gods, and bowed down himself before them, and burned incense to them.” Chief among those gods was Qos, about whom not much is known.4 However, the adoption of many gods by the Edomites may not have been much different than that of the Israelites, who would prove time and again to be less than faithful to their one god YHWH. Some scholars posit that the Edomites and Israel shared a religious heritage, which would certainly have been the case if both descended from Isaac, who was devoted to YHVH.5 Furthering that idea would be the years the Edomites spent under Jewish authority, which would suggest that many customs would have become shared. Indeed, that is exactly what Strabo suggests in his first-century CE Geography when he states that the Idumeans, having been banished from 4. “Edom,” Jewish Virtual Library; Peter Richardson, Herod: King of the Jews and Friend of the Romans (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 55, 56. 5. The scriptural basis is usually given as Deuteronomy 33:2, where Moses denotes in the blessing on Israel at his death that “the Lord came from Sinai, and rose up from Seir among them,” and Judges 5:4, which recounts the same incident—both refer to the camp Israel made around Mount Seir after its departure from Egypt before its unsuccessful attempt to pass through Edom on its journey. The Encyclopedia Judaica connects the worship of YHVH among the two peoples via statements on an Egyptian list from the time of Ramses II, one that reads “the land of the Shasu of JHW” and the other “the land of Shasu of Seir.” “Edom,” Jewish Virtual Library. 162 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered Nabatean territory, “joined the Judaeans, and shared in the same customs with them.”6 As such, some scholars, most notably Aryeh Kasher, have posited that the “forced conversion” to the Jewish faith during the time of the Hasmonean dynasty may have been more of a voluntary one to the “full” version of a faith with which many Idumeans were already familiar rather than a name-only adoption of some strange religion.7 In other words, the subjugation of Idumea by John Hyrcanus may have been more of an annexation of the territory and its people than a conquering. The Roman general Pompey, on imposing Roman authority over Judea in 63 BCE, several generations after Hyrcanus, considered the eastern territory of Idumea essentially Jewish, and some Idumeans are noted as having been disciples in the House of Shammai, the famous Jewish rabbi, and scrupulous in their observance of the Jewish law.8 This doesn’t mean, however, that the Idumeans were necessarily accepted as fully Jewish. No doubt there was a mix of levels of belief and even differences in the manner of belief among Idumeans as there was among the people of Jewish ancestry. Some continued to worship Qos and other gods, while others worshipped YHVH, some of them devoutly. Even so, those who converted were still proselytes and, thus, not considered Jewish to the same level. As Joachim Jeremias notes, the idea that a convert was “considered ‘in all things as an Israelite’ [did] not mean that the proselyte enjoyed the same rights as a full Israelite, but merely that he was bound, like all Jews, to observe the whole Law.”9 Perhaps we see a reflection of 6. Strabo, Geography of Strabo, 16.2.34, http://penelope.uchicago .edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Strabo/16B*.html. 7. Richardson, Herod, 55. Aryeh Kasher’s ideas are summarized in the same work on pp. 54–56. 8. Richardson, Herod, 55. 9. Joachim Jeremias, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus: An Investigation into Economic and Social Conditions during the New Testament The Idumeans 163 this in Jesus’s statement discussed in chapter 1 regarding the fact that the scribes and Pharisees, though compassing “sea and land to make one proselyte,” made “him twofold more the child of hell” after conversion (Matt. 3:15). Thus, although Herod’s family may have converted to the Jewish faith two generations before Herod the Great came to power, the Pharisees remained unwilling to take an oath of loyalty to the king.10 Dependent then on Rome for their continuing authority but also in part on the good graces of the Jewish people over which they ruled and on similar good feelings from the other scattered peoples (Samaritans; some Nabateans, Itureans, and immigrant Greeks) who fell within their jurisdiction, the Herods had to perform a constant political balancing act to maintain their position. To curry favor with Rome, Herod the Great became a strong devotee to the imperial cult, building three temples, as noted in the previous chapter, dedicated to Roma and the emperor Augustus, though wisely outside Judea itself, and so many other structures dedicated to the emperor that, as Josephus put it, “there was not any place of his kingdom fit for the purpose that was permitted to be without somewhat that was for Caesar’s honor.”11 In addition, he sponsored athletic games dedicated to Caesar and sent his sons to be educated in Rome.12 To curry favor with his non-Jewish Period, trans. by F. H. and C. H. Cave (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969), 323. 10. Ibid., 332. 11. Josephus, War of the Jews; or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem, trans. William Whiston, 1.21.4, Project Gutenberg, https:// www.gutenberg.org/files/850/850-h/850-h.htm. See also Richardson, Herod, 184; Paula Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2018), 164; Lily Ross Taylor, The Divinity of the Roman Emperor (Middleton, Conn.: American Philological Association, 1931), 171. 12. Richard A. Horsley, Galilee: History, Politics, People (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1995), 58. 164 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered subjects, he sponsored yet other buildings, for example, a temple to Ba’al Shamin at Si’a near Canatha, in Nabatean territory to the west of the Sea of Galilee, and a memorial to Abraham near Hebron in Idumea.13 As for the Jews, the Herodian rulers, Jeremias observes, “knew very well that as descendants of proselytes they had no right to the throne and must pay due regard to public opinion.”14 To ingratiate himself with the Jewish subjects, Herod the Great built most prominently in areas “where his buildings would be most appreciated” and “where his involvement would be the most beneficial to world Judaism.”15 Such buildings on Judean land, including his personal palaces, show no evidence of the figurative art banned by Jewish prohibition of graven images, furthering evidence of his attentiveness to the Jewish people, even while he demonstrated devotion to Rome and to his other subjects in other locations.16 The most ambitious project of his reign was likewise dedicated to his Jewish subjects, an expansion of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, a renovation so great that the temple would come to be known as his own. The expansion aimed to appeal not only to local inhabitants of Judea but also to the Jewish people of the diaspora. As such, Herod reached out to members of the Jewish community in both Babylon and Egypt when appointing high priests. The high priest Hananeel was from Mesopotamia; Jesus son of Phiabi and Boethus were from Egypt. These latter two served during the planning and start of the renovation, likely bringing their experience at the Jewish temple at Leontopolis to the work. Herod biographer Peter Richardson posits that two courts added to Herod’s temple (the courts of the Gentiles and of women)—neither 13. Richardson, Herod, 67, 184, 61. 14. Jeremias, Jerusalem, 334. 15. Richardson, Herod, 176. See also John W. Welch, “Herod’s Wealth,” BYU Studies Quarterly 36, no. 3 (1996): 75. 16. Richardson, Herod, 32, 183. The Idumeans 165 of which had existed in Solomon’s temple—may have come about because of the influence of Jesus son of Phiabi.17 Appointing such outsiders also had a political advantage, since by not placing a Hasmonean in the high priesthood, such as his son Aristobulus, whose mother Mariamme I was of the Hasmonean line, Herod was able to keep his throne more secure.18 The Herodian attachment to the throne, however, had the side effect of spurring Messianic causes. Such causes would have been in contrast to the leanings of a party that Matthew and Mark refer to as the Herodians—people who supported the royal family, even when governorship of Judea itself fell to a Roman procurator, as it had during the time of Jesus’s ministry, most likely for the stability and favor (and possibility of a king) that the Herods offered to Judea under Roman oversight.19 That both Matthew 22:16– 17 and Mark 1:13–14 point to the Herodians specifically with regard to a question about taxation is noteworthy. In both passages, the Herodians are paired with the Pharisees, but a parallel passage in Luke 20:19–22 references instead scribes and the chief priests, a fact that emphasizes the underlying purpose of the question—the annihilation of Jesus, who each party saw as a threat to their status (Mark 3:6). In this case, the chief priests, placed in power by the Romans and earlier by Herod the Great, stand in for the Hellenistic and Roman interests that the Herodians also represented. As Peter Richardson puts it in his biography of Herod the Great, “Herodians owed their standing to Herod, and their continuing positions of influence to the close relationship he established with the Imperial family. Such views may not have been held by a 17. Ibid., 244–245. 18. Ibid., 29; Martin Sicker, Between Rome and Jerusalem: 300 Years of Roman-Judaean Relations (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001), 80. 19. Richardson, Herod, 260. 166 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered large number, but some of the elite and powerful’s interests coincided with Rome’s and their positions depended on their links with the Herodian family.”20 No doubt the great number of building projects that Herod sponsored, projects that continued well after Herod the Great’s death, benefited particular portions of the populace, especially construction workers and temple and government associates, both in terms of jobs and in terms of prestige, and those projects required substantial financial resources.21 Much of that money came from Herod’s personal wealth, much of which he inherited.22 A vast holder of agricultural land, he rented out much of it to Arab peoples for grazing and also held a monopoly on balsam, which could be grown only near Jericho.23 He also received royalties from a set of copper mines on Cyprus.24 In addition was the wealth he accrued from others—confiscation of the property of political enemies and tribute from territories placed under his control and customs from the trade routes along that land.25 And of course, there were taxes—from the local population and 20. Ibid. 21. Construction of the western wall of the temple complex may not have even started construction until twenty years after Herod the Great’s death. Associated Press, “Discovery May Cause Biblical Rewrite of King Herod,” CBS News, November 3, 011, https://www .cbsnews.com/news/discovery-may-cause-biblical-rewrite-of-kingherod/. At some points, the temple renovation employed eighteen thousand. John W. Welch, “Herod’s Wealth,” 75. The temple was completed only a couple of years before the first Jewish rebellion in 66 CE. Mark A. Chauncey, Greco-Roman Culture and the Galilee of Jesus (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 78. 22. Duane W. Roller, The Building Program of Herod the Great (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 119–120; Welch, “Herod’s Wealth,” 77. 23. Duane W. Roller, Building Program of Herod, 120; Welch, “Herod’s Wealth,” 77–78. 24. Duane W. Roller, Building Program of Herod, 121; Welch, “Herod’s Wealth,” 78. 25. Duane W. Roller, Building Program of Herod, 120–121; Welch, “Herod’s Wealth,” 77–78. The Idumeans 167 from the diaspora population as a whole. Money also poured in from outside areas to support the temple.26 His subjects complained of the tax burden, though Herod also at times remitted a portion of the tax he collected.27 After Herod the Great’s death and division of his kingdom into three states among his sons, new building projects, for new capitals in Galilee (first a rebuilt Sepphoris, then Tiberius) and in Batanea (Caesarea Philippi), required further investment. While some scholars have claimed that complaints about taxation were no more than the usual antitax grumbling common to all people, others, such as Martin Hengel, include the financial trouble Herod brought to his subjects among the list of grievances against the Herods and as a reason for the rise in the hope for a Messianic figure.28 “The general effect of Herod’s rule on all subject peoples,” Richard A. Horsley writes in his book on Galilee, taking a similar view, “was extreme economic burden and hardship.”29 Taxes, after all, had to be paid not just to the Jewish king but also to the temple and to Rome, constituting three layers of taxation.30 Martin Hengel lists, in addition to taxes, five other matters regarding Herod’s rule that led to Messianic fervor: (1) the Hellenizing tendencies of Herod; (2) Herod’s lack of strict-enough adherence to the Jewish law; (3) the illegitimacy of Herod’s rule over the Jewish people; (4) Pharisaical opposition to Herod; and 6. Welch, “Herod’s Wealth,” 78. 27. Ibid., 77; F. F. Bruce, New Testament History (New York: Anchor Books, 1972), 21–22, 39–40. 8. Welch, “Herod’s Wealth,” 77, and Roller, The Building Program of Herod the Great, 119–121, both claim that accusations that Herod the Great’s taxes were exorbitant are exaggerated. Martin Hengel’s claims are made in The Zealots: Investigations into the Jewish Freedom Movement in the Period from Herod I until 70 A.D., trans. David Smith (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1989), 324. 29. Horsley, Galilee, 59. 30. Ibid. 168 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered (5) increasing poverty among the general population.31 Opposition to the Herods, thus, would have leant to a general atmosphere in which a Messiah was both desired and expected. Such opposition also prompted the delicate dance the Herods played to maintain their rulership, attempting, on the one hand, to please their Jewish subjects (both powerbrokers and the general populace, whose objectives were not always the same) enough to discourage outright rebellion, while, on the other, nourishing good relations with the Romans to sustain their office in the face of any possible rebellion. This balancing act informs Jesus’s and the early church’s interactions with the Herods in the Gospel accounts and in Acts. Of course, other than the account of Jesus’s birth in Matthew 2, the Herod most often referenced in the Gospels ruled not in Judea but in Galilee, though Herod the Great’s lone appearance certainly falls in line with the Herods’ obsession with maintaining power. In Matthew’s account, Herod the Great hears of a coming Messianic figure, a King of the Jews, is troubled by the news, and demands that the chief priests and scribes tell him where this figure is to be born (Matt. 2:3–6). The priests and scribes, of course, would have had their own concerns about the emergence of such a figure and their grasp on power. Later, when wise men from the East claim to have been led by a star to the child in Bethlehem, Herod requests that they inform him when they find him (Matt. :1–, 7–1). After their failure to report back, Herod proceeds to have all children in Bethlehem under two years of age murdered (Matt. 2:16). Herod the Great’s murder of his wife Mariamme and his two sons by her, because he feared that they, as sons of a woman of the kingly Hasmonean line, might be held to have more legitimacy as king, as well as the murder of his firstborn, Antipater, for similar fears over his son’s ambi31. Hengel, Zealots, 324. The Idumeans 169 tions, would have lent credence to such a story, whether it is true or not.32 Jesus’s parents, however, having been warned to flee to Egypt return only after the Herod’s death. Even here, however, fear of Archelaus, Herod the Great’s successor in Judea, whose cruelty led to Rome’s deposing him after ten years, causes Jesus’s parents to settle in Galilee instead (Matt. 2:22). Thus, the Herod referenced throughout most of the Gospels is Antipas, the son who inherited rulership of Galilee and Perea (to the east of the Dead Sea and the southern end of the Jordan River). This Herod, too, was beholden to both the Jewish masses and Rome. The first mention of him in the Gospel accounts comes during the ministry of John the Baptist, after Herod Antipas imprisons John for preaching against Antipas’s many evils (Luke 3:19), including his marriage to Herodias (Luke 3:19, Mark 6:17–18, Matt. 14:3–4). Antipas’s niece Herodias had previously been married to his half-brother Philip (also known as Herod II or Herod Philip I)—not to be confused with Philip the Tetrarch (Herod Philip II), who inherited rulership of the kingdom of Batanea from Herod the Great. In Josephus’s account Herod Antipas had fallen for Herodias while lodging with Philip (Herod II) in Rome. Antipas and Herodias agreed to divorce their current partners and take each other as spouses when they returned east. The divorce of 32. No other primary sources document Herod’s slaughtering of Bethlehem’s children, causing many scholars to doubt its veracity. Those pointing to its possible truth, however, note that Bethlehem was likely a small town—probably no more than a thousand people—meaning that the total number of children killed would have been small enough, a couple dozen at most, that few outsiders would have noted it as worthy of historical record, especially at a time when infant mortality rates were so high anyway. See, for example, Wayne Jackson, “Did Matthew Fabricate the Account of Herod’s Slaughter of the Bethlehem Infants?,” Christian Courier, https://www.christiancourier.com /articles/638-did-matthew-fabricate-the-account-of-herods-slaughter -of-the-bethlehem-infants. 170 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered Herod Antipas’s previous wife, daughter of the Nabatean king Aretas, along with a border dispute, led to a war with her people and the destruction of Antipas’s army, which some Jews thought to be God’s vengeance for what Herod Antipas had done to John the Baptist.33 The Gospel accounts all say that Herod Antipas had been hesitant to kill John, who he had imprisoned, but was finally persuaded by Herodias’s daughter at that daughter’s birthday party (Matt. 14:6–11, Mark 6:21–28); however, the accounts give varying reasons for that hesitance. Matthew 14:5 notes that Herod Antipas “feared the multitude, because they counted him as a prophet.” Mark 6:0 notes that Herod “feared John, knowing that he was a just man and an holy, and observed him; and when he heard him, he did many things, and heard him gladly.” In other words, in Mark’s account, Herod is fascinated by the prophet figure and, as the descendent of Jewish converts, perhaps somewhat receptive to John’s overall message of repentance, even if it were listened to out of apprehensive superstition or for spiritual entertainment rather than it effecting an actual change to lifestyle. (Antipas, in similar fashion to Herod the Great, showed deference to the Jewish proscription against idolatry, as is evidenced by the lack of images on his coinage and by his petition to Pontius Pilate regarding some votive shields the latter had placed at the Jerusalem temple.)34 In the Matthew’s account, no mention is made of Herod Antipas’s fascination with the figure; rather, Antipas refuses to kill John merely because he fears the Jewish multitude. And in Josephus’s account, it is in fact Antipas’s fear of those masses that ultimately 33. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 18.5.1–2. 34. Emil Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, vol. 1, revised and edited by Geza Vermes, Fergus Millar, and Matthew Black (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1973), 343n16; Philo, On the Embassy to Gaius, 38.299–300. The Idumeans 171 causes him to put John to death: “Herod, who feared lest the great influence John had over the people might put it into his power and inclination to raise a rebellion, [for they seemed ready to do any thing he should advise,] thought it best, by putting him to death, to prevent any mischief he might cause, and not bring himself into difficulties, by sparing a man who might make him repent of it when it would be too late.”35 The two Gospel accounts note that it was because of Herod’s vow and for the “sakes of those which sat with him” (Mark 6:6; cf. Matt. 14:9)—that is, his court and other notable people who would have attended such an event—that he went through with his promise to behead John. The variation in the accounts speaks to the contradictory motivations Herod Antipas would have had with regard to a man such as John—fascination as a Jewish man, even if not terribly devout, with such a figure; fear of the masses a man like John could inspire and of the trouble those masses might spell for Antipas’s own authority; and the need to keep other powerful members of his kingdom and court satisfied with his rulership. Jesus’s entrance on the scene inspires similar mixed feelings within Herod Antipas, according to the Gospel accounts. On one hand, Antipas is portrayed as wanting to kill Jesus and, on another, as wanting to see Jesus. This is understandable insofar as when Antipas first hears of Jesus’s work, he mistakes Jesus as John the Baptist resurrected (Matt. 14:1–2; Mark 6:14, 16), which causes him to reach the conclusion that “therefore mighty works do shew forth themselves in him” (Matt. 14:, Mark 6:14). As with John the Baptist in the first go-round, Herod “desired to see” Jesus (Luke 9:9) because he “had heard many things of him; and he hoped to have seen some miracle done by 35. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, trans. by William Whiston, 18.5.2, Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org /files/848/848-h/848-h.htm. 172 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered him” (Luke 3:8). No doubt, fascination with such figures among the Jewish people didn’t necessarily portend belief or sincere devotion. “Ye seek me,” Jesus told a crowd that had followed him from a previous speech that had been accompanied by a meal, “not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of the loaves, and were filled” (John 6:26). Jesus even mourns at various points, in a manner similar to that recounted in Matthew 23:37, over his audience’s inability to accept his message: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee.” “Repent”—that is, change from your self-centered, physically focused ways toward the more spiritual focus of the “kingdom of God”—both John and Jesus proclaimed (Mark 1:4, 15), but though many listened, few really put the admonishment into action. Thus, just as the Pharisees could claim to know that Jesus was “a teacher come from God” (John 3:) but seek to destroy him (e.g., Matt. 1:14, Mark 3:6) and his influence, Herod, too, could, on one hand, desire to see a miracle wrought by Jesus and, on another, seek to kill him, as some of the Pharisees warned Jesus on a journey through Perea,36 “Get the out, and depart hence: for Herod will kill thee” (Luke 13:31), knowing that Jesus represented a threat to Herod’s authority over the kingdom. When at the end of Jesus’s ministry, Antipas finally manages to meet Jesus, Antipas is disappointed by Jesus’s silence and “set him at nought,” Luke 23:11 tells us—mocking him and thus accounting him as a nonthreat but, like Pontius Pilate, happy enough to concede to the will of his accusers to keep peace in the kingdom, a role that the same author says places Herod among those who “were gathered together” against Jesus (Acts 4:27). 36. The Perea location is per A. T. Robertson, Harmony of the Gospels for Students of the Life of Christ (New York: Harper and Row, 1950). The Idumeans 173 The last reference to Herod in the New Testament, which takes place more than a decade later, is to that of Herod Agrippa I, who at the three-year peak of his power would reign over a kingdom whose borders roughly equaled those of his grandfather. As the grandson of Herod the Great, through Mariamme I, and thus the descendent of the Hasmonean dynasty in addition to the Herodian, Agrippa I would have had more legitimacy among the Jewish people as king than the previous Herods. But his reign shows a similar concern for pleasing both his Roman overseers and his Jewish subjects. Agrippa, for one, came to power largely through the auspices of a friendship with the Roman emperor Caligula, and then he extended that rule via the emperor Claudius, whose favor he curried by aiding Claudius in gaining the throne after Caligula’s death.37 Likewise, among the Jewish people, he cut property taxes for inhabitants of Jerusalem, offered sacrifices in the prescribed manner, and took a strong stance against a statue of Caesar being placed in a synagogue and, earlier, under Caligula, before Agrippa’s rise to power in Judea, in the temple.38 Herod Agrippa I, thus, many scholars conclude, tried to conform to whatever the popular opinion was among devout Jewish people—even perhaps Pharisaism.39 And so it makes sense that in Acts 12:1, Agrippa I is said to have “stretched forth his hands to vex certain of the church.” With the Christian faith gaining literally thousands of followers in its first weeks after the Pentecost founding of the church, it would have posed a threat to contemporary Jewish authorities, such as the priesthood and the scribes—and as well the Idumean king. The growing inclusion of non-Jewish followers among the ranks of 37. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 18.5, 19.4–5. 38. Ibid., 19.6.1, 19.6.3, 18.8.8–9. 39. David Goodblatt, “Agrippa I and Palestinian Judaism in the First Century,” Jewish History 2, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 7. 174 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered Jesus’s followers would have leant further abhorrence of the movement to many more Jews, who previously had not been undisposed to it but who now viewed the new teachings as interfering with Israel’s special status with God.40 Agrippa began his persecution of the church by killing the apostle James and then, because it “pleased the Jews,” Luke tells us, proceeded to imprison Peter, with the intention “to bring him forth to the people”—no doubt to have him killed also (Acts 12:3–4). The Galileans Agrippa I did not reign over just Judea but over an array of peoples from varying backgrounds. And in the same way that the Idumean rulership aimed to appease not just Idumeans but Greeks, Nabateans, Jews, and the imperial Roman authorities, the area in which Jesus spent most of his childhood and ministry, Galilee, showed, over time, the influence of varying strains of people and cultures, even as it came more and more heavily under Jewish control. The varying influences go back to Israel’s first occupation of the region. In the time of ancient Israel’s first founding, although Galilee was settled chiefly by the tribes of Zebulun and Naphtali (Josh. 19:10–16, 32–39), with Asher along the Mediterranean Sea coast and Issachar to the south (Josh. 19:17–31), the native Canaanites were never fully removed (Judg. 1:30–33). This meant that indigenous Canaanite customs would continue to play a role in the Israelite kingdom. Indeed, the author of Judges notes that the people of the land proved to be “as thorns” and that “their gods” ensnared the conquering Israelites (Judg. 2:3). “They forsook the Lord God of their fathers,” the author notes, “. . . and followed other gods, of the gods of the people that were round about them, and bowed themselves unto them, 40. Bruce, New Testament History, 261. The Galileans 175 and provoked the Lord to anger. And they forsook the Lord, and served Baal and Ashtaroth” (Judg. :1–13). Such counter-religious traditions would continue right up through the time of Assyria’s conquest of the land nearly seven hundred years later (1 Kings 17:6–18) and into the time of Jesus, as evidenced by the worship of the god at Carmel at the edge of Galilee, on the coast, north of Caesarea Maritima. Here it was that the Israelite prophet Elijah faced down the prophets of the god Baal during the reign of the Israelite king Ahab (1 Kings 18). And in the first century CE, we find worship to a non-Israelite god continuing. Tacitus writes in his Histories at the beginning of the second century of “a hill called Carmel” “on the frontier of Judaea and Syria,” where “a god of the same name is there worshipped according to ancient ritual. There is no image or temple: only an altar where they reverently worship.”41 Basilides, the priest of the altar, Tacitus tells us, promised the mid-first-century Roman emperor Vespasian, who was sacrificing at the site, that he would receive whatever he had requested.42 An inscription dated to the second century CE connects the site to the worship of the god Heliopolis (Baalbeck).43 The tribes of Israel that settled in the north, furthermore, would display from fairly early on an independence from the Jewish kingdom in the south. Soon after the atthat-point united kingdom of Israel’s first king, Saul, died, the Jewish people would settle on a new dynasty, headed by the first in a line of rulers who would descend from Saul’s one-time armorbearer, David, while in the north, Saul’s son Ishbosheth would reign in the king’s stead (2 Sam. 2:7–11). After a two-year war between the two groups 41. Tacitus, The Histories, trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe, 2.78, Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1697/1697-h/1697 -h.htm. 42. Ibid. 43. Horsley, Galilee, 253. 176 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered (2 Sam. 2:10, 3:1) and the assassination of Ishbosheth (2 Sam. 4:5–8), the tribes of the north acceded to David’s rule (2 Sam. 5:1–3, 1 Chron. 11:1–3). For the northern kingdom, it was a short dynasty. Heavy taxation under David’s son Solomon led the tribes to separate again after Solomon’s son Rehoboam took the throne (1 Kings 12:1–20). The area of Galilee forged the northernmost part of the ancient northern kingdom. While the tribe of Judah looked to Jerusalem for central leadership, the northern tribes looked to Shechem and eventually to Samaria, a city whose name would come to stand for the entire kingdom. The remoteness of the northernmost tribes inhabiting Galilee, however, meant that the people of the land likely long maintained a certain amount of independence from any kind of central government. For this reason, Richard A. Horsley posits in his book on Galilee, that the area, “far from being a cultural and/or political unity, . . . was fragmented into various regions and/or particular villages that insisted on autonomy and resisted outside control. The passion for autonomy became ‘manifest’ perhaps only when the rulers ordinarily in place were temporarily unable to assert effective control, as happened in the [Jewish uprising in the] summer of 66.”44 No doubt, such independence, of the northern kingdom, as well as of the Galilean region specifically, likely played a role in its reaction to the Judean king Hezekiah’s invitation to attend the feast of Passover in Jerusalem during his reign, after Assyrian forces had already deported the tribe of Naphtali from Galilee (2 Kings 15:9). “They laughed them to scorn, and mocked them,” the author of Kings writes about the reaction to Hezekiah’s messengers (2 Chron. 30:10), though some apparently did choose to attend (2 Chron. 30:11). Assyria’s continuing relocation of the people of Galilee and indeed of the entire northern kingdom would resume 44. Ibid., 255. The Galileans 177 not long after, leaving the land mostly destitute (2 Kings 18:11), though some few peasants may have remained.45 Unlike the land to the south, Assyria apparently did not repopulate Galilee with conquered peoples to the same extent as it did other areas it captured.46 Over time, peoples from surrounding territory migrated into Galilee, mixing with what few people remained. Among them were Phoenicians, Syrians, and Itureans.47 Eventually, during Persian control of the area, the Jewish people returned to the southern kingdom, though only a few came north into Galilee, as attested to by the troubles that arose among the population in 1 Maccabees 5: Then the Gentiles in Gilead gathered together against the Israelites who lived in their territory, planning to destroy them. . . . While the letter was still being read, other messengers from Galilee, with torn clothing, said similar things. They related that the people of Ptolemais, Tyre, Sidon, and all Galilee of the Gentiles had gathered together “to annihilate us.” When Judas and the people heard all this, a great assembly was called to decide what they should do to assist their people who were in distress and were being attacked by enemies. Then Judas said to Simon his brother: “Choose your men and go rescue your 45. Horsley, in fact, proposes that Galilee’s first-century population consisted largely of such lingering Israelite peasants. Horsley, Galilee, 40. 46. Mark A. Chancey, Greco-Roman Culture and the Galilee of Jesus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 26. Chancey to a large extent defends the biblical account that Assyria largely depopulated the area. See especially Chancey, The Myth of a Gentile Galilee (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 47. Chancey, Greco-Roman Culture, 26; Andrew C. Skinner, “A Historical Sketch of Galilee,” Brigham Young University Studies 36, no. 3 (1996–1997): 113, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43044121. 178 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered people in Galilee.” . . . Three thousand men were assigned to Simon to go to Galilee. . . . So Simon went to Galilee, fought several battles with the Gentiles, and crushed them. He pursued them to the gate of Ptolemais. As many as three thousand Gentiles died, and he plundered their possessions. Then he took the Jews of Galilee and Arbatta, together with their wives and children and all they owned, and led them to Judea with great rejoicing.48 The Jewish people, thus, were a minority among the many non-Jewish peoples who had settled in the region, including, likely, by this time settlers from the kingdoms that ruled the area, Persians and Greeks, who brought with them their various religious beliefs, such as the dualist battle between good and evil and the concept of immortal soul.49 The people dominant in Galilee, however, would soon change after the Jewish flight enabled by Simon. About sixty years later, descendants of the Maccabees, the Hasmonean rulers of Judea, would return under the leadership of John Hyrcanus I and his successors Aristobulus I and Alexander Jannaeus, taking Galilee for themselves and forcibly converting the residents to the Jewish faith.50 Most inhabitants chose to leave, as is evidenced by archeology.51 Those few who chose to stay adopted the Jewish faith, 48. 1 Maccabees, 5.9, 14–17, 20–23, Common English Bible. 49. James W. Ermatinger, Daily Life in the New Testament (Wesport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2008), 21. 50. Richardson, Herod, 133; Chancey, Myth of a Gentile Galilee, 14, 47; Skinner, “Historical Sketch of Galilee,” 116–117; Chancey, GrecoRoman Culture, 36; John E. Stambaugh and David L. Balch, The New Testament in Its Social Environment (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), 22. 51. Chancey, Myth of a Gentile Galilee, 47; Chancey, Greco-Roman Culture, 19; Carl Hoffman, “Who Were the Galileans in the Days of Jesus?” Charisma News, https://www.charismanews.com/opinion The Galileans 179 as the Idumeans to the south of Judea had. Galilee, thus, became largely Jewish territory, but the degree to which the peoples of the territory were accepted as on par with those peoples who lived in Judea proper remained questionable, which may be the basis for such observations as those of the priestly council, in Acts 4:13, who perceived Peter and John to be “unlearned and ignorant men.”52 The Pharisees did not consider the conversion of non-Jewish Galileans valid because of its forced nature, and the Galilean culture showed a more heavily Hellenistic influence than did the conquering peoples to the south.53 The first century BCE geographer Strabo writes that the land continued to be inhabited by “mixed stocks of people,” though his description may suffer from some overgeneralization and misunderstanding.54 The large presence of non-Jewish archeological artifacts in Galilee, of course, does not necessarily mean that the people of Galilee were predominantly polytheist in orientation or devoted to Greek or other foreign philosophies,55 but it does demonstrate that Greek culture among others maintained at least an indirect influence on the thinking of the inhabitants. Indeed, the prevalence of Aramaic and other languages in Galilee rather than Hebrew remained a source of frustration to /standing-with-israel/47643-who-were-the-qgalileansq-in-the-days -of-jesus. 5. Hoffman, “Who Were the Galileans?” Luke particularly notes in Acts 4:13 that the very fact of the “ignorance” on some level betrays that they had been with Jesus, a sentiment similarly expressed in Matt. 26:33, when Peter’s Galilean accent betrays him as one of Jesus’s companions. 53. Ermatinger, Daily Life in the New Testament, 20. 54. Strabo, The Geography of Strabo, 16.2.34, https://penelope .uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Strabo/16B*.html. Mark A. Chancey points out that Strabo mixed up the Jewish people with the Egyptian, probably never visited Galilee himself, and may have been relying on older sources. Chancey, Myth of a Gentile Galilee, 64. 55. Mark Chancey makes this point in both Myth of a Gentile Galilee and Greco-Roman Culture. 180 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered rabbis.56 Inscriptions in lower Galilee and along the western shore of the sea further demonstrate the mix of languages, with 40 percent showing familiarity with Greek and 50 percent with Aramaic.57 Further, those peoples who left Galilee rather than convert did not move far away, remaining on the borders of the region so that the territory was in fact surrounded by non-Jewish people.58 The area was also a crossroads for traders and other travelers, connecting Rome to Palestine and regions beyond, with the sea itself serving as a popular means of transport.59 This meant that Galilee’s Jewish inhabitants would have had somewhat regular contact with other cultures, even if the district itself had fallen under largely Jewish control. Cities, as centers of cosmopolitanism and trade, were more likely to show foreign influence than villages, with some of them likely having mixed populations, most especially the governmental capitals.60 The Jewish inhabitants also probably were less beholden to strict Jewish traditions, as evidenced by the presence of lamps and figures with pagan symbols on them among archeological finds in Jewish residential areas in Sepphoris, Galilee’s first capital under Antipas.61 In Galilee’s succession of capitals were to be found the ruling elites, most notably the family of the Herods, which by conversion was Jewish but which also showed defer56. Horsley, Galilee, 249. 57. Ibid., 248. 58. Chancey, Myth of a Gentile Galilee, 164–165. 59. Ermatinger, Daily Life in the New Testament, 19–21; Chancey, Myth of a Gentile Galilee, 78; Chancey, Greco-Roman Culture, 6. Though acknowledging the many roads that traversed Galilee, Chancey claims most users of them would have been local. Chancey, Greco-Roman Culture, 20. Still, with border regions made up of Syrians, Phoenicians, Itureans, Nabateans, Greeks, and others, Galilee would have seen a fair number of outsiders, even if not from distant locales. Chancey, Myth of a Gentile Galilee, 165. 60. Horsley, Galilee, 104. 61. Ibid.; Hoffman, “Who Were the Galileans?” The Galileans 181 ence to the Greco-Roman influences it found necessary to curry and maintain power. Thus, Antipas would build and name his second Galilean capital, Tiberias, in honor of the Roman emperor; he would do so over a graveyard, making it abominable to Jewish inhabitants.62 “Strangers came and inhabited this city,” Josephus tells us, but also many from Galilee.63 To encourage Jewish people to populate it despite misgivings, Antipas granted some who were slaves freedom, land, and houses on the promise that they would not leave the city.64 The differences between such foreign-influenced cities and the largely Jewish villages surrounding them would become a source of friction.65 The independence of the people in the region continued to manifest itself in the form of occasional revolts against the foreign rulership, as evidenced in the reference to Judas of Galilee in Acts 5:37, discussed in chapter 1. As the place of origin for such rebel activity,66 Galilee to some extent became identified with the Zealots, the radical political-religious party that intended to throw off the leadership of pagan outsiders. For many inhabitants, the resistance no doubt related more to the taxation by ruling authorities than it did to an idealism grounded in a call for religious purity. Taxes brought poverty to much of the farming population, who bore an unequal share of the tax burden.67 For such inhabitants, tax collection presented “the city’s only impor- 62. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 18.2.3. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid. 65. Skinner, “Historical Sketch of Galilee,” 13. 66. Hengel, Zealots, 56, 74; Ermatinger, Daily Life in the New Testament, 20. 67. Pheme Perkins, “Taxes in the New Testament,” Journal of Religious Ethics 12, no. 2 (1984): 183, http://www.jstor.org /stable/40014983. 182 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered tant function”—and thus the source of their trouble.68 Although Galilee was a fertile region, most farms were of a size that allowed only “for subsistence living for a family of five or six.”69 With three levels of taxation during the first century CE—to Rome, to the Judean temple complex, and to the Herodian rulership—many peasants eventually fell into debt and were forced to give up their land to their creditors, thus becoming day laborers or tenant farmers.70 Small independently owned plots gave way to larger estates as the century progressed;71 rebel activity increased in tandem until the entire land erupted in rebellion against Rome in 66 CE. Jesus’s parables often reflect this concern with debt, peasantry, and large landholders, no doubt mirroring the social conditions much of his audience was experiencing. Many Bible scholars note that Jesus largely ministered in villages and small towns,72 though Mark 1:45 suggests that this was not because he deliberately avoided cities but rather because the crowds grew too large for him to preach within them. Indeed, neither of the capitals, Sepphoris nor Tiberias, though the former was a short distance from Nazareth, are mentioned in the New Testament as places that Jesus visited. Whether Jesus’s interaction with those cities simply went without written record or whether Jesus deliberately did not visit them because of their higher concentration of non-Jewish inhabitants in an attempt to focus his message on the descendants of Israel, his stated 68. Martin Goodman, State and Society in Roman Galilee, A.D. 132–212 (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983), 131, quoted in Horsley, Galilee, 180. 69. Richardson, Herod, 134; quote from Horsley, Galilee, 219. 70. Horsley, Galilee, 219–221; Skinner, “Historical Sketch of Galilee,” 10–11. 71. Skinner, “Historical Sketch of Galilee,” 11. 72. See, for example, Ermatinger, Daily Life in the New Testament, 21; Paula Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2018), 141. The Galileans 183 purpose in Matthew 15:24, or in an attempt to avoid direct contact with Herod, we do not know. No matter, because he often preached outside the cities, much of his audience likely consisted of small landholders and their now landless day-laboring associates, who would have identified with the persons in tales such as that of the Unforgiving Servant (Matt. 18:23–25), in which a debt-riddled man begs for mercy from his creditor but refuses to extend it to others; the Laborers in the Vineyard (Matt. 20:1–16), in which a large landholder pays all day laborers the same wage whether they’ve worked all day or one hour; and the Tenant Farmers (Matt. 21:33–45, Mark 12:1–12), in which a landowner sends servants to collect his share of the harvest from his tenants only to have his servants killed. Interestingly, in each of the parables noted here, Jesus uses the narrative not to critique the rich landowners but rather highlights the poor’s poor response to them, thus emphasizing not a one-sided social-justice message but rather a message about justice meted out on all, even on those of lesser means. No doubt, criticism of the rich also forged part of his message (see, for example, the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man, in Luke 16:19–31, or the parable of the Rich Fool, in Luke 12:13–21), but critiques of class went both ways. When one examines Jesus’s teachings as a whole, one hardly gets the sense that he was a radical calling for the immediate disestablishment of the powers that be. Even of the Pharisees, he noted, “whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do” (Matt. 3:3); what he railed against most was the hypocrisy of people like the Pharisees, which presented a false view of the God the Jewish people worshipped. That Jesus’s message interfered with the ambitions such people had of their own to control the Jewish nation ultimately led to Jesus’s death. In addition to parables about debt and farm labor, concerns about taxation—and the perceived corruption of those who collect it—also pervade the Gospels, speaking to 184 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered common views of the time. Already recounted is the situation in Matthew 22, Mark 12, and Luke 20 in which the Pharisees and priests, the scribes and Herodians, ask Jesus whether paying taxes is lawful, hoping to trick him into betraying either the taxing authorities or the popular multitudes. In another passage in Matthew 17:24–27, Jesus has Peter pay the temple tax by pulling a coin from the mouth of a fish. However, the general reputation of those collecting such taxes is a negative one. Even Jesus uses the pejorative reputation of tax collectors in his teachings, as in his advice in Matthew 18:15–17 regarding what to do with a person who wrongs others and will not come to terms with them—“let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a publican” (verse 17). He uses this reputation to good effect in his parable in Luke 18:10–14 regarding the Pharisee and the publican who go to the temple to pray. Indeed, even though Jesus was aware of the negative reputation of the tax collectors, one of the common accusations against his righteousness was the fact that he spent time among them (see, for example, Matt. 9:11, 11:19; Mark 2:16; Luke 5:30), even making the publican Matthew/Levi one of his twelve disciples (Matt. 9:9, Mark 2:14–15, Luke 5:27). The character of Galilee would change much in the years following Jesus’s death. The main impetus for this would be the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE. With no center for Jewish worship in Judea, many of the temple elites, including the Pharisees, would trek west, to Jamnia, and then eventually, after the Bar Kochba revolt in 132–135 CE, north.73 Banned from Jerusalem, the Pharisees would make Galilee the center of what would become 73. Horsley, Galilee, 94, 124, 253; Chancey, Myth of a Gentile Galilee, 61; Ernest L. Martin, The People That History Forgot: The Mysterious People Who Originated the World’s Religions, chap. 10, “The Solidification of Rabbinic Judaism,” http://www.askelm.com/people /peo010.htm. The Galileans 185 rabbinical Judaism.74 Cities of formerly mixed populations would over the next century become increasingly more Jewish, and centers of Jewish learning, first at Jamnia and then at Gophna, Usha, Shefar’am, and Beth She’arim, to which many scribes and priests migrated, and eventually even Sepphoris and Tiberius, would formalize the rules of the Jewish religion, putting into print, in the form of the Mishnah, the traditions that until then had been preserved only orally.75 A region that, while primarily Jewish, had formally had a mix of influences due to its place in the midst of non-Jewish cultures, its historical role as a backwater less inclined to follow Jerusalem authority, and the diasporic nature of its Jewish population now became the very heart of the territory controlled by the Jewish peoples who had been contending for power in Jerusalem. What this meant for the early Christian church was that an area that had once included many people skeptical of temple authority now became an area of people more inclined to accept such authority. By the time of the Roman emperor Constantine in the early fourth century CE, churches in Galilee would disappear from church records, failing to appear among the list of those churches who attended the Council of Nicaea or on Eusebius’s list of settlements in Palestine from which martyrs derived.76 As Richard A. Horsley surmises, “Communities with some attachment to Jesus would thus appear to have been inconspicuous and/or to have made no significant break with their Israelite heritage—or to have simply disappeared.”77 We might conclude then that the church in Galilee likely failed to adapt to the changes wrought in the church among 74. Horsley, Galilee, 94, 124, 253. 75. Ibid., 103, 253; Chancey, Myth of a Gentile Galilee, 60; Philip Neal, Judaism—Revelation of Moses or Religion of Men? (Hollister, Calif.: York Publishing, 2010), 23–25, 51, 54. 76. Horsley, Galilee, 106. 77. Ibid. 186 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered non-Jewish believers and/or became even more traditionally Jewish—and thus either way became unrecognizable as Christians. Jewish Talmudic sources, many written from academies in Galilee, have little to say about Christianity in its early centuries, which seems surprising given how much interaction Jesus had with Galileans and the apostles in Acts with synagogue Jews, a strategy that may have been deliberate: “By largely ignoring the Christians [in their writings],” Philip S. Alexander posits in an article on “Jewish Believers in Early Rabbinic Literature,” the rabbis denied Christianity what in modern jargon would be called “the oxygen of publicity.” The trouble with attacking another point of view is that you draw attention to it—you dignify it with a response. The rabbis may have decided that the best way to deal with Christianity was to develop and promote vigorously their own point of view, and to rely on that to keep Christianity at bay. They certainly played this card in hermeneutics. Rather than waste time refuting directly readings of the Bible of which they disapproved, they preferred on the whole to advance their own exegesis and rely on that preemptively to occupy the exegetical space and crowd out unacceptable interpretations.78 To find mention of Christianity in rabbinical writings, one must read between the lines, looking for small clues here and there, but the ongoing disagreement within the Jewish community over how to react to Christianity is also evident in the writings of early second-century Christian writers such as Justin Martyr, who wrote his Dialogue with Trypho to counter Jewish ideas, and Ignatius, bishop of 78. Philip S. Alexander, “Jewish Believers in Early Rabbinic Literature (d to 5th Centuries),” chap. 1 in Jewish Believers in Jesus: The Early Centuries, ed. Oskar Skarsaune and Reidar Hvalvik (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 2007), 660–661. The Galileans 187 nearby Antioch of Syria, who in his letter to the Magnesians complains that “it is absurd to profess Christ Jesus, and to Judaize. For Christianity did not embrace Judaism, but Judaism Christianity.”79 No doubt, rabbinical teachings had an impact on some Christian believers, just as among non-Jewish believers anti-Jewish views were taking hold. It is likely that as the Pharisaical sect took on more power in Galilee after the destruction of the temple, suppressing other sects that had once held sway throughout parts of the Jewish world, it was able to impose its table fellowship ideas more stringently on the Jewish population by taking control of the major Jewish institutions, among them the synagogues.80 By defining who could participate in the synagogues, what was to be taught in the Jewish schools, what constituted acceptable forms of worship, how laws were to be adjudicated, and eventually who could contribute to commercial and social enterprises within the Jewish community, those who fell in line with the rabbinical Judaism that emerged sidelined their less politically inclined Jewish Christian cousins, eventually pushing them out of the synagogues.81 We see a corollary to this in Talmudic writings even with regard to the treatment of the rival Jewish Sadducean sect: “As for Sadducee women, when they undertake to walk in the ways of their fathers, then they are like the Samaritan women; if they separate themselves to walk in the way of Israel, then they are like Israelites.”82 In other words, those not falling in 79. Ignatius of Antioch, Ignatius to the Magnesians, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, chap. 10, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/ignatius-magnesians -longer.html; intertextual readings of the rabbinical writings can be found Alexander, “Jewish Believers,” esp. 661–687. 80. Alexander, “Jewish Believers,” 671. 81. Ibid., 671, 676, 686. 82. Quoted in James Alan Montgomery, The Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect: Their History, Theology, and Literature (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1907), 188. 188 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered line with the teachings of the rabbinical sect were not appropriate for marrying. Meanwhile, non-Jewish Christian believers, in an attempt to avoid the persecution of local Roman authorities brought on by the revolts of the Jewish people, progressively attempted to distance themselves from Jewish practices, including any association with Jewish synagogues.83 The attempts, thus, of rabbinical Jewish followers to distance themselves from Christians and the corresponding attempt of non-Jewish Christians to distance themselves from Jews placed the predominantly Jewish Christians in Galilee in the position of having to choose between their Jewish communities and their Christian faith. Most chose one or the other, rather than falling out of sync with both of them. The process would be repeated throughout the empire. The Samaritans There were yet other sets of believers who did not fit in with what would become Jewish orthodoxy but who were not fully Gentile. In between the regions from which rabbinical Judaism sprang, Judea and Galilee, for instance, was the land of Samaria, which had a distinctive form of the Jewish faith that claimed to be the true and ancient one, much to the annoyance of those who held power at the Jerusalem temple. Although the Samaritan people were a cultural outlier on the Jewish scene, from among them would spring a man, if early Christian writers such as Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Eusebius are to be believed, who would prove to have a significantly formative role in the Gnostic beliefs that would help shape the version of 83. Samuele Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday: A Historical Investigation of the Rise of Sunday Observance in Early Christianity (Rome: Pontifical Gregorian University Press, 1977), 18–183. The Samaritans 189 the Christian faith that eventually spread throughout the world. Samaritan beliefs, in many ways, echoed those of the Jewish people to the south and north of them. Of course, as with any religious faith, Samaritan beliefs have varied over place and time, which can make it challenging to discern the tenets of the religion at any one particular historic point.84 Also adding to the confusion are the differing definitions of and contexts for usage of the term “Samaritan,” which can refer to a religion, to the Israelite people of the northern kingdom, or to the people who settled in formerly Israelite territory, many of them pagan and a few of them an Israelite remnant.85 We can say with some certainty, however, that during the first two centuries CE, like their Jewish counterparts, those of the Samaritan religion in the land of Samaria claimed to worship YHVH; accepted the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, as holy scripture; kept the Sabbath day; and circumcised their male offspring.86 Though the Samaritans have often been accused otherwise by Jewish writers, most evidence points to those of this particular area and religion being largely monotheistic (in fact, perhaps, more rigidly so than the Jewish people) and eschewing of iconography.87 In many ways their views at the time of Je84. James D. Purvis, “The Fourth Gospel and the Samaritans,” Novum Testamentum 17, no. 3 (July 1975), 164; Montgomery, Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect, 204–206. 85. On the difficulty of defining the group, see Shaye J. D. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1987), 169. 86. Bruce Hall, “From John Hyrcanus to Baba Rabbah,” in The Samaritans, ed. Alan D. Crown (Tubingen, Germany: J. C. B. Mohr, 1989), 40; Montgomery, Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect, 170. 87. Robert T. Anderson and Terry Giles, The Keepers: An Introduction to the History and Culture of the Samaritans (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2002), 118; Montgomery, Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect, 28, 33. 190 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered sus mirrored those of the Jewish Sadducean sect, including rejection of the resurrection (though not necessarily the immortal soul), rejection of the Pharisaical oral law, and rejection of the books of the Old Testament outside the Torah (though Jewish sects such as the Sadducees may have merely prioritized the Torah in importance over the other scriptures). Such similarities led early rabbinical thinkers, who had largely sprung from the Pharisees, to denigrate both groups.88 The main difference—indeed, the main source of contention—between the Samaritans and all other Jewish sects was the Samaritan choice of Mount Gerizim as the central location for worship rather than Jerusalem.89 Another difference includes a veneration of Moses above all other biblical fathers, whereas the Jewish people would have been more likely to look to Abraham first. In fact, in Samaritan belief, Moses has a standing almost equivalent to Jesus or (more closely, because Moses is not considered divine) the Islamic prophet Muhammed, and in some traditions he is believed to have had preexistence, to have ascended to heaven, and to be set one day to return, though perhaps only in the form of a prophet who is like him (based on Deut. 18:15, to be discussed later).90 The calendar of annual holy days also may vary a bit from Jewish custom, as it is set yearly by the Samaritan priesthood, and Samaritans also do not observe the Jewish civil holidays such as Purim and Hanukkah.91 88. Anderson and Giles, Keepers, 10, 45; Montgomery, Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect, 186–188. 89. Montgomery, Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect, 34; Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem, 167–168. 90. Anderson and Giles, Keepers, 120; Jarl Fossum, “Sects and Movements,” in Crown, Samaritans, 386; Alan F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism (Leiden: Brill, 1977), 198; Montgomery, Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect, 225, 228. 91. Anderson and Giles, Keepers, 126. The Samaritans 191 Such differences become significant when one considers the contradicting accounts of the historical origins of the Samaritans. The narrative of how the Samaritans came to be differs greatly depending on who is writing the history—and thus also the acceptance of the legitimacy of their particular beliefs. Samaritans themselves claimed to be descendants of the northern kingdom of Israel and the true followers of YHVH, whereas, according to them, the Jewish peoples forged a counterfeit religion based around worship at the city of Shiloh, rather than the Samaritan site of Shechem, at the time of the priest Eli, near the end of the period of the Judges, before Israel established its first king.92 Though these particular claims seem dubious to most scholars, some believe the Samaritans were at least in part descended from the Israelite kingdom and that their beliefs perhaps represent an earlier form of the Jewish religion before it became centered on Jerusalem.93 Thus, the Samaritan preference for Mount Gerizim as a holy place fits within a culture that had once venerated many sites, including Shiloh, Mount Ebal, and Hebron. Even some of these scholars admit, however, that the Samaritan scriptures that posit Mount Gerizim as the location of various events in the early history of the ancestors of Israel in place of, for example, Mount Ebal (as the location of the first altar set up by the twelve tribes in the Promised Land in Deut. 27:4) are likely alterations to the Old Testament scriptures rather than representative of actual earlier documents.94 In the Samaritan tradition, Ger92. Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem, 167–168; Anderson and Giles, Keepers, 11; Cohen, From the Maccabees, 170. Eli’s story is recounted in 1 Samuel 1–4. The father of two immoral priestly sons, Hophni and Phinehas, Eli would lose them both in a battle with the Philistines in which Israel would also temporarily lose its ark of the covenant, the shock of which would kill Eli (1 Sam. 4:1–18). 93. See, for example, Horsley, Galilee, 32; Montgomery, Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect, 50–55, 188. 94. Montgomery, Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect, 235. 192 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered izim also becomes identified with Bethel (the place where Jacob saw God, Gen. 28:10–19), Mount Moriah (where Abraham offered Isaac), and the Garden of Eden, even as the Jewish people would likewise identify Jerusalem as the site of certain important early events, such as the offering of Isaac.95 As to be expected, the Jewish accounts of Samaritan origins differ substantially from the Samaritans’ own. For those who wrote the biblical scriptures of the Jewish people, the people of the Israelite kingdom to the north had long been compromised in their worship of YHVH. The roots of this went back to the reign of Rehoboam, when Israel separated permanently from the Judean people in the South. Israel’s new king, Jeroboam, in an effort to distinguish the two kingdoms and thus maintain power, fostered a new faith for which he “made two calves of gold,” setting one in Bethel and one in Dan, so that the people would not go to the Judean capital of Jerusalem to worship (1 Kings 12:28–29). He also created his own priesthood to replace the tribal Levitical priests who served in Jerusalem’s temple cult and a new holiday festival to rival the festivals ordained in Leviticus 23 (1 Kings 12:31–32; 2 Chron. 11:14–15). Nevertheless, some few remained true to the old faith, choosing to continue to travel to Jerusalem to offer sacrifices and perhaps even moving to Judea (2 Chron. 11:16–17). The author of Kings notes that at the time of the Israelite king Ahab, about fifty years later, there were “seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which [had] not bowed unto Baal” (1 Kings 19:18), and as noted earlier, even after Assyria began deporting Israelites from their homeland, some who had not yet been exiled still chose to come to Jerusalem to keep the Passover (2 Chron. 30:11–12). These faithful likely had an impact on the Sa- 95. Ibid., 236–238. The Samaritans 193 maritan beliefs that would be in play all the way down to the first century CE.96 The next encounter with the people who would make up Samaria in the Jewish accounts occurs after Assyria’s importation of people from the lands of Babylon and Persia, in place of the Israelite tribes that Assyria had deported. These people, the author of Kings tells us, brought with them their own customs and gods (2 Kings 17:24–25, 29–34, 41).97 When lions came among them (or a plague, as Josephus says in his Antiquities),98 the people appealed to the king of Assyria that they were being punished because they knew not the god of the land (2 Kings 17:25–26). Such a belief would have been common in the ancient Middle East, where gods were typically associated with specific geographical locations, in addition to specific peoples.99 The king of Assyria’s solution was simple: send to the new residents a priest from among the people he had deported to teach the new residents about the god of the area (2 Kings 17:27–28). Said priest was likely familiar with the religion that Jeroboam had set up, as he selected Jeroboam’s chosen city of Bethel for his homeplace, though the writer of Kings also says that the priest knew the ways of the “Lord,” implying either that whomever was sent had retained a number of customs from the earlier pre-Jeroboam faith or that Jeroboam’s religion itself had maintained certain aspects of that faith. No matter, the writer of Kings tells us, the people introduced into the land then mixed the worship of their own gods with that of their worship of YHVH, creating a new syncretic-type religion (2 Kings 17:32–33). Even so, Josephus tells us, these people “continue[d] to make 96. Ibid., 54. 97. See also Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 9.14.3, for a parallel account. 98. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 9.14.3. 99. “ Kings 17:6,” Matthew Poole’s Commentary, Bible Hub, https://biblehub.com/commentaries/2_kings/17-26.htm. 194 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered use of the very same customs [they had learned from the priest] to [Josephus’s] very time.”100 Some scholars posit that a number of Israelites, largely among the poor, were left behind by the Assyrians and that these then influenced the settlers imported from afar.101 James Alan Montgomery, in his book on the Samaritans, for example, claims that “the bulk of the Israelites . . . remained behind, in the condition prophetically described by the prophet Hosea, ‘without king, and without prince, and without altar, and without sacrifice, and without pillar, and without ephod or teraphim.’”102 While this is possible, the fact that a priest (or priests) had to be sent to the land suggests that few if any residents remained and that those who did either were not devout adherents to the local religion or were uncomfortable sharing that faith among the immigrants without recourse to the reimportation of a selection of the religious elite. Without a leader, even Montgomery acknowledges, most who remained would have amalgamated with the peoples who were imported, with perhaps a few adhering more strongly to the religion of the old kingdom.103 The idea that some Israelites stayed behind, however, certainly would lend credence to the Samaritans to their belief that they were descendants of the northern kingdom, since undoubtedly the mixing of 100. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 9.14.3 101. Montgomery, Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect, 50–55. 102. Ibid., 50. Shaye J. D. Cohen, in his From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, notes that “the twin facts that priests, who are obsessed with genealogical purity, married the daughters of these outsiders, and that some of these outsiders had Jewish names like ‘Tobiah,’ imply that these people were not real foreigners at all” (141). Similarly, Richard A. Horsley’s arguments in his book Galilee with regard to the Galileans being former Israelites would also apply in some ways to the Samaritans, while as a counterpoint Mark A. Chauncey’s use of archeological evidence in The Myth of a Gentile Galilee to show the emptying out of the northern kingdom’s population with regard to Galilee would also have some application to the land of Samaria. 103. Montgomery, Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect, 53–54. The Samaritans 195 outsiders with the home population would have resulted in the promulgation of such a tradition among their progeny.104 Thus, whether the Samaritans were related to the Israelites or not, when the Jewish people returned to their land during the time of Cyrus the Great to rebuild the Jerusalem temple and the city itself, they found a population dwelling there who in many ways shared a religion similar to their own. “Let us build with you,” Ezra 4: records the people of the land as saying (though true to the biblical and Jewish tradition Ezra reports that they were clearly imported from the Assyrians), “for we seek your God, as ye do; and we do sacrifice unto him since the days of Esarhaddon king of Assur, which brought us up hither.”105 The Jewish response was notably antagonistic: “But Zerubbabel, and Jeshua, and the rest of the chief of the fathers of Israel, said unto them, Ye have nothing to do with us to build an house unto our God; but we ourselves together will build unto the Lord God of Israel, as king Cyrus the king of Persia hath commanded us” (Ezra 4:5). Josephus, in his account, softens the response a bit, noting that the returning Jewish people offered to let the people of the land come worship at the temple but that they could not help in its construction, in part because Cyrus had authorized them alone to build it.106 Fearful of what the arriving Jewish contingent meant for their own claims to the land, the offer to help rebuild 104. Modern genetic studies seem to confirm a common ancestor for the Samaritan and Jewish people. See “More than Just a Parable: The Genetic History of the Samaritans,” 23andMe blog, September 5, 2008, https://blog.23andme.com/ancestry-reports/more-than-just-a -parable-the-genetic-history-of-the-samaritans/. Of course, Abraham himself is said to have come from Chaldees, so there would also have been earlier familial/genetic links between those imported from the East by Assyria and those who would go on to become Israel. 105. See also Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 11.4.3. 106. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 11.4.3. 196 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered was in part, of course, an attempt by the peoples of the land to forge a pact with the returning inhabitants. The negative response only encouraged the peoples of the land to do their best to prevent the reconstruction of Jerusalem and its temple. They wrote to regional governors, such as the one in Syria, and, according to Josephus, even bribed them, requesting interference with the project (Ezra 4:5).107 The local peoples also staged military actions, such that the Jewish leader Nehemiah felt compelled to order half his workers to guard the other half doing construction (Neh. 4:8–23).108 And most notably, the locals wrote to the Persian emperor, Cambyses, Cyrus’s successor, the following letter: Be it known unto the king, that the Jews which came up from thee to us are come unto Jerusalem, building the rebellious and the bad city, and have set up the walls thereof, and joined the foundations. Be it known now unto the king, that, if this city be builded, and the walls set up again, then will they not pay toll, tribute, and custom, and so thou shalt endamage the revenue of the kings. Now because we have maintenance from the king’s palace, and it was not meet for us to see the king’s dishonour, therefore have we sent and certified the king; That search may be made in the book of the records of thy fathers: so shalt thou find in the book of the records, and know that this city is a rebellious city, and hurtful unto kings and provinces, and that they have moved sedition within the same of old time: for which cause was this city destroyed. We certify the king that, if this city be builded again, and the walls thereof set up, by this 107. Ibid., 11.4.4. 108. Ibid., 11.5.8. The Samaritans 197 means thou shalt have no portion on this side the river. (Ezra 4:12–16)109 The tactic worked, insofar as it delayed further building until the reign of Darius (Ezra 4:5, 23–24; 5:5).110 Of course, the locals’ feelings about the Jewish building program were not helped by the fact that the peoples of the land were forced to pay tribute to aid the enterprise (Ezra 6:8).111 As the Jewish resettlement proved unstoppable, the peoples of the land resorted to another tactic, one that had much more success: intermarriage. The books of both Ezra and Nehemiah record the respective leaders’ disapproval. “The people of Israel, and the priests, and the Levites,” Ezra is informed by local Jewish rulers, “have not separated themselves from the people of the lands, doing according to their abominations, even of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Egyptians, and the Amorites. For they have taken of their daughters for themselves, and for their sons: so that the holy seed have mingled themselves with the people of those lands: yea, the hand of the princes and rulers hath been chief in this trespass” (Ezra 9:1–). Likewise, Nehemiah finds himself dismayed to discover “Jews that had married wives of Ashdod, of Ammon, and of Moab: And their children spake half in the speech of Ashdod, and could not speak in the Jews’ language, but according to the language of each people” (Neh. 13:3–4). While Nehemiah “contended with [such Jews], and cursed them, and smote certain of them, and plucked off their hair, and made them swear by God, saying, Ye shall not give your daughters unto their sons, nor take their daughters unto your sons, or for yourselves” (Neh. 13:5), Ezra called on the 109. Ibid., 11.2.1. 110. Ibid., 11.4.6–7. 111. Ibid., 11.1.3, 11.4.9. 198 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered men who had taken such wives to separate from them, and his book provides a list of those who chose to take this step (Ezra 10:18–43). The men had a strong reason to do this, beyond whatever fealty they had to the Jewish faith, since Ezra threatened that any man who did not come up to Jerusalem to discuss the matter would find “all his substance . . . forfeited, and himself separated from the congregation of those that had been carried away” (Ezra 10:8). Nehemiah, however, references an incident for which Josephus, flawed as his account is, likely provides much more detail, an event that James Alan Montgomery hypothesizes may be the origin of the Samaritan sect’s temple of Gerizim and modern development as an offshoot of the Jewish faith.112 Toward the end of Nehemiah’s discussion of foreign wives, he notes that “one of the sons of Joiada, the son of Eliashib the high priest, was son in law to Sanballat the Horonite” (Neh. 13:8). Nehemiah notes that he chased this priestly son from him “because they have defiled the priesthood, and the covenant of the priesthood, and of the Levites” (Neh. 13:9). Josephus, in his Antiquities, records that it was one Manasseh, the brother of the high priest Jaddua, who took Sanballat’s daughter Nicaso as his wife.113 Sanballat himself had come to Samaria from Cuth in the region of Babylon during the reign of the Persian emperor Darius, from which many of the Samaritans imported into the land of Israel had derived.114 Knowing the Jewish peoples who had returned to the land to have been a source of trouble decades earlier for the Assyrians, the marriage, for him, was “a pledge and security that the nation of the Jews should continue their good-will to him.”115 Not all men gave up their wives as willingly as those recorded in Ezra. 112. Montgomery, Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect, 66–67. 113. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 11.7.2. 114. Ibid. On Cuth, see “Cuth, Cuthah” in the Encyclopedia Judaica, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/cuth. 115. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 11.7.2. The Samaritans 199 Rather than divorcing Nicola, Manasseh appealed to his father-in-law, Sanballat, who, in turn, “promised him not only to preserve to him the honor of his priesthood, but to procure for him the power and dignity of a high priest, and would make him governor of all the places he himself now ruled, if he would keep his daughter for his wife. He also told him further, that he would build him a temple like that at Jerusalem, upon Mount Gerizzini, which is the highest of all the mountains that are in Samaria.” Following Manasseh’s lead, other priests and Levites who had married people of the land “revolted to Manasseh,” and thus was born the Samaritan priestly line, one founded on Judea’s return to its Promised Land from among those same returnees.116 Here, Josephus’s account takes a strange turn, insofar as he notes that Sanballat then conspired with Alexander the Great during the Greek siege of Tyre, promising to deliver to him half the Jewish nation against Darius in exchange for aid in building a temple.117 The problem: Alexander’s reign occurred a century later, long after Darius had left the throne in Persia. Either Josephus conflated the stories of two different Sanballats (unlikely, given that both are noted as father-in-law to Manasseh) or he transported a story from one century to another. In all likelihood, as James Alan Montgomery notes, Josephus was relying on a Samaritan legend, and “just as the Jews had their legend concerning Alexander’s favor to Jerusalem, so the Samaritans told their fables concerning his connection with their sect and temple.”118 Nevertheless, the story highlights another incident lending to the hostility between the two groups. 116. Ibid., 11.8.2. 117. Ibid., 11.8.4. 118. Montgomery, Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect, 68. 200 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered Indeed, from the time that the Samaritan temple on Gerizim was built down to Jesus’s day, the animosity between the two peoples would continue to fester, with the smaller Samaritan sect, if we are to believe the Jewish sources, opportunistically taking the side of whatever oppressor would most help it to survive.119 “When they see the Jews in prosperity,” Josephus would write of them, “they pretend that they are changed, and allied to them, and call them kinsmen, as though they were derived from Joseph, and had by that means an original alliance with them; but when they see them falling into a low condition, they say they are no way related to them, and that the Jews have no right to expect any kindness or marks of kindred from them, but they declare that they are sojourners, that come from other countries.”120 Thus, as Josephus tells their story, the Samaritans, “seeing that Alexander had so greatly honored the Jews, determined to profess themselves Jews” and invited Alexander to their own temple in Shechem and requested that he remit their tribute every seventh year for the land sabbath that both they and the Jewish people under Jerusalem’s authority kept.121 Conversely, during the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes, when the king outlawed the Jewish religion in Jerusalem, the Samaritans compromised with regard to their worship of YHVH, dedicating their temple to Zeus and denying any relation to the Jewish peoples, taking on instead identification with the Sidonians of Canaanite-Phoenician stock, even while retaining their religious customs.122 This betrayal, and a later confederacy with the Syrians against the Jewish people in the colony of Merissa during 119. This line of thinking finds its way into non-Jewish sources too, such as Ermatinger, Daily Life in the New Testament, 23. 120. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 9.14.3. 121. Ibid., 11.8.6. 1. Ibid., 1.5.5; Jarl Fossum, “Sects and Movements,” in Crown, Samaritans, 294; Ermatinger, Daily Life in the New Testament, 23. The Samaritans 201 the Maccabean revolt, in turn, would lead the Maccabees, in their uprising against the Grecian Seleucid forces, to invade Samaria and impose their authority over the land. While revenge and religious zeal both played their role in the invasion, it’s also likely that the Maccabean leader John Hyrcanus’s destruction of the city of Samaria and the temple at Gerizim were an attempt “to eliminate any possible rival political-religious center” to that in Jerusalem.123 Indeed, even outside the Judeo-Samaritan region, the conflict between the two temple systems flourished, as evidenced by arguments that arose in Egypt between diasporic emigrants of the two sects regarding the proper destination for sacrifices and, likely, temple gifts.124 Thus, as with other conquered territories, after Hyrcanus’s victory, a forced Judaization of the Samaritan land, and concomitant imposition of loyalty to the Jerusalem center, then ensued.125 Though the temple was not to be rebuilt, the Samaritans, many of whom had been taken away as slaves under John Hyrcanus, were restored to their city of Samaria a century later when the Roman general Pompey created the Roman province of Syria.126 The Roman vassal king Herod the Great, whose Idumean people had suffered a similar defeat to the Maccabees and whose wife Malthace was a Samaritan, poured money into the province, renaming the city of Samaria as Sebaste and building there a temple to Augustus, a palace, new walls, and towers.127 Such treatment likely contributed to the lack of an uprising among the Samaritans after Herod the Great’s death, for which 123. Horsley, Galilee, 37. See also Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 13.10.12; Josephus, War of the Jews, 1.2.6. 124. Montgomery, Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect, 76. 125. Richardson, Herod, 139. 126. Josephus, War of the Jews, 1.2.6, 1.7.7. 127. Taylor, Divinity of the Roman Emperor, 171; Ermatinger, Daily Life in the New Testament, 23; Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 15.8.5 202 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered they were then accorded an easement from one-quarter of their taxes.128 The good relations with Rome, however, would not persist. Both Judea and Samaria would suffer under the tyranny of Herod the Great’s successor, the tetrarch Archelaus, for which the Roman emperor Augustus would remove him. Under the procuratorship of Pontius Pilate, a large group of Samaritans attempting to ascend Mount Gerizim to view a set of sacred objects would find their way blocked by the procurator, with some being killed and others taken prisoner, an incident that would lead to Pilate’s dismissal from his post.129 During the same period, troubles between the Samaritan and Jewish people would continue. One Passover season during the procuratorship of Coponius, between 6 and 9 CE, Josephus tells us, a group of Samaritans would defile the Jerusalem temple by scattering dead bodies about within it, such that afterward Samaritans were banned from entering the complex.130 In another incident, about twenty years after the death of Jesus, Samaritans attacked Galilean pilgrims on their spring journey to Jerusalem. Jews, in retaliation, attacked Samaritan villages. The conflict eventually required the intervention of Roman troops.131 This is not to say that the Jewish people refused all interaction with the Samaritans. The very fact that Galilean pilgrims sometimes chose to pass through Samaria rather than around it on their way to Judea shows a degree of intercourse between the two peoples. Further, the Jewish people used Samaritan markets, a sign that they accepted Samaritan foods as properly chosen and prepared in the 128. Josephus, War of the Jews, 2.6.3. 129. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 18.4.1–2. 130. Ibid., 18.2.2. 131. Chancey, Myth of a Gentile Galilee, 54; Josephus, War of the Jews, 2.12.3–8; Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 20.6.1–3. The Samaritans 203 Jewish manner.132 As such then, the Samaritans forged a kind of Jewish underclass—not considered quite legitimate as to be fully Jewish but legitimate enough that they might be allowed to enter the Jewish temple or that a Jewish person could buy their food; Samaritan illegitimacy was likely furthered once rabbinic Judaism took shape and the Pharisaical sect became dominant, pushing out Sadducean, Essene, Christian, and other points of view. Jesus’s ministry and that of the early Christian church would have occurred in the midst of disagreements between the Samaritans and the other sects, and thus the Gospels reflect and play off of the Jewish views regarding the Samaritans. Jesus’s own views regarding the sect seem to place them in a category as similarly nebulous as that to which other Jews assigned them. They were not Gentiles nor Jews nor peoples of the former northern kingdom of Israel, and yet they could also be treated as if they were any one of the three. “Go not into the way of the Gentiles,” Jesus tells the twelve disciples when he sends them out, “and into the city of the Samaritans enter yet not: But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. 10:5– 6). Yet in Luke 17:11–19, as Jesus travels through Samaria and Galilee and is met by a set of ten lepers, he instructs the Samaritan among them to do as the others—that is, to show themselves to the priest and, thus, become cleansed. In this way, as Jesus held “them to the Levitical law, he included the Samaritan with the rest as an Israelite,” thus inferring the “acceptability of the Samaritan as a subject of the Jewish laws of purification at the temple.”133 At the same time, when the Samaritan proves to be the only one who returns to thank him, Jesus drops him out of the Israelite order: “There are not found that returned to give glory to God,” he says, “save this stranger” (Luke 11:18). 132. Montgomery, Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect, 160. 133. Ibid. 204 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered The Gospels also reflect the ongoing conflict between the two peoples. Not only was Jesus sometimes not welcome among the Samaritans but Jewish unbelievers thought Jesus akin to a Samaritan. “Say we not well that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?” John quotes the Jews as telling Jesus when they refused to listen to his message (John 8:48), thus equating Samaritan teaching with that of the great deceiver and Jesus perhaps with Samaritan wonderworkers who claimed to have come from heaven or to have some otherwise divine-like or Messianic status.134 Meanwhile, Jesus, on a trip through Samaria to Jerusalem, found that the people there would not receive him—precisely because his destination was Jerusalem rather than Gerizim, and he was left without a place to stay (Luke 9:51–58). Though in Matthew 10, Jesus tells his disciples not to go to the Samaritans, because his message was primarily to the Israelites (Matt. 15:24), various passages seem to foreshadow a ministry to the Gentiles—as well as to the Samaritans. In such passages, a faithful Samaritan appears as a foil to the Jewish people. The case, already mentioned (Luke 17:11–19), of the Samaritan leper who returns to thank Jesus is certainly one such instance. The intense desire of a Canaanite woman to have her daughter healed by Jesus while he retreated to Tyre and Sidon is another (Matt. 15:21–28), an interesting passage given that the Samaritans sometimes identified themselves with Sidonians.135 Indeed, with regard to the Gentiles in gen134. Purvis, “Fourth Gospel and the Samaritans,” 195–197. Among such teachers would have been Simon Magus and Dositheus, who was either Simon’s teacher or his follower. Montgomery, Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect, 55–56. Though Simon’s ministry is first noted in Acts 8:9, after Jesus’s death, the fact that Luke describes him as “beforetime” bewitching “the people of Samaria” suggests that Simon had been active for a while, possibly before Jesus’s death, with an earlier version of teachings, as Jesus had only been dead about a year or two when Philip entered Samaria. 135. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 11.8.6, 12.5.5. The Samaritans 205 eral, one might also point to the example of the centurion who requests Jesus heal his servant from afar rather than bothering to come to his home, an appeal that draws from Jesus much admiration (Matt. 8:5–13, Luke 7:2–10): “I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel,” he says (Matt. 8:10, Luke 7:9). Perhaps the greatest example of the Samaritan as foil, however, occurs in the parable of the Good Samaritan, wherein a Jewish priest and a Levite pass by a man who has been mugged and left half dead, but a Samaritan picks up the man, takes him to a hostel, and pays for the man’s recovery (Luke 10:30–37). The parable is told in response to a lawyer wishing to “justify himself” after receiving Jesus’s answer regarding what to do to inherit eternal life—that is, keep the law (Luke 10:25–29). In a society where possessing the law, biblical as well as oral, was a point of pride and where those who did not conform to the oral law, as the Pharisees and scribes did, were seen as unworthy to socialize with, Jesus’s parable points to the idea that even a stranger is one’s neighbor, and a Samaritan, showing concern for the stranger, was in fact the one better complying with the law. One of the most noteworthy interactions Jesus had with the Samaritans arose in a conversation he had with a woman at a well on Gerizim while traveling through the land (John 4:1–30, 39–42). This particular incident demonstrates well some of the Samaritan obsessions and also plays off the Samaritan ideas of the Messiah. Although the concept of Messiah does not appear to have played as central a role in Samaritan tradition as it has in the traditions of Jews and Christians, the idea clearly had a following in the first and second centuries.136 For the Samaritans, the Messiah is usually identified with the Taheb, a figure who 136. Stephen Haar, Simon Magus: The First Gnostic? (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), 166; Montgomery, Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect, 243. 206 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered is to restore all things—that is, bring the world to repentance via adherence to God’s laws—based on the passage in Deuteronomy 18:18–19: “I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee [Moses], and will put my words in his mouth; and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him. And it shall come to pass, that whosoever will not hearken unto my words which he shall speak in my name, I will require it of him.”137 In this sense, the Messiah is identified in Samaritan views with Moses and, as a restorer of the law rather than the one who first brings it, is generally seen as someone who is lesser than Moses.138 Some commentators believe that the Samaritan who led others to attempt to ascend Mount Gerizim to view sacred vessels, eventually bringing about Pilate’s dismissal, was in fact a Messianic claimant, and it is also probable that similar later claimants contributed to the development and spread of Gnostic ideas.139 This same Taheb figure is likely whom the woman at the well initially had in mind as Jesus talked with her.140 True to the Samaritan focus on an alternative priesthood and temple, the woman at first is surprised that the Jewish Jesus would talk with her at all, even if just to request a drink of water. “How is it that thou, being a Jew, askest drink of me,” she asks, “which am a women of Samaria? for the Jews have no dealing with the Samaritans” (John 4:9). In the course of conversation, Jesus reveals to the woman that he knows that she has had five husbands and that the man she currently lives with is not officially 137. Montgomery, Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect, 243; Purvis, “Fourth Gospel and the Samaritans,” 18. 138. Montgomery, Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect, 243; Purvis, “Fourth Gospel and the Samaritans,” 190. 139. Hall, “From John Hyrcanus,” 39; Montgomery, Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect, 43; Purvis, “Fourth Gospel and the Samaritans,” 182, 195. 140. Montgomery, Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect, 243; Purvis, “Fourth Gospel and the Samaritans,” 183. The Samaritans 207 married to her, a set of facts that causes her to perceive him to be a prophet (John 4:17–19). When she then raises the Gerizim versus Jerusalem home of the temple as a point of contention between the two peoples (John 4:20), although Jesus points her toward the Jewish God (“Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship: for salvation is of the Jews”—John 4:), he also seemingly critiques both points of view: “The hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father. . . . But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth” (John 4:1, 3). Jesus then goes on to identify himself not simply as a prophet in the spirit of Moses but as supreme, through his adoption of “I am” terminology from Exodus: “I that speak unto you am” (John 4:6).141 The observations with regard to woman’s life causes her to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, which in turn causes her to bring others to see him and accept him as the “Saviour of the world” (John 4:4). That many Samaritans, in the end, were receptive to Jesus and his teachings is evident from their interaction with the early Christian church and the fact that the specific region is listed among those to whom the gospel should go (Acts 1:8). Indeed, as persecution of the Christian faith in Jerusalem intensified, many early Jewish followers, Acts notes, “scattered abroad throughout the regions of Judaea and Samaria” (Acts 8:1). In time, Philip, Peter, John, Paul, and Barnabas also passed through Samaria, bringing with them Jesus’s message and building churches (Acts 8:5–8, 14, 25; 9:31–32; and 15:3). Because the Samaritan faith mirrored those of the Jewish sects in many aspects (Sabbath keeping, food regulation, and most notably circumcision), the fate of those who 141. Martina Bohm, “Samaritans in the New Testament,” Religions 11, no. 3 (2020), sec. 2.3, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11030147. 208 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered adhered to the religion would prove to be similar to that of the Jewish people during their efforts to throw off Roman rule in 66–70 CE and, even more so, in 132–135 CE. In the former, the city of Sebaste (formerly Samaria) would be burned to the ground, never to be fully restored, and many Samaritans also participated in the uprising, though most other towns avoided a similar fate.142 After the Bar Kochba revolt of 132–135 CE, however, the Samaritans would suffer a far worse tribulation. In the war’s aftermath, the Roman emperor Hadrian would ban the practice of various Jewish rites, including that of circumcision, thrusting the Samaritans who continued to exercise their faith into the same legal jeopardy as their Jewish neighbors.143 Further, Hadrian destroyed virtually all Samaritan records and set up a temple to Jupiter at the most holy Samaritan site on Mount Gerizim, as he also did in Jerusalem.144 Such actions would have made difficult the continuing of the Samaritan sect in its heavily Jewish form, including any form of Christianity that maintained Jewish practices. However, it is possible that many Samaritans were already in the process of abandoning such customs—or had never really adhered to them, given the differing definitions we have for the term, earlier mentioned (practitioners of the religion, Israelites from the former northern kingdom, or people dwelling in the region). Simon the Magician Among the Samaritans that Philip, Peter, and John met was a magician named Simon, whom Luke, in Acts 8:8– 11, claims had once had a following among the Samaritans. This Simon, Luke tells us, “beholding the miracles 142. Montgomery, Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect, 86–87. 143. Ibid., 90. 144. Ibid., 91–92. Simon the Magician 209 and signs which were done” by Philip, marveled and was even baptized (Acts 8:13). Only after the apostles Peter and John arrived to lay hands on those who had been baptized did Simon perceive how such miracles and signs were wrought—namely, through the Holy Spirit by the laying on of the apostles’ hands (Acts 8:14–19). Simon then offered to pay for the power to give others the Holy Spirit through his own hands but was rebuffed: “Thy money perish with thee,” Peter said, “because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money” (Acts 8:0). The presence of this account in the scriptures suggests that Simon would go on to have some kind of importance to the history of the church as it would develop, as indeed he would if we are to believe such second-century writers as Justin Martyr, Hippolytus of Rome, and Irenaeus of Lyons. In fact, the latter would comment that “all sorts of heresies derive their origin from him,” a claim that would by the time of the church historian Eusebius in the fourth century be stretched into Simon being “the author of all heresy.”145 The historicity of Simon and the things attributed to him, however, have proven problematic for modern historians, whose reactions have “ranged from denying his existence to agreeing with the assessment of Irenaeus that he was the father of the Gnostic movement which threatened the existence of Christianity in the second century.”146 One problem is that little of the information we have about Simon is firsthand—in fact, most subsequent accounts of 145. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, 1.23.2, Early Christian Writings, http://www .earlychristianwritings.com/text/irenaeus-book1.html; Eusebius, Church History, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert, from Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. 1, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo, N.Y.: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1890), .13.6, rev. and ed. by Kevin Knight for New Advent, http://www.newadvent .org/fathers/250102.htm. 146. Haar, Simon Magus, 33. 210 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered Simon’s teachings seem based on those of Hippolytus or Irenaeus, whose own accounts may have been based on a lost one of Justin, and already by the time of the former two, Simon had a certain legend built around him, as evidenced by the late second-century Acts of Peter, wherein the apostle Peter and Simon take part in what is essentially a magic showdown, with Peter sending a talking dog and a talking baby to Simon, and Simon and Peter appearing before Roman officials killing and raising a boy from the dead to convince the people whom they “ought truly to believe.”147 In fact, the details of Justin’s and Irenaeus’s accounts are so mixed up and “confusing that it has been supposed that two Simons are referred to.”148 As G. R. S. Mead puts it in his classic study of Simon, “So eager were the fathers to discredit Simon that they contradict themselves in the most flagrant fashion on many important points.”149 Meanwhile, Hippolytus’s account, though probably providing actual “access to some of the writings of the Simonians,” may not in fact be by Hippolytus at all and, as with later accounts, borrows much of its source material from Irenaeus.150 The attempt of Simon to obtain the Holy Spirit in Acts, however, occurs within the context of him already having forged a following, having used sorcery to bewitch “the people of Samaria, giving out that himself was some great one: To whom they all gave heed, from the least to the 147. Ibid., 2; G. R. S. Mead, Simon Magus: An Essay on the Founder of Simonianism Based on the Ancient Sources with a Re-evaluation of His Philosophy and Teachings (1892), part 2, Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/189/189-h/189-h.htm; The Acts of Peter, trans. M. R. James (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), secs. 3.9 and 3.12 (dog), sec. 3.15 (baby), secs. 3.23–30 (Roman counsel), sec. 3.23 (quote), Early Christian Writings, http:// www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/actspeter.html. 148. Mead, Simon Magus, part 2. 149. Ibid. 150. Ibid. Simon the Magician 211 greatest, saying, This man is the great power of God” (Acts 8:9–10). Such a following among the Samaritans, however, poses another potential problem—namely that, as James Alan Montgomery writes, “his claim to be the Great Power of God represents nothing we find in Samaritan doctrine, whose Messianism was of a very primitive type. Further, he left behind no influence, either upon Samaritan religion or upon its historical traditions.”151 One issue, of course, may be the fact that Montgomery here focuses on the faith, whereas the author of Acts may be referring more broadly to the people living in the area. Indeed, Montgomery acknowledges such a possibility when he writes that Simon “probably found his following rather amongst the Hellenistic population of Samaria, than in the Samaritan sect.”152 Even Justin Martyr’s claim that the Samaritans “acknowledge [Simon] as the first god” is caught up in this set of contradictions regarding usage of the term “Samaritan,” as he appears to use it to reference the ethnic group at times and other times residents of Samaria.153 Such difficulties cause the scholar Bruce Hall to conclude that if Luke was not simply mistaken in his claim about Simon’s influence on the Samaritans, then likely “the Simonian movement began among the Samaritans, spread to the Gentiles, and did not flourish among the Samaritans.”154 Despite the claims of historians to the contrary, however, some scholars, such as Jarl Fossum, have hit upon some possible solutions to how Simon Magus could have had an appeal even among those of the Samaritan faith, notwithstanding, for example, its antipathy to any kind of 151. Montgomery, Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect, 268. 152. Ibid. 153. Justin Martyr, First Apology, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, chap. 26, Early Christian Writings, http://www .earlychristianwritings.com/text/justinmartyr-firstapology.html; Haar, Simon Magus, 163; Hall, “From John Hyrcanus,” 45–47. 154. Hall, “From John Hyrcanus,” 50. 212 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered anthropomorphism of God. In Fossum’s analysis, Simon’s claim to be “the great power of God” is key, as the term itself “has a Samaritan derivation.”155 Fossum sees the name as divine, and this divinity can find expression not just in God but in God’s appearance among men, an intermediary otherwise known as the “Glory,” as in the glory that appeared to Moses in the bush on Mount Sinai (Ex. 3:2).156 The function of the Glory is to both conceal and reveal God to men.157 Other expressions of this “great power” include Melchizedek and the angel of the Lord.158 As such, Simon’s claim to be the “great power” was that he was the “manifestation of God in human form,” in essence playing a role much like Jesus, with one essential difference, if we accept Irenaeus’s description of Simon’s assertions—namely that Simon “appeared among the Jews as the Son, but descended in Samaria as the Father while he came to other nations in the character of the Holy Spirit.”159 In other words, the essence of Simon was not really human but rather simply an appearance, via an intermediary state, of the great power, or as Hippolytus would put it: “This man who is born of blood is (the aforesaid) habitation, and that in him resides an indefinite power, which he affirms to be the root of the universe.”160 At one time (among the Jewish people), he had come as the son of God, and then among the Samaritans, he came as the Father of all, whom the Son had spoken of.161 In each case, he “had descended, transfigured and assimilated . . . so that he might appear among men to 155. Fossum, “Sects and Movements,” 363. 156. Ibid., 365–366. 157. Ibid. 158. Ibid., 369, 372. 159. Ibid., 371; Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.23.1. 160. Hippolytus of Rome, The Refutation of All Heresies, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, 10.8, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/hippolytus6.html. 161. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.23.1; Hippolytus of Rome, Refutation of All Heresies, 6.14. Simon the Magician 213 be a man, while yet he was not a man,” and in the case of being the son, “he was thought to have suffered in Judaea, when he had not suffered.”162 The claim to be an appearance of God becomes even more apparent in his taking on of yet another name: “He who stood, stands, and will stand,” as Hippolytus denotes, or “the Standing One,” as it is put the PseudoClementines.163 In making such a claim, Simon essentially made himself equivalent to the divine “I am,” while also taking on immortality, having always existed and continuing always to exist.164 It also allowed him to equate himself with Moses or with the prophet to come who would be like Moses (Deut. 18:15, 18–19), for in some Samaritan traditions, Moses never died and, as noted earlier, even ascended to heaven; Simon claimed to have come down from heaven.165 Another idea that would put Simon in line with Samaritan beliefs would be his rejection of the Jewish prophets, in accordance with the edict against false prophets in Deuteronomy 18:20–22, as, the Samaritans believed, they “uttered their predictions under the inspiration of those angels who formed the world . . . to bring men into bondage.”166 Such a teaching with regard to the angels and creation, however, would have gone against “the [general] Samaritan doctrine . . . that God was the creator of all things,” though we may have a hint of Simon’s views in the fourth-century Samaritan poet-theologian Marka who believed that “the angels were emanations from the Glory.”167 162. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.23.3. 163. Hippolytus of Rome, Refutation of All Heresies, 10.8, http:// www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/hippolytus10.html; PseudoClementines as referenced in Fossum, “Sects and Movements,” 384. 164. See Haar, Simon Magus, 86; Fossum, “Sects and Movements,” 384–385. 165. Fossum, “Sects and Movements,” 380–38, 388. 166. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.23.3; see also Fossum, “Sects and Movements,” 389. 167. Montgomery, Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect, 221, 222. 214 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered If even a small number of Samaritans shared such a view in the first century (as Fossum would seem to imply in claiming the angel of the Lord was one of the appearances of God), then Simon may well have adapted that view to fit his own theology. For Simon, the angels were in fact two levels removed from him as the great power and Father over all. Angels had, in effect, been created by his thought (Ennoea), who was “the first conception of his mind” and “the mother of all.” I’ll let Irenaeus take it from here: This Ennoea [i.e., mental act] leaping forth from him, and comprehending the will of her father, descended to the lower regions, and generated angels and powers, by whom . . . [in turn] this world was formed. But after she had produced them [the angels], she was detained by them through motives of jealousy, because they were unwilling to be looked upon as the progeny of any other being. . . . She suffered all kinds of insulting behavior from them, so that she could not return upwards to her father, but was even shut up in a human body, and for ages passed in succession from one female body to another, as from vessel to vessel.168 In the first century, Ennoea found home in the body of one Helen, a prostitute. It was to rescue her from this continuing reincarnation in a human body that Simon had taken on a human form and come to earth—and just as he had saved the Ennoea/Helen from bondage to physical being, brought about by angels who wished preeminence for themselves, so too Simon promised to free human beings from theirs. The key to this, if we are to believe Irenaeus’s summation, was accepting Simon’s grace. In doing so, such 168. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.23.2. Simon the Magician 215 people—such souls or spirits, as we might put it in more contemporary nomenclature—would be spared the eventual dissolution of the physical world.169 Hippolytus goes further in discussing Simon’s concepts of the great power and salvation, most especially Simon’s notions regarding a duality of being, an inner essence and an outer presentation, what one might read as akin to a spiritual immortal soul or spirit and a physical temporal body. Simon as the great power was essentially a manifestation of God in flesh, an avatar, if one were to use the terminology of the Eastern religions.170 In one metaphorical example that Simon used, Hippolytus notes that Simon equated the great power to fire.171 Such an idea would have had its correspondence in Greek philosophy, which posited that the First Cause or Universal Principle was fire— or “Divine Light”; such symbology also had its equivalent in ancient religions that “regarded fire and the sun as the most fitting symbols of Deity.”172 Simon claimed that this fire consisted of two parts—a secret part and a visible part. The visible fire, which corresponded to the senses, derived its being from the secret fire, which corresponded to intellect. Further, the visible fire was like the appendages of a tree—the branches, the leaves, the bark—while the secret fire was like the tree itself. When this tree was burned up at the end of the world, all of the former (leaves, branches, bark), he noted, would be consumed by the latter (the tree), except for the fruit.173 169. Ibid., 1.23.3. 170. Mead, Simon Magus, part 3. 171. Hippolytus of Rome, Refutation of All Heresies, 6.4, 10.8. 172. Mead, Simon Magus, part 3. On Stoicism and divine fire, see also Walter H. Wagner, After the Apostles: Christianity in the Second Century (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 49; and Alan Knight, Primitive Christianity in Crisis (Antioch, Calif.: A.R.K. Research, 2003), 18. 173. Hippolytus of Rome, Refutation of All Heresies, 6.4, 10.8. 216 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered In this sense, Simon appears to have been playing off ideas similar to those in various biblical passages—the fire being drawn from the bush that burned but did not burn up in which God first appeared to Moses (Ex. 3) but with a role similar to that in Jesus’s parable of the wheat and the chaff (Matt. 13:24–30), with some being burned up and some living on. The tree metaphor also finds its corollary in Jesus’s reference to himself as the vine, separate from which no man can live and from which, if as a branch, one bears no fruit, one will be cast off and burned (John 15:1–6). The ultimate goal of a believer, in Simon’s theology, was to be one of the bearers of fruit—or rather, to become the fruit itself. Being a fruit constituted a change in terms of what one affixed oneself to within the dual nature. Borrowing perhaps from Plato and other Greek philosophers, Simon asserted that we are created with both a countable and an uncountable part, a physical and a spiritual, a visible and an invisible.174 Those who fail to find within themselves their full divine potential will fade away with the physical, but others who receive “proper instruction and teaching” become “equal and similar to the unbegotten and indefinite power,” in essence the great power themselves; as such, the uncountable part, the spiritual part, the invisible part, Simon claimed, rests within human beings.175 It is in this manner that, as Justin Martyr puts it, Simon likely “persuaded those who adhered to him that they should never die.”176 Such ideas also had their antecedents in ancient Chaldean religions and in the work of Heraclitus of Ephesus (503 BCE), who likewise professed an affinity to a “selfkindled and self-extinguishing” fire as emblematic of the “one Eternal Reality” that was the “quickening power of 174. Ibid., 6.4. 175. Ibid., 6.11. 176. Justin Martyr, First Apology, chap. 26. Simon the Magician 217 the universe” and in which all things had their being.177 (Like Xenophanes and many other Greek philosophers succeeding him, Heraclitus professed a single supreme God.) While the physical body for humans—indeed, the physical world—was temporal, the fire constituted “the Self . . . a portion of the Divine Intelligence” that rested in every person.178 Similar to Simon, Heraclitus believed this fire in its purest form to reside in the highest heaven; the souls of human beings, as portions of that fire, were said to have descended from that heaven, like the rays of the sun, and to be in “exile here on Earth.”179 Similarly, the Chaldean Oracles, accredited to the ancient Persian prophet Zoroaster, posited that “all things are generated from One Fire.”180 Such beliefs made their way also into the Jewish religion, most specifically in the concept of “Hidden Light” that would forge one of the tenets of Jewish Kabbalah mysticism, a concept, with which Simon, as a Samaritan, was likely familiar and from which he may well have based some of his beliefs.181 As G. R. S. Mead notes, “The identity of [Simon’s] ideas and the probability . . . that the Initiated of antiquity all drew from the same sources, shows that there was nothing original in the main features of the Simonian system.”182 Indeed, unlike the Samaritans, as their religion has come down to us, but like many Jewish people of the diaspora, including, for example, the Alexandrian Philo, Simon interpreted the Torah in a heavily allegorical manner such that he was able to make the scriptures speak to and 177. Mead, Simon Magus, part 3. Hippolytus, in fact, claims that Simon plagiarized from Heraclitus. Hippolytus of Rome, Refutation of All Heresies, 6.4. 178. Mead, Simon Magus, part 3. 179. Ibid. 180. Ibid. 181. Ibid. 182. Ibid. 218 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered about his system in ways that fit the larger religious and philosophical beliefs around him. The Torah, in his reckoning, became a tale of the birth of human beings, showing the divine potential forged within each of us.183 Each of the five books of the Torah represented one of the five senses—Genesis, vision; Exodus, hearing; Leviticus, smell; Numbers, taste; and Deuteronomy, touch—by which one could come to a knowledge of the universe.184 The Spirit of God, who was an image of the indefinite power, forged humans in the Garden of Eden, Paradise, which represented the womb; humans then passed through the Red Sea, which, sharing a name with the color of blood, represented birth.185 By the instruction offered in the scriptures, humans could turn the bitter water of life, drunk by the Israelites in the wilderness, following their metaphorical birth in the Red Sea, into sweet water and thus reach their full potential.186 Such allegorical readings may have led some to misunderstand the teachings of Simon—and the accompanying practices of Simon’s followers—just as early Christian practices and their accompanying symbology were often misunderstood by pagan detractors who accused Christians of, for example, cannibalism and rampant sexual immorality.187 The latter accusation was also, as it turns out, one made against Simon and his followers. 183. Hippolytus of Rome, Refutation of All Heresies, 6.9–11; potential is specifically discussed in 6.11. 184. Hippolytus of Rome, Refutation of All Heresies, 6.10–11. 185. Ibid., 6.9–10. 186. Ibid., 6.10–11. 187. Such accusations against Christians are documented, among other places, in Justin Martyr, Second Apology, chap 12; The Octavius of Minucius Felix, chaps. 9 and 28; and Origen, Contra Celsus, 6.27. For more on this subject, see Bart Wagemakers, “Incest, Infanticide, and Cannibalism: Anti-Christian Imputations in the Roman Empire,” Greece & Rome 57, no. 2 (October 2010): 337–354, http://www.jstor .com/stable/40929483. Simon the Magician 219 Irenaeus, for example, observed that the result of Simon’s teaching led to hedonism. He remarked that devotees to Simon claimed to be “free” and “live as they please,” since their own righteous actions accounted for nothing. Rather, the “precepts” written by the (probably Jewish) prophets under the inspiration of the angels were meant to bring men into bondage.188 Simon’s priests, Irenaeus noted, lived “profligate lives.”189 Hippolytus, similarly, accused Simon’s followers of promoting “the necessity of promiscuous intercourse, . . . asserting that this is perfect love.”190 The degree to which Simon was actually against biblical law and encouraged sexual profligacy may have been overstated, however, as Jarl Fossum brings out. No doubt, as a Samaritan, Simon would have rejected the Jewish prophets and their teachings, and Irenaeus may have misinterpreted this as a rejection of all biblical law and, further, confused Simon’s views with those of other heretical groups, such as the followers of Marcion (discussed in chapter 4).191 Similarly, Hippolytus’s accusations regarding sexual misconduct could have been a misreading—a literalizing—of Simon’s allegorical teachings regarding the simultaneous unity and duality of the universal principle, with the male thinker, emanating from above, representing power, and the female, emanating from below (though originally derived from the thinker above), representing thought, together forging a “conjugal” oneness.192 (Of course, Irenaeus and Hippolytus may well have been stating true facts also, given the general sexual license within Roman culture and the fact that in some cases the descriptions provided regarding the beliefs of other groups Irenaeus and Hippoly188. 189. 190. 191. 192. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.23.3. Ibid., 1.23.4. Hippolytus of Rome, Refutation of All Heresies, 6.14. Fossum, “Sects and Movements,” 389. Hippolytus of Rome, Refutation of All Heresies, 6.13. 220 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered tus deemed heretical have proven to be more or less accurate when compared against the later discovered writings of said groups.)193 No matter the accuracy or lack thereof, such presentations of Simon fit well for Irenaeus’s and Hippolytus’s purposes—namely to demonstrate that Simon’s teachings were not only blasphemous but also morally corrupting. Nevertheless, numerous parallels to what would become Christian teachings can be seen in those of Simon, allowing the two sets of beliefs to be easily confused and some of the latter to be adopted into what would eventually become the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. Simon’s teaching regarding his identity—that is, that he was a manifestation of God—mirrored that of Jesus. Although the deaths of Jesus and Simon were likely separated by more than a decade, some later converts to Christianity might well have mistaken their teachings, or proponents of their teachings, for one other. And early on, some may well have thought that Simon was the risen Jesus, insofar as the latter was said to have been resurrected and the former claimed to be the incarnation of God and the Son of God to the Jews. Later Christians adopted other ideas similar to those of Simon, including the idea that God exists in a tripartite form (just as Simon claimed to be, at various times, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) and the idea that humans had an immortal soul that needed to be freed from the body so that it could go to heaven (though in Simon’s theology, it was a return to heaven). If Luke’s account in Acts 8:9–11 is accurate, Simon’s preaching was backed up by miracles—or as Luke and the early Christians put it, magic. The distinction between magic and religion was not as firm in ancient times as we 193. Haar, Simon Magus, 305; Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 121. Simon the Magician 221 would think of it as being today. Magic forged an important part of the “education of the Egyptian priests,” such that Pythagoras is said to have trained in Egypt before setting up his school of philosophy, as did several other preSocratic Greek philosophers.194 Writing in the first century CE, Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, equated the foundations of the eventual religious faith of the Jewish people to Egyptian magic also. “There is another sect,” he wrote, “also, of adepts in the magic art, who derive their origin from Moses [and] Jannes . . . Jews by birth, but many thousand years posterior to Zoroaster.”195 For Pliny, as mentioned in chapter 2, the Persian mystic Zoroaster was the main source of magic’s integration into Greek philosophy, as Plato and other Greeks traveled to Persia to learn from the magi, who were seen by first-century BCE Roman statesman Cicero as “Persian religious specialists,” an opinion shared by many in ancient Greece.196 Throughout ancient Greek society, as Martin Hengel puts it in his book Judaism and Hellenism, “The ‘wise men of the East,’ including the Indian Brahmans, the Persian ‘Magi,’ the Babylonian ‘Chaldeans’ and the Egyptian priests were regarded as special kinds of philosophers and bearers of higher knowledge, from whom answers were sought to questions of life which remained inaccessible to rational 194. George G. M. James, Stolen Legacy: Greek Philosophy Is Stolen Egyptian Philosophy (New York: Philosophical Library, 1954), 56, 12, http://www.jpanafrican.org/ebooks/eBook%20Stolen%20Legacy.pdf; also available at http://www.sacred-texts.com/afr/stle/stle08.htm. 195. Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, ed. John Bostock and H. T. Riley (London: Taylor and Francis, Red Lion Court, Fleet Street, 1855), 30.2, Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper /text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D30 %3Achapter%3D2. Jannes and Jambres, mistaken to be Jews by Pliny, were said to have been among the magicians who tried to counter Moses’s works before Pharaoh (2 Tim. 2:3). 196. Haar, Simon Magus, 53, 65. 222 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered thought.”197 And the realm of magic wasn’t limited to the East. On the Italian peninsula, the ancient Etruscans and Sabines were known as “necromancers, rainmakers, and water diviners.”198 The priestly Druids of the Gallic provinces, too, Pliny notes, were adept at magic.199 Pliny’s opinions with regard to magic were largely negative, his purpose in writing about it being “to refute the impostures of the magic art.”200 But even he acknowledged its influence on—indeed, integration with—many aspects of ancient society, including religion: That it first originated in medicine, no one entertains a doubt; or that, under the plausible guise of promoting health, it insinuated itself among mankind, as a higher and more holy branch of the medical art. Then, in the next place, to promises the most seductive and the most flattering, it has added all the resources of religion, a subject upon which, at the present day, man is still entirely in the dark. Last of all, to complete its universal sway, it has incorporated with itself the astrological art; there being no man who is not desirous to know his future destiny, or who is not ready to believe that this knowledge may with the greatest certainty be obtained, by observing the face of the heavens. The senses of men being thus enthralled by a three-fold bond, the art of magic has attained an influence so mighty, that at the present day 197. Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974), 212. 198. Haar, Simon Magus, 136. 199. Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, 30.4, http://www .perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02 .0137%3Abook%3D30%3Achapter%3D4. 200. Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, 30.1, http://www .perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02 .0137%3Abook%3D30%3Achapter%3D1. Simon the Magician 223 even, it holds sway throughout a great part of the world, and rules the kings of kings in the East.201 While denigrated publicly by many first-century CE intellectuals, magic continued to hold appeal among them privately and among the masses.202 Part of its denigration among the upper classes no doubt related to Greek attempts, in the years following Alexander’s invasion of Persia, to downplay Persian influence on its own culture.203 Dismissing Persian religious practices as mere superstition—perhaps even dangerous superstition—suited this purpose well.204 Among the subject peoples whose gods continued to be intimately connected to such practices, however, what some considered magic remained evidence of religious efficacy, such that, as Stephen Haar states, “magical beliefs and practices can hardly be overestimated in their importance for the daily life of people in the ancient Mediterranean world.”205 Or as George G. M. James puts it in his Stolen Legacy, “Magic was applied religion, or primitive scientific method.”206 No wonder then that the Jesus pointed to his miracles as evidence of his identity as the Messiah, telling two of John’s disciples, for example, when they came to inquire whether Jesus was the one they were looking for, “Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see: The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them” (Matt. 11:4–5). Or, in another place, when questioned about his identity—his ability to forgive sins—he raised a man sick of palsy (Matt. 9:2–7, Mark 2:1–12, Luke 5:17–25). No won201. 202. 203. 204. 205. 206. Ibid. Haar, Simon Magus, 138–139. Ibid., 68. Ibid. Ibid., 139. James, Stolen Legacy, 97. 224 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered der, also, that those who disbelieved Jesus did so by denigrating his miracles as being done not by the legitimate power of God but “by Beelzebub the prince of the devils” (Matt. 12:24). No doubt similar accusations and appraisals followed Simon and his followers with regard to their own wonder working.207 Such would have fit into a culture in which, as Eusebius put it in his description of the practices of the followers of the pagan religions in the Roman Empire of his day, “prophecies and oracles are continually talked of, and cures and healing of all sorts of illness, and punishments of the impious.”208 And indeed, as the first century CE passed into the second and third, increasingly, even among the elites, as Ramsay MacMullen observes in his general history of paganism in the Roman Empire, “enchantments, trances, and wonder-working raise[d] no laugh; rather, fear and awe”—that is, the distance between religion and magic that had manifested itself among the elite during the early Roman Empire diminished until largely disappearing under Constantine.209 As Pliny the Elder’s comments demonstrate, those interacting with the Jewish people were also often caught up in this fascination with magic and looked to the Jewish people specifically for such abilities. In a religious world where “my miracle is your magic” and where Simon may have “claimed to have been the Prophet of Moses,”210 miracles or magic would not only have been expected but also would have served as a basis for much of his appeal not only among the Samaritans but more significantly among those outside Samaria. Practitioners of the Jewish faith were often thought to possess “’higher powers, especially 207. See, for example, beyond Acts 8, Hippolytus of Rome, The Refutation of All Heresies, 6.15; Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.23.4. 208. Quoted in Ramsay MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 98. 209. MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, 72. 10. Fossum, “Sects and Movements,” 380. Simon the Magician 225 in connection with the holy name of God.”211 As a Samaritan, Simon may well have played off such a stereotype, as did other Jewish teachers—and it was among such Jewish teachers in the diaspora, outside the land of Judah, that the mixing of biblical teachings and pagan ideas became commonplace such that “we find evidence for Jewish-pagan mixed cults in various inscriptions in Asia Minor.”212 So, too, we find Greek-educated Jews whose radical allegorization of the scriptures robbed them of their literal meaning and moral authority.213 Thus, Martin Hengel claims, “The broad field of Jewish magic,” of which a Samaritan like Simon would have been a part, “. . . led to open syncretism.”214 Still, that Simon’s appeal among the Samaritans, such that, as Justin Martyr would claim, “almost all the Samaritans, and a few even of other nations, worship him,” would lead Eusebius to claim him as “the author of all heresy” ten to fifteen decades later seems strange, even if we believe Eusebius’s statement comes with a great deal of hyperbole.215 Samaria forged just a small sector of the ancient land of Israel, and the Samaritan religion and its people forged just a small, largely obscure sect. How could Simon’s views, even if eventually accepted by “almost all the Samaritans,” have spread so widely as to threaten the teachings of a Christian church that had begun among mainstream Jewish sects and spread to a wide array of non-Jewish, non-Samaritan peoples? The answer to this question may reside both in how we define the Samaritan people and in how we think about their religion. Certainly, the sect today is small, and its beliefs compa211. Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism, 241. 212. Ibid., 308. 213. Ibid. 214. Ibid. 215. Justin Martyr, First Apology, chap. 26; Eusebius, Church History, 2.13.6. 226 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered rable to those of mainstream Judaism, save for its separate priesthood, its calendar (something about which even some Jewish sects differ), and its acceptance of only the Torah as scripture. In the first century, however, Samaritans, like the Jewish people, were spread throughout the empire in probably roughly equivalent numbers.216 And just as many diaspora Jews took on Greek customs, or tried to meld Greek philosophy with Jewish scripture, so too likely did scattered Samaritans, perhaps to the extent that they eventually lost their unique alt-Jewish Samaritan identity. In fact, Ernest L. Martin, noting the victory of rabbinic Judaism over other sects after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple and its highly antisyncretistic inclination, claims most “Jewish-pagan mixed cults” that show up in archeology were in fact Samaritan in origin rather than what became mainstream Jewish.217 Though the writings of Philo and other Jewish people of the diaspora would seem to make clear that syncretism of Jewish scripture with non-Jewish thought did occur enough that it would affect Christian groups coming into being from among the Jewish people at that time, a large number of Jewish-pagan syncretistic ideas among Christian believers certainly could have derived from Samaritan sects—and from other peoples from the eastern portions of the Roman Empire. Indeed, Martin also draws on evidence, especially the work of the historian Tenney Frank, that shows that the makeup of the Roman peoples changed significantly from the first century BCE to the time of Constantine, as slaves from the eastern portions of the Roman Empire, from which the Samaritans derived (as a mix of peoples imported to Israel from the Babylonian Empire 216. Cohen, From the Maccabees, 170; Martin People That History Forgot, chap. 6, http://www.askelm.com/people/peo006.htm. 217. Martin, People That History Forgot, chap. 4, “Who Built the Idolatrous Synagogues?,” http://www.askelm.com/people/peo004 .htm. Simon the Magician 227 and possibly a few nonexported Israelites), made up more and more of the population on the Italian peninsula, bringing with them their various customs and religious ideas.218 In fact, Martin estimates that even by the first century CE, 90 percent of those living in Italy were from the eastern portions of the empire.219 Support for this can be found in the inscriptions evident in Rome and other parts of Italy; Tenney Frank and his colleagues examined 13,900 of them and found that 75 percent “bore names of foreign derivation,” the vast majority of them Greek.220 Certainly one could hypothesize that Greek names were simply popular, but Frank’s further examination of family names shows that Greek fathers usually gave their children Latin names but Roman fathers rarely gave theirs Greek names.221 Nor did the change in the makeup of the population go unnoticed among the ruling class, as evidenced by laws, enacted during Augustus’s reign, encouraging freeborn citizens of Rome to have more children in attempt to reverse the trend.222 Martin goes on to discuss the significance of Stoicism, which proved so popular in first-century Rome, being more of an Eastern philosophy than a Western, stemming originally not even from Greece but from Phoenicia—and further back from Babylon—for its founder Zeno, as noted 218. Martin, People That History Forgot, chaps. 11, 12, and 17, http://www.askelm.com/people/peo011.htm, http://www.askelm .com/people/peo014.htm, http://www.askelm.com/people/peo019 .htm. Martin draws much of his argument from Tenney Frank, “Race Mixture in the Roman Empire,” American Historical Review 21, no. 4 (July 1916): 689–708, http://www.jstor.com/stable/1835889. 219. Martin, People That History Forgot, chap. 11. 220. Ibid. 1. Frank, “Race Mixture,” 69–693. . Arnold Mackay Duff, Freedman in the Early Roman Empire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928), 191, cited in Martin, People That History Forgot, chap. 11. 228 The Alt-Jewish World Jesus Entered in chapter 2, was not a Greek but “a native of Citium, a Phoenician colony in Crete.”223 As Martin surmises: When, during the Greek period, the religions in Greece took a back seat to the study of philosophy, and many influential people were abandoning their ancient religious allegiances, the Chaldeans entered the new field by creating a philosophy of their own, a philosophy which would retain the gods and at the same time be attractive to intellectuals. Thus, Stoicism was born. . . . It is clear that Stoicism is Babylonian philosophy. Its teachings and doctrines were accepted with open arms in Italy. The new Romans brought their religions with them, and they . . . also brought their philosophical beliefs with them.224 Thus, as a Samaritan who adapted Jewish scriptures and Stoic philosophical tenets, among other sources, for his own purposes, Simon would have been teaching a mixture of ideas that many in Rome were already to some extent familiar with and, thus, would have an easier time understanding and adopting. With Rome as the center of the Western world and with many of Simon’s ideas having derived from Eastern sources, it is easy to understand how teachings like his could have easily influenced any religious sect taking shape and growing in popularity during the same period. And indeed, as we turn next to the Gnostic world Jesus entered, that appears to be what happened. 223. J. B. Lightfoot, St. Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians (1868; New York: Macmillan, 1896), 273, quoted in Martin, People That History Forgot, chap. 17. 224. Martin, People That History Forgot, chap. 17. Chapter 4 The Gnostic World Jesus Entered Early Christian historians claim that Simon’s ideas forged the foundation for the heresies that would wrack the early church. Today, we would call most of the teachings described Gnosticism. Few, if any, of the sects that have come to be known as practitioners of what scholars call “Gnosticism,” however, would have used such a term to identify themselves in their day.1 The term “Gnostic,” as applied to the body of believers who had ideas similar to those noted of Simon, in fact, may not have come into usage until 1669 in a treatise by Henry More against Catholicism.2 Irenaeus and most other early polemicists simply used the term “Gnostic” for the various heresies they addressed, as if Gnostics were all of one nature and origin.3 Many, if not most, such “Gnostics” rather would have considered 1. Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism? (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 2; Stephen Haar, Simon Magus: The First Gnostic? (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), 242; Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (1979; New York: Vintage Books, 1989), xix. 2. King, What Is Gnosticism?, 7; Haar, Simon Magus, 242. 3. King, What Is Gnosticism?, 7, 31–32; Haar, Simon Magus, 89–90. 230 The Gnostic World Jesus Entered themselves Christians or sometimes even Jews.4 Given the wide disparity of beliefs the term is used to describe, a precise definition of the term, despite its widespread use, has proven difficult for scholars to construct.5 Despite the protests of many second-century Christian writers, Christianity, as a religion arising in the East and then spreading with its followers to Rome and, thus, throughout the West, can be seen as perhaps a religion whose tenets are similar to those of the magician who it tried hard to denounce. The Christianity we know may in fact be, in many ways, the faith that Simon founded. Indeed, Simon’s teachings, as described in the writings of Hippolytus and Irenaeus share many parallels with those of various sects that scholars generally categorize as Gnostic: among them, a soul within each person descended from the heavens whose goal is to reattain its place in the divine sphere; angelic or other godlike beings who are lesser emanations of the ultimate deity; a spirit manifestation (Jesus) of God that has only the appearance of being human (a belief that would come to be called Docetism); and the allegorization of scripture. In fact, each of these ideas would have their correspondence with the philosophical and religious tenets of the day. Allegory Allegory wasn’t just a tool of Simon the Magician’s. It was also a common method that the Jewish people used to interpret scripture, one that Paul, Peter, and Jesus all put into play (see, for example, Paul’s use of Israel’s passage through the Red Sea as a metaphor for baptism in 1 Corinthians 10:2, Peter’s similar use of the rite in reference to 4. Pagels, Gnostic Gospels, 104; Alan Knight, Primitive Christianity in Crisis (Antioch, Calif.: A.R.C. Research, 2003), 90. 5. Haar, Simon Magus, 242. Allegory 231 Noah’s flood in 1 Peter 3:0–1; or Jesus’s use of Jonah’s three days and nights in a great fish as a sign of the resurrection in Matthew 12:40). Such was also the practice of Jewish writers like Philo who would apply scriptural interpretation to Greek philosophical tenets, even as he decried others who did so in ways with which he did not agree, namely by “rob[bing] the law of its literal meaning.”6 So, too, did Greek thinkers use allegory in reference to the ancient myths to explain their philosophical ideas, a custom that originated in response to the criticism by philosophers such as Xenophanes and Hericletus that the actions of the gods in works by Homer and other poets made the gods hardly worthy of worship.7 Thus, thereafter, philosophers such as Theagenes of Rhegium, who is actually credited with being the first to pursue the allegorical practice, would interpret myths to fit a particular moral or philosophical end.8 Theagenes, for example, argued that “the battle of the gods in Homer is really a description of the fight in nature between the primary elements and/or opposites.”9 The idea that people had within them a divine fire, or soul, that had descended from the heavens had its Greek corollary in which fire, as the lightest of the four elements 6. Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974), 308. See also Philo, On the Migration of Abraham, 16.89–93; and Shaye J. D. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1987), 207. 7. John E. Stambaugh and David L. Balch, The New Testament in Its Social Environment (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), 130; Walter H. Wagner, After the Apostles: Christianity in the Second Century (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 14; Knight, Primitive Christianity in Crisis, 11; Gerard Naddaf, “Allegory and the Origins of Philosophy,” in Logos and Muthos: Philosophical Essays in Greek Literature, ed. by William Wians (New York: State University of New York Press, 2009), 106–107. 8. Naddaf, “Allegory and the Origins,” 109. 9. Ibid. 232 The Gnostic World Jesus Entered in Hellenistic thinking, was the most heavenly, while the other three elements—air, water, and earth—each weighed the human being down, keeping the person bound to the material world.10 By “modeling [one’s] personality and conduct after the order and stability of the starry heavens” and refraining from the “uncontrolled emotion and passion . . . that [bound] man to this world,” Stoics reasoned, one could purify one’s soul enough that it could rise to the heavenly levels.11 Such Stoic concepts, in turn, as noted earlier, had Roman, Greek, Persian, and Babylonian pedigrees, as each culture adopted such philosophical tenets for its own.12 Gnostic ideas also had corollaries in the teachings of Plato, who posited similar views with regard to the soul being weighed down by the body and whose followers would claim that from the One, the First Cause, God, or whatever one wished to call the Supreme, “there emanated a bewildering series of other divine beings, spilling outwards like water from a fountain, so that between the One True Spirit and this material world there were large numbers and various kinds of divine intermediaries.”13 Christianity came into being within this milieu, and as such, it was only natural that such ideas would come to be reflected within its set of tenets as the first generation of Jesus’s followers died out and were replaced by diaspora Jews and Jewish converts, Samaritans, and nonJewish peoples, all of whom brought with them their own 10. Knight, Primitive Christianity in Crisis, 18. 11. Ibid. 12. Among those who have argued that Eastern religion, thought, myth, and astrology infiltrated Greek culture and thus all the Mediterranean world well before the advent of Christianity was the scholar Adolf von Harnack, author of What Is Christianity? and History of Dogma. See King, What Is Gnosticism?, 63. The process is also discussed in detail in part 1 of Knight, Primitive Christianity in Crisis. 13. Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 120; see also Wagner, After the Apostles, 48. The Importance of Knowledge 233 cultural prejudices and ways of thinking and none of whom had had direct contact with Jesus. The Importance of Knowledge Perhaps the most important trait of Gnosticism is related to the Greek term from which the varying sects get their name: gnosis—that is, knowledge. It was possession of this knowledge that set the advocates of such beliefs apart, insofar as knowledge in their view was the key to salvation, and most often this knowledge was secretly bestowed on those same advocates as they were the ones, they believed, destined to be saved. In a way, such views were not that different from many of the claims of biblical scripture. “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge,” God rails against Israel in Hosea 4:6, back in the Old Testament, showing forth a need for a more informed humanity, and when it came to New Testament times, both Jesus and the apostles emphasized the importance of knowledge in the Messiah’s saving work. Jesus himself would rail against the scribes for taking “away the key of knowledge” and for hindering others from using said key (Luke 11:52). As noted in chapter 2’s discussion of skepticism, Jesus claimed that people would come to “know the truth, and the truth [would] make [them] free” (John 8:3). Jesus himself claimed to be that truth (John 14:6), so knowing him and his teachings was essential to one’s being saved from temporal existence in this world. Yet Jesus also claimed that that knowledge was limited to a select few. In explaining to his disciples why he taught the masses in parables, he noted, “Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God: but to the rest in parables; that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand” (Luke 8:10–11; see also Matt. 13:10–18 and Mark 4:10–12). Not only did those who wrote the Gospel accounts emphasize the importance of knowledge to salvation, so too did the apostle Paul in his 234 The Gnostic World Jesus Entered letters. In Colossians 2:2–3, he notes that in God “are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” and in his first letter to Timothy, Paul ties salvation to knowledge when he writes that God “will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. :4). Such sayings and writings, no doubt, would have been useful to those with Gnostic leanings. But the connection between knowledge and salvation for Gnostic thinkers had a different emphasis and importance. For the writers of both the Old and New Testaments, knowledge was arguably affiliated with God, with forgiveness of sin—that is, atonement for living apart from God’s law—and with love. The rest of Hosea 4:6, for example, reads, “Because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.” Jesus, in Luke 1:77, claimed that part of his commission was “to give knowledge of salvation . . . by the remission of . . . sins.” In denying people understanding through the telling of parables, Jesus explicitly denoted that he was denying the ability of certain people to, at that time, be forgiven. As he puts it in Mark 4:12, “That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them.” And Paul, in his writings, would denote that “by the law is the knowledge of sin” (Rom. 3:20). Knowledge, for Paul, was thus demonstrated by letting one’s love abound (Philip. 1:9), apart from sin. So, too, for John, who would write, “We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren” (1 John 3:14). Indeed, as Paul would write, the ultimate goal of the Christian was to “know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God” (Eph. 3:19), something that was demonstrated by Christ’s death for humanity, or as Paul would put it in his first letter to the Corinthians: “I determined not to know The Importance of Knowledge 235 any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). In contrast to the New Testament writers who emphasized knowledge as being something that God alone had and that people reached outside themselves toward God to obtain, Gnostic teachers would emphasize that knowledge could be obtained by coming to understand how the eternal spark of God was already inside humans. As Elaine Pagels puts it in her book The Gnostic Gospels, in Gnostic understanding, “Instead of coming to save us from sin, [Jesus] comes as a guide who opens access to spiritual understanding.”14 Self-knowledge, as Pagels puts it, “is knowledge of God; the self and the divine are identical.”15 Sin is no longer so much the issue that needs addressing but ignorance.16 Certainly, New Testament scriptures can be used to bolster the idea that God is within each human and that what is needed is spiritual understanding; as such, those who advocated for Gnostic ideas likely saw themselves as in line with Jesus’s own teachings. “If a man love me,” Jesus told his disciples in John 14:23, “he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.” The apostle Paul would claim that God had “reveal[ed] his Son in [him]” (Gal. 1:15–16) and on many other occasions would reference Jesus being within believers (e.g., 2 Cor. 13:5; Rom. 8:10; and Col. 1:27). Both Peter and John, in works credited to their name, would in places talk of how believers are “of God.” Our goal is to “be partakers of the divine nature,” Peter would write in his second letter (2 Pet. 1:4). “We are of God,” John would write, “he that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth us not” (1 John 4:6). 14. Pagels, Gnostic Gospels, xx. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 124. 236 The Gnostic World Jesus Entered Gnostic teachers would emphasize such ideas and deemphasize the concept of sin as what separates God from man. Here, for example, is what Jesus teaches in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas (50–140 CE), a collection of sayings of the Messiah, some of which echo sayings in the synoptic Gospels but others of which focus on the self as the seat of salvation: “If those who lead you say to you, ‘See, the kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty.”17 A similar emphasis on self-knowledge forges the heart of the second-century Gnostic Gospel of Mary. “There is no such thing as sin,” Jesus is quoted as saying to the apostles, “rather you yourselves are what produces sin when you act in accordance with the nature of adultery, which is called ‘sin.’ For this reason, the Good came among you, pursuing (the good) which belongs to every nature. It will set it within its root.” Then he continued. He said, “This is why you get si[c]k and die: because [you love] what de[c]ei[ve]s [you]. . . . “[Ma]tter gav[e bi]rth to a passion which has no Image because it derives from what is contrary to nature. A disturbing confusion then occurred in the whole body. That is why I told you, ‘Become content at heart, while also remaining discontent and 17. Gospel of Thomas, verse 3, trans. Thomas O. Lambdin, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text /thomas-lambdin.html. The Importance of Knowledge 237 disobedient; indeed become contented and agreeable (only) in the presence of that other Image of nature.’”18 Sin, in the Gospel of Mary, while paralleling biblical admonitions, is most destructive not because it contravenes God’s will for humanity but because it is rooted in physical desire and thus separates humans from the spiritual knowledge contained within themselves. As Jesus notes, later in the same work, “The child of true Humanity exists within you. Follow it! Those who search for it will find it.” Jesus, as “the Good,” has shown us the way to do so. More such ideas regarding self-knowledge and the role of the savior can be found in this passage from the secondcentury Gospel of Truth: Ignorance of the Father brought about terror and fear. And terror became dense like a fog, that no one was able to see. Because of this, error became strong. . . . . . . [D]o not take error too seriously. . . . [S]ince it had no root, it was in a fog as regards the Father, engaged in preparing works and forgetfulnesses and fears in order, by these means, to beguile those of the middle and to make them captive. The forgetfulness of error was not revealed. . . . Forgetfulness did not exist with the Father, although it existed because of him. What exists in him is knowledge, which was revealed so that forgetfulness might be destroyed and that they might know the Father, Since forgetfulness existed because they did not know the Father, if they then come to know the Father, from that moment on forgetfulness will cease to exist. 18. Gospel of Mary, trans. Andrew Bernhard, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/gospelmary2.html. 238 The Gnostic World Jesus Entered That is the gospel of him whom they seek, which he has revealed to the perfect through the mercies of the Father as the hidden mystery, Jesus the Christ. Through him he enlightened those who were in darkness because of forgetfulness. He enlightened them and gave them a path. And that path is the truth which he taught them. . . . And as for him, them he found in himself, and him they found in themselves, that illimitable, inconceivable one, that perfect Father who made the all, in whom the All is, and whom the All lacks, since he retained in himself their perfection, which he had not given to the all.19 Here, the author gives little heed to sin as the object that separates man from God. Rather, such separation rests in “forgetfulness,” which can be overcome by a select and special few to whom the Father reveals knowledge of himself (through Jesus, who “gave them a path”), knowledge that already rests within such people. In fact, the idea that Jesus showed a path was in a manner of speaking a way of saying that every enlightened person was Jesus, which is the essence of Jesus’s opening lines to Thomas in late second- or third-century Book of Thomas the Contender: Now, since it has been said that you are my twin and true companion, examine yourself, and learn who you are, in what way you exist, and how you will come to be. Since you will be called my brother, it is not fitting that you be ignorant of yourself. And I know that you have understood, because you had already understood that I am the knowledge of the truth. So while you accompany me, although you are uncomprehending, you have 19. Gospel of Truth, trans. Robert M. Grant, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/gospeltruth.html. The Importance of Knowledge 239 (in fact) already come to know, and you will be called “the one who knows himself.” For he who has not known himself has known nothing, but he who has known himself has at the same time already achieved knowledge about the depth of the all.20 At the end of that same book, Jesus advises Thomas and others who would wish to have understanding to “watch and pray that you not come to be in the flesh, but rather that you come forth from the bondage of the bitterness of this life. . . . For when you come forth from the sufferings and passions of the body, you will receive rest from the good one, and you will reign with the king, you joined with him and he with you.”21 The advice is preceded by a series of woes, but unlike the woes to the Pharisees in Luke 11 and Matthew 23, which focus largely on their hypocrisy— their posing as spiritually superior for the physical reward of respect—many of the woes in The Book of Thomas the Contender pertain to merely having physical wants: “Woe to you who love intimacy with womankind and polluted intercourse with them! Woe to you in the grip of the powers of your body, for they will afflict you! Woe to you in the grip of the forces of the evil demons!”22 Certainly, Jesus, in the synoptic Gospels, denotes that a person must prioritize the spiritual over the physical. “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself,” Matthew 16:24–26 quotes Jesus as saying, “and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall 20. The Book of Thomas the Contender, trans. John D. Turner, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text /thomascontender.html. 21. Ibid. . Ibid. The “evil demons” is a point we will return to, since the concept fits well with certain Gnostic sects’ views of the divine universe. 240 The Gnostic World Jesus Entered find it. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”23 Luke 8:33 quotes Christ as saying that “whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple,” and earlier in that same chapter, Jesus says that any follower of him must hate “his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also” if that follower is to be Jesus’s disciple (Luke 8:26). Such sentiments would be extended in Gnostic works like The Book of Thomas the Contender to the degree that spiritual matters were not just to be prioritized over physical concerns but the flesh itself would come to be seen as corrupt. Such ideas also fit well with Stoic and Platonic teachings regarding the weighing down of the soul with the body. The Stoic philosopher Seneca would put his views this way, while dwelling on philosophical speculation in a letter to Lucilius. Such speculations, Seneca denoted, elevate and lighten the soul, which is weighted down by a heavy burden and desires to be freed and to return to the elements of which it was once a part. For this body of ours is a weight upon the soul and its penance; as the load presses down the soul is crushed and is in bondage, unless philosophy has come to its assistance and has bid it take fresh courage by contemplating the universe, and has turned it from things earthly to things divine. There it has its liberty, there it can roam abroad; meantime it escapes the custody in which it is bound, and renews its life in heaven.24 23. Parallel accounts appear in Mark 8:34–38 and Luke 9:23–26. 4. Seneca, “On the First Cause” (letter 65), in Moral Letters to Lucilius, trans. Richard M. Gummere (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1925), 65.16, Wikisource, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral _letters_to_Lucilius/Letter_65. The Importance of Knowledge 241 Note Seneca’s conclusion to the letter: “God’s place in the universe corresponds to the soul’s relation to man. Worldmatter corresponds to our mortal body; therefore let the lower serve the higher. Let us be brave in the face of hazards. Let us not fear wrongs, or wounds, or bonds, or poverty.”25 The Stoic, in other words, lives in the mind, on a higher spiritual plane; to give heed to physical travail is to ground one’s self in the earthly body rather than the heavenly soul. Plato’s views on the soul being weighed down by matter were discussed in chapter 2, but what’s interesting about his ideas, as he explains them in Phaedrus, is that like the Gnostic, he ties that weight at least on some level to a lack of knowledge. In the ten-thousand-year span of the reincarnation of a soul from its fall to the lower realms to its regaining of the higher, Plato says, There is a law of Destiny, that the soul which attains any vision of truth in company with a god is preserved from harm until the next period, and if attaining always is always unharmed. But when she is unable to follow, and fails to behold the truth, and through some ill-hap sinks beneath the double load of forgetfulness and vice, and her wings fall from her and she drops to the ground, then the law ordains that this soul shall at her first birth pass, not into any other animal, but only into man. . . . He who does righteously improves, and he who does unrighteously, deteriorates his lot.26 For Plato, the failure to grasp the truth results in a fall, one that at first results in a descent through a hierarchy of 25. Ibid., 65.24. 26. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. by Benjamin Jowett, Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1636/1636-h/1636-h.htm#linkH_4 _0002. 242 The Gnostic World Jesus Entered male roles but that can eventually result in one becoming (gasp!) a woman or an animal.27 Forgetfulness and vice are the means by which one can doom oneself to the lower levels; knowledge and well doing raises the self slowly to the heavenly plane. As one ascends through the human (male) roles a soul might take, one might become a tyrant, a sophist, an artisan or farmer, an artist or poet, a prophet, an athlete or physician, a politician or merchant, or finally a king. At the very top of Plato’s hierarchy is the philosopher: The mind of the philosopher alone has wings; and this is just, for he is always, according to the measure of his abilities, clinging in recollection to those things in which God abides, and in beholding which He is what He is. And he who employs aright these memories is ever being initiated into perfect mysteries and alone becomes truly perfect. But, as he forgets earthly interests and is rapt in the divine, the vulgar deem him mad, and rebuke him; they do not see that he is inspired.28 Asceticism and the Degradation of the Body Gnostics would adapt such views to their notions of the body and the physical world and, by extension, to the steps necessary to achieve salvation. Gaining spiritual knowledge meant downplaying the elements of the flesh.29 This took on practical application in one of two ways: renouncing all connections to the body by either denying it of all 7. Ibid.; see also Carl Korak, “The Influence of Philosophy on Early Christianity,” personal paper, January 6, 01, 10, https:// www.academia.edu/13404/The_Influence_of_Philosophy_in_Early _Christianity. 28. Plato, Phaedrus. 29. Pagels, Gnostic Gospels, 101; Ehrman, Lost Christianities, 126. Asceticism and the Degradation of the Body 243 but its most basic needs, what is generally called asceticism, or denying the relevance of all physical things to one’s spiritual mind-set such that one’s actions have no bearing on one’s spiritual state, what Jude called lasciviousness (Jude 4).30 In the latter case, some Gnostics apparently even went so far as to claim that degrading the body through what most Christians considered sin was actually helpful to moving one away from physical concerns toward the spiritual—or at least, that is what Irenaeus and other early Christian writers who wrote about the Gnostics would have us believe. Of the followers of the Gnostic Valentinus, for example, Irenaeus would claim that “they hold that they shall be entirely and undoubtedly saved, not by means of conduct, but because they are spiritual by nature. For, just as it is impossible that material substance should partake of salvation (since, indeed, they maintain that it is incapable of receiving it), so again it is impossible that spiritual substance (by which they mean themselves) should ever come under the power of corruption, whatever the sort of actions in which they indulged.”31 This, in turn, meant that, in Irenaeus’s summarizing, “the ‘most perfect’ among them addict themselves without fear to all those kinds of forbidden deeds of which the Scriptures assure us that ‘they who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.’”32 Such actions included eating meat sacrificed to idols, attending pagan religious festivals and gladiatorial events, and defiling themselves sexually.33 Irenaeus’s description of the beliefs of the followers of Carpocrates 30. Knight, Primitive Christianity in Crisis, 44; Ehrman, Lost Christianities, 126. 31. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, 1.6.1, Early Christian Writings, http://www .earlychristianwritings.com/text/irenaeus-book1.html. 32. Ibid., 1.6.3. 33. Ibid. 244 The Gnostic World Jesus Entered went even farther. Not only were such believers free to indulge, but it was their moral imperative to do so: They deem it necessary . . . that by means of transmigration from body to body, souls should have experience of every kind of life as well as every kind of action (unless, indeed, by a single incarnation, one may be able to prevent any need for others, by once for all, and with equal completeness, doing all those things which we dare not either speak or hear of, nay, which we must not even conceive in our thoughts, nor think credible, if any such thing is mooted among those persons who are our fellow-citizens), in order that, as their writings express it, their souls, having made trial of every kind of life, may, at their departure, not be wanting in any particular.34 Such teachings apparently were already making themselves felt among Christians in the first century, as evidenced by Jude’s denunciation, earlier alluded to, of “certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness” (Jude 4) and John’s frequent admonition in his letters to obey the commandments: “He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him” (1 John :4). Many modern scholars, however, have called into question the idea that Gnostic believers espoused such radical views. “This is one aspect of the Gnostic religions that their enemies appear to have misunderstood (or, possibly, misrepresented),” writes Bart Ehrman in his book Lost Christianities. “As far as we can tell from the Nag Hammadi writings [a large set of mostly Gnostic writings discovered in 1945], instead of taking a libertine view of eth34. Ibid., 1.25.4. Asceticism and the Degradation of the Body 245 ics (anything goes, since nothing matters), Gnostics were ascetic, advocating the strict regulation and harsh treatment of the body. Their logic was that since the body is evil, it should be punished; such attachment to the body is the problem of human existence, and since it is so easy to become attached to the body through pleasure, the body should be denied all pleasure.”35 That John, Jude, Irenaeus, and others testify to the libertine views of the Gnostics and that other early descriptions of Gnostic doctrines have largely proven to be accurate, however, suggest that there likely were some who extended such thought into decadence, even if they were not in the majority. Yet, indeed, many early sources also point to ascetic lifestyles as the end such Gnostic teachings often sought. Much of the Gospel of Mary, for example, is given over to admonitions to avoid desire, as it is that which holds a person to the physical world. Or take this description from the likely second-century treatise found among the Nag Hammadi manuscripts Authoritative Teaching: “For they [the ignorant] work at their business, but we go about in hunger (and) in thirst, looking toward our dwelling-place, the place which our conduct and our conscience look toward, not clinging to the things which have come into being [the physical], but withdrawing from them. Our hearts are set on the things that exist [the divine], though we are ill (and) feeble (and) in pain. But there is a great strength hidden within us.”36 In his Stromata, Clement of Alexandria quotes from a work used among the followers of the Gnostic Basilides and perhaps some other Gnostic groups titled The Traditions of Matthias like so: “One should fight the flesh and abuse it, never allowing it to give way to 35. Ehrman, Lost Christianities, 126. 36. Authoritative Teaching, trans. George W. MacRae, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text /authoritativeteaching.html. 246 The Gnostic World Jesus Entered licentious pleasure, so that the soul might grow by faith and knowledge.”37 Clement makes the quote in the context of discussing one Nicolaus—sometimes equated with the biblical Nicolas of Acts 6:5, “a proselyte of Antioch” who was one of the Christian church’s first seven deacons, and with the founder or inspirer of the doctrine of the Nicolaitanes, mentioned in Revelation 2:6 and 2:15. The Nicolaus in Clement’s work is said to have “taught what it meant to ‘abuse the flesh’ by refusing the distracting passions.”38 In his case, this meant having relations with no woman other than his wife and, going even further, when accused of being jealous over his possession of her, offering to give her to the apostles for their own use.39 Much of Paul’s New Testament writing, often taken to be arguing against the need for the keeping of the Old Testament law by non-Jews, is actually sounding alarms against the asceticism being introduced by proto-Gnostic teachers. A case in point would be a passage in Paul’s letter to the Colossians. Early in chapter 2, Paul warns the Colossians to “let no man judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ” (Col. :16–17). A common reading of this passage is to take it to mean that Paul is telling the Colossians not to let Jews judge them with respect to their not following biblical food laws, biblical holy days, or the Sabbath.40 Yet, 37. Clement of Alexandria, The Stromata, or The Miscellanies, 3.4.26, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings .com/text/clement-stromata-book3-english.html. For information on The Traditions of Matthias, see “The Traditions of Matthias,” Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com /traditionsmatthias.html. 38. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 3.4.26. 39. Ibid., 3.4.25–26. 40. A summary of such standard readings can be found at “Colossians :16–17 Commentary,” Precept Austin, https://www .preceptaustin.org/colossians_216-23, which includes summaries and Asceticism and the Degradation of the Body 247 in Acts 15, non-Jews, even while being told that they need not be circumcised, were enjoined to keep laws with regard to not eating food sacrificed to idols, meat that was strangled, or blood—and this within the context of such followers of Christ being taught about Mosaic customs “in the synagogue every sabbath day” (Acts 15:0–1). Paul, thus, would have been teaching against what the apostles and elders, including Paul himself and Silas, had agreed to a few years earlier at the Jerusalem conference. Further, it would have made little sense for Paul to warn a largely Greek church in Colossae about others judging them for not doing what most of their neighbors weren’t doing anyway. In all likelihood, these Colossian believers were keeping the customs Paul mentions in verse 16—and were being judged for doing so. Paul’s warning, thus, is exactly the opposite, to let no man judge them for doing such things. We can account for this by the contrast that Paul makes in the passage that immediately follows, which is, in fact, a warning against teachings that Gnostic believers, and many in the Hellenistic world surrounding them, would have held: Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind, And not holding the Head, from which all the body by joints and bands having nourishment ministered, and knit together, quotes from works by Ray Stedman, John MacArthur, Bob DeWaay, and Joseph Parker among others, which use the passage to argue against legalism and the idea that one can earn salvation by works. Ernest L. Martin, taking a similar line, references Colossians 2:16–17 when noting that Paul’s writings “made it clear that observing the food and drink laws of the old Testament and the Mosaic holydays were not required in the Christian dispensation.” Ernest L. Martin, “The Rejection of the Apostle John,” chap. 6 of Restoring the Original Bible, http:// www.askelm.com/restoring/res034.htm. 248 The Gnostic World Jesus Entered increaseth with the increase of God. Wherefore if ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments of the world, why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances, (Touch not; taste not; handle not; Which all are to perish with the using;) after the commandments and doctrines of men? Which things have indeed a shew of wisdom in will worship, and humility, and neglecting of the body: not in any honour to the satisfying of the flesh. (Col. 2:18–23) In verse 17, Paul notes that the biblical customs were a shadow of the Christ to come, pointing to their prophetic nature and value, but in verse 22, he notes that the various customs with regard to “touch not, taste not, handle not” are “after the commandments and doctrines of men” and “perish with the using”—that is, they are not part of the Old Testament scripture. These various ordinances, in the ascetic tradition, had a “shew of wisdom in will worship [in self-imposed religion], and humility, and neglecting of the body” (verse 3). Paul also notes that such teachings were related to the “worshipping of angels” (verse 18) and to “the rudiments of the world” (verse 0), ideas that were based in the idea that angels were evil emanations from a lower god intended to keep men bound to the corruption of the physical.41 Paul provides a similar warning against asceticism in Galatians 4:8–10, when he asks the Galatians, “Howbeit then, when ye knew not God, ye did service unto them which by nature are no gods. But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage? Ye observe days, and months, and 41. For a fuller explanation on the Gnostic context of Colossians 2, see Knight, Primitive Christianity in Crisis, 95–103. Asceticism and the Degradation of the Body 249 times, and years.” As with the passage in Colossians, many scholars take Paul to be writing here about the Jewish holy days.42 Certainly, the context of the letter itself could lead one to such a conclusion, for it is apparent from the larger discussion that a significant contingent of Jewish followers were advocating that non-Jewish believers in Galatia needed to become physically circumcised and submit themselves to various Pharisaical Jewish table fellowship customs. However, the immediate context for Paul’s comments in Galatians 4:10 is that the non-Jewish Galatians were “turning back to the weak and beggarly elements” (verse 9) that they were in bondage to when they “did service unto them which by nature are no gods” (verse 8), before their conversion to Christianity. As such, what concerns Paul here is not so much the Galatian observance of annual holy days espoused in the Jewish scriptures to which Paul himself adhered (see, for example, Acts 18:21, 20:16; 1 Cor. 5:8) but their return to adherence to superstitions revolving around particular periods of time deemed as “evil,” somewhat like, as in contemporary times, the date Friday the thirteenth is associated with ill omen (but with a greater degree of seriousness at that time than how we would deem such superstitions today). In fact, the study of which days and times were particularly good or bad was common among many Greek and Latin writers, including, for example, Hesiod and Plutarch, though the tradition long preceded them, going back two thousand years to Babylonian and Egyptian sources.43 The Greek historian 42. A summary of and quotes from such standard readings can be found at “Galatians 4 Commentary,” Precept Austin, https://www .preceptaustin.org/galatians-4-commentary. Martin makes the same comment for Galatians 4:10 as he did with regard to Colossians 2:16– 17 in “The Rejection of the Apostle John.” 43. A. T. Grafton and N. M. Swerdlow, “Calendar Dates and Ominous Days in Ancient Historiography,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 51 (1988): 15–18. Plutarch, in fact, appears to 250 The Gnostic World Jesus Entered Herodotus recorded as common thought that “’each month and each day’ has a god, and . . . that one ‘can tell what fortune and what end and what disposition a man shall have according to the day of his birth.’”44 One of those days commonly considered ominous was that of the new moon, when it was “believed that evil spirits could roam freely,” and lack of attention to such harbingers could result in bad ends.45 The Eighth Day Particular concern was also placed on the specific days of the month, especially the fifth and seventh days of the month, while in Babylonian tradition multiples of the seventh day of each month (7, 14, 21, 28) were “unsuited for doing anything desirable. Prayer and weeping shall the assembly institute.”46 Hellenistic science posited that there were seven planets (the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn). In time, because ancient astronomers believed them to have erratic orbits around the earth (rather than fluid orbits around the sun), these seven spheres became associated with the idea of chaos, while the stars beyond them came to be understood as representing harmony and order.47 Thinkers such as Pythagoras, Orpheus, and Plato came to see such increasing chaos the closer one came to Earth as emblematic of the descent of the human person’s soul from the heavens—that is, from have to based his list of good and bad days on sources that preceded him, lending credence to the idea that such practices were common. Grafton and Swerdlow, “Calendar Dates and Ominous Days,” 5. 44. Grafton and Swerdlow, “Calendar Dates and Ominous Days,” 16. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., 17; quote from S. Langdon, Babylonian Menologies and the Semitic Calendars (London: 1933), 78, qouted in Grafton and Swerdlow, “Calendar Dates and Ominous Days,” 15n5. 47. Knight, Primitive Christianity in Crisis, 8–9 The Eighth Day 251 the unchanging spiritual Oneness to physical corruption and constant turmoil.48 The number seven, as such, “came to represent evil because it symbolized descent into the world of matter.”49 Even today, that seventh planet, Saturn, is considered “naturally malefic” in the world of astrology.50 Meanwhile, the number eight became associated with the heavens—and with them, what was good, unchanging, and immortal.51 The number eight, and by extension the eighth day, had its own significance among Jewish thinkers as well, who came to see it as symbolic of eternity. As the scholar Sam uele Bacchiocchi notes, “In . . . Jewish apocalyptic literature the duration of the world was commonly subdivided into seven periods (or millennia) of which the seventh generally represented paradise restored.”52 Naturally, Jewish thinkers began to posit that following that seventh period was an “eternal new aeon which, though not so designated, could readily be viewed as ‘the eighth day, since it was the culmination of the seventh.’”53 Thus, the seven-day week came to represent the duration of the world, while the day following came to stand in for the eternity that would follow.54 We find this number scheme even in the 48. Ibid., 9–10. 49. Ibid., 9. 50. See, for example, “Saturn—Naturally Malefic Planet in Astrology,” Umastro, https://www.umastro.com/article/saturn-naturally -malefic-planet-in-astrology; “The Effects of Saturn & Remedies to Nullify Them,” GaneshaSpeaks.com, https://www.ganeshaspeaks .com/predictions/astrology/the-effects-of-saturn—remedies-to-nullify -them-66/; and “Saturn Is Said to Be the Greatest Malefic Planet,” Truthstar: Truth about Your Birth Stars, November 2020, https:// www.truthstar.com/saturn-is-said-to-be-the-greatest-malefic-planet/. 51. Knight, Primitive Christianity in Crisis, 9. 52. Samuele Bacchiocchi, From the Sabbath to Sunday: A Historical Investigation of the Rise of Sunday Observance in Early Christianity (Rome: Pontifical Gregorian University Press, 1977), 81. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. Bacchiocchi points to a passage from the likely first-century Jewish Alexandrine text 2 Enoch 33.1 as an example: “And I [God] 252 The Gnostic World Jesus Entered final set of Old Testament holy days, the seven-day Sukkot festival and the day immediately following it, Shemini Atzeret (Azeret; literally, the eighth day), though the Jewish people largely interpreted the former as representing God’s dwelling with the world (the seventy nations in Jewish tradition) and the latter as a holdover festival for celebrating God’s special relationship with his people.55 This preference, in Greek culture, for the eighth day as opposed to the seventh, and the significance of it even among Jewish thinkers, in turn, would find its way into Gnostic teachings and, from there, would come to influence mainline Christian teachings, possibly as early as the late first century CE. The importance of the number eight is reflected in the Gnostic concept of the Ogdoad, or the “eighth celestial realm.” Similar to the manner in which Greek philosophy valued the realm of eight that sat above the seven bodies of the solar system, various Gnostic teachers posited that “the seven celestial spheres of the moon, sun, and planets known in antiquity . . . were in the power of fallen angelic powers, led by the ‘prince of this world,’ who resided on the seventh and controlled the physical and visible universe. The eighth realm was, of course, the abode of members of the Sacred Ogdoad,” which depending on the Gnostic system was generally the highest or next to the highest realm of spiritual entities, with the ninth being the realm of the appointed the eighth day also, that the eighth day should be the firstcreated after my work, and that the first seven revolve in the form of the seventh thousand, and that at the beginning of the eighth thousand there should be a time of not-counting, endless, with neither years nor months nor weeks nor days nor hours.” The Apocalypse of 2 Enoch, trans. R. H. Charles, Early Jewish Writings, http://web.archive .org/web/20061113025725/http://members.iinet.net.au/~quentinj /Christianity/2Enoch.html. 55. Kaufman Kohler and Lewis N. Dembitz, “Shemini Azeret,” Jewish Encyclopedia (1906), http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com /articles/13559-shemini-azeret. The Eighth Day 253 First Cause or of the first derivations of the First Cause.56 It was to these higher realms that the Gnostics aspired. In the late first-century or early second-century Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth, a master discloses to his student the means to higher levels of enlightenment by describing to him how “by stages he advances and enters into the way of immortality. And thus he enters into the understanding of the eighth that reveals the ninth.”57 The second- or thirdcentury Sophia of Jesus Christ consists of a dialogue between Jesus and his disciples following his resurrection. In it, he, too, describes how humans can enter into the realms of the eighth and beyond, the eighth being the first level below the First Cause, or the Unbegotten Father: “Whoever, then, knows the Father in pure knowledge will depart to the Father and repose in Unbegotten Father. But whoever knows him defectively will depart to the defect and the rest of the Eighth. . . . Whoever knows Son of Man in knowledge and love, let him bring me a sign of Son of Man, that he might depart to the dwelling-places with those in the Eighth.”58 In turn, the number eight would also come to have significance in terms of calendar days. In summarizing the beliefs of the Gnostic Marcosian sect, whose theology was based in part around the importance of various numbers, Irenaeus denotes how the sect particularly focused on the number eight and how this came to have significance for the members in terms of the creation: 56. Aecio E. Cairus, “Gnostic Roots of Sunday-Keeping,” Journal of the Adventist Theological Society 13, no. 1 (2002): 70, https:// digitalcommons.andrews.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1266 &context=jats. 57. Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth, trans. James Brashler, Peter A. Dirkse, and Douglas M. Parrott, Early Christian Writings, http:// www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/eighthninth.html. A summary of the discourse is available in Pagels, Gnostic Gospels, 136–137. 58. The Sophia of Jesus Christ, trans. Douglas M. Parrott, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text /sophia.html. 254 The Gnostic World Jesus Entered They affirm that man was formed on the eighth day, for sometimes they will have him to have been made on the sixth day, and sometimes on the eighth, unless, perchance, they mean that his earthly part was formed on the sixth day, but his fleshly part on the eighth, for these two things are distinguished by them. Some of them also hold that one man was formed after the image and likeness of God, masculo-feminine, and that this was the spiritual man; and that another man was formed out of the earth. Further, they declare that the arrangement made with respect to the ark in the Deluge, by means of which eight persons were saved, most clearly indicates the Ogdoad which brings salvation. David also shows forth the same, as holding the eighth place in point of age among his brethren. Moreover, that circumcision which took place on the eighth day, represented the circumcision of the Ogdoad above. In a word, whatever they find in the Scriptures capable of being referred to the number eight, they declare to fulfil the mystery of the Ogdoad.59 Of note here is the Marcosian separation of the fleshly man from the earthly man. Stephen O. Presley, in his commentary on Irenaeus’s work, denotes that the Marcosians believed in a two-stage creation of man.60 Some believed, as Irenaeus notes here, that those two stages are present in two particular scriptures, with the first referencing God’s breathing into the earthly man’s nostrils the breath of life on the sixth day (Gen. 2:7) and the second referencing God’s giving man “sensible” skin on the eighth day when, 59. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, 1.18.2–3. 60. Stephen O. Presley, The Intertextual Reception of Genesis 1–3 in Irenaeus of Lyons (Boston: Brill, 2105), 57. The Eighth Day 255 after Adam and Eve’s fall, God made for them “coats of skins, and clothed them” (Gen. 3:1).61 Other Marcosians, by contrast, saw the two stages as being present in Genesis 1:27, when God said he would make man in his image, and Genesis 2:7, when man was made from the earth. In this latter interpretation, there were actually two different types of men, some made spiritually and some made earthly.62 Both, however, posited two steps, and in each case numerology, especially around the numbers six and eight, played a role. In time, Christian teachers influenced by Gnosticism pushed an “eighth-day theology” as superior to the Sabbath, with the seventh day representing merely the culmination of the physical creation, which was generally considered inferior and corrupt, but with the eighth day representing the ultimate spiritual creation. We find such readings in both the late first-century–early second-century Epistle of Barnabas and in the writings of the late second-century Clement of Alexandria. In the former, the writer uses the Jewish concept of one day equaling one thousand years to profess that the seventh-day sabbath is in fact indicative of a spiritual rest that mankind will receive only after Jesus’s return.63 In the meantime, however, sinful man cannot adequately fulfill that rest by keeping that physical seventh day holy.64 The writer quotes from Isaiah 1:13: “Finally He saith to them; Your new moons and your Sabbaths I cannot away with.”65 And then, read61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63. Epistle of Barnabas, 15.4–5. Summaries and commentary regarding The Epistle of Barnabas, the Sabbath, and the eighth day, on which this discussion relies, can be found in Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday, 218–223, and Knight, Primitive Christianity in Crisis, 62–66. 64. Epistle of Barnabas, 15.6–7. 65. The Epistle of Barnabas, trans. J. B. Lightfoot, 15.8, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/barnabas.html. 256 The Gnostic World Jesus Entered ers come to the crux of his argument: “Ye see what is His meaning; it is not your present Sabbaths that are acceptable [unto Me], but the Sabbath which I have made, in the which, when I have set all things at rest, I will make the beginning of the eighth day which is the beginning of another world. Wherefore also we keep the eighth day for rejoicing, in the which also Jesus rose from the dead, and having been manifested ascended into the heavens.”66 The eighth day, in fact, becomes more important than the seventh, because it represents the eternal world that comes afterward—a new spiritual creation. Clement of Alexandria, some fifty to one hundred years later, links his reasons for preferring eight to seven to Gnostic teachings even more explicitly. He does this by referencing Greek and Gnostic ideas about the planetary spheres. In his interpretation of Ezekiel 44:27, for example, he sees the seven-day priestly purification as emblematic of the creation week, with the eighth day, on which the priest brings the offering, as symbolic of a soul moving beyond sin and the physical world. In that, he sees a link with Greek ideas of “the seven heavens, which some reckon one above the other; [and] . . . the fixed sphere which borders on the intellectual world [that] be called the eighth[;] the expression denotes that the Gnostic ought to rise out of the sphere of creation and of sin.”67 He also sees in Greek philosophy a reason to preference the eighth day, which in fact becomes the same as the first day of the week, being 66. Epistle of Barnabas, 15.8–9. 67. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 4.25, http://www .earlychristianwritings.com/text/clement-stromata-book4.html. Clement’s use of the word “Gnostic” is not synonymous with that which has become common in modern parlance; he means simply a knowing or knowledgeable one, not someone who necessarily adheres to so-called Gnostic beliefs, though in fact many of his teachings reflected such thinking. On Clement, the Sabbath, and the eighth day, I am in debt to the discussions in Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday, 287, and Knight, Primitive Christianity in Crisis, 59–62. Vegetarianism and Celibacy 257 the day following the sabbath, when he writes of Plato’s supposed stealing of Jewish teaching: And the Lord’s day Plato prophetically speaks of in the tenth book of the Republic, in these words: “And when seven days have passed to each of them in the meadow, on the eighth they are to set out and arrive in four days.” By the meadow is to be understood the fixed sphere, as being a mild and genial spot, and the locality of the pious; and by the seven days each motion of the seven planets, and the whole practical art which speeds to the end of rest. But after the wandering orbs the journey leads to heaven, that is, to the eighth motion and day.68 In other words, the true rest begins on the eighth day, as representative of the heaven above the seven planetary spheres, represented in the seven-day week. In turn, Clement would come to see the first day of the week, being the day after the seventh, as imminently superior: “And the fourth [commandment] is that which intimates that the world was created by God, and that He gave us the seventh day as a rest, on account of the trouble that there is in life. For God is incapable of weariness, and suffering, and want. But we who bear flesh need rest. The seventh day, therefore, is proclaimed a rest—abstraction from ills—preparing for the Primal Day, our true rest.”69 Vegetarianism and Celibacy Warnings regarding ascetic teachings can also be found in Paul’s first letter to Timothy when he writes, “Now the 68. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 5.14, http://www .earlychristianwritings.com/text/clement-stromata-book5.html. 69. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 6.16, http://www .earlychristianwritings.com/text/clement-stromata-book6.html. 258 The Gnostic World Jesus Entered Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron; Forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth” (1 Tim. 4:1–3). Beliefs regarding the need to avoid meat were already common among certain Jewish sects before Jesus’s time, as, for example, the Nasaraeans, who the fourth-century Christian teacher Epiphanius of Salamis, in his Panarion, denotes “would not offer sacrifice or eat meat.”70 Such ideas were also known among certain Greek sects, such as the Pythagoreans, and among such Samaritan sects as the Dositheans.71 In certain Gnostic circles, meat became associated with an increase in sexual desire.72 As such, avoiding meat went along with the concept of avoiding sexual relations. Here, too, the idea of avoiding sexual relations and, with them, marriage, had its predecessor in the concepts of certain Jewish sects, such as the Essenes; some Greek philosophy, such as that promoted by Pythagoras and Plato; and certain Samaritan sects, such as the Dositheans.73 As referenced in chapter 1, the Essenes avoided mar70. Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion, trans. Frank Williams, 1.18.1.4, https://web.archive.org/web/20170916133936/http://www .masseiana.org/panarion_bk1.htm#29. 71. Ibid., 1.3.1.4, 1.13.1.1. Dositheus, among early writers on Christian heresies, is thought to have been variously a teacher, rival, or student of Simon Magus. James Alan Montgomery, Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect: Their History, Theology, and Literature (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1907), 255–256. 72. Andrew Phillip Smith, The Secret History of the Gnostics: Their Scriptures, Beliefs, and Traditions (London: Watkins, 2015), 73. 73. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 18.1.5; Elizabeth Abbott, A History of Celibacy, 43, quoted in “Pythagoras and Celibacy,” Celibacy Quotes, SelfDefinition.org, https://selfdefinition.org/celibacy /quotes/pythagoras-and-celibacy.htm; Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion, 1.13.1.1. Vegetarianism and Celibacy 259 riage, because they saw it as distracting to their spiritual concerns, and sexual relations, except in certain cases strictly for procreation, because they eschewed pleasure as evil.74 Pythagoras, who believed that the human has a dual makeup of soul and body, taught that sexual contact debases the human and thus keeps the morally superior soul trapped in the body; as with some of the Essenes, Pythagoras advanced that sexual contact should be limited to procreation purposes only.75 Following Pythagoras’s lead, including his ideas regarding the soul/body dichotomy, Plato too embraced the concept that sex keeps men focused on lesser matters.76 For him, the human psyche consisted of three parts—the rational (mind), the spiritual (courage and drive), and the appetitive (physical desire).77 In Phaedrus, Plato spends much time denoting how the rational needs to remain in control of the appetitive and how concerns about romantic love often keep the rational from doing so: In every one of us there are two guiding and ruling principles which lead us whither they will; one is the natural desire of pleasure, the other is an acquired opinion which aspires after the best; and these two are sometimes in harmony and then again at war, and sometimes the one, sometimes the other conquers. When opinion by the help of reason leads us to the best, the conquering principle is called temperance; but when desire, which is devoid of reason, rules in us and drags us to pleasure, that power of misrule is called excess. 74. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 18.1.5; Josephus, War of the Jews, 2.8.2. 75. Abbott, History of Celibacy, 43. 76. Ibid. 77. Michael Ruse, “Philosophy and Sex: Not a Happy Couple,” Metanexus, September 1, 1999, https://metanexus.net/philosophy -and-sex-not-happy-couple/. 260 The Gnostic World Jesus Entered . . . The irrational desire which overcomes the tendency of opinion towards right, and is led away to the enjoyment of beauty, and especially of personal beauty, by the desires which are her own kindred—that supreme desire, I say, which by leading conquers and by the force of passion is reinforced, from this very force, receiving a name, is called love (erromenos eros).78 For Plato, love is a kind of madness—a madness of the wrong kind, for like the psyche, Plato distinguishes between “two kinds; one produced by human infirmity, the other was a divine release of the soul from the yoke of custom and convention.”79 The good kind is caused by the inspiration from the higher elements (such as that which philosophers fall into), which causes men to leave off interest in the physical realm, but the bad madness keeps the human soul tethered to the body: “He who is not newly initiated or who has become corrupted, does not easily rise out of this world to the sight of true beauty in the other; he looks only at her earthly namesake, and instead of being awed at the sight of her, he is given over to pleasure, and like a brutish beast he rushes on to enjoy and beget; he consorts with wantonness, and is not afraid or ashamed of pursuing pleasure in violation of nature.”80 For this reason, Plato would espouse abstinence and temporary marriages meant only for procreation and the good of the state.81 78. Plato, Phaedrus. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid. 81. Michael Ruse, “Philosophy and Sex”; Elizabeth Brake, “Marriage and Domestic Partnership,” sec. : “Understanding Marriage: Historical Orientation,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, November 29, 2016, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marriage/#:~:text=In %20his%20depiction%20of%20the,marriage%20practices%20of %20his%20time.&text=On%20his%20view%2C%20Plato%20errs ,transferred%20to%20all%20fellow%2Dcitizens. Vegetarianism and Celibacy 261 Although Plato and Pythagoras were radicals when it came to their attitudes toward sex and marriage, the idea that one should control one’s passions in order to better focus on spiritual matters was common to both Stoics and early Christians. As David I. Balch argues in his article “1 Corinthians 7:32–35 and Stoic Debates about Marriage, Anxiety, and Distraction,” both Paul and Stoics such as Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, and Hierocles espoused that “marriage is helpful for some, not advantageous for others.”82 “He that giveth her in marriage doeth well,” Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 7:38, “but he that giveth her not in marriage doeth better,” suggesting that “celibacy makes some men and women anxious and distracted while marriage makes others anxious and distracted. Each Christian must decide for herself or himself.”83 The goal in both cases was to do what best helped one focus on spiritual matters. Nevertheless, the influence of abstinence and aversion to marriage among some Jewish sects and certain Greek philosophers would have a definitive influence on certain Gnostic thinkers. Like Plato and Pythagoras, such thinkers thought of sexual desire as tying humans to their body rather than to spiritual enlightenment. Already noted was the passage in The Book of Thomas the Contender, wherein followers are warned not to “love intimacy with womankind and polluted intercourse with them.” Similarly, in the Dialogue of the Savior, Christ tells his disciples to “pray in the place where there is no woman” and thus to “destroy the works of womanhood,” meaning not that he does not value women—indeed, Mary Magdalene is accounted among the disciples throughout the Dialogue—but rather 82. David I. Balch, “1 Corinthians 7:32–35 and Stoic Debates about Marriage, Anxiety, and Distraction,” Journal of Biblical Literature 102, no. 3 (September 1983): 439. For more on Stoic thinking about love, see “What the Stoics Thought about Love,” Daily Stoic: Ancient Wisdom for Everyday Life, https://dailystoic.com/stoicism-love/. 83. Balch, “1 Corinthians 7:3–35 and Stoic Debates,” 435. 262 The Gnostic World Jesus Entered that they should avoid sexual relationships and concerns, insofar as “womanhood” is representative of such.84 Likewise, the writer of The Testimony of Truth denotes that he who is father of Mammon is (also) father of sexual intercourse. But he who is able to renounce them shows that he is from the generation of the Son of Man.85 Followers of the gnostic Valentinus had yet other unique ideas with regard to marriage. In Valentinus’s view, “All emanations from the heavenly Father [were] pairs of beings with male and female attributes.”86 Such pairings represented the unity, peace, and completeness that exist in heaven.87 When spirit fell into the material world, an evil lesser god, often identified with the Old Testament Yahweh, who thought he was the supreme god, separated the sexes, creating forever after a longing within human beings for the opposite sex—and thus the human preoccupation with sexual lust and desire.88 The key to removing this preoccupation was to marry humans to their angelic opposites—men to female angels, women to male angels.89 84. Dialogue of the Savior, trans. Stephen Emmel, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/dialoguesavior .html. See also Pagels, Gnostic Gospels, 66–67, regarding this passage. 85. The Testimony of Truth, trans. Soren Giversen and Birger A. Pearson, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings .com/text/truth.html. See also Pagels, Gnostic Gospels, 111, regarding this passage. 86. Knight, Primitive Christianity in Crisis, 101. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid. On the other god, see Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, 1.5. An example of scriptural exegesis to support such a position can be found in the Gospel of Philip: “And the Lord [Jesus] would not have said ‘My Father who is in Heaven’ [Mt 16:17], unless he had had another father, but he would have said simply ‘My father.’” Gospel of Philip, trans. Wesley W. Isenberg, Early Christian Writings, http:// www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/gospelphilip.html. 89. Knight, Primitive Christianity in Crisis, 101–102. See again the Gospel of Philip: “If you are born a human being, it is the human being Vegetarianism and Celibacy 263 In such a way, followers would no longer be pulled toward physical desire for the opposite sex—or toward demonic spirits whose goals were similarly inclined to keeping people imprisoned to their physical state and materialistic concerns.90 Rather, after death, such believers would be united with their angelic counterparts in heaven.91 In practice, however, if we are to believe Irenaeus’s writings about the Valentinians, this led not to aestheticism among those of the sect but to the exact opposite: healed of their concerns with the material world, they were now free to indulge in whatever behavior they wished, grace having been extended to them “by means of an unspeakable and indescribable conjunction.”92 Ascetic teachings regarding marriage and sex would extend long past Paul’s own warning against them, eventually becoming part of the Christian creed. Indeed, Paul’s own teachings in 1 Corinthians 7 (especially verses 1, 7–8, 25–27, and 32–34) would over the next few centuries become the basis for teachings preferring celibacy to marriage—and by the fourth century celibacy among those who would be part of the clergy would, for some, become an official church policy. Writing in the early second century, for example, Ignatius, in his letter to Polycarp, would note that “if any one is able to abide in chastity to the honour of the flesh of the Lord, let him so abide without boasting.”93 Those who did marry were to do so only “with the consent of the bishop, that the marriage may be after who will love you. If you become a spirit, it is the spirit which will be joined to you.” 90. Knight, Primitive Christianity in Crisis, 101–102. 91. Ibid., 102. 92. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.6, quote from 1.6.4; Knight, Primitive Christianity in Crisis, 102. 93. Ignatius of Antioch, Ignatius to Polycarp, trans. J. B. Lightfoot (1891), 5.2, Early Christian Writings, http://www .earlychristianwritings.com/text/ignatius-polycarp-lightfoot.html. 264 The Gnostic World Jesus Entered the Lord and not after concupiscence.”94 The idea, for Ignatius, seemed to be that celibacy was good as long as it did not become a matter of pride, in which case, one was better off marrying—and even then not to fulfill lustful desire (just the opposite of Paul’s recommendation to marry “to avoid fornication” in 1 Corinthians 7: and to maintain regular marital relations in 1 Corinthians 7:5 “that Satan tempt you not for your incontinency”). Paul, in the late second-century Acts of Paul, became an austere figure, one who would claim, “Blessed are they that abstain (or the continent)” and “Blessed are they that possess their wives as though they had them not.”95 Indeed, throughout the second century, the belief, though in the minority and subject to much debate, that Christians after baptism should renounce sex, even if married, was quite common.96 In the early third-century Acts of Thomas, the apostle Thomas tells a couple of newlyweds, If ye abstain from this foul intercourse, ye become holy temples, pure, being quit of impulses and pains, seen and unseen, and ye will acquire no cares of life or of children, whose end is destruction: and if indeed ye get many children, for their sakes ye become grasping and covetous, stripping orphans and overreaching widows, and by so doing subject yourselves to grievous punishments. For the more part of children become useless oppressed of devils. . . . But if ye be persuaded and keep your souls chaste before God, there will come unto you living 94. Ibid. 95. The Acts of Paul, in The Apocryphal New Testament, trans. M. R. James (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), 2.5, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/actspaul.html. 96. Richard M. Price, “Celibacy and Free Love in Early Christianity,” Theology and Sexuality 12, no. 2: 122–123, DOI: 10.1177 /1355835806061426. Vegetarianism and Celibacy 265 children whom these blemishes touch not, and ye shall be without care, leading a tranquil life without grief or anxiety, looking to receive that incorruptible and true marriage, and ye shall be therein groomsmen entering into that bride-chamber which is full of immortality and light.97 After the couple’s first night together, the bride tells her father, much to his consternation: “I have set at nought this husband and this marriage that passeth away from before mine eyes, it is because I am joined in another marriage; and that I have had no intercourse with a husband that is temporal, whereof the end is with lasciviousness and bitterness of soul, it is because I am yoked unto a true husband.”98 Origen, also in the early third century, would take his ascetic tendencies to such an extreme that he would castrate himself, an action for which his overseer Demetrius would initially admire him.99 By the fourth century, reasoning that single celibates were best able to dedicate themselves to the work of God, the councils of Ancyra and Neocaesarea would decree that clergy who had not already married were to be banned from entering into marriage after ordination; even married Christians sometimes pledged themselves to live without having sexual relations with their spouses.100 97. The Acts of Thomas, in The Apocryphal New Testament, trans. M. R. James (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), 12, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/actsthomas.html. 98. Ibid., 14. 99. Eusebius, Church History, 6.8.1–2. 100. Roman Cholij, “Priestly Celibacy in Patristics and in the History of the Church,” Congregation for the Clergy, The Roman Curia, The Holy See, http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations /cclergy/documents/rc_con_cclergy_doc_01011993_chisto_en.html. See also Apostolic Constitutions, 6.17, reprinted in “The Ecclesiastical Canons of the Same Holy Apostles,” The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Grand Rapids, Mich.: B. Eerdmans), 8.27.27, https://www 266 The Gnostic World Jesus Entered Docetism The idea that the flesh itself was corrupt and was thus to be renounced would lead some Gnostic thinkers to the logical conclusion that Jesus himself, as a perfect emanation from the Father, had never actually come in the flesh, a belief that has come to be called Docetism. Docetic ideas generally took one of two forms: either Jesus was a phantasm, only appearing to have a body, or he was a spirit who possessed another man’s physical body.101 A couple of Gnostic works with docetic leanings of the first category are The Acts of John and The Acts of Peter, both from the late second century. In the latter, Peter describes Jesus as one who did “eat and drink for our sakes, himself being neither an-hungered nor athirst.”102 The Acts of John contains numerous passages emphasizing Jesus’s immateriality. In it, Jesus appears in various guises to different people. John describes him this way, which, as he notes, is different from the way in which his brother James saw him: He was seen of me as having rather bald, but the beard thick and flowing, but of James as a youth whose beard was newly come. We were therefore perplexed, both of us, as to what that which we had seen should mean. And after that, as we followed him, both of us were by little and little perplexed as we considered the matter. Yet unto me .ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf07.ix.ix.vi.html#fnf_ix.ix.vi-p39.1: “Of those who come into the clergy unmarried, we permit only the readers and singers, if they have a mind, to marry afterward.” 101. Ehrman, Lost Christianities, 15. On Docetism, see also Edwin M. Yamauchi, “The Crucifixion and Docetic Christology,” Concordia Theological Quarterly 46, no. 1 (1982): 1–20, http://www.ctsfw.net /media/pdfs/YamauchiDoceticChristology.pdf; Pagels, Gnostic Gospels, 72–75. 102. The Acts of Peter, trans. M. R. James (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), 20, Early Christian Writings, http://www .earlychristianwritings.com/text/actspeter.html. Docetism 267 there then appeared this yet more wonderful thing: for I would try to see him privily, and I never at any time saw his eyes closing (winking), but only open. And oft-times he would appear to me as a small man and uncomely, and then again as one reaching unto heaven. Also there was in him another marvel: when I sat at meat he would take me upon his own breast; and sometimes his breast was felt of me to be smooth and tender, and sometimes hard like unto stones, so that I was perplexed in myself.103 In addition to Jesus never blinking, elsewhere John describes Jesus as having no footprints and, as suggested in the above passage, as being both material and immaterial depending on the situation.104 During his crucifixion, Jesus tells John, “I am being crucified and pierced with lances and reeds, and gall and vinegar is given me to drink. But unto thee I speak, and what I speak hear thou. . . . Neither am I he that is on the cross, whom now thou seest not, but only hearest his (or a) voice.”105 Among works that take a view that Jesus possessed another’s human body are The Coptic Apocalypse of Peter and The Second Treatise of the Great Seth, both from the late second century or early third century CE. Like The Acts of John, of particular note with regard to works of this leaning are descriptions of Christ’s death, which often include explanations with regard to Jesus’s lack of suffering—but in this case, that suffering was performed by another, the inhabited human. In The Coptic Apocalypse of Peter, when Peter asks Jesus about his witnessing of the crucifixion, 103. The Acts of John, trans. M. R. James (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), 89, Early Christian Writings, http://www .earlychristianwritings.com/text/actsjohn.html. 104. Ibid., 93. 105. Ibid., 97, 99. 268 The Gnostic World Jesus Entered Jesus tells him, “He whom you saw on the tree, glad and laughing, this is the living Jesus. But this one into whose hands and feet they drive the nails is his fleshly part, which is the substitute being put to shame, the one who came into being in his likeness. But look at him and me. . . . And I am the one who was in it, not resembling him who was in it first. For he was an earthly man, but I, I am from above the heavens.”106 In The Second Treatise of the Great Seth, Christ makes plain, “I visited a bodily dwelling. I cast out the one who was in it first, and I went in.”107 Like the Jesus in The Coptic Apocalypse of Peter, Christ claims not to have been the one on the cross: And I did not die in reality but in appearance. . . . I <suffered> according to their sight and thought. . . . For my death, which they think happened, (happened) to them in their error and blindness, since they nailed their man unto their death. . . . Yes, they saw me; they punished me. It was another, their father, who drank the gall and the vinegar; it was not I. They struck me with the reed; it was another, Simon, who bore the cross on his shoulder. I[t] was another upon Whom they placed the crown of thorns. But I was rejoicing in the height. But I was rejoicing in the height over all the wealth of the archons and the offspring of their error, of their empty glory. And I was laughing at their ignorance.108 106. The Coptic Apocalypse of Peter, trans. James Brashler and Roger A. Bullard, Early Christian Writings, http://www .earlychristianwritings.com/text/apocalypsepeter.html. 107. The Second Treatise of the Great Seth, trans. Roger A. Bullard and Joseph A. Gibbons, Early Christian Writings, http:// www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/greatseth.html. 108. Ibid. Docetism 269 The Father here is a reference to Yaldabaoth, the name some Gnostics gave to the lower god who created the physical world and who mistook himself for the true God of all, and the archons are his angelic servants that bind men to that physical world; as such, the Messiah’s victory here is not so much over sin as over a lower spiritual realm that keeps knowledgeable humans from rising to the heavens. Those who proposed that Jesus was immaterial could use various biblical passages to endorse their views. On Jesus as phantasm, one might point to Romans 8:3, where Paul denotes that God sent “his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh” (emphasis added), not actual flesh.109 On Jesus taking another’s body, one might turn to Mark 15:34 and the account of Jesus’s death, wherein he calls out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”—or as one could translate it, “My God, my God, why hast thou left me?,” the possessed man no longer possessed.110 But such readings were not kindly looked on by New Testament writers themselves, as is evidenced by the reaction both Paul and John, among others, had to such teachings. Earlier in the same letter to the Colossians in which Paul argued so strongly against certain ideas shared by Gnostics, Paul warned the Colossians not to be deceived through philosophy having to do with the “rudiments of the world” (evil angels or emanations of God binding humans to earth through their control of physical forces such as rain and wind) specifically because “in [Christ] dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Col. :8–9).111 John was particularly concerned about docetic-type teachings. At the start of his first letter, he emphasizes the physicality of the Jesus that he knew: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we 109. Wagner, After the Apostles, 112–113. 110. Ehrman, Lost Christianities, 15. 111. On “rudiments of the world” as “evil angels,” see Knight, Primitive Christianity in Crisis, 97, 357–359. 270 The Gnostic World Jesus Entered have looked upon, and our hands have handled . . . declare we unto you” (1 John 1:1, 3). Later in the same letter, he is even more plain regarding the threat to the teaching he has previously imparted: “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God” (1 John 4:1–3). Indeed, the letters and martyrdom of the early second-century preacher Ignatius of Antioch can be seen, in part, as an attempt to dissuade others from falling for docetic teachings: “But if it were as certain persons who are godless, that is unbelievers, say, that He suffered only in semblance, being themselves mere semblance, why am I in bonds?” he asks in his letter to the Trallians on his way to be martyred in Rome.112 Willingness to become a martyr, to in essence mirror the suffering of a physical Jesus, Elaine Pagels argues, even became one of the distinguishing characteristics between those who held Gnostic views and other Christians.113 Nevertheless, Docetism would have its effect on Christian teaching as the second century came to an end. Both Clement of Alexandria and Origen expressed docetic-like views.114 Like the writer of The Acts of Peter, Clement would claim, that “in the case of the Saviour, it were ludicrous [to suppose] that the body, as a body, demanded the necessary aids in order to its duration. For He ate, not for the sake of the body, which was kept together by a holy energy, but in order that it might not enter into the minds of those who 112. Ignatius of Antioch, Ignatius to the Trallians, trans. J. B. Lightfoot, 10.1, Early Christian Writings, http://www .earlychristianwritings.com/ignatius.html. See also Ehrman, Lost Christianities, 151–152; Pagels, Gnostic Gospels, 82–83. 113. Pagels, Gnostic Gospels, 82. 114. Ehrman, Lost Christianities, 178. Docetism 271 were with Him to entertain a different opinion of Him; in like manner as certainly some afterwards supposed that He appeared in a phantasmal shape. . . . But He was entirely impassible . . . ; inaccessible to any movement of feeling—either pleasure or pain.”115 Such views emphasized Jesus’s divine status so heavily that Christians who advocated them could be accused of falling for a Gnostic docetic heresy. In contrast, those who emphasized Jesus’s physical being could be accused of taking on an adoptionist Christology—namely that Jesus was a very righteous man, naturally born of Joseph and Mary, whom God “adopted” as his son, a position held by the late first- and second-century Jewish Christian Ebionites among other sects.116 Indeed, even some Gnostic teachers, such as Cerinthus, held adoptionist views, merging them with the concept that Jesus was adopted not by the lower god who created the world but by the “Supreme Ruler . . . the unknown Father.”117 Countering such views involved the formalizing of creeds to explain how Jesus could be both God and man and, as such, contributed to the eventual adoption of the doctrine of the trinity.118 Gnostic teachings regarding God also contributed to the move within the Jewish religion to a hardline monotheism and, thus, forged the basis for the foundation of what we now call Judaism. As discussed in chapter 2, prior to the first century CE, some parts of the Jewish community occasionally interpreted “the different names of God both as signifying different figures and as symbolizing His attributes.”119 As some Hellenistically inspired teachers moved 115. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 6.9. 116. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.26.1–2. On adoptionism, see Wagner, After the Apostles, 96–107. 117. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.26.1. 118. Ehrman, Lost Christianities, 194–195. 119. Alan F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism (Leiden: Brill, 1977), 43. See also 272 The Gnostic World Jesus Entered to “dilute strict monotheism in order to support traditions which applied to their ancestors, heroes and saviors” and as “Christians and others [took] the fall of Jerusalem as proof of the end of the Jewish dispensation . . . [a] new set of standards was necessary to insure survival” of the Jewish faith.120 Taking stricter control of the synagogues after the destruction of the Jewish temple, Pharisaical rabbis insisted on scriptural interpretations that enforced a firm single-God viewpoint and thus excluded as heretical any who held alternative theologies. Old Testament scriptures that Christians pointed to as referencing a pre-incarnate Jesus were given a strict monotheistic bent. No longer was it possible that there might be two figures in heaven (the Father and a mediating Angel of the Lord), as some biblical interpreters had posited; rather, there were simply different attributes of God anthropomorphized for the reader, as the rabbis came to read passages like that in Daniel 7 pointing to two authorities in heaven—one representing God as old, one as young; one as just and one as merciful.121 Where the uniplural “Elohim” was used in scriptural passages, as in Genesis 1:26 (“Let us make man . . .), rabbis would point to nearby scriptures using a singular term for God as means of showing that the plural was simply a kind of royal “we” and not intended to show actual plurality of persons.122 While the reaction to Gnostic ideas may have helped solidify Jewish theological ideas during the first two centuries CE, the debate over docetic and Gnostic ideas within early Christianity brought a great degree of confusion Larry Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998), 18. 120. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven, 266, 264. 121. On the rabbinic interpretation of Daniel 7, see Segal, Two Powers in Heaven, 39–40. On the mediating angel among Jewish thinkers, see Segal, 150; and Hurtado, One God, One Lord, 18, 81–82, 86. 122. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven, 27, 123. Docetism 273 before also transforming and formalizing many Christian tenets. Believers in Gnostic teachings, as noted earlier, did not generally consider themselves as members of a separate sect; rather, they were Christians, part of the larger church.123 Indeed, one of the most important secondcentury Gnostic teachers, Valentinus, came close to becoming a bishop in the Roman church.124 Valentinian Christians, even while believing doctrines quite different from those that we think of as being Christian, would have fit in well among other Christians. Like other Christians, they professed one God—one supreme God; unlike other Christians, however, they also professed a realm of divine emanations from God—the Pleroma, or fullness of God—the paired sets of angels, aeons, or archons noted earlier from which the youngest aeon had fallen, creating her own deformed being, the Hebrew god, who in turn created the world and who naively thought himself supreme.125 While Christians worshipped the one true God, the Father of all, so too did the Valentinians—but their view of who that one true God was differed significantly.126 Christians worshipped the creator; Valentinians worshipped the one who was above the creator, believing themselves to be more enlightened and knowledgeable than the Christians around them and heirs to greater rewards.127 Both viewed Jesus as the savior come to remove them from a sinful world, but what that “sin” was—lawlessness versus ignorance—differed substantially.128 The fact that both groups used simi123. King, What Is Gnosticism?, 2; Haar, Simon Magus, 242; Pagels, Gnostic Gospels, xix, 115. 124. Knight, Primitive Christianity in Crisis, 53; Tertullian, Against the Valentinians, chap. 4; Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, 3.4.3. 125. Knight, Primitive Christianity in Crisis, 53; Wagner, After the Apostles, 77–78. 126. Pagels, Gnostic Gospels, 32–33. 127. Ibid., 37, 115; Knight, Primitive Christianity in Crisis, 54; Wagner, After the Apostles, 93. 128. Pagels, Gnostic Gospels, 116–117. 274 The Gnostic World Jesus Entered lar terminology allowed Valentinians to, as Irenaeus says, “appear to be like [other Christians], by what they say in public, repeating the same words as [other Christians] do; but inwardly they are wolves.”129 Indeed, the conflict between Christians over such teachings was, in fact, a battle for who ultimately would hold authority within the church. To what degree would those who held fast to the Jewish traditions that dominated among early believers maintain such control? And which Jewish traditions would serve as the guide—those of Hellenized diasporic Jews, those abiding by a Pharisaical tradition, or those who claimed a wholly other tradition, such as the Samaritans? To what degree would ideas of non-Jewish peoples, who increasingly made up more of the church, be integrated into the faith? How Jewish would the church remain? To what degree would those who had known Jesus and his apostles remain in charge versus those who claimed a greater knowledge revealed to them directly from God or from Jesus himself? The conflict was already well in process during the time that the New Testament was being written, as attested by various biblical passages already noted in this chapter. “I fear,” Paul wrote to the Corinthian church, “lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. For if he [some other teacher] that cometh preacheth another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if ye receive another spirit, which ye have not received, or another gospel, which ye have not accepted, ye might well bear with him” ( Cor. 11:3–4). In Ephesus, Paul wept at his leave-taking, because he knew that “after [his] departing [would] grievous wolves enter in among [the elders], 129. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, 3.16.8, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com /text/irenaeus-book3.html. Docetism 275 not sparing the flock. Also of [their] own selves [would] men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them” (Acts 0:9–30). Indeed, in  Thessalonians 2:1–3, Paul complained that some were even writing in his name, posing as him: “Now we beseech you . . . that you be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us. . . . Let no man deceive you by any means.” The number of Gnostic gospels written in the names of Paul, Peter, John, and other apostles confirm that such a practice was not uncommon. Valentinus himself claimed to have received much of his teaching directly from one of Paul’s disciples.130 But even if teachers confined themselves to writings that would eventually be proclaimed authoritative, there was no shortage of varying interpretations. Peter, in his second letter, for example, notes that some “wrest . . . unto their own destruction” Paul’s epistles, as “they do also the other scriptures” ( Pet. 3:15–16). The canonization of the New Testament, no doubt, was an attempt to stave off alternative Christianities, especially in light of the passing of the first generation of Christian believers.131 That, of course, didn’t stop some from forging 130. Pagels, Gnostic Gospels, 15, 22. 131. Most scholars place the canonization of the New Testament variously between the fourth century and the seventh century CE, with much of the New Testament not being written until after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE (taking the prophetic call for its destruction as evidence that the Gospels were written after said date). However, there are strong reasons to believe that both the writing of most of the New Testament, as well as its canonization, occurred much earlier, precisely because concerns regarding authority and alternative teachings would have demanded it. A written Gospel obviously had value to those who were not in the presence of witnesses to Jesus’s ministry, which is exactly how the Gospel of Mark was written, if we are to believe Eusebius’s account, which states that Roman residents begged Mark to write Peter’s version of events for them so that they would have a record of what Peter had preached among them. Eusebius, Church History, 2.15.1–2. Although 276 The Gnostic World Jesus Entered their own “New Testaments.” The second-century teacher Marcion, whose views mirrored many Gnostic ones, save many scholars believe the Gospels to be later written accounts taken from mostly oral sources, other than the prophecy regarding the destruction of the temple, there is really little reason that such accounts could not have been written much earlier, especially as a means for eyewitnesses to help spread the message of the gospel before death took them, as Richard Bauckham sets out in his book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2006). John A. T. Robinson, in his book Redating the New Testament (1976; Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf and Stock, 2000; available online at http://richardsshow. com/redating-testament.pdf), starts off with the assumption that the New Testament works were actually all written before the destruction of Jerusalem, given that none of the books mention the event except in vague prophetic terms rather than with the specificity one would expect of works written after the event. Similarly, though most scholars place New Testament canonization much later than the first or second century, already in the second century we find writers such as Irenaeus of Lyons and Clement of Alexandria referring to virtually all the New Testament works and in a manner that suggests those works carried the authority of scripture. Eusebius may have had doubts regarding the authority of certain works in what has become the New Testament, but of note is that even his list of recognized and disputed books entails the version of the New Testament we have now, and his rejected texts remain so today. Eusebius, Church History, 3.25.1–7. David Trobisch argues that writers like Eusebius, in fact, were not so much arguing about what should be canonized but rather about the value of what had already been canonized. David Trobisch, The First Edition of the New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 35. Indeed, even the early manuscripts of New Testament works far outnumber early manuscripts for any noncanonical works, demonstrating the widespread dissemination and likely early acceptance of the former. On early canonization, see also Paul R. Finch, Beyond Acts: New Perspectives in New Testament History (Palm Bay, Fla.: Sunrise Publications, 2003); Ernest L. Martin, Restoring the Original Bible, http://www.askelm.com/restoring/index.asp; Michael J. Kruger, The Question of Canon: Challenging the Status Quo in the New Testament Debate (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2013); Michael J. Kruger, “The Complete Series: 10 Misconceptions about the NT Canon,” Canon Fodder blog, August 24, 2012, https://www .michaeljkruger.com/the-complete-series-10-misconceptions-about -the-nt-canon/. Docetism 277 that he did not believe in Gnostic cosmology, created his own New Testament using solely most of the writings of Paul and a redacted version of Luke.132 Such a Bible fit well his own doctrinal view that the Old Testament was the story of a different god than that of the New, the former being a harsh and legalistic god, the creator and god only of the Jewish people, and the latter being the supreme god, a loving and redeeming god revealed in Jesus.133 The various books by men such as Irenaeus of Lyons, Tertullian, and Epiphanius defining what constituted heresy and denoting how such views diverged from the “authoritative” scriptures were also an attempt to put a stop to people following after thinkers such as Marcion and Valentinus. Also part of this effort to establish and maintain orthodoxy were attempts by elders and bishops to institute clear lines of authority and to do away with rites and gatherings among lay people without appropriate supervision. Note, for example, the policy that early second-century bishop Ignatius of Antioch set forth in his letter to the Smyrnaeans: Do ye all follow your bishop, as Jesus Christ followed the Father, and the presbytery as the Apostles; and to the deacons pay respect, as to God’s commandment. Let no man do aught of things pertaining to the Church apart from the bishop. Let that be held a valid eucharist which is under the bishop or one to whom he shall have committed it. Wheresoever the bishop shall appear, there let the people be; even as where Jesus may be, there 132. Marian Hillar, From Logos to Trinity: The Evolution of Religious Beliefs from Pythagoras to Tertullian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 180–181; Ehrman, Lost Christianities, 107– 108; Knight, Primitive Christianity in Crisis, 51. 133. Hillar, From Logos to Trinity, 180–181; Pagels, Gnostic Gospels, 28; Wagner, After the Apostles, 76–77; Knight, Primitive Christianity in Crisis, 49–51. 278 The Gnostic World Jesus Entered is the universal Church. It is not lawful apart from the bishop either to baptize or to hold a love-feast; but whatsoever he shall approve, this is wellpleasing also to God; that everything which ye do may be sure and valid.134 Even with such restrictions, however, the forces of the society and culture surrounding early Christian believers proved too powerful to shut out. Christians lived in the world, and the Christian faith was practiced by people originating from Roman, Greek, Jewish, Babylonian, and Persian societies, to name just a few, each people of which brought their various backgrounds, practices, cultures, and beliefs to bear on what Christianity would become. This book has so far laid out what many of those differing ideas were; the next two chapters focus on how such cultures and societies influenced, first, the establishment and development of a specific practice—missionary work and, eventually, the Christian meeting—and, second, of a specific belief—the afterlife. Each was founded within a Jewish world that had already felt the pull of Hellenism, and each would transform further in reaction to the events occurring to the Jewish people and to the non-Jewish people who made up a larger and larger sector of the Christian church as it moved from first century into the third. 134. Ignatius of Antioch, Ignatius to the Smyrnaeans, trans. J. B. Lightfoot (1891), 8.1–2, Early Christian Writings, http://www .earlychristianwritings.com/text/ignatius-smyrnaeans-lightfoot.html. Chapter 5 The Missionary World Jesus Entered In his book Contagious: Why Things Catch On, Jonah Berger proposes six factors for why particular phenomena become popular:1 1. 2. 3. 4. Social currency. People like to appear to be up to date and knowledgeable, which contributes to the word-of-mouth spread of information. Triggers. One thing reminds a person of another, which also contributes to word-of-mouth dissemination of information. Emotion. People pay more attention to things that stir emotions, especially those of anger and awe. Public. People pay attention to things that others are paying attention to; thus, the more attention a particular product or service gets, the more likely people are to take notice of it and adopt it themselves. 1. Jonah Berger, Contagious: How Things Catch On (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013). The Missionary World Jesus Entered 280 5. 6. Practical value. If people find something of value to their everyday lives, they are more likely to start using it. Story. People like a good tale to learn more about and to share. Any one or more of these factors could be credited for the quick spread of Christianity during its first two centuries of existence. The story: A wonder-working man in Palestine is very publicly put to death by Roman authorities, and then, three days later various witnesses claim to see him alive again. Awe and social currency. The philosophy that this man espouses promises eternal life to its followers, a fact his own resurrection testifies to. Practical value. The more people convert to the new religion, the more people become aware of it and consider adopting it as their own. Public. Others, if we are to believe the account in Matthew 27:52–53, were raised from the dead at the time that Jesus died. When one sees them or yet others who had been healed by the man during his earthly ministry or by his followers in his name later, one is reminded of the story. Trigger. Edward Gibbons in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire would propose five explanations for the growth of Christianity specifically, factors that fit well with Berger’s: I. II. The inflexible, and if we may use the expression, the intolerant zeal of the Christians, derived, it is true, from the Jewish religion, but purified from the narrow and unsocial spirit, which, instead of inviting, had deterred the Gentiles from embracing the law of Moses. The doctrine of a future life, improved by every additional circumstance which could give weight and efficacy to that important truth. The Missionary World Jesus Entered 281 III. The miraculous powers ascribed to the primitive church. IV. The pure and austere morals of the Christians. V. The union and discipline of the Christian republic, which gradually formed an independent and increasing state in the heart of the Roman Empire.2 If we were to collate Gibbons’s arguments with those of Berger, we could say that factors 1 and 3, zeal and moral austerity, played to emotion and triggering, insofar that such zeal and moral inflexibility would have stirred up animosity among those, both Jewish and non-Jewish, not inclined to accept the new faith. Further, the Christians’ constant rejection of pagan religious rites when among non-Jews combined with the Christians’ continual insistence on telling the story of Jesus’s divinity among the Jews and their rejection of the Gentile-Jewish divide in social matters would have served as continual reminders of their presence. The steadfast insistence on the promise of an afterlife (factor 2) would have stood out from most faiths of the time, whose own views were generally less assured, befitting, as noted earlier, the practical value Berger offers as a reason for the growing popularity of an idea. Miracles would have played to the emotional and story elements in Berger’s list, which would have in turn led to a desire among some to remain socially current by spreading the news, even if not believing it themselves. Finally, Gibbons’s claim that a Christian ecclesiastical government grew up within and eventually competed with the Roman state would play to Berger’s concept of the public, wherein the more people who fall in line with a given 2. Edward Gibbons, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 1, chap. 15, part 1, Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5717/5717-h/5717-h.htm#chap15.1. 282 The Missionary World Jesus Entered product, the greater the probability even more people will decide to adopt it. The concern of this chapter, however, isn’t so much why the Christian church grew but how, though the two questions are intimately related, since things like the performance or recounting of miracles or the sharing of a fresh message were the means by which the new faith spread. Those means would play an important role in how that message would become associated with and transformed by the various philosophies and faiths already present in the first- and second-century world. Even as the message that the followers of Jesus espoused at times critiqued the cultures and societies in which they lived, its means of dissemination were the same used by purveyors of yet other philosophies and religions in both the Jewish and nonJewish world. As such, new adopters of the Christian faith often adapted its ideas and practices, whether consciously or not, to those with which they were already familiar. The very fact that Jesus in our day has been, as Paul Rhodes Eddy denotes, “variously tagged as a Galilean holy man, an eschatological prophet, an occultic magician, an innovative rabbi, a trance-inducing psychotherapist, a political revolutionary, an Essene teacher, a proto-liberation theologian, and a hellenized Cynic sage” shows that fitting Jesus and his message into traditions that were already present and well known in his day is not a difficult task.3 Just as scholars in our day do it, so did scholars in the early centuries of the Christian faith, as explorations in the previous chapters have shown; the general populace would likely have seen such parallels as well and easily have mistaken aspects of one for the other, especially when certain purveyors of the faith were already doing so. Eddy’s article 3. Paul Rhodes Eddy, “Jesus as Diogenes? Reflections on the Cynic Jesus Thesis,” Journal of Biblical Literature 115, no. 3 (1996): 449–450. The Synagogue 283 focuses on those who have seen early Christianity as being heavily influenced by Cynicism, a topic discussed in chapter . One specific way that such scholars see Christianity as mirroring Cynicism is in its missionary practices (the wandering preacher, the bold pronouncements, the minimal attachment to material goods when traveling). Indeed, divorced from its Jewish roots, as Christianity would eventually become, the spread of the Christian message would at times have paralleled the manner in which Cynics and other philosophical schools and religions spread theirs— through regular meetings, schools, public preaching, and ceremonial rites. Today, religious groups proselytize via members personally sharing their message with family and acquaintances, often by inviting them to a social function, such as a special holiday gathering or a wedding or a funeral; via parents instilling their values and beliefs in their children; via the practices and stances members take in their individual lives as they intersect with the public sphere; via the spreading of literature (more often, these days, over the Internet); and via public preaching (more often, these days, on television than on the street). Save for the aid of modern technologies, such propagation was no different in the first and second centuries. The Synagogue The location in which Jesus and his followers first began to spread their message was in the synagogue. The term “synagogue,” to modern ears, most often connotes a building set aside for Jewish religious activities and, to lesser extent, cultural activities. Such an understanding, however, conceals a much more complex definition and corresponding set of functions as they existed in the first and second centuries CE. “In reality,” Shaye J. D. Cohen notes in discussing the term, “there were many kinds of syna- 284 The Missionary World Jesus Entered gogues, during both the second temple and rabbinic periods, with varying functions, architecture, religious rituals, and social settings. . . . The word ‘synagogue’ covers a wide variety of phenomena, and a definition that fits one place and time may not be appropriate for another.”4 Archeological evidence for synagogue buildings in the first century is, in fact, rather sparse.5 In part, this may be because many synagogue buildings may have grown out of homes that were eventually converted to religious and community functions, making it near impossible to distinguish one from the other in the archeological record.6 When using the term, scholars may also be referring to different types of buildings: Jewish prayer houses, amphitheaters, meeting halls, schools.7 Some synagogues may not have had buildings at all; in such cases, synagogue gatherings may have occurred in the open, in fields, at town centers, and the like.8 Indeed, most often, the term “synagogue,” at least as it is used in the New Testament, is more directly a reference to an assembly than to a building.9 Here, too, a synagogue assembly could have different purposes and meanings. A 4. Shaye J. D. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1987), 115. 5. Richard A. Horsley, Galilee: History, Politics, People (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1995), 224; Lidia D. Matassa, Invention of the First-Century Synagogue (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2018), 3. 6. Vincent P. Branick, The House Church in the Writings of Paul (Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazer, 1989), 55; Horsley, Galilee, 224; Matassa, Invention of the First-Century Synagogue, 3. Further contributing to the difficulty is the fact that scholars have neither settled on nor found any common distinguishing features by which to define first-century synagogue buildings other than open space and benches, which may as easily be interpreted in other ways. Matassa, 5. 7. Horsley, Galilee, 224; Cohen, From the Maccabees, 66, 110, 111. 8. Horsley, Galilee, 226. 9. Ibid., 225. Luke 7:5 and Acts 18:7 are the only New Testament scriptures that unambiguously refer to the synagogue as a building; most references are ambiguous, just as references to “church” in modern writings can refer to a building, an organization, or the people The Synagogue 285 gathering for community-oriented governmental-type decisions could be a synagogue just as could be a gathering on the Sabbath for distinctly religious purposes.10 It is to this latter definition of synagogue, a Jewish religious assembly, that this text most often adheres, with references specifically to the physical structure being called a “synagogue building,” though to be sure in some cases there may not be a clear or significant distinction between the various possible meanings. If we take the New Testament accounts as our main witness, Jesus himself spread his message most often in the synagogues and at the temple (John 18:20), and this would continue to be the practice during the early years of the Christian church, as evidenced throughout the book of Acts. This synagogue focus in the early years, of course, would have differed, except in terms of the wide geographical range, from the way in which non-Jewish peoples would have spread their ideas insofar as such locations limited the message to the Jewish people and to those who were curious about the Jewish faith. The basic structure of the synagogue meeting itself, however, would have had many parallels in the non-Jewish world, such that non-Jewish peoples taking part in a Christian meeting would have already been familiar with many of the activities, even if the ultimate subject of the meeting was different, a fact that would greatly affect the liturgy of the church as it became progressively less Jewish. In the earliest days of the Christian church, as Acts tells us, the members met “daily with one accord in the temple” (Acts 2:46), where, along with attestations in individual houses, the apostles “ceased not to teach and preach Jewho are members or who are assembled, or to elements of all of these depending on the context. 10. Horsley, Galilee, 226–227; Cohen, From the Maccabees, 110– 111; Matassa, Invention of the First-Century Synagogue, 3. 286 The Missionary World Jesus Entered sus Christ” (Acts 5:4). Even after the arrest of several of Jesus’s apostles and their subsequent escape from prison, their first impulse was to return to the temple to share their message (Acts 5:25, 5:42). As the Christian faith spread away from Jerusalem, early adherents continued to meet in the synagogues, as is evidenced by the fact that Paul, before his conversion, both used the synagogues to find Christians to arrest (Acts 9:) and began his ministry in them (Acts 9:20). In fact, it was to the synagogues that Paul generally went when he began missionary work in a given town. Acts notes this as such in various locations in Asia Minor, including Antioch of Pisidia (Acts 13:14), Iconium (Acts 14:1), and Ephesus (Acts 18:19), and in modern-day Greece, including Thessalonica and Berea (Acts 17:1, 10). That meeting in the synagogue was typical of the early Christians is also evident from how long Paul is noted as having spent in some of these locations—three sabbaths in the synagogue of Thessalonica (Acts 17:2); one and a half years in Corinth, where the head of the synagogue became a Christian (Acts 18:8, 11); and three months on one of his subsequent passes through Ephesus (Acts 19:8). As Paula Fredriksen puts it in her book When Christians Were Jews, “Members of the Christ-following assembly would have formed within, and thus considered themselves part of, the host synagogue community.”11 These meetings in the synagogues included not only Jews but also non-Jews. “Just as pagans could be found visiting with Israel’s god in his temple’s precincts,” Fredriksen writes, “they could also be found, variously affiliated, in the synagogues of western diaspora cities.”12 These Gentile 11. Paula Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 146. 12. Ibid., 140. It was not uncommon for people to visit the temples or participate in the worship of deities who were not that of their own people, and it is in this context “that we can understand the phenomenon of Gentiles frequenting Diaspora synagogues.” Larry W. Hurtado, The Synagogue 287 associations with the synagogue could take many forms, ranging from a mere visit to satisfy curiosity about another god to full-on conversion to the Jewish faith. Squarely in the middle of these extremes were those who have popularly come to be known as God-fearers: Gentiles interested in Judaism who had not fully converted and who had not become circumcised. What this degree of interest, however, meant remains “nebulous.”13 According to some scholars, “Godfearers expressed enough interest in Judaism to attend synagogue and possibly give alms, but did not fully embrace the Law.”14 According to Paula Fredriksen and Shaye J. D. Cohen, God-fearers acknowledged the Jewish god among others but remained polytheists.15 For yet others, the question of the God-fearers’ continued polytheism is more open: Was the Jewish god the chief god, the only God, or one of many gods?16 The God-fearers, in others’ views, might contribute financially to a Jewish synagogue or participate in some of its activities but otherwise remain largely pagan, or they might be largely Jewish except in their devotion to the oral law and adherence to circumcision.17 Certainly, Luke’s book of Acts suggests that GodAt the Origins of Christian Worship: The Context and Character of Earliest Christian Devotion (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1999), 13–14. 13. Chelica Hiltunen, “Who Were the God Fearers?” Bible Study Magazine, June 3, 2016, http://www.biblestudymagazine.com/bible -study-magazine-blog/2016/6/3/who-were-the-god-fearers. 14. Hiltunen, “Who Were the God-Fearers?” 15. Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews, 142–143; Cohen, From the Maccabees, 56. 16. Hiltunen, “Who Were the God-Fearers?” 17. Compare Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews, 140; Hiltunen, “Who Were the God-Fearers?”; Vidush Bhandari, “The ‘God-Fearers’: Significance of the Gentile Worshippers in Luke-Acts as a Paradigm for Mission among Yeshu Bhaktas,” 3–4, https://www.academia .edu/31072920/THE_GOD-FEARERS_SIGNIFICANCE_OF_THE _GENTILE_WORSHIPPERS_IN_LUKE-ACTS_AS_A_PARADIGM_FOR _MISSION_AMONG_YESHU_BHAKTAS. 288 The Missionary World Jesus Entered fearers of the latter type existed. The argument James provides to the Jerusalem council in Acts 15 regarding what level of adherence Gentile converts must maintain to Jewish law and tradition, including circumcision, is in part based around the prospect that such Gentiles were already convening with the Jews “in the synagogue every sabbath day” to hear the law (Acts 15:1). It was from these sort of Gentiles that early Gentile Christian adherents were probably drawn, their main break from pagan communities around them, insofar as they no longer served pagan gods, having come earlier but certainly no later than their full adoption of Christian belief.18 The emphasis on certain laws in the letters sent from the Jerusalem council (abstaining from meat offered to idols, from blood, from things strangled, and from sexual immorality, as denoted in Acts 15:29) may represent a version of the seven socalled Noachide laws enjoined on all peoples after Noah’s flood according to rabbinical tradition (abstaining from “blasphemy, idolatry, adultery, bloodshed, robbery, and eating flesh torn from a live animal,” or drinking blood from a live animal). However, the more important point of the directives is the emphasis they would have placed on the Gentiles’ break from pagan lifestyles, institutions, and 18. Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews, 143; Bhandari, “GodFearers,” . Also see P. F. Esler, Community and Gospel in Luke-Acts: The Social and Political Motivations of Lucan Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 36, 42; John J. Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora (Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000), 264; Martinus C. De Boer, “God-Fearers in Luke-Acts,” in Luke’s Literary Achievement: Collected Essays, ed. C. M. Tuckett (England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 50; John R. Bartlett, Jews in the Hellenistic and Roman Cities (London: Routledge, 2002), 50, all quoted in Bhandari, 3–4. For a more extended discussion, see J. Jervell, “The Church of Jews and God-Fearers,” in Luke-Acts and the Jewish People: Eight Critical Perspectives, ed. J. B. Tyson (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1988), pp. 11–20, also cited in Bhandari, 6. The Synagogue 289 dining customs, wherein temple meals and general sexual license (and even perhaps temple prostitution) flourished as part of the common social fabric.19 Thus, the Noachide laws would not have been the main focus here, since such laws were already denoted in the written law such Godfearers heard read each Sabbath, as James denotes. Rather, the focus was on differentiating non-Jewish God-fearers from the customs of the pagans around them and making their presence socially palatable to other Jewish believers. In sexual matters, many a Gentile man would have had to contend with social norms that placed sex as a recreational pursuit and wherein slaves were often turned into prostitutes, such that “sexual restraint . . . was the exception rather than the rule.”20 The historian Nickie Roberts 19. Sanhedrin 56a, cited in David H. Stern, Jewish New Testament Commentary (Clarkesville, Md.: Jewish New Testament Publications, 1992), 278. Of course, the fact that Noachide laws, as something distinguishable from the Sinaitic law, first explicitly appear in rabbinic tradition suggests that they were part of an oral tradition that likely developed later, rather than at the time of Noah. The first written form of the Noachide laws, although differing a bit in content from the later rabbinic traditions, appears in the Jewish book Jubilees 7.20, 28, around the second century BCE. John J. Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem, 170–171. The very fact that it would be an echo of these laws that the council would enjoin on Gentiles suggests that it is the Mosaic oral law that was under discussion; in affirming that Gentiles need only follow these customs, the council was freeing them from other Jewish oral traditions, traditions that even Jesus’s Jewish followers often eschewed. See, for example, Paul’s words to Peter in Galatians 2:14. For Jesus’s own rejection of such traditions, see, for example, Mark 7:1–13. On the Noachide laws, see Jeffrey Spitzer, “The Noahide Laws,” My Jewish Learning, https://www.myjewishlearning.com /article/the-noahide-laws/. 20. Nickie Roberts, Whores in History: Prostitution in Western Society (London: HarperCollins, 1992), 13, 35, quote on 38; Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 281–282. The sexual freedoms of women were less often written about and were likely more circumscribed, 290 The Missionary World Jesus Entered writes of male-only parties in which men “were entertained by groups of dancer-musician-prostitutes—the auletrides—who played their flutes, drums and finger cymbals, and performed the sensuous dances of the Middle East. . . . After the entertainment, the men vied with each other for the sexual services of the performers.”21 Add to such social functions the fact that a visit to the grounds of the temple of a pagan deity often brought one into contact with sex workers, whose trade was frequently plied in the vicinity—as well as in or near the Roman baths.22 The first-century BCE Greek geographer Strabo included in his main work many examples of prostitution carried out for the purpose of worship. Among the Babylonians, for example, he writes, “in accordance with a certain oracle all the Babylonian women have a custom of having intercourse with a foreigner, the women going to a temple of Aphrodite with a great retinue and crowd; and each woman is wreathed with a cord round her head. The man who approaches a woman takes her far away from the saas various Roman writers expressed disapproval with regard to loose women, especially if married, even if Roman women were allowed more freedoms than other ancient Mediterranean women generally and sometimes expressed it even sexually. Goodman, 283–284; Roberts, 34, 38. Greek women were confined to play the role of either wife or prostitute. Roberts, 16–17. 21. Roberts, Whores in History, 29. See also Valeriy A. Alikin, The Earliest History of the Christian Gathering: Origin, Development, and Content of the Christian Gathering in the First to Third Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 22, https://brill.com/view/title/17341. 22. Roberts, Whores in History, 43. “Prostitutes and their clients tended to favor particular places in the city. A great source of knowledge on this subject is Ovid’s Ars amatoria where he described in detail two best places to establish a contact—pillared halls, temples, especially those devoted to female deities such as Isis, Pax, Ceres, Bona Dea or Magna Mater, but also Venus and the baths, circuses and theaters and the district Suburra, rather lower-class area.” “Prostitution in Ancient Rome,” Imperium Romanum, https://www .imperiumromanum.edu.pl/en/roman-society/marriage-and-love-life -in-ancient-rome/prostitution-in-ancient-rome/amp/. The Synagogue 291 cred precinct, and then has intercourse with her; and the money is considered sacred to Aphrodite.”23 He claims that in Corinth there were more than one thousand courtesans dedicated to the same goddess.24 He writes that in Thebes in Egypt in worship of Zeus, “they dedicate a maiden of greatest beauty and most illustrious family (such maidens are called ‘pallades’ by the Greeks); and she prostitutes herself, and cohabits with whatever men she wishes until the natural cleansing of her body takes place; and after her cleansing she is given in marriage to a man; but before she is married, after the time of her prostitution, a rite of mourning is celebrated for her.”25 The Armenians, he denotes, built temples in honor of the goddess Anaïtis, to whom “the most illustrious men of the tribe actually consecrate to her their daughters while maidens; and it is the custom for these first to be prostituted in the temple of the goddess for a long time and after this to be given in marriage; and no one disdains to live in wedlock with such a woman.”26 The accuracy of these accounts, and others like them by other classical-age authors, has been questioned by many modern scholars. Strabo’s accounts, for example, the historian Stephanie Budin writes, derive from the writings of such authors as Herodotus rather than his own witness and fall prey to propaganda meant to show the superiority of Greek culture, or they are anachronistic misunderstandings on Strabo’s part of the cultures he writes about, or they have been mistranslated or misunderstood by his 23. Strabo, The Geography of Strabo, 16.1.20, Loeb Classical Library Edition, 1932, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts /Strabo/16A*.html. 24. Ibid., 8.6.20, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman /Texts/Strabo/8F*.html. 25. Ibid., 17.1.46, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman /Texts/Strabo/17A3*.html. 26. Ibid., 11.14.16, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E /Roman/Texts/Strabo/11N*.html. 292 The Missionary World Jesus Entered readers, such that the “sacred prostitutes” we read of in translation are simply cultic functionaries in his original language.27 That said, while it may be questionable whether sexual services were actually incorporated into the worship of various deities in Roman times, the fact that there was some sort of connection between sexual expression and the worship of ancient goddesses is documented in many early sources, even if perhaps exaggerated.28 The goddess Venus was regarded as a protector of sex workers, while worshippers of the goddess Bona Dea were strictly female and known for their licentiousness; the goddess Isis, derived from her predecessor the whore-goddess Ishtar, also saw a growing slate of followers in the Roman Empire, though worship of her in Roman times was apparently quite staid.29 Indeed, even if prostitution was not explicitly part of the worship of such deities, the connection between sex and the religions based around them were well established in the form of traditions involving fertility passed down from Mesopotamian and Egyptian societies into the Greek and Roman.30 Idols of Asherah, a Canaanite fertil7. See chapter 6, “Strabo, Confused and Misunderstood,” in Stephanie Lynn Budin, The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 28. Matthias Schulz, “Sex in the Service of Aphrodite: Did Prostitution Really Exist in the Temples of Antiquity,” Spiegel Online, March 26, 2010, https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/sex -in-the-service-of-aphrodite-did-prostitution-really-exist-in-the -temples-of-antiquity-a-685716.html, lays out the current scholarly debate, largely siding with the sceptics. Budin, in her Myth of Sacred Prostitution, goes so far as to contend that there never was any such thing as sacred prostitution. 29. Roberts, Whores in History, 45–46; Larry Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2016), 85; Dorothy I. Sly, Plato’s Alexandria, quoting Tran Tam Tinh (New York: Routledge, 1996), 115. 30. Roberts, Whores in History, 7. Indeed, even Budin in her Myth of Sacred Prostitution admits to a connection between Mesopotamian religion and sex; her issue is with the concept that prostitution was The Synagogue 293 ity goddess, featured a nude, sometimes pregnant, woman with exaggerated breasts, and her cult transformed into those of the Greco-Roman fertility goddesses of Artemis and Aphrodite.31 Passion plays focused on the agricultural goddess Demeter’s search for her daughter Persephone, whose disappearance into the Underworld caused Demeter to burn all the crops and whose return also brought with it the return of seed, represented by wheat.32 Lupercalia, celebrated in Rome on February 15, what we now know as Valentine’s Day, honored the Roman fertility god Lupercus and the supposed she-wolf who rescued the two founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus. The festival featured the sacrifice of goats, whose hides were then cut into strips and used to whip women that they might become fertile.33 Festivals for the Greek fertility god Dionysus featured giant phalluses alongside heavy drinking.34 And in Corinth, involved, for prostitution involves an “exchange of sex for something else of value,” whereas rituals of the faith such as the sacred marriage ceremony were between “prescribed personnel (priest and priestess) to represent the union of god and his consort” and may well not have even involved sex except in a theoretical sense. Budin, Myth of Sacred Prostitution, 17, quoting J. Miner, “Courtesan, Concubine, Whore: Apollodorus’ Deliberate Use of Terms for Prostitutes,” American Journal of Philology 124 (2003): 30, and E. J. Fisher, “Cultic Prostitution: A Reassessment, Biblical Theology Bulletin 6 (1976): 230. See also Budin, Myth of Sacred Prostitution, 22. 31. Ray Vander Laan, “Fertility Cults of Canaan,” That the World May Know, https://www.thattheworldmayknow.com/fertility-cults-of -canaan. 32. Ishtar Babilu Dinger, “The Sacred Sex and Death Rites of the Ancient Mystery Groves,” Ancient Origins: Reconstructing the Story of Humanity’s Past, October 9, 2014, https://www.ancient-origins.net /myths-legends/sacred-sex-and-death-rites-ancient-mystery-groves -00186. For different ancient accounts of the myth, see “Demeter Myths 1,” Theoi Greek Mythology, https://www.theoi.com/Olympios /DemeterMyths.html#Apollodorus. 33. “Lupercalia,” History.com, August 1, 018, https://www .history.com/topics/ancient-rome/lupercalia. 34. Jeffrey Hays, “Ancient Greek Religion and Mystery Cults: Ancient Greek Religion,” Facts and Details, 01, “Wild Dionysus Festi- 294 The Missionary World Jesus Entered to which Paul wrote specifically about prostitution, a “special festival of Aphrodite for prostitutes,” as Robert M. Grant notes, may not strictly count as sacred prostitution but still evokes the idea of “prostitution especially sanctioned by a goddess.”35 The religion of the Jewish people, of course, was not without its own links between God and man placed within a metaphorical marital, and by extension sexual, context. The ancient prophets Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Hosea all compared God to a husband, albeit jilted, and the nation of Israel to a wife, albeit unfaithful, but with a promise that one day the wife would return to the husband.36 Such comparison was furthered by allegorical interpretations of the highly romantic Song of Solomon, which depicted loving relations between God and Israel in the form of a king and his lover, though the earliest written account of such interpretations date to the Midrash and Targum—the oral traditions—which did not begin to be written down until the first century CE.37 Paul and the Gospel writers, too, reference marriage between the divine Jesus and his believers. The three synoptic Gospels, for example, refer to an incident in which the Pharisees ask Jesus why his disciples do not fast. Jesus’s response is a question that poses vals” section, http://factsanddetails.com/world/cat55/sub350 /item2319.html. 35. Robert M. Grant, Gods and the One God (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), 24. 36. See, for example, Jeremiah 3, Ezekiel 16, and Hosea 2. For Israel’s return, see Hosea 2:16, 19–20. 37. Emil G. Hirsch and Crawford Howell Toy, “Song of Songs, The (A. V. The Song of Solomon),” Jewish Encyclopedia (1906), “Interpretation: Solomon as Bridegroom” section, http://www .jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/13916-song-of-songs-the; on the date of written Targum, see Martin McNamara and Paul V. M. Flesher, “Targum,” Oxford Bibliographies, April 8, 017, DOI: 10.1093 /OBO/9780195393361-0187. On Targum more generally, see Bruce M. Metzger, “The Jewish Targums,” Bible Research, http://www.bible -researcher.com/aramaic4.html. The Synagogue 295 himself as a groom and his disciples as his bride: “Can the children of the bridechamber fast, while the bridegroom is with them?” (Mark :19).38 Picking up on the same theme, Paul tells the church at Corinth, “For I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ” (1 Cor. 11:). While none of the Jewish or Christian traditions are as sexually explicit as the pagan rituals and legends often were, they conveyed a similar idea about the unity of God and man through sacred marriage. Thus, the main point of the Acts 15 council’s dictum against fornication, a law that was already part of the commandments Jesus’s followers would have been observing, then would have been for God-fearers to avoid the general looseness but also the social and religious elements inherent in the pagan society from which they had come and in which they likely still held connections, be it through friends or, more particularly, family. Indeed, this is what Paul essentially told the largely non-Jewish church in Corinth in his letters to them: “I wrote unto you in an epistle not to company with fornicators: Yet not altogether with the fornicators of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or with idolators; for then must ye needs to go out of the world. But now I have written unto you not to keep company, if any man that is called a brother [a follower of Jesus] be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolator, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner; with such an one no not to eat” (1 Cor. 5:9–11). A similar concern would have been the foundation for the other three items specifically designated as elements of the law to which the non-Jewish believers needed to pay special attention—abstaining from meats offered to idols, from blood, and from things strangled—that is, to take heed of the items one might eat within the social situations former pagans who had not fully converted to Judaism would 38. Parallel accounts occur in Matthew 9:14–15 and Luke 5:33–35. 296 The Missionary World Jesus Entered have sometimes found themselves. One of the main issues for non-Jewish people who took up an interest in the Jewish faith—and by extension the early Christian faith—was the extent to which pagan temples served as a center for the societies from which such peoples came. Much as the synagogue served as the hub of social activities for the Jewish peoples—not only Sabbath services but various gatherings and educational activities—so too did local pagan temples for non-Jewish peoples. Particular gods were often associated with specific families and ethnicities, and the temples often doubled in function as libraries, lecture halls, banks, and community centers.39 Adopting the Christian faith would have strained friendships and familial relationships, since a given convert would no longer have been able to participate in the various pagan rituals associated with one’s friends and family; becoming a full convert to the Pharisaic version of the Jewish faith, however, as some Jews wished to ordain upon the God-fearers, would have meant giving up such connections completely, since even mere contact in certain social situations, not to mention professional life, would have been forbidden. The pagan social context, thus, was the reason for Paul’s comments regarding food in his letters to the Romans and Corinthians. In 1 Corinthians 10:27–28, for example, he writes that “if any of them that believe not bid you to a feast, and ye be disposed to go; whatsoever is set before you, eat, asking no question for conscience sake. But if any man say unto you, this is offered in sacrifice unto idols, eat not for his sake that shewed it, and for conscience sake.” 39. On synagogue uses, see Chad Spigel, “First Century Synagogues,” Bible Odyssey, https://www.bibleodyssey.org/en/places /related-articles/first-century-synagogues; on household and local gods, see Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods, 47, 78; on temple libraries and lecture halls, see Ramsay MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 11; on temple banking, see James W. Ermatinger, Daily Life in the New Testament (Wesport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2008), 78. The Synagogue 297 Given that most people did not have homes large enough to host such a simple social function as a shared meal, the pagan temple often became the locus for such an activity.40 Often, this activity might include a meal in honor to a god in a temple dining room—sometimes, even at the invitation of the god.41 This background might in fact be one basis for Paul’s comment in 1 Corinthians 11:20–26, that the Corinthians, used to extravagant banquets in the name of some god, were not, on Passover, gathering for the same purpose and in the same manner as they did formerly to “eat the Lord’s supper” (1 Cor. 11:0) and that, instead, they have “houses to eat and to drink in” (1 Cor. 11:);42 rather, Paul goes on to write, their purpose was more somber, to “show the Lord’s death” (1 Cor. 11:6) by following the convention (the taking of bread and wine) that Jesus laid down “the same night in which he was betrayed” (1 Cor. 11:3). In addition to meals in honor of a given temple’s god, it was also possible that a largely secular activity or meal might be hosted at a temple, rented out for the occasion.43 Even if the occasion were not directly related to the worship of the pagan deity, the food served might well have been derived from a sacrifice to that deity, just as food in the marketplace often derived from such sources, as is made clear in Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians 10:25 (“Whatsoever is sold in the shambles, that eat, asking no question 40. MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, 36; Hurtado, At the Origins, 41. 41. MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, 36; Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods, 60. 42. Andrew McGowan notes, “Calling their common meal a [supper], Paul and the Corinthians were likening it to those held in the dining rooms of pagan temples (1 Cor 8:10) or in private homes (10:27), among diners bound by kinship or common interest. . . . Linking a banquet to a divine host or patron was expected.” Andrew McGowan, “The Myth of the ‘Lord’s Supper’: Paul’s Eucharistic Meal Terminology and Its Ancient Reception,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 77 (2015): 505, 506. 43. MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, 39. 298 The Missionary World Jesus Entered for conscience sake”). Thus, Paul warned his readers in Corinth to be careful about what foods they ate and where: “If any man see thee which hast knowledge sit at meat in the idol’s temple, shall not the conscience of him which is weak be emboldened to eat those things which are offered to idols; and through thy knowledge shall the weak brother perish, for whom Christ died?” (1 Cor. 8:11–1).44 In fact, in certain non-Jewish areas, it may well have been next to impossible to distinguish meat offered to idols from any other kind of meat, leading some to avoid eating meat altogether, which was apparently the case among some in the Roman church (Rom. 14:1–3). “When Christianity gradually took over in antiquity,” writes Gunnel Ekroth in an article about meat in ancient Greece, “one of the great challenges was to wrench slaughter and meat-eating away from the pagan cults of which they had formed the core. The killing and butchering of animals had to become ‘secular,’ or an essential part of men’s lives, dining, would have been too intimately linked with pagan religion.”45 The point that the council in Acts 15, thus, was attempting to make and that was reaffirmed by Paul was that even when Gentile God-fearers were not among Jewish believers, they were to maintain a lifestyle that was not affiliated with pagan practices; at the same time, they need not become full-on Jews in terms of cultural affiliation, completely disassociating from their cultural milieu. To be sure, such peoples in some ways “became Jews”—at least in terms of keeping the law read from the Torah each Sab44. For a full discussion of the passages in 1 Corinthians on dining, see David E. Garland, “The Dispute over Food Sacrificed to Idols (1 Cor 8:1–11:1),” https://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/religious_studies /SNTS2002/garland.htm. Garland makes the point that Paul was warning Gentiles away from eating in the temples and away from eating any food that was explicitly affiliated with idolatry. 45. Gunnel Ekroth, “Meat in Ancient Greece: Sacrificial, Sacred or Secular?,” Food and History 5, no. 1 (2007): 254–255. The Synagogue 299 bath—and that in itself would have disassociated many of them from their pagan neighbors. However, they did not take on many of the customs prescribed in the oral law that the scribes and Pharisees attempted to enjoin on all believers, a position that many of Christ’s followers had not taken on either, as evidenced in Galatians 2:14, and in the accounts of Christ’s own words on the matter, in such places as Luke 11:37–40, both discussed in chapter 1. Indeed, even the mere fact of circumcision alone would not have been the entire issue with those Jewish people who insisted that non-Jewish believers needed to obey the whole law, needed in essence to become full Jews, for circumcision was already practiced among many cultures in the eastern part of the Roman Empire. Rather, such Jewish thinkers likely wanted non-Jewish men to be circumcised in the prescribed Jewish fashion (as even today, those Jewish children who are secularly circumcised in a hospital must pass through a ceremony in which yet more blood is drawn to confirm that circumcision).46 But to Paul and the church elders in Acts 15, neither circumcision was anything nor uncircumcision, “but the keeping of the commandments of God” (1 Cor. 7:19). In this sense, the early followers of Jesus began to forge a new sect, within the Jewish synagogue, one that was skeptical of scribal oral law and that was so open to non-Jewish believers that it considered them equals. “There is neither Jew nor Greek,” Paul would tell the Galatians, “there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:8). The form of the synagogue service itself, as it happened, aided the spread of Jesus’s message, for unlike most Christian church services today, a singular pastor did not carry out the bulk of the preaching at any given worship session. Rather, the service was, as Ernest L. Martin puts it, in a 46. Stern, Jewish New Testament Commentary, 274–275. 300 The Missionary World Jesus Entered discussion about “Synagogues and Ekklesias,” “a layman’s work.”47 The service was open to discussion among the congregation, and any male over the age of twelve could speak.48 The ruler of the synagogue, chosen from among the men, or “elders,” of the synagogue community, was essentially the caretaker of the synagogue building, if there was one, and the arranger of the meetings but was not necessarily the synagogue’s spiritual head. While priests and Levites were often given deference in terms of speaking, and the Pharisees, too, often served in leadership roles, the Pharisees’ rabbinical descendants would not become the de facto spiritual heads until many centuries after the first.49 In addition, especially outside Jerusalem, synagogue services were generally held in Aramaic (in the East) or Greek (in the West)—most diaspora Jewish people not knowing Hebrew—which would have aided comprehension among Gentiles who happened to attend, the numbers of whom could be large.50 47. Ernest L. Martin, “Synagogues and Ekklesias,” ed. David Sielaff, December 005, Associates for Scriptural Knowledge, http:// www.askelm.com/doctrine/d051201.htm. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid.; Ray Vander Laan, “He Went to Synagogue,” That the World May Know, https://www.thattheworldmayknow.com/he-went -to-synagogue; Spigel, “First Century Synagogues”; Cohen, From the Maccabees, 18, 226–228. 50. Hurtado, At the Origins, 33–34; John J. Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem, 185; F. F. Bruce, New Testament History (New York: Anchor Books, 1972), 144. Martin Hengel, in The “Hellenization” of Judaea in the First Century after Christ, estimates that between 10 and 20 percent of the Jewish population of Jerusalem had Greek as its mother tongue (10); even Jerusalem synagogues would have been motivated to conduct readings and discussion in Greek to serve the many diaspora Jewish people who traveled through the city, especially during festivals. Martin Hengel, The “Hellenization” of Judaea in the First Century after Christ (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1989), 13. The Synagogue 301 A standard meeting took on a simultaneously prescribed and open format: songs, blessings, chants, and prayers, followed by readings, one from the Torah and one from the Prophets (translated as needed). The readings, at least for the Torah, were likely based around a triennial schedule (or possibly a yearly one), such that the first five books of the Old Testament were read once every one to three years. After this often came a short explication, with the discussion then opened to the entire congregation.51 And because any man was able to talk, most especially about the reading, Jesus—and later Jesus’s followers—were easily able to 51. On the order of the service, see, among others, Silouan Thompson, “First-Century Synagogue Liturgy,” Silouan blog, September 15, 007, https://silouanthompson.net/007/09/first-century-christian -synagogue-liturgy/; “Paul and the Synagogue,” Netivyah Bible Instruction Ministry blog, https://netivyah.org/paul-and-the-synagogue/; Martin, “Synagogues and Ekklesias”; Bruce, New Testament History, 143–145; D. W. Ekstrand, “Worship in the Early Church,” The Transformed Soul, section “The ‘Liturgy’ of the First-Century Synagogue Consisted of Five Elements,” http://www.thetransformedsoul.com /additional-studies/miscellaneous-studies/-worship-in-the-early -church; and Tim Hegg, “The Public Reading of the Scriptures in the 1st Century Synagogue,” Torah Resource, 2007, https://www .torahresource.com/EnglishArticles/TriennialCycle.pdf. On the cycle of readings, see comments on Acts 13:15, Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers, https://biblehub.com/commentaries/acts/13-15.htm; Alikin, Earliest History, 152, 154; Bruce, New Testament History, 143; and Hegg, “Public Reading of the Scriptures.” Admittedly, our knowledge of the first-century synagogue is limited, much of it reconstructed from later times. For a discussion of these limitations, specifically with regard to the architecture of the synagogue, see Matassa, Invention of the First-Century Synagogue, especially the introduction. Hegg, in “The Public Reading of the Scriptures,” admits that “most of the extant historical materials that describe synagogue practices were written in the nd Century and later” (1). That said, Hegg does a convincing job of showing how what few examples we do have of first-century practice demonstrate “affinity to the later traditions of the Mishnah and Talmuds” (16), including a schedule of readings. John E. Stambaugh and David L. Balch, The New Testament in Its Social Environment (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), 85, however, doubt that such a schedule existed at this time. 302 The Missionary World Jesus Entered spread the Christian message within the synagogue itself. This is the setting for Jesus’s comments in Luke 4:15–27. Luke writes that Jesus, as he traveled through Galilee, “taught in their synagogues” and that when he came to Nazareth, where he had grown up, he “stood up for to read”—likely invited to do so because of his return home. In this case, he was the reader for a section from Isaiah, after which, he provided an explication—“This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears”—after which followed a discussion. Acts 13:15–16 provides a similar example of how the synagogue service could be used to spread the Christian gospel, this time through Paul’s explication. Luke writes of Paul’s visit to a synagogue in Antioch in Pisidia that “after the reading of the law and the prophets the rulers of the synagogue sent unto them, saying, Ye men and brethren, if ye have any word of exhortation for the people, say on.” Paul responds by rising to provide the audience with an account of Jesus’s death and resurrection. This order of service, perhaps with the integration of select New Testament readings, apparently remained among Christian followers even into the second century, after many had given up meeting on the Sabbath, though perhaps by then with a set speaker, as testified to by Justin Martyr around 150 CE: “And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things.”52 52. Justin Martyr, First Apology, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, chap. 67, Early Christian Writings, http://www .earlychristianwritings.com/text/justinmartyr-firstapology.html; Ekstrand, “Worship in the Early Church,” section “When Christians Were No Longer Allowed to Worship in the Synagogues.” Fellowship Meals, the Passover, and the Eucharist 303 Fellowship Meals, the Passover, and the Foundation for the Eucharist At the end of the Christian meeting, Justin Martyr added one other element, which, though not a formal part of the synagogue service, also forged an important aspect of the Jewish community—a communal meal: “Then we all rise together and pray, and, as we before said, when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings, according to his ability, and the people assent, saying Amen; and there is a distribution to each, and a participation of that over which thanks have been given.”53 For the Jewish people fellowship meals among family and friends were a common occurrence, often happening at the end of the Sabbath, and the early Christian church appears to have continued with similar get-togethers.54 Indeed, fellowship meals among early Christians occurred from the very first days of the church’s existence. Almost immediately after its founding on the day of Pentecost, Christians, Luke notes, were “breaking bread from house to house” (Acts 2:46). Such meals, in the Jewish world, however, were rarely part of the synagogue meeting.55 To that, then, we have to look elsewhere, and indeed, we find an important parallel in the non-Jewish world in the form of Greek or Roman association or club meetings.56 Such clubs, like the synagogue, often had meetings that took on an open format 53. Justin Martyr, First Apology, chap. 67. 54. Alikin, Earliest History, 27, 29, 30, 46–47; Henk Jan de Jonge, “The Origins of the Sunday Eucharist,” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 92, no. 4 (2016): 575, DOI: 10.2143/ETL.92.4.0000000; Tim Hegg, “An Investigation of ‘The Lord’s Table’ in Five Parts,” part , 1999, TorahResource.com, https://silo.tips/download/church-history -and-the-lords-table. 55. Alikin, Earliest History, 28–29. 56. Branick, House Church in the Writings, 111. 304 The Missionary World Jesus Entered that involved songs, blessings, chants, prayers, speeches, and readings, with discussion.57 Indeed, one could even say that synagogues were a form of association, since one common type of club revolved around the devotion to a particular chosen deity.58 In the Greco-Roman association meetings, however, a meal was usually included among the festivities.59 Justin Martyr was quite possibly writing not about a mere meal, though, but about the tradition of the Eucharist, the eating of bread and wine in commemoration of Jesus’s death, a fact affirmed by his reference to it and description of it in his Dialogue with Trypho: “The offering of fine flour . . . was a type of the bread of the Eucharist, the celebration of which our Lord Jesus Christ prescribed, in remembrance of the suffering which He endured on behalf of those who are purified in soul from all iniquity, . . . the bread of the Eucharist, and also the cup of the Eucharist, affirming both that we glorify His name, and that you profane.”60 How the Eucharist was added to a standard Christian gathering, however, is a much more complex and mysterious subject than some might imagine, with various scholars pointing to Jewish Passover traditions, others to Greco-Roman association meals, and still others to yet other Jewish or non-Jewish rituals and meals.61 In all 57. Alikin, Earliest History, 21–22. 58. Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974), 244; Cohen, From the Maccabees, 110, 116. 59. Branick, House Church in the Writings, 111; Alikin, Earliest History, 18. 60. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, chap. 41, Early Christian Writings, http:// earlychristianwritings.com/text/justinmartyr-dialoguetrypho.html. 61. Alikin, Earliest History, 5, 9–14. Alikin provides a summary of differing views of the origin of the Eucharist in the early portion of his study, though his book largely argues that “the Hellenistic association is the model which best explains the Christian gathering” (5). Fellowship Meals, the Passover, and the Eucharist 305 likelihood, as with so many other Christian practices, the Christian Eucharist has partial origins in all of these traditions as they blended together over the first two centuries of the faith.62 Many Bible readers take the various accounts of the Christians breaking bread in the New Testament as evidence of the Eucharist being practiced frequently from early on after Jesus’s death,63 but as a ritualistic meal commemorating Jesus’s sacrifice, this is almost certainly not the case. The phrase “breaking bread” likely references not a Eucharistic ritual but simply a Jewish meal practice.64 The phrase is of Aramaic origin and does not appear in Greco-Roman writings of the first century CE outside scripture, its roots likely being that of the Jewish blessing that preceded the start of a meal.65 Breaking bread, thus, became a shortened way of saying “gave the blessing and 62. As P. Coutsoumpos, in his PhD dissertation (University of Sheffield, 1996), “Paul’s Teaching of the Lord’s Supper: A Socio-historical Study of the Pauline Account of the Last Supper and Its GraecoRoman Background,” puts it: “Sharing of meals was a normal religious practice in the pagan mystery religions, Judaism and Christianity, and there are some parallels in all these meals.” He goes on to note that the Lord’s supper “would not have grown in the manner it did without Hellenistic influence” (75, 74). 63. See, for a popular example, the entry for “Breaking of Bread” at Encyclopedia.com (https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion /encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/breaking-bread). Alikin, in his Earliest History, uses the term as evidence for the early adoption of the Eucharist, as in, “The book of Acts repeatedly mentions the celebration of the Lord’s Supper (the breaking of the bread in Acts 2:42, 46, 20:7, 11) without ever alluding to the interpretation of the elements as Christ’s body and blood or to the institution of the meal by Jesus” (11). 64. Tim Hegg, “An Investigation of ‘The Lord’s Table’ in Five Parts,” part ; Luana Fabri, “Breaking of Bread the Jewish Understanding,” Grafted-In Ministries, http://messianicfellowship.50webs.com/bread .html. 65. Hegg, “Investigation of ‘The Lord’s Table,’” part ; Fabri, “Breaking of Bread.” 306 The Missionary World Jesus Entered ate.”66 As such, the term simply attests to the frequency of fellowship meals among the early church members. Indeed, the phrase “broke bread” is used in the Gospels in Jesus’s feeding of the four thousand and the five thousand, with bread and fish (Matt. 15:36; Matt. 14:19), long before his final supper with his disciples, at which most contemporary Christians believe he introduced the Eucharistic practice. The regularity with which early Christians gathered to eat would have also had a rough parallel in the GrecoRoman world and its club culture.67 From Paul’s description in 1 Corinthians 10, the formats of such meals appear as if they might have been somewhat similar, at least among non-Jewish Christians.68 After foot washing performed as guests entered the gathering place, association meetings usually began with a meal.69 Most people subsisted on bread, with fruit and vegetables as in season, and wine or water; meat was a rare treat.70 An opulent meal often consisted of three courses: first, vegetables, herbs, and olives; second, meat; and third, dessert, such as cheese, fruit, nuts, or cake.71 Wine was served to drink, with the first cup usually dedicated to a deity.72 Most of the drinking, however, occurred after the meal, during the symposium or entertainment portion of the evening.73 If such banquets were not sponsored by the host, a collection was taken up to pay for the cost of the meal or the meal 66. Hegg, “Investigation of ‘The Lord’s Table,’” part . 67. Alikin, Earliest History, 24. 68. Ibid., 34; Andrew McGowan, “Rethinking Eucharistic Origins,” Pacifica 23 (June 2010): 180. 69. Alikin, Earliest History, 0; Coutsoumpos, “Paul’s Teaching,” 80. 70. Alikin, Earliest History, 19, 58, 59; Coutsoumpos, “Paul’s Teaching,” 83. 71. Alikin, Earliest History, 0; Coutsoumpos, “Paul’s Teaching,” 85. 72. Alikin, Earliest History, 19. 73. Ibid., 1; Coutsoumpos, “Paul’s Teaching,” 84; McGowan, “Rethinking Eucharistic Origins,” 185. Fellowship Meals, the Passover, and the Eucharist 307 was put together potluck style, with people sharing the food that they had brought.74 Afterward among Christians might follow singing, scripture reading, and prayer.75 But such symposium-like events at Christian gatherings might also precede the meal, as various second-century writers testify.76 The African bishop Tertullian describes such an occasion in his Apology in the early third century: Our feast explains itself by its name[.] The Greeks call it agape, i.e., affection. . . . The participants, before reclining, taste first of prayer to God. As much is eaten as satisfies the cravings of hunger; as much is drunk as befits the chaste. They say it is enough, as those who remember that even during the night they have to worship God; they talk as those who know that the Lord is one of their auditors. After manual ablution, and the bringing in of lights, each is asked to stand forth and sing, as he can, a hymn to God, either one from the holy Scriptures or one of his own composing,—a proof of the measure of our drinking. As the feast commenced with prayer, so with prayer it is closed.77 Where things get slippery and confusing is in delineating how and when and why such a meal became simplified into a ritual involving simply bread and wine, or whether it was a separate ritual altogether, and how that ritual, in turn, became associated with Jesus’s last supper. If we accept that the phrase “breaking bread,” in scripture, refer74. Alikin, Earliest History, 19, 57–58; Coutsoumpos, “Paul’s Teaching,” 1, 100. 75. Alikin, Earliest History, 32, 67. 76. Ibid., 67. As Alikin notes, the late second-century Acts of Paul, Peter, and John, for example, each attest to differing orders of service. 77. Tertullian, The Apology, trans. S. Thelwell, chap. 39, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text /tertullian01.html. 308 The Missionary World Jesus Entered ences not a formal Eucharist, as it is practiced in contemporary Christianity, but rather a fellowship meal similar to the “love feast” Jude 1 and Tertullian mention, the only scriptural references to a ritual limited to bread and wine are those that appear near the end of a formal Passover meal in the Gospel accounts and to the occasion described by Paul in 1 Corinthians 11, wherein he complains of a full meal being eaten among the Corinthian brethren. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 11:0, uses the phrase “Lord’s supper” to discuss what the Corinthians are gathering to participate in— and that name over the centuries has come to stand in as a synonym for the Eucharist.78 Curiously, however, Paul’s explicit language in the passage is that when Corinthians are “come together, it is not to eat the Lord’s Supper” (emphasis added). Such a phrase can be read in at least three ways. One, Paul could be saying that the manner in which the Corinthians are coming together does not befit the name the Lord’s supper. Indeed, that seems to be the interpretation most commentators give the line.79 Thus, the 78. The interpretation of Paul’s phrase “the Lord’s supper,” in fact, varied among early Christian scholars, as shown by Andrew McGowan in “The Myth of the ‘Lord’s Supper.’” McGowan claims that the “Lord’s Supper” was “probably not an actual name for the Christian meal in Paul’s writings, or in other very ancient texts” (504). Clement of Alexandria, McGowan notes, used the phrase to refer to regular Christian meals, and “Eucharist” to refer to the ritual bread-and-wine meal (510). Only in the fourth century can we say that “Lord’s supper” begins to be applied specifically to a bread-and-wine Eucharist, in Basil of Caesarea’s Short Rules (McGowan, 516). Throughout, I have used the term “Eucharist” to refer to the bread-and-wine ceremony, as it has come to be practiced among contemporary Christian faiths; some scholars use the term more loosely, applying it to meals early on that sometimes involved other foods (what I am calling fellowship meals) and that slowly morphed into the familiar communion ritual of today. 79. The Benson Commentary calls the Lord’s supper “that solemn memorial of his death; nor does it deserve to be called by that name.” Matthew Henry’s Concise Commentary notes that Paul “rebukes the disorders in their partaking of the Lord’s supper.” Matthew Poole’s Commentary notes, “to eat the Lord’s supper in an unlawful manner, is Fellowship Meals, the Passover, and the Eucharist 309 Lord’s supper is a reenactment of the Passover—or a new tradition imposed by Jesus at his last supper, following the Old Testament Passover meal.80 Two, Paul could be setting up a comparison not between a ritualistic meal eaten in a manner befitting the Lord and one not befitting but rather between an actual meal he’s calling the Lord’s supper and a different ceremony altogether—the New Testament Passover, as set out by Jesus. In other words, the Lord’s supper could simply be a reference to a fellowship meal—much as suppers were eaten throughout the Roman world in honor of a god.81 Or, three, Paul’s use of the term “Lord’s supper” could be a reference to the Jewish manner of keeping the Passover, with a full meal. After all, the imminent spring Passover season timing of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians is heavily implied throughout it, evidenced by his references to “purg[ing] out the old leaven” (1 Cor. 5:7) and “keep[ing] the feast, not with old leaven . . . but with . . . unleavened bread” (1 Cor. 5:8).82 not to eat it.” All available at the commentary for 1 Corinthians 11:0 at Bible Hub, https://biblehub.com/commentaries/1_corinthians/11 -20.htm. 80. The latter interpretation is that given in the Jamieson-FaussetBrown Bible Commentary: “The love-feast usually preceded the Lord’s Supper (as eating the Passover came before the Lord’s Supper at the first institution of the latter). It was a club-feast, where each brought his portion, and the rich, extra portions for the poor; from it the bread and wine were taken for the Eucharist; and it was at it that the excesses took place, which made a true celebration of the Lord’s Supper during or after it, with true discernment of its solemnity, out of the question.” See commentary for 1 Corinthians 11:0 at Bible Hub, https://biblehub.com/commentaries/1_corinthians/11-20.htm. 81. The idea that the term Lord’s supper had its corollary in a cultic meal is implied in Coutsoumpos, “Paul’s Teaching,” 0–4, 8. “A comparable invitation to dine ‘at the table of the lord Serapis’ is found in at least three . . . papyri,” Coutsoumpos notes (4). 82. The Lord’s supper as being a full, Old Testament Jewish Passover meal is a position taken by Fred R. Coulter, The Christian Passover: What Does It Mean? When Should It Be Observed—the 14th or the 15th? (Hollister, Calif.: York Publishing Company, 1993), 253. 310 The Missionary World Jesus Entered The second proposition—that Paul may be comparing fellowship meals in general with a New Testament Passover ceremony imposed by Jesus—is supported by the fact that many of Paul’s complaints about the meal among the Corinthians reflect common customs and complaints about symposium meals among non-Jewish peoples.83 “For in eating,” Paul notes in 1 Corinthians 11:1, “every one taketh before other his own supper; and one is hungry, and another is drunken.” In Greco-Roman culture, it was not uncommon for those sharing a meal who arrived early to begin eating before others arrived.84 Symposiums also frequently ended with excessive drinking.85 It could well be that the Corinthians had persisted with such traditions in their own meals. As such, Paul, in saying that he “praise[d] them not in this,” may be commenting on what he’d heard of happenings at the Corinthians’ fellowship meals as well as pointing out that the Passover service was not to even come close to being like those. Not only should church members avoid becoming drunk or eating one before another (1 Cor. 11:33) but they should use their own houses “to eat and to drink in” (1 Cor. 11:), especially if “any man hunger” (1 Cor. 11:34). That Paul was writing about previous Passover experiences in Corinth is also possible, though it would seem somewhat odd for him to have waited nearly a year to address the shortcomings of the previous Corinthian Passover gathering, even if the timing was perfect in terms of reminding the Corinthians with regard to how they should conduct themselves at the one upcoming. If that is the case, 83. McGowan, “Rethinking Eucharistic Origins,” 180. 84. Coutsoumpos, “Paul’s Teaching,” 6, 10. Hegg, “Investigation of ‘The Lord’s Table,” part 4, by contrast, ties the differing start times to Jewish members rushing through the meal before non-Jewish members arrived because of Jewish traditions regarding fasting during the roasting of the Passover lamb (that is, from its killing till its eating). 85. MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, 40. Fellowship Meals, the Passover, and the Eucharist 311 then the third proposition makes sense—that is, he could be calling the Passover, with a full meal, as observed by the Jews, the Lord’s supper. Although the Passover seder meal was not formalized until much later, that Jesus, on his last night with his disciples, participated in something like it, as various other Jewish people did, indeed, suggests that Paul’s comments about the supper could have been with regard to Corinthians having adopted such a seder-like meal as part of the Passover service. That said, the Lord’s supper terminology is not used as a synonym for Passover elsewhere in the Jewish scriptures. The closest parallel to such terminology in scripture appears in Malachi 1:7 and 1:1, both of which use the term “the table of the Lord” in conjunction with sacrifices offered to God. Indeed, Paul may very well be alluding to Malachi when he contrasts the Lord’s table and the table of devils in 1 Corinthians 10:21 as two different sacrifices. As such, the Lord’s table would become Jesus’s own sacrifice, made at the end of the Passover day, while the table of devils would become a profane sacrifice, used in worship of pagan deities, as would have been the case in many a symposium meal.86 If so, then Paul’s use of “Lord’s table” in one location and “Lord’s supper” in the other could suggest that he is using the terminology as another name for the Passover Jesus instituted, rendering credibility to the first reading, that the line “not to eat the Lord’s Supper” means “not in accordance with the manner in which the Passover should be eaten.” What is clear, no matter Paul’s meaning with regard to the phrase “Lord’s Supper,” however, is that his teaching in 1 Corinthians was that the Passover should be conducted in the manner that he had “received of the Lord, . . . which [he] delivered unto [them]” (1 Cor. 11:3), a service involving unleavened bread and wine that Jesus himself 86. Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods, 60; Coutsoumpos, “Paul’s Teaching,” 4; Hegg, “Investigation of ‘The Lord’s Table,’” part 3. 312 The Missionary World Jesus Entered noted as a Passover: “With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer” (Luke :15), one that arguably differed from the full meal earlier observed among the Jewish people.87 That Christians continued to observe a Passover service on the fourteenth of the first month of the Jewish calendar, as did the Jews, and in a manner similar to the format that Jesus and Paul describe is clear from the controversy with regard to the correct day on which to serve the bread and wine that developed in the second century. Even before this, during Jesus’s time, the correct day on which to observe the Passover was of some controversy, with some Jewish people observing it at the end of the fourteenth and others observing it at the beginning.88 The former had become the standard practice among the majority of the priesthood—and was the position taken by the Pharisees— whose sacrifice of the Passover lambs in the late afternoon in Jerusalem on the fourteenth led the meal to be conducted on the evening of the fifteenth.89 Ironically, it was the Sadducees, who made up most of the high priestly elite, who espoused the position that the sacrifice should take place at sunset at the start of the fourteenth.90 Many Jewish people, including those who adhered to the earlier Passover date, cooked and ate the meal at home, a fact attested to by the sheer number of lambs slaughtered—far too many to occur completely at the temple—and by such witnesses as the first-century Jewish writer Philo, who noted, for 87. Coulter, Christian Passover, 241–242; Joseph Lenard, “Jesus’ Death and Resurrection—Which Passover?,” Truth in Scripture blog, February 6, 2017, https://truthinscripture.net/2017/02/06/jesusdeath-and-resurrection-which-jewish-passover/. 88. Coulter, Christian Passover, 29; Lenard, “Jesus’ Death and Resurrection.” 89. Coulter, Christian Passover, 29, 112, 118–119; Lenard, “Jesus’ Death and Resurrection.” 90. The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, 406, quoted in Coulter Christian Passover, 118–119; Lenard, “Jesus’ Death and Resurrection.” Fellowship Meals, the Passover, and the Eucharist 313 example, that on the “pascha, on which the whole nation sacrifices, each individual among them, not waiting for the priests, since on this occasion the law has given, for one especial day in every year, a priesthood to the whole nation, . . . each private individual slays his own victim on this day.”91 From the chronology offered in the Gospel accounts, it seems clear that it was the home-based start-ofthe-fourteenth tradition to which Jesus and his disciples were adhering at the last supper.92 Further confusion over the Passover’s time arose with the Jewish rebellion against Rome during the reign of Hadrian in 132–135 CE and the resulting scattering of the Jewish leadership, which had formally set the calendar each year, most especially its start and the official declaration of the various annual festivals.93 With a temporary gap in authority, the determination of which day was even the fourteenth became a matter of some debate. Although Jewish authority was reset by 142 CE, the new resulting calculated calendar allowed for the Passover to occasionally fall before the vernal equinox, which had not previously been permissible.94 Amid the confusion and the ob91. Philo, The Decalogue, trans. C. D. Yonge, 30.159, Early Jewish Writings, http://www.earlyjewishwritings.com/text/philo/book26 .html. Josephus gives the number of Passover participants in and near Jerusalem as 2.7 million; however, Joachim Jeremias estimates that there could have only been 180,000 such participants (ten per lamb) based on the fact that the timing of the temple lamb slaughtering could not have allowed for more than about 18,000 such sacrifices. The discrepancy, though possibly reflecting a degree of hyperbole on Josephus’s part, is likely also due in part to the number of Passover lambs sacrificed at home versus at the temple. Coulter, Christian Passover, 216–219. 92. See Coulter, Christian Passover, chaps. 18–19, for a fuller exploration of the Gospel’s Passover chronology. 93. Ernest L. Martin, “The Rejection of the Apostle John,” chap. 6 in Restoring the Original Bible, https://www.askelm.com/restoring /res034.htm. 94. Ibid.; the controversy over the vernal equinox is discussed in Eusebius, Church History, 7.32.14–19. 314 The Missionary World Jesus Entered jection among some Christians to the calendrical change, some Christian groups took it upon themselves to set the date for the Passover.95 Still others, reacting to a growing anti-Semitism, caused in part by the Jewish wars of rebellion, determined to continue the Passover ceremony on the Sunday morning following the first new moon of spring, justifying the practice by claiming it to be the time of Jesus’s resurrection.96 The controversy came to a head shortly later, when a bishop from Asia Minor named Polycarp visited the Roman bishop Anicetus in an attempt to patch over the differences, but as Eusebius tells us, “Neither could Anicetus persuade Polycarp not to observe what he had always observed with John the disciple of our Lord, and the other apostles with whom he had associated; neither could Polycarp persuade Anicetus to observe it as he said that he ought to follow the customs of the presbyters that had preceded him.”97 Thus two traditions for the taking of the bread and wine, one on the Jewish Passover on the fourteenth of Abib and one on Easter Sunday, would exist side by side in the Christian faith for the next several decades, until again coming to a head near the end of the second century when the Roman bishop Victor would at- 95. Martin, “Rejection of the Apostle John.” 96. Ibid. Anti-Judaic feelings in Rome during this time are discussed in Samuele Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday: A Historical Investigation of the Rise of Sunday Observance in Early Christianity (Rome: Pontifical Gregorian University Press, 1977), 169–185; the anti-Judaic motivation for the move to Easter Sunday is discussed in Bacchiocchi, 198–207. Bacchiocchi places the Roman switch from Passover to Easter during the bishopric of Sixtus (116–126 CE). Bacchiocchi, 199–200. 97. Eusebius, Church History, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert, from Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. 1, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo, N.Y.: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1890), 5.24.16, rev. and ed. Kevin Knight for New Advent, https:// www.newadvent.org/fathers/250105.htm. Fellowship Meals, the Passover, and the Eucharist 315 tempt to excommunicate those who continued to adhere to the Passover tradition.98 But already, some, it appears, were keeping a service with bread (often leavened rather than unleavened) and wine (or water) more frequently. As such, the Eucharist may reflect other origins that merely echo the Passover rites introduced by Jesus. Similar traditions can be accounted for in general fellowship meals, where bread and wine or water were typical sustenance among poorer populations; the Jewish Kiddush, which though only attested to in later traditions, included bread and wine or water; or in rites among various Greco-Roman religions, including Mithraism and other mystery religions.99 Although Mithraism was limited to male participants, it included the service of bread and water in honor of the god Mithra and was close enough in practice that Justin Martyr would complain about its similarity to the tradition to which he and similar Christian believers adhered.100 Some other mystery faiths also included a sacrificial meal. For example, the worship of Dionysus involved a ritual called “Omopha98. Martin, “Rejection of the Apostle John”; Eusebius, Church History, 5.23–25. 99. On bread and wine as staples of most meals in the ancient Greco-Roman world, see Alikin, Earliest History, 58–59; Coutsoumpos, “Paul’s Teaching,” 13; and McGowan, “Rethinking Eucharistic Origins,” 184, 185. On possible Jewish origins for the foundation of the Eucharist, see Coutsoumpos, 55, and Raymond Moloney, “The Early Eucharist: The Jewish Background,” Irish Theological Quarterly 47, no. 1 (1980): 34–42, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F002114008004700103. Although Maloney acknowledges the late date of Jewish bread-andwine traditions that are ancillary to a meal, he still sees the “similarity in structure and themes” of Jewish table prayers with those of Jesus at his last Passover as supporting the hypothesis that the “Christian Eucharist grew out of the Jewish table ritual” (38). 100. Justin Martyr, First Apology, chap. 66; Alikin, Earliest History, 5; Coutsoumpos, “Paul’s Teaching,” 39; Arnaldo Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians (Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 189. 316 The Missionary World Jesus Entered gia,” which included the drinking of wine and eating of bull meat in which supplicants were said to have drunk the blood and eaten the flesh of the god and thus taken on the god’s character and immortality.101 Several scholars point out that such faiths were just taking shape in the form that we know historically during the second century CE, too late to have been the basis for the Christian breadand-wine practice—but in fact just in time to influence a practice that itself was taking shape outside its Passover context.102 The timing of such meals, outside the Passover, was also likely reflective of the greater society. Gathering at dawn to start the day with worship, but also sometimes to eat a ritualistic meal, was common among religious groups in the Greco-Roman world, including cults who worshipped Dionysus, Isis, Zeus, and the sun, as well as various Jewish groups such as the Essenes and the Egyptian Alexandrian sect the Therapeutae.103 The practice also became common among Christians, as attested to by Roman provincial governor Pliny the Younger near the start of the second century, when he wrote to Roman emperor Trajan that the Christians he knew met “on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by oath, not to some crime. . . . When this was 101. Fabri, “Breaking of Bread”; G. E. Mylonas, “Mystery Religions of Greece, “ in Ancient Religions, ed. Vergilius T. A Fern (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), 176, quoted in Coutsoumpos, “Paul’s Teaching,” 33. 102. On the lateness of mystery religions, see Coutsoumpos, “Paul’s Teaching,” 49. 103. Alikin, Earliest History, 27, 83–88; de Jonge, “Origins of the Sunday Eucharist,” 560. Alexander Hislop, in his classic antiCatholic polemic The Two Babylons; or, The Papal Worship Proved to Be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife (1858; rpt., London: S. W. Partridge, n.d.), 159–161, points out that even the shape of the wafers provided at Catholic mass services corresponds to traditions going back to worship of the Egyptian sun god Osiris. Fellowship Meals, the Passover, and the Eucharist 317 over, it was their custom to depart and to assemble again to partake of food—but ordinary and innocent food.”104 The writings of Tertullian and other later second-century sources note similar practices.105 As such, it seems likely that simple Christian fellowship meals, usually involving bread and wine or water and often falling before or after worship services (and later sometimes at dawn), became associated with ideas regarding the unity of the believers and, echoing Greco-Roman traditions, the sacrifice of a deity, and then, eventually, as the Abib 14 Passover fell out of practice among certain Christians, became a replacement for the Passover ceremony itself. Such may account for the lack of mention of the Jesus flesh-and-blood symbology in Eucharistic prayers in certain early documents, such as the likely first-century liturgical instruction manual, the Didache (chaps. 9–10), where such blessings were possibly intended as part of a generic fellowship meal rather than as a meal symbolically related to the now-defunct Jewish Passover.106 Indeed, it would seem to be, as scholar of the Eucharist Gerard Rouwhorst puts it, that “the influence of 104. Pliny the Younger to the Emperor Trajan, in Pliny the Younger, Letters, 10.96–97, Early Christian Writings, http://www .earlychristianwritings.com/text/pliny.html. 105. Alikin, Earliest History, 93, 95–97; de Jonge, “Origins of the Sunday Eucharist,” 566. Alikin and de Jonge list testimonies by Tertullian (On Prayer, 19; On Idolatry, 7), Clement of Alexandria (Who Is the Rich Man That Shall Be Saved?, 23), the Acts of Peter (13), and the Apostolic Tradition (22, 35–37). 106. As Matthew David Larsen puts it, “It would seem difficult to imagine that the final redactor of the Didache, writing around the turn of the first century, was unaware of the Last Supper tradition. This becomes especially so when one considers widespread usage of the Last Supper tradition in early Christianity. . . . We may reasonably proceed under the assumption that the Didachist likely knew of the Last Supper tradition and chose not to use it.” See Larsen, “Addressing the Elephant That’s Not in the Room: Comparing the Eucharistic Prayers in ‘Didache’ 9–10 and the Last Supper Tradition,” Neotestamentica 45, no. 2 (2011); 253, 257, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43048808. McGowan writes, “The familiar narration of the Last Supper in the Eu- 318 The Missionary World Jesus Entered the Last Supper and the New Testament institution narratives on early Christian practice was less than has often been believed, and became stronger only in the course of time.”107 The integration of flesh-and-blood symbology into a ritualistic bread-and-wine sacrament at regular Christian-only assemblies rather than at a yearly Passover, thus, was indicative of the manner in which Christianity changed as it separated from Jewish synagogues and their attendant communities to become more aligned with the Greco-Roman society around it.108 The Separation from the Synagogue The ability of Jesus’s followers to spread his message within the synagogues would diminish as certain Jewish elements took offense with it, necessitating other places of meeting and other means of distribution. The seeds of disapproval, and coming separation, were already evident, of course, in Jesus’s day, the push for crucifixion and the criticism of various Pharisees and Sadducees being the most obvious examples, but such disapproval, the Gospel accounts denote, was also evident in certain specific synagogues. In the passage in Luke 4 quoted earlier, where Jesus spoke in the synagogue, we read, for example, that as Jesus talked, “all they in the synagogue . . . were filled with wrath, and rose up, and thrust him out of the city” (Luke 4:8–9). In another passage, in Luke 13:14, the synagogue ruler excharistic prayer is a later development rather than an original or universal feature.” McGowan, “Rethinking Eucharistic Origins,” 188. 107. Gerard Rouwhorst, “The Roots of the Early Christian Eucharist: Jewish Blessings or Hellenistic Symposia,” in Jewish and Christian Liturgy and Worship: New Insights into Its History and Interaction, ed. Albert Gerhards and Clemens Leonhard (Boston: Brill, 2007), 299. 108. Indeed, as Andrew McGowan asserts, in “The Myth of the ‘Lord’s Supper,’” even substantive communal meals themselves fell away in favor of a ritualistic Eucharist (517). The Separation from the Synagogue 319 presses his disapproval of Jesus’s healing of a woman on the Sabbath, though in this latter case, Luke denotes that a sizable number of synagogue goers sided with Jesus (verse 17). And in John 9:22, the parents of a blind man healed by Jesus fear the synagogue rulers because “the Jews had agreed already, that if any man did confess that he was Christ, he should be put out of the synagogue.” The book of Acts, too, shows a Jewish population alternately open to teachings about Jesus and antagonistic to such teachings, with the antagonism growing in places and at times to such an extent that eventually those who chose to accept the new teachings often moved out of the synagogue. The antagonism is evident even in the example earlier given in Acts 13, in Antioch in Pisidia. After Paul shared his message in the synagogue service, some of both the Gentile and Jewish persuasion asked to learn more, though in this case the Gentiles proved the more interested: And when the Jews were gone out of the synagogue, the Gentiles besought that these words might be preached to them the next sabbath. Now when the congregation was broken up, many of the Jews and religious proselytes followed Paul and Barnabas: who, speaking to them, persuaded them to continue in the grace of God. And the next sabbath day came almost the whole city together to hear the word of God. But when the Jews saw the multitudes, they were filled with envy, and spake against those things which were spoken by Paul, contradicting and blaspheming. Then Paul and Barnabas waxed bold, and said, It was necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken to you: but seeing ye put it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles. For so hath the Lord commanded 320 The Missionary World Jesus Entered us, saying, I have set thee to be a light of the Gentiles, that thou shouldest be for salvation unto the ends of the earth. And when the Gentiles heard this, they were glad, and glorified the word of the Lord: and as many as were ordained to eternal life believed. And the word of the Lord was published throughout all the region. But the Jews stirred up the devout and honourable women, and the chief men of the city, and raised persecution against Paul and Barnabas, and expelled them out of their coasts. (Acts 13:42–50) This pattern would be repeated many times, with certain Jewish elements objecting to the new teachings and eventually kicking Paul and others out of the fellowship— and often, with the help of civil authorities, even out of town. In the very next chapter of Acts, for example, Paul and Barnabas continue on to Iconium, southeast of Antioch, where a company of both Jews and Gentiles accept their message but where also other Jewish people stir up yet other Gentiles, who then together stone the two messengers. Much later, in Corinth, we learn that Paul “reasoned in the synagogue every sabbath, and persuaded the Jews and the Greeks” to the extent that even Crispus, the chief ruler of the synagogue, along with his family, accepted Paul’s teaching (Acts 18:4, 8). However, eventually, certain Jewish elements opposed Paul to such an extent that he was forced to declare, “I will go unto the Gentiles” (Acts 18:6) and then “departed thence, and entered into a certain man’s house, named Justus, one that worshipped God, whose house joined hard to the synagogue” (Acts 18:7). Later still, in Ephesus, Paul would again begin to spread his message in his usual fashion: “And he went into the synagogue, and spake boldly for the space of three months, disputing and persuading the things concerning the kingdom of God” (Acts 19:8). But once more, The Separation from the Synagogue 321 “divers were hardened, and believed not, but spake evil of that way before the multitude” (Acts 19:9). In this case, however, Paul chose to “[separate] the disciples, disputing daily in the school of one Tyrannus” (Acts 19:9). Commentaries differ as to what this school was and who Tyrannus was. Some assert that Tyrannus was Jewish and the school a private synagogue or kind of yeshiva; others assert that Tyrannus was a physician and the school a classroom; and still others assert that Tyrannus was a Greek philosopher or rhetorician and the school a lecture hall (possibly only named after Tyrannus rather than belonging to him).109 Those arguing that Tyrannus had to be Jewish do so on the basis that Jewish believers would not have been willing to meet in a Greek philosophical hall; however, in the diaspora, the attempts among certain Jewish classes, especially in urban areas, to integrate Greek and Jewish ideas are well established, and even certain concepts of education had been adapted from Greek ideas, as noted in chapter 2.110 Regardless, three months in the synagogue would be followed by two years in this alternate location (Acts 19:10), demonstrating a break with the Jewish establishment in the city, one that would widen across Jewishinflected areas as time passed, most especially after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE. With that temple’s destruction and the concomitant fading away of the priesthood, rabbinic Judaism, derived particularly from the Pharisaic school of the Jewish reli109. Stern, Jewish New Testament Commentary, 292–293; and various commentaries on Acts 19:9 available at Bible Hub, https:// biblehub.com/commentaries/acts/19-9.htm. 110. Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism, 48; Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem, 5. The Jewish writer most identified with this approach was the first-century Alexandrine Philo, whose “corpus is a tour de force for interpreting Judaism through Greek philosophy” such that in describing the function of synagogues he makes them sound like “Greek philosophical schools.” Sly, Plato’s Alexandria, 101. 322 The Missionary World Jesus Entered gion, would come to dominate the synagogue culture that remained: “The result of the transformation,” as Marian Hillar puts it, “was now a sharper delineation of orthodox Judaism and an exclusion of all kinds of deviations from the established body of doctrines, including the sect of Messianists who were called Nazarenes.”111 The new Jewish religion would be centered around a scholarly academy in Jamnia, established in 90 CE, and later, around 142, in Usha in Galilee.112 With that domination came also a crackdown on those who failed to adhere to the strict monotheistic ideas that the rabbis expounded, as noted in chapters 2 and 4, including, for example, those who accepted the divinity of Jesus. As Alan F. Segal puts it in his classic text on the Two Powers in Heaven, a successful campaign was mounted to silence various sectarians in the synagogue by regulating the content and procedures of prayer. Among those silenced were some evincing “two powers” interpretations of scripture. The sectarians may not have called themselves “two gods” or “two powers” heretics. Only the offended party, from a new position of authority, described these doctrines as heresy. When the rabbis insisted that prayers in synagogue meet specific standards of monotheism, the incipient heretics and the rabbis withdrew from each other by mutual consent but certainly on less than peaceful terms. Although they separated, the groups encountered each other in debate frequently, showing that the heretics continued to 111. Marian Hillar, From Logos to Trinity: The Evolution of Religious Beliefs from Pythagoras to Tertullian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 90. 11. Martin, “Rejection of the Apostle John.” The Separation from the Synagogue 323 proliferate and that they remained in close proximity to the rabbinic community.113 The prayer most often identified with this crackdown was the Birkat ha-Minim (Benediction of the Apostates), possibly introduced into synagogue Sabbath services sometime in the first century: For the apostates let there be no hope. And let the arrogant government be speedily uprooted in our days. Let the nozerim [Nazarines] and the minim [heretics] be destroyed in a moment. And let them be blotted out of the Book of Life and not be inscribed together with the righteous. Blessed art thou, O Lord, who humblest the arrogant.”114 The prayer’s wording and application were not universal, nor was the prayer in its other forms necessarily about Christians but rather about those who posed a threat to the Jewish people or to Jewish religious unity (including, for example, various Jewish Gnostic sects).115 Nevertheless, such a push out of the synagogue would have posed a real threat to the well-being of believers when they were no longer associated with the Jewish milieu in that the Jewish people were excepted from the expected worship of the local and state-sanctioned pagan gods and were allowed 113. Alan F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism (Leiden: Brill, 1977), 154. 114. “Birkat ha-Minim,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2008, Jewish Virtual Library, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/birkat-ha-minim. 115. Ibid. Ron Cantor, in an article on Jewish believers, for example, claims that the prayer was changed to remove Nazarenes within a generation after it was imposed. Ron Cantor, “The Fascinating History of the Jewish Believers (Part ),” October 5, 014, Messiah’s Mandate International, http://messiahsmandate.org/the-fascinating-history -of-the-first-jewish-believers-part-/. The apparent “victims” differed according to need and time. Allan Nadler, “Do Jews Curse Christians?,” Jewish Ideas Daily, June 17, 2012, http://www.jewishideasdaily .com/4489/features/jews-curse-christians/. 324 The Missionary World Jesus Entered to meet freely: “The simple fact of the excommunication from the synagogues,” notes Peter Hirschberg in an article on Jewish believers in Asia Minor, “would imply a death sentence, because in certain situations membership in the synagogue was the only real protection against actions of the state.”116 The Home as Meeting Place Paul’s move to Justus’s house, right next to the synagogue, demonstrates one meeting area that the followers of Jesus often resorted to, one that also would have in many ways been outside the oversight of authorities: the house. Indeed, the house was often the setting of worship and fellowship from the beginning days of the church, even as believers continued to meet in the temple and synagogues. Acts :46 notes that after the first Pentecost after Jesus’s death, the new believers continued to meet daily not only in the temple but also in fellowship “from house to house.” Likewise, Acts 5:42 notes the apostles preached and taught in these homes. Meeting in a home was not necessarily a departure from Jewish practice, as homes also sometimes served as synagogues. As Martin Goodman notes, “Since there was no need for each synagogue community to own an impressive building, and in principle they could meet in private houses or even in the open, there were hundreds of such [synagogue] groups in the first-century-CE Jerusalem.”117 In a sense then, when dismissed from the Jewish synagogue, the followers of Jesus simply continued the synagogue tradition in another place. Nor would the house church have been an unfamiliar setting for Gentile believ116. Peter Hirschberg, “Jewish Believers in Asia Minor according to the Book of Revelation and the Gospel of John,” in Jewish Believers in Jesus: The Early Centuries, ed. Oskar Skarsaune and Reidar Hvalvik (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 2007), 233. 117. Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem, 228. The Home as Meeting Place 325 ers, whose household “cults took place within the confines and in the privacy of the home” and whose newer nonhousehold cults and associations often began by meeting in private houses.118 The New Testament is replete with references to churches meeting in homes and, prior to that, to Jesus’s own preaching in homes. Often, Jesus’s preaching in a house was in conjunction with a meal—with fellowship. Such is what happens, for example, in Matthew 9:9–11, when Jesus adopts Matthew as a disciple—they go to his house to eat, along with a host of others, “publicans and sinners” (Matt. 9:11). Likewise, as discussed in chapter 1, Jesus took up invitations for table fellowship from various Pharisees, for example, in Luke 11:37 and 14:1. Indeed, it was in individual homes of “worthy individuals” that Jesus instructed his disciples to find a place to stay when they entered a city (Matt. 10:5–15; Mark 6:8–11; Luke 9:1–5, 10:1–11), but no doubt, as they continued in that city, if other people in it were open to the message of Jesus, invitations to visit other homes arose—a circumstance that Paul denotes to the elders of Ephesus as occurring in Asia Minor, where he taught “from house to house” (Acts 0:0). The practice of meeting in homes is also demonstrated by the fact that the preconversion Paul chose to enter “every house” in Jerusalem to commit followers of Jesus to prison (Acts 8:3); almost certainly, Paul wasn’t literally entering every house but rather the houses where Jewish religious gatherings were taking place. As time went on and disassociation from the Jewish synagogues intensified, individuals’ houses more and more often served as the actual meeting place for worship, specifically Christian worship, in addition to fellowship. We read of churches in the home of Priscilla and Aq118. Branick, House Church in the Writings, 43. See also Branick, 47; Hurtado, At the Origins, 15; Alikin, Earliest History, 49. 326 The Missionary World Jesus Entered uila in Rome (Rom. 16:5) and likely also in Ephesus (1 Cor. 16:19), of Nymphas near Laodicea (Col. 4:15), and of Philemon (Philem. 2). In fact, it may well be that some of the problems with division in the church in Corinth were related to meetings in differing households. Paul writes, for instance, of the “house of Chloe,” by whom he has learned of the divisions (1 Cor. 1:11); he also refers to the “household of Stephanus” (1 Cor. 1:16) and to “Crispus” (1 Cor. 1:14), who we learn in Acts 18:8 was the leader of a synagogue, and to Gaius (1 Cor. 1:14), who hosted Paul while in Corinth (Rom. 16:23). If, indeed, each household represented a separate gathering, some baptized by Apollos, some by Peter, and a few by Paul (1 Cor. 1:12), there might well have been certain diversities of background (some arriving from Jerusalem, where Peter had been, or Alexandria or Asia Minor, where Apollos had been) and even to an extent of understanding. Vincent P. Branick, in his book on The House Church in the Writings of Paul, hypothesizes that the Corinthian church may have lacked a developed sense of (unified) local leadership: They are not maintaining the necessary order of the Lord’s supper (1 Cor 11). They are not functioning as the arbitrators of disputes among the brethren (1 Cor 6). They are not maintaining moral discipline (1 Cor 5). All indications point to a lack of development of these local patron-authorities. They are not yet representing the church to outside authorities. They are evidently not in charge of any central church fund . . . (1 Cor 16:2).119 Indeed, without the clear directives of a central authority (or absolute clarity about and submission to the doctrines of Jesus), unity would have been difficult to maintain. 119. Branick, House Church in the Writings, 94–95. The Home as Meeting Place 327 Branick even theorizes that “the division between Gentile and Jewish Christians found expression in distinct house churches,” as evidenced by the largely Jewish names found among Aquila and Priscilla’s house church mentioned in the last chapter of Romans and by the fact that Peter and the other Jewish leaders in Antioch in Galatians 2 ate with the Gentiles until certain Jews from Jerusalem (another set of churches) came to eat.120 If this was the case, one can certainly see how divisions could so easily ensnare the early church, with some house churches espousing Pharisaical table fellowship and others not—Pharisaical rules being a major issue in many of Paul’s letters—or later with some practicing customs more akin to those of Hellenistic Jews and still others customs from the pagan society from which they had derived.121 One gets the sense from scriptures and from the historical context that the house churches were actually led by the persons who owned the home (and often consisted largely of the family living in that home).122 Teachers such as Paul or Peter, Apollos or John, might come through an area, preaching and teaching the way among various house churches in a region, sometimes staying for a few years, and still other local elders might serve as decision makers, teachers, or spiritual overseers in the absence of such travelers, but on the localist of levels, the man or woman who hosted the household gathering ultimately wielded the power over who entered into that particular Christian fellowship and how it was to be conducted, for the fellow120. Ibid., 69; Romans 16:3–15; Galatians 2:12. 121. See, for example, Colossians 2:16: “Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days.” See also Galatians 4:17: “They [those espousing circumcision and certain aesthetic doctrines] zealously affect you, but not well; yea, they would [want to] exclude you, that ye might affect [be zealous for] them.” 122. Hurtado, At the Origins, 15, notes this even of many smaller pagan cults. 328 The Missionary World Jesus Entered ship was, after all, being conducted on the host’s property. Indeed, Jesus’s instructions to his disciples about entering into the house of “worthy” individuals in Matthew 10 and elsewhere would seem to confirm this. While spreading Jesus’s message away from their own home, the missionaries stayed in one house, with one particular family, one host. Such was the case not only of Gaius hosting Paul in Corinth, as already mentioned, but of Philemon (Philem. 22), Lydia (Acts 16:15), Jason (Acts 17:7), Philip (Acts 8), and Mnason of Cyprus (Acts 21:16), each of whom hosted Paul, and of Simon the tanner, who hosted Peter (Acts 9:43, 10:6). No doubt others of the faith hosted yet other travelers, as shown by how Paul asked various churches to take in the evangelists he was sending, such as Tychicus (Eph. 6:21, Col. 4:7) and Timothy (1 Cor. 16:10). Paul also sent a woman, Phebe, from Corinth to Rome with a letter (Rom. 16:1–2). Such power vested in the host of the house church meant that he or she was ultimately responsible for the teachers and brethren allowed to attend, as opposed to the actual teaching that might take place, a task reserved for the elders, who were often but not always the same persons.123 Thus, the elders might ban a person from fellowship, in accordance with Matthew 18:20, or even reprimand one of their own, as Paul instructed Timothy in 1 Timothy 5:19–20, but such decisions required the consent of the host. John’s instructions to the “elect lady and her children” that “if there be any come unto you, and bring 123. Women, such as Lydia, might have hosted a church or synagogue but would not have served as speaking elders. For a discussion of the appointment of elders in the church, see Samuele Bacchiocchi, Women in the Church: A Biblical Study on the Role of Women in the Church (Berrien Springs, Mich.: Biblical Perspectives, 1987), 166–169; for women’s roles in the synagogue, see Shmuel Safrai, “The Place of Women in First-Century Synagogues,” Priscilla Papers 16, no. 1 (2002), https://www.cbeinternational.org/resources/article/priscilla-papers /place-women-first-century-synagogues. The Home as Meeting Place 329 not this doctrine [that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh], receive him not into your house” applied then as much to the church as to the owner of the building (2 John 10). The instructions in the early Christian Didache were similar: “Whosoever, therefore, comes and teaches you all these things that have been said before, receive him. But if the teacher himself turns and teaches another doctrine to the destruction of this, hear him not.”124 Such authority vested in the host had the potential also to go wrong—and did. In John’s third letter, we are told of a certain “Diotrophes, who loveth to have the preeminence among them,” refusing to receive John and others associated with him and even forbidding others to, to the extent that Diotrophes cast out of the church any who took in those associated with John (3 John 9–10). If we suppose that that church was in his home—especially if the home was large enough to host other smaller house churches—Diotrophes’s actions would have posed quite a threat to church unity and to the authority of teachers coming from other areas; indeed, it would have even infected those (elders and laypeople) living in the local area. The authority of the host would have been based in standard concepts about authority in the household, including religious authority, prevalent in the Jewish and Roman worlds at the time. In the Jewish world, the home was in some circles considered an extension of the temple, with each head of household a priest, as denoted in chapter 1. Such beliefs extended beyond the Pharisees to diaspora Jews, such as Philo, who wrote that at Passover, as earlier alluded to, “each house is at that time invested with the character and dignity of a temple, the victim being sacrificed so as to make a suitable feast for the man who has 124. Didache, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Robertson, chap. 11: “Concerning Teachers, Apostles, and Prophets,” Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/didache -roberts.html. 330 The Missionary World Jesus Entered provided it and of those who are collected to share in the feast, being all duly purified with holy ablutions.”125 The husband and father was considered the head of the household—and thus the head of the religious customs in the home. In discussing the role of religion in the Jewish family, Kaufman Kohler and Adolf Guttmacher point out that not only was an ancient person “born into a group of fellow citizens, but, as a matter of course, he embrace[d] the gods of the family and of the state.” Further on in their article in The Jewish Encyclopedia, Kohler and Guttmacher raise examples of the various patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) who embraced the family’s god Yahweh; of Joshua, who called God his inheritance (Joshua 13:33); and of Ruth, who in refusing to return to her own people after the death of her Israelite husband, confirmed that the god of the Hebrews would be her own (Ruth 1:14).126 The father and husband’s authority can be seen in such Old Testament laws as the one concerning the making of vows, in Numbers 30:3–9, which denoted that any woman who made a vow was bound to fulfill it, unless her father or husband heard of it and disallowed it. Similar views of the household extended to Gentile families. In the Roman family, the father’s control not only impacted the immediate family and its slaves but “reached down through the generations and could affect the fortunes of relatives who lived apparently quite separate lives.”127 The father held near total power: all property, even if obtained by someone else in the family, belonged to him; marriages occurred only with his blessing, and divorces could be imposed by his command as well. Only 125. Philo, The Special Laws, 2:148, Early Jewish Writings, http:// www.earlyjewishwritings.com/text/philo/book28.html. 126. Kaufman Kohler and Adolf Guttmacher, “Family and Family Life,” Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906, http://www.jewishencyclopedia .com/articles/6007-family-and-family-life. 127. Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem, 208. The Home as Meeting Place 331 when a father died did his authority wane, even over adult children.128 Religious authority extended to the father also, who served as the de facto head of the household faith, often the worship of the spirits of dead ancestors, gods who were said to protect the family and to whom reverence was an expected duty of those who were members of the household.129 Thus, as in the Jewish household, the home, as the Roman writer Cicero put it, became a kind of temple: “What is there more holy, what is there more carefully fenced round with every description of religious respect, than the house of every individual citizen? here are his altars, here are his hearths, here are his household gods: here all his sacred rites, all his religious ceremonies are preserved. This is the asylum of every one, so holy a spot that it is impious to drag any one from it.”130 Thus, when the head of the household became a follower of Jesus, the entire household often came with him or, in some cases, her, which of course could result in some less than sincere conversions but which also meant that a good amount of the spread of the Christian faith occurred within families. The New Testament is replete with examples of entire households who adopted the new faith. In John 4:49–53, Jesus’s healing of nobleman’s son spurs the nobleman’s entire household to believe. Notably, the conversion of the first Gentile, Cornelius, in Acts 10, is not just of him but of “all his house,” who were all Godfearers (Acts 10:2, 47). In Acts 16:14–15, a rich merchant woman, Lydia, along with her household, is baptized. In 128. Ibid. 129. Branick, House Church in the Writings, 43; Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods, 46, 54. 130. M. Tullius Cicero, On His House (Domo Sua), Cic. Dom. 109, in M. Tullius Cicero, The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, trans. C. D. Yonge and B. A. London (Convent Garden: George Bell & Sons, 1891), Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper /text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0020%3A.text%3DDom .%3Asection%3D109. 332 The Missionary World Jesus Entered Acts 16:30–34, a prison keeper and “all his” are baptized. And in Acts 18:8, the synagogue ruler Crispus comes to believe “with all his house.” Notably, among the qualifications Paul notes for bishops in 1 Timothy 3:4–5 is “one that ruleth well his own house, having in subjection with all gravity; (For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?).” Of course, not always did an entire household convert to the faith, as is made obvious by Paul’s instructions in 1 Corinthians 7:12–15: If any brother hath a wife that believeth not, and she be pleased to dwell with him, let him not put her away. And the woman which hath an husband that believeth not, and if he be pleased to dwell with her, let her not leave him. For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband: else were your children unclean; but now are they holy. But if the unbelieving depart, let him depart. A brother or a sister is not under bondage in such cases. Examples of mixed households included those of Timothy, whose mother and grandmother were Jewish believers but whose father was a Greek (Acts 16:1; 2 Tim. 1:5), and of Philemon, whose slave Onesimus did not initially convert (Philem. 10–11, 16). An entire household following Jesus, of course, had obvious advantages, more easily allowing the home to become a center of worship and a host of other believers and itinerant teachers. As noted earlier, however, most homes were not large enough to hold large social gatherings, meaning that the number of people in a given house church generally had to be relatively small, consisting sometimes perhaps of just the family. The dining rooms of houses among the richer sort in Roman times generally The Home as Meeting Place 333 held no more than about ten people, given the manner in which reclining furniture generally lined the walls.131 Clear the room of furnishings and extend the meeting area into an open atrium that often abutted the dining area, and a given house might be able to hold forty to fifty people.132 Poorer families, in cities where the population density often reached two hundred people per acre, usually had no such facilities and would have been forced to meet with wealthier host families or in alternative settings, such as a room in an apartment or a shared ground-floor room.133 Eventually, as the years progressed, just as some homes had become synagogues in the Jewish world, some Christian homes would be cleared out and converted into dedicated church buildings.134 The wealth of such hosts is evident at times from the context in New Testament references. The disciple Matthew, for example, could not have hosted so many in his house when Jesus dined with him, let alone provided for a “great feast,” had he not had a certain amount of wealth, no doubt at least partially enabled by his status as a tax collector (Luke 5:27–29). Cornelius is noted as one who “gave much alms” (Acts 10:). Philemon was rich enough to own a slave. And Lydia, “a seller of purple,” after her baptism, invited Paul and all those traveling with him (likely Silas, Timothy, and Luke) to “come into [her] house, and abide” (Acts 16:14–15). 131. Branick, House Church in the Writings, 39–42; Hurtado, At the Origins, 21, 41. 132. Branick, House Church in the Writings, 39–42; Hurtado, At the Origins, 41; Alikin, Earliest History, 57. Alikin, however, estimates that some dining halls may have been able to hold one hundred people (53). 133. Branick, House Church in the Writings, 43, 121; Hurtado, At the Origins, 21; Alikin, Earliest History, 55, 56. 134. Branick, House Church in the Writings, 55, 130. 334 The Missionary World Jesus Entered Open and Public Spaces The location in which Paul first met Lydia demonstrates yet another place to which early followers of Jesus would have resorted after leaving the synagogues and through which they would have spread their message: open spaces. While passing through Philippi, in Macedonia, Paul and his companions “on the sabbath went out of the city by a river side, where prayer was wont to be made”—Lydia was one of the women who “resorted,” or customarily met, there (Acts 16:13). As earlier mentioned, not all synagogue communities possessed dedicated buildings, and open space was sometimes an option when the home was not used;135 this would prove true among Jesus’s followers as well. Already noted is how poorer families in cities lived in a density comparable to that of modern Western slums. “To alleviate this misery,” Branick notes, “municipalities generally dedicated about one fourth of the city to public areas. The attractive spaciousness of these public facilities allowed the bulk of the population to put up with the uncomfortable crowding at home. Once we move, then, from the circle of the rich to that of the poor we must envision life with little privacy, lived on the streets, sidewalks, and squares.”136 Where no synagogue building or rich person’s house could afford for a congregation of believers, and where, as was often probable, no space could be found within an apartment building, those followers likely resorted to these open spaces. Indeed, even among pagan worshippers, the practice of sending out “delegations of heralds” to publicize a particular temple or god would have made the sharing of Jesus’s beliefs in such public spaces 135. Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem, 228. In Lydia’s case, the choice of a riverside may have been related to the lack of a quorum of ten men necessary to forge an official synagogue in Jewish tradition. Bruce, New Testament History, 145. 136. Branick, House Church in the Writings, 43. Open and Public Spaces 335 seem rather ordinary.137 In this manner also, we see the tie to the way in which philosophical schools, particularly that of the Cynics, often spread their particular ideas in public arenas, including, for example, in the marketplaces, a location to which we’ll turn shortly. One reason the early church met in the temple was that the temple, if we are to believe Luke’s account in Acts, was one of the few buildings in Jerusalem that would have fit the great number of believers: three thousand baptisms after Peter’s initial Pentecost message (Acts 2:41) and shortly later five thousand (Acts 4:4). Likewise, in other cities, we read sometimes of large numbers of believers that would have been difficult to impossible to fit not only into a house but into most buildings. In Acts 13:44, in Antioch of Pisidia, “almost the whole city” comes to hear Paul and Barnabas speak on the second Sabbath they are there. While “almost the whole city” may refer to those who were somehow affiliated with the synagogue—who may not have attended at the same time and, thus, missed Paul’s earlier message—the fact that certain Jews were astounded by the multitudes that appeared (Acts 13:45) shows that the contingent was much larger than any standard synagogue service and quite likely did not fit into the building itself. Similarly, in Ephesus and surrounding areas, in Acts 19, Paul’s teaching had such an effect that fifty thousand pieces of silver worth of spiritualist books were burned (Acts 19:19) and temple silversmiths despaired because of the shrinking need for their craft (Acts 19:24–27).138 Such an economic impact suggests that the church meetings had likely grown to a substantial size and might have been 137. MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, 25. 138. Because Luke does not specify the denomination, estimates of what the fifty thousand pieces of silver would have been worth vary wildly, from tens of thousands of 2022 dollars to several million. Regardless, the amount suggests a large number of people divested themselves of books on the magic arts. 336 The Missionary World Jesus Entered a contributing factor in Paul’s meeting daily with others (Acts 19:9) rather than simply on the Sabbath—that is, in order to accommodate so many people Paul may not have been able to meet in person with the whole church at any one time, so people wishing to hear him teach would have had to come at times outside a weekly meeting. Such is also the implication when it comes to the preaching of Jesus and his precursor John the Baptist. When we are first introduced to the latter’s preaching in the Gospel accounts, he is already “in the wilderness of Judea” (Matt. 3:1). However, Luke 1:80 denotes that he was “in the deserts till the day of his shewing unto Israel,” a comment that suggests that for a brief period, John’s preaching may have occurred in more heavily populated places, where he would have been more able to garner enough notoriety that, by word of mouth, crowds would have followed. Once that happened, John would have removed himself again to the country, where “went out to him they of Jerusalem and all the land of Judaea and all the region round about Jordan, and they were baptized of him in the River Jordan” (Matt. 3:5–6). Of course, his chosen location near the river was also “the most public part of the wilderness of Judaea, the crossing of the Jordan north of the Dead Sea, where traffic between Judaea and Peraea passed this way and that.”139 Of particular note with regard to John’s move to the wilderness was his call to baptism, a rite that would have been familiar to those of Jewish extraction, for the practice of washing one’s body before entry into the temple was a well-known one, as was its use in accompaniment of circumcision for Jewish converts, so much so that dozens of small baths surrounded the temple walls.140 139. Bruce, New Testament History, 154. 140. Stern, Jewish New Testament Commentary, 15; Joachim Jeremias, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus: An Investigation into Economic and Social Conditions during the New Testament Period, trans. F. H. and C. H. Cave (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969), 320; “Shiloah (Si- Open and Public Spaces 337 Indeed, the Pool of Siloam, at the start of a wide Herodian street, was a natural spot from which washed and purified pilgrims ascended to the temple mount.141 By moving the baptism to the River Jordan, John may have been implicitly criticizing the varying Jewish sects and powerbrokers who held sway over the temple, as is evidenced by Matthew’s words, “But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said unto them, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance” (Matt. 3:7–8). The move from synagogues and enclosed areas to open space is more explicit in the case of Jesus. While he went into various cities and villages—and specifically into the synagogues—to teach, the crowds often grew very large. In Mark 2:1–4, for example, after word catches on that Jesus is teaching in a house in Capernaum, the place becomes so packed that a man wishing to be healed of palsy has to be lowered through the roof rather than entering through the door. By Mark 8, the multitude following Jesus has grown so large, four thousand strong, that we find him preaching to them in a mountainous wilderness (Mark 8:1–9, Matt. 15:29–38). In Luke 6:17, he preaches to them in a plain. In Matthew 14:14–1, he preaches to five thousand in the desert—and as we learn from Luke 9:10, he does so because he has sought the desert as a means to separate himself from the crowds, apparently unsuccessfully. Departure by sea would become another avenue Jesus would use in an attempt to flee the crowds (Mark 3:7–9), just as preaching from a ship along the sea would become a means to speak to a large multitude (Mark 4:1). loam) Pool,” BibleWalks.com, November 9, 013, https://biblewalks .com/sites/ShiloahPool.html. 141. “Shiloah (Siloam) Pool,” BibleWalks.com. 338 The Missionary World Jesus Entered In Acts 17:17, we find Paul taking the message of Jesus to the marketplace. And indeed, in Acts 20:20, when Paul mentions teaching the elders in Ephesus “from house to house,” he also mentions teaching them “publicly.” The move to public spaces would not have been out of keeping with that of philosophers and public heralds of the various pagan faiths in the ancient Roman world, as Luke’s account in Acts 17:18–21 attests: Then certain philosophers of the Epicureans, and of the Stoicks, encountered him. And some said, What will this babbler say? other some, He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods: because he preached unto them Jesus, and the resurrection. And they took him, and brought him unto Areopagus, saying, May we know what this new doctrine, whereof thou speakest, is? For thou bringest certain strange things to our ears: we would know therefore what these things mean. (For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing.) Parallels in the Roman world include various philosophical itinerants, Cynics, wonderworkers, and priests. . . . We meet such itinerants in the orations of Dio Chrysostom, who wandered about in obedience to an oracle’s command, teaching on moral themes in the tradition of Socrates and Diogenes (e.g., Orations 3.12–24; 4; 13.9; 72; 80); in Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana, with its laudatory picture of an unselfish, conscientious miracle worker; in Lucian’s Alexander the False Prophet, which lashes out with an expose of a false oracle . . . ; in Lucian’s Passing of Peregrinus, which treats with skepticism the career of a Cynic Open and Public Spaces 339 preacher who had connections with various Christian communities and who immolated himself in spectacular fashion at the Olympic festival in 165 C.E.; and in Apuleius’ Golden Ass, which depicts debauched eunuch priests of the Syrian goddess (8.27), as well as virtuous priests of Isis who guide the hero of the tale to a deep committed relationship with the goddess (book 11).142 The second-century orator and author Aelius Aristides “devotes many pages to describing persons of a certain type known to his audience [who] . . . spoke in public, took the title ‘philosophers,’ sought out and consorted with the rich and respectable, asserted their candor and freedom of speech, and claimed to offer wisdom to a wanting world without fee.”143 The epitaph of one “Julius Eutecnius, native of Laodicea,” recounts how “persuasion flowed from his tongue. He circulated among various races, he knew many peoples and afforded training to the soul among them. He entrusted himself constantly to waves and seas, bringing to the Gauls and to the land of the West all the gifts that god ordered the fruitful land of the East to bear—for god loved mortal man.”144 The second-century defender of paganism Celsus writes of many in Palestine and Phoenicia, who, although of no name, with the greatest facility and on the slightest occasion, whether within or without temples, assume the motions and gestures of inspired persons; while others do it in cities or among armies, for the purpose of attract142. Stambaugh and Balch, New Testament in Its Social Environment, 143–144. A fuller account of many of these itinerants is available in Graham Anderson, Sage, Saint, and Sophist: Holy Men and Their Associates in the Early Roman Empire (London: Routledge, 1994). 143. MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, 97. 144. Ibid., 97–98. 340 The Missionary World Jesus Entered ing attention and exciting surprise. These are accustomed to say, each for himself, “I am God; I am the Son of God; or, I am the Divine Spirit; I have come because the world is perishing, and you, O men, are perishing for your iniquities. But I wish to save you, and you shall see me returning again with heavenly power. Blessed is he who now does me homage. On all the rest I will send down eternal fire, both on cities and on countries. And those who know not the punishments which await them shall repent and grieve in vain; while those who are faithful to me I will preserve eternally.”145 In other words, for Celsus, the public teachings of Christians were nothing special, being in line with others, such as Simon the Magician, discussed in chapter 3, who made similar claims. The attraction to such itinerant speakers in public places was often amplified by spectacle, most especially by miracles. Indeed, such was the cause for much of the multitude that accumulated around Jesus during his ministry. Again and again, the Gospel accounts place Jesus’s speaking alongside the healings he performed, as in Luke 6:17: “A great multitude of people out of all Judaea and Jerusalem, and from the sea coast of Tyre and Sidon, . . . came to hear him, and to be healed of their diseases.” John 6: is more direct in making the connection: “And a great multitude followed him, because they saw his miracles which he did on them that were diseased.” Similar “wonders and signs” (Acts 2:43, 5:12) accompanied the preaching of the early apostles. As with Jesus, Luke claims in Acts 5:15–16, multitudes soon “brought forth the sick into the streets, and laid them on beds and couches, that at the least the shadow of 145. Quoted in Origen, Contra Celsus, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Robertson, 7.9, Early Christian Writings, http://www .earlychristianwritings.com/text/origen167.html. Open and Public Spaces 341 Peter passing by might overshadow some of them. There came also a multitude out of the cities round about unto Jerusalem, bringing sick folks, and them which were vexed with unclean spirits: and they were healed every one.” So it also was with Paul, Luke claims in Acts 19:11–12, by whose hands “God wrought special miracles . . . so that from his body were brought unto the sick handkerchiefs or aprons, and the diseases were departed from them, and the evil spirits went out of them.” Such healings were also claimed for pagan gods and miracle workers, such as by the aforementioned Alexander the false prophet, who sent out agents claiming that the healing god Asclepius would catch fugitive slaves, heal the sick, and raise the dead.146 The first-century traveling Pythagorean philosopher Apollonius of Tyana is also said to have performed miracles, though in Philostratus’s defense of Apollonius’s work, these were due to his “superior knowledge, not of wizardry.”147 While traveling in India, for example, among other things, it is claimed he cast a demon out of a sixteen-year-old boy, massaged a thirty-year-old man mauled by lions back to health, and restored sight to a blind man and movement to a paralyzed hand, and while staying in Athens, he cast a demon out of another young man.148 146. Stambaugh and Balch, New Testament in Its Social Environment, 143. 147. “Apollonius of Tyana,” Introduction, “Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius,” Livius.org, https://www.livius.org/articles/person /apollonius-of-tyana/. 148. Philostratus, Life of Apollonius, 3.38-39, Livius.org, https:// www.livius.org/sources/content/philostratus-life-of-apollonius /philostratus-life-of-apollonius-3.36-40/#3.38; 4.20, https:// www.livius.org/sources/content/philostratus-life-of-apollonius /philostratus-life-of-apollonius-4.16-20/#4.20. Apollonius was one of a set of “divine men” in Roman times rumored to have a special connection to the gods. Jesus’s life and works would have had obvious parallels to such miracle workers among pagan converts. “Apollonius 342 The Missionary World Jesus Entered While miracles of this sort would have gone far in attracting attention for Christian teachers as well as for others, one basic difference would have separated the former from the latter and helps explain the eventual popularity of the former. Wonder-working activity among the pagans, as Ramsay MacMullen puts it in his book Paganism in the Roman Empire, “represented no system of beliefs; it sought to change no one’s life; and it quite took for granted, and assumed that listeners likewise took for granted, the true divinity of the god advertised.”149 Meanwhile, philosophy could call for a change to behavior and pose cures for life’s ills, but its focus was generally on the here and now. Epicureans, after all, ultimately sought happiness in this life, as did the Stoics, the one by avoiding pain and the other by accepting it as natural. Views of the afterlife in the Roman world were confusing and uncertain, with some espousing no afterlife at all and others some vague idea of a god-borne immortality for certain notable persons.150 Yet others, influenced by Platonic, Pythagorean, Egyptian, and Babylonian ideas, took on ideas about the transmigration of an immortal soul.151 Following the teachings of those who espoused Jesus—or even the teachings of some sects of Judaism—provided not only moral mandates, a way of life, and a community of like-minded thinkers but also a more concrete hope for the future. Miracles in the Christian world testified to the truth of Jesus’s resurrection and thus to the eventual possibility of the resurrection of believers. of Tyana (8),” “Divine Men,” Livius.org, https://www.livius.org /articles/person/apollonius-of-tyana/. 149. MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, 98. 150. Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem, 239. 151. Joshua J. Mark, “Pythagoras,” Ancient History Encyclopedia, May 23, 2019, https://www.ancient.eu/Pythagoras/. Schools and Clubs 343 Schools and Clubs Departure of the followers of Jesus from the synagogue in favor of the home and open spaces was accompanied by another meeting location that would have paralleled that of first-century philosophers: the school or lecture hall. The most familiar possible reference to such a place in the New Testament occurs in Acts 19:8–10, when Paul makes the aforementioned move from the synagogue in Ephesus to “the school of one Tyrannus,” a setting whose nature is under dispute, as to whether it represented a Jewish school or a Gentile one, and if the latter, whether it was a lecture hall, medical school, or building named after Tyrannus.152 No matter, the parallel is an important one insofar as Christianity, within the first two centuries, would, in some ways, come to be identified with philosophy and with its schools. Not by accident was it the Stoics and Epicureans who confronted Paul in Acts 17. Those who set out to spread the teachings of Jesus espoused not just an unfamiliar god but a different way of life, the latter being much more in keeping with philosophical teachers and their ethical concerns than with temple heralds, especially since Christian teachers drew into doubt the existence of the pagan gods and avoided the ritualistic trappings of most other faiths of the time, save for that of the diasporic Jews. Even the manner in which followers of Jesus met mirrored philosophical schools and clubs more, in some ways, than it did religious institutions. As Larry Hurtado notes, the lack of “normal components of religion” would cause “some outsiders [to regard] Christian groups as more like 152. Stern, Jewish New Testament Commentary, 292–293; Bruce, New Testament History, 327; and various commentaries on Acts 19:9 at Bible Hub, https://biblehub.com/commentaries/acts/19-9.htm. 344 The Missionary World Jesus Entered philosophical associations than religious groups.”153 Even some of the things Christians wrote could have been taken as philosophy, as Gerald F. Downing notes of Paul’s statements in Romans 1:19–20 about the invisible God being known by the visible creation, which could have been taken as “commonplace Stoicism” by non-Jews.154 Of course, such things could have been said for Jewish thinking, from which Paul’s argument was drawn, and for Jewish synagogue services too. Part of what appealed about the Jewish religion to non-Jews, after all, was its “philosophical dimension, its ethical codes, and aniconic God.”155 To some Greek outsiders, the Jews appeared to be a philosophizing people. Megasthenes, a Greek historian who wrote about Indian culture and who lived some three hundred years before Jesus, is reputed to have tied the Jewish people to Greece’s own philosophical traditions when he wrote, “All that has been said regarding nature by the ancients is asserted also by philosophers out of Greece, on the one part in India by the Brachmanes, and on the other in Syria by the people called the Jews.”156 The secondcentury CE Greek historian Arrian of Nicomedia, in quoting the fragment from Megasthenes, even goes so far as to claim that Jewish “philosophy, which has been committed to writing, preceded the philosophy of the Greeks.”157 And the Greek philosopher of the fourth and third century BCE Clearchus of Soli claimed, according to Josephus, that his teacher Aristotle wrote that certain Jews from Coele-Syria “are derived from the Indian philosophers” and that one of them “became a Grecian; not only in his language, but in 153. Hurtado, At the Origins, 24–25. 154. F. Gerald Downing, Cynics, Paul, and the Pauline Churches: Cynics and Christian Origins II (New York: Routledge, 1998), 275. 155. John J. Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem, 13. 156. Megasthenes, Indika, fragment 42, http://www.sdstate.edu /projectsouthasia/upload/Megasthene-Indika.pdf. 157. Ibid. Schools and Clubs 345 his soul also. Insomuch that when we our selves happened to be in Asia about the same places whither he came, he conversed with us, and with other philosophical persons; and made a trial of our skill in philosophy. And as he had lived with many learned men, he communicated to us more information than he received from us.”158 Of course, Jewish diaspora writers were themselves motivated to make such comparisons, “representing Judaism as a philosophy, while playing down the more peculiar customs and rituals,” as they “resented the fact that they were . . . denied the privileged status of the Greeks [and] consequently, often tried to emphasize their affinities with the Greeks.”159 In the same passage in which Josephus makes mention of Clearchus of Soli and Aristotle, for example, he also claims that the Greek philosopher Pythagoras “did not only know [Jewish] doctrines, but was in very great measure a follower and admirer of them” to the extent that “he took a great many of the laws of the Jews into his own philosophy.”160 Philo, also writing in the first century CE, claimed Greek philosophy as “a natural development of the revelatory teachings of Moses,” a view in keeping with claims by the Jewish historian Artapanus two centuries earlier that Moses was to be equated with the Greek prophet Orpheus and with the claims of the Herodian Aristobulus a century after that, that Homer had drawn his materials from Mosaic writings.161 In Philo’s description, synagogues became home to philosophical schools not unlike those in Greek culture: “Even to this day, the Jews hold philosophical discussions on the seventh day, disputing about their national philosophy, and devoting that day to the knowledge and consideration of the subjects of nat158. Josephus, Against Apion, 1.22, https://penelope.uchicago.edu /josephus/apion-1.html. 159. John J. Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem, 15, 12. 160. Josephus, Against Apion, 1.22 161. Hillar, From Logos to Trinity, 41. 346 The Missionary World Jesus Entered ural philosophy.”162 Thus, it was natural that the language adopted for Christian gathering places may itself to some extent have been owed to Greek and Roman philosophical clubs. Although it does not appear “that Christian groups consciously modeled themselves on these clubs,” Vincent P. Branick notes, “the common term for such clubs, thiasos, was applied to Christian groups of the second century, by both non-Christians and Christians.”163 The Greek and Roman clubs were generally founded as types of voluntary associations. With an eye toward preventing assemblies from turning toward political ends, three main types were permitted by authorities: professional groups, religious groups (into which philosophical associations would have fit), and funerary groups.164 The first were associations consisting of people of like profession and usually also had a presiding god; it is likely such an association of silversmiths in Ephesus that Demetrius addressed in Acts 19:24–27 when he claimed that Paul’s teachings endangered their craft. The second were clubs organized to further the worship of a particular god, often one that was unfamiliar to locals, thus allowing foreigners and immigrants to gather for veneration to their home deity, but others wishing to associate socially who did not fit neatly into the first category of clubs likely picked a convenient god and organized under this second type as well. Synagogues would have fit the parameters of this second type of club, and it seems probable that Christian groups eventually organized along similar lines. In fact, at some points, the Christian removal from the synagogue would have been a strong reason to meet in the home, un162. Philo, On the Life of Moses, trans. W. D. Yonge, 2.216, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/yonge /book25.html. 163. Branick, House Church in the Writings, 48–49. 164. Information on the three types of clubs is from Stambaugh and Balch, New Testament in Its Social Environment, 124–126. Schools and Clubs 347 til such time that a Christian group was able to organize in some kind of official fashion, given the state’s prohibition against unauthorized association.165 The third group was organized for the purpose of providing decent burials to the poor, allowing the poor to pool resources for funerary arrangements—but it could also serve as a social gathering. This latter club also had a seeming correspondence among later Christian circles, as burial of the poor was used by various second-century Christian apologists to justify the meetings of followers of Jesus. “And whenever one of their poor passes from the world, each one of them according to his ability gives heed to him and carefully sees to his burial,” wrote Aristides of Christians to the emperor Hadrian around the year 125.166 Tertullian, writing at the end of the second century, was even more direct in his Apology in comparing Christian meetings to those of burial organizations and various religious associations: We meet together as an assembly and congregation, that, offering up prayer to God as with united force, we may wrestle with Him in our supplications. . . . There is no buying and selling of any sort in the things of God. Though we have our treasurechest, it is not made up of purchase-money, as of a religion that has its price. On the monthly day, if he likes, each puts in a small donation; but only if it be his pleasure, and only if he be able: for there is no compulsion; all is voluntary. These gifts are, 165. In Pliny the Younger’s account to the Emperor Trajan of Christians meeting “on a fixed day before dawn” and later partaking of food, he notes that the Christians had ceased such activities after he “had forbidden political associations.” Pliny the Younger, Letters, 190.96–97. 166. Aristides, The Apology of Aristides the Philosopher, trans. D. M. Kay, chap. 15, Early Christian Writings, http://www .earlychristianwritings.com/text/aristides-kay.html. 348 The Missionary World Jesus Entered as it were, piety’s deposit fund. For they are not taken thence and spent on feasts, and drinkingbouts, and eating-houses, but to support and bury poor people. . . . You abuse also our humble feasts, on the ground that they are extravagant as well as infamously wicked. To us, it seems, applies the saying of Diogenes: “The people of Megara feast as though they were going to die on the morrow; they build as though they were never to die!” But one sees more readily the mote in another’s eye than the beam in his own. Why, the very air is soured with the eructations of so many tribes, and curioe, and decurioe. The Salii cannot have their feast without going into debt; you must get the accountants to tell you what the tenths of Hercules and the sacrificial banquets cost; the choicest cook is appointed for the Apaturia, the Dionysia, the Attic mysteries; the smoke from the banquet of Serapis will call out the firemen. Yet about the modest supper-room of the Christians alone a great ado is made. . . . Whatever it costs, our outlay in the name of piety is gain, since with the good things of the feast we benefit the needy.167 When smaller, such clubs tended to meet “in an area of a public temple, or in a rented hall, or in a private house,” just as the early followers of Jesus met in the temple, in synagogues, and in homes.168 As they grew larger, they often built, rented, or purchased their own building.169 Such was made possible by donations from the association members 167. Tertullian, Apology, 39; Stambaugh and Balch, New Testament in Its Social Environment, 141. 168. Stambaugh and Balch, New Testament in Its Social Environment, 126. 169. Ibid., 126, 141. Schools and Clubs 349 and/or by wealthy patrons, just as house churches were hosted by the better-off.170 That Paul met daily with believers at the school of Tyrannus may also suggest that what Paul had actually done in leaving the synagogue was form a Christian school of sorts, whether modeled on that of the Jewish Yeshiva or the Greek academy. Not that there was a significant difference in terms of system. Jewish schools, after all, were in part based in Hellenistic ideas about education, as noted in chapter , even if the curriculum was very different. As Jesus had gathered around him his disciples, so too Greek “philosophical teachers . . . gather[ed] groups of disciples around them. That is how,” Dorothy I. Sly notes in her book on Philo in Alexandria, “the Academy and the Lyceum had developed in Athens. Students chose their teachers through sampling their lectures.”171 And here in Ephesus, it may well be, Paul, too, gathered a set of disciples and lectured on who Jesus was and how he fulfilled the Jewish scriptures. As such, non-Jewish followers would have taken Paul’s schooling for something similar to what was offered among philosophical classes in the Roman and Greek world. “Rhetorical technique was the chief content of higher education,” John E. Stambaugh and David L. Balch tell us in their book about the social environment of the New Testament, “and it permeated every area of public life. . . . The most characteristic form of instruction was the public lecture, which made available to the general population a sense of the standards by which to judge an oratorical performance.”172 Philosophers who wished to 170. Ibid., 126; Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem, 228; Branick, House Church in the Writings, 47–48. 171. Sly, Plato’s Alexandria, 140. 172. Stambaugh and Balch, Social Environment of the New Testament, 1. See also Coutsoumpos, “Paul’s Teaching,” 147–148, regarding the similarity of Paul’s rhetorical techniques to those of the Greco-Roman philosophical schools of the time. Philosophical rhetoric, 350 The Missionary World Jesus Entered spread their ideas proved no exception to this penchant to perform oratorically, and “there are indications in the New Testament that Paul and other early Christian leaders were being judged on their rhetorical abilities and that some audiences were comparing them as if they were engaged in an oratorical competition.”173 Stambaugh and Balch see Paul’s comments 2 Corinthians 10 and 13 as being references to just this sort of thing, which Paul thought foolish: “For we dare not make ourselves of the number, or compare ourselves with some that commend themselves; but they measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise” ( Cor. 10:13). Foolish or not, as the first decades of Christianity gave way to the second century, various followers of Jesus made explicit their connection to philosophy as they themselves founded schools to spread their ideas. Justin Martyr, for example, writing in his Dialogue with Trypho in the midsecond century, a work devoted to defending Justin’s version of the Christian faith to a Jewish man named Trypho, introduces himself as a philosopher. That is how Trypho’s Jewish companions also address Justin and what they think of him as, given his state of dress.174 Then, when writing of how he came to be a believer in Jesus, Justin begins by discussing his various forays into Greek and Roman philosophy—Stoicism, Peripateticism, Pythagoreanism, and finally Platonism.175 At last, one day, Justin has a indeed, formed a common portion of the club meeting. Coutsoumpos, 96–97. 173. Stambaugh and Balch, Social Environment of the New Testament, 122. 174. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, chap. 1. 175. Ibid., chap. 2. All of these philosophies, but most especially Platonism, would color Justin Martyr’s ideas about Christianity. See the section “Justin and Philosophy” in Jules Lebreton, “Gospel of Luke,” Early Christian Writings, http://earlychristianwritings.com /info/justin-cathen.html; also see Hillar, From Logos to Trinity, 139. Schools and Clubs 351 long philosophical discussion with a man about the definition of God, the meaning of the soul, and the nature of truth, during which he is introduced to the man’s faith in Jesus.176 After this, Justin writes, “A flame was kindled in my soul; and a love of the prophets, and of those men who are friends of Christ, possessed me; and whilst revolving his words in my mind, I found this philosophy alone to be safe and profitable. Thus, and for this reason, I am a philosopher.”177 Taking this as his starting point, he would go on to found a Christian school in Rome, which Tatian, another early Christian scholar and later Gnostic, would attend.178 If we are to believe what Eusebius and others write about Alexandria, a philosophically oriented Christianity, with an attendant school, existed there not long after Jesus’s demise. Eusebius credits the establishment of the Alexandrian church to Mark, where “the multitude of believers, both men and women, that were collected there at the very outset, . . . lived lives of the most philosophical and excessive asceticism,” a description he gleans by applying Philo’s description of the ascetic Therapeutae, in Philo’s work On the Contemplative Life or on Suppliants, to Christians.179 This linking of philosophy to Christianity plays out more fully when Eusebius comes to his discussion of Pantaenus, a second-century Alexandrian teacher who took 176. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, chaps. 3–7. 177. Ibid., chap. 8. 178. “From Justin’s writings we may deduce that his school in Rome prepared such materials as catechisms, manuals for instruction against other Christian doctrines usually classified as heresies, and harmonizing texts of the synoptic Gospels. Some of that material was used in the schools in Alexandria after his death.” Hillar, From Logos to Trinity, 141. On Tatian, see Eusebius, Church History, 4.29.3. 179. Eusebius, Church History, 2.16.1–2, 2.17.3, http://www .newadvent.org/fathers/250102.htm. The idea that the Therapeutae were actually Christians is considered highly unlikely. Marian Hillar, “Philo of Alexandria (c. 0 BCE–40 CE),” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://www.iep.utm.edu/philo/. 352 The Missionary World Jesus Entered charge of “the school of the faithful in Alexandria,” which Eusebius describes as “a school of sacred learning, which continues to our day, [that] was established there in ancient times.” Pantaenus, Eusebius notes, “was at that time especially conspicuous, as he had been educated in the philosophical system of those called Stoics.”180 Pantaenus, in turn, trained Clement of Alexandria, who himself became leader of the school, whose writing made generous use of Greek philosophy in addition to biblical and apocryphal scriptures, and who would, in turn, train Origen, whose ideas would go on to influence much of what would become Catholicism.181 Clement would devote much of his work Stromata to defending the usage of philosophy in the study of scripture: First, even if philosophy were useless, if the demonstration of its uselessness does good, it is yet useful. Then those cannot condemn the Greeks, who have only a mere hearsay knowledge of their opinions, and have not entered into a minute investigation in each department, in order to acquaintance with them. . . . Philosophy does not ruin life by being the originator of false practices and base deeds, although some have calumniated it, though it be the clear image of truth, a divine gift to the Greeks; nor does it drag us away from the faith, as if we were bewitched by some delusive art, but rather, so to speak, by the use of an ampler circuit, obtains a common exercise demonstrative of the faith. Further, the juxtaposition of doctrines, by 180. Eusebius, Church History, 5.10.1, http://www.newadvent.org /fathers/250105.htm. 181. Ibid., 5.11.1–; Glenn Davis, “Clement of Alexandria,” The Development of the Canon of the New Testament, http://www.ntcanon .org/Clement.shtml. Writings 353 comparison, saves the truth, from which follows knowledge.182 For Clement, philosophy was the means by which God led the Greeks to Jesus, as the law was the means for the Jews, even as he acknowledged that not all philosophy was conducive to Godly wisdom, for example, the Epicurean and Stoic, the former because it sought solely after pleasure rather than after God, and the latter because it claimed that the “Deity, being a body, pervades the vilest matter.”183 Writings What followers of Jesus would have learned in such schools and at various meetings would have, in the early years, focused on the Old Testament scriptures, as in the synagogues, but with the added dimension of Jesus as the fulfillment of what those scriptures pointed to. In the absence of the physical presence of the apostles, their writings, and those of followers close to or affiliated with them, took on increasing importance. Letters forge the majority of books of the New Testament for good reason. In them, Paul, Peter, John, and Jesus’s brothers James and Jude (or people writing in their names) passed along messages, often through scribes, to various churches and individuals scattered throughout the Roman world. Paul wrote the letter to the Romans, for instance, because he had been unable to visit, even though he had “oftentimes . . . purposed to come unto [them]” (Rom. 1:13). In his letter to the Colossians, Paul mentions how he worked hard for those “who have not seen [his] face in the flesh” (Col. :1) and of his inability to visit given his imprisonment (Col. 4:18). And 182. Clement of Alexandria, The Stromata, or Miscellanies, 1.2, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com /text/clement-stromata-book1.html. 183. Ibid., 1.5, 1.11. 354 The Missionary World Jesus Entered in 2 Peter, the apostle designates one of his reasons for writing as being his eventual death: “Yea, I think it meet, as long as I am in this tabernacle, to stir you up by putting you in remembrance; Knowing that shortly I must put off this my tabernacle, even as our Lord Jesus Christ hath shewed me. Moreover I will endeavour that ye may be able after my decease to have these things always in remembrance” ( Pet. 1:13–15). Indeed, Luke notes the desire for accuracy of teaching as one of his motivations for the writing his Gospel: “It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, that thou mightest know the certainty of those things, wherein thou has been instructed” (Luke 1:3–4). Such letters and writings were meant not merely to be read but to be passed along and shared. “And when this epistle is read among you,” Paul wrote to the Colossians, “cause that it be read also in the church of the Laodiceans; and that ye likewise read the epistle from Laodicea” (Col. 4:16). Paul sent the letter via Tychicus and Onesimus (Col. 4:6, 9), just as he received news regarding the church in Colossae via Epaphras (Col. 1:7). Such messages were enabled by a network of roads and sea routes that ran throughout the Roman Empire and by the frequency of travel along them. Though there was no formal postal system, friends, family, business associates, soldiers, and pilgrims often took messages with them, such that a letter from Rome could arrive in Britain in about five weeks and in Syria in about seven.184 So, too, the letter was passed along by travelers and often served as the means by which particular teachers were recommended to a given church. Thus, Paul, in his letter to the Colossians, notes that Epaphras is “a faithful minister of Christ,” as is Tychicus (Col. 184. Tom Standage, Writing on the Wall: Social Media—The First 2,000 Years (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 2, 44. Writings 355 1:7, Col. 4:7). In his letter to the Corinthians, he denotes that he has sent “Timotheus, who is my beloved son, and faithful in the Lord” (1 Cor. 4:17). John denotes that “Demetrius hath a good report of all men” (3 John 1). The letter could also warn followers away from certain teachers, as Jude does of “men who crept in unawares, . . . turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness” (Jude 4) or John does of people “who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh” ( John 7). The system of passing along writings wasn’t, of course, confined to Christian churches. As Tom Standage writes of Rome in his book on early communication systems, “Letters were often copied, shared and quoted in other letters. Some letters were addressed to several people and were written to be read aloud, or posted in public for general consumption.”185 Standage devotes much of his chapter on the Roman Empire to the Roman thinker, writer, philosopher, and statesman Cicero, many of whose letters and other writings survive to our day: “When Cicero or another politician made a noteworthy speech, he could distribute it by making copies available to his close associates, who would read it and pass it on to others. Many more people might then read the speech than had heard it being delivered. Books circulated in a similar way, as sets of papyrus rolls passed from person to person. Anyone who wished to retain a copy of a speech or book would have it transcribed by their scribes before passing it on.”186 Cicero wrote about many of the major philosophical schools, including Stoicism and Skepticism, to which he had a particular affinity.187 And Koch Piettre notes that proponents of the Epicurean philosophy in particular maintained a network of 185. Tom Standage, “Writing on the Wall,” tomstandage.com, https://tomstandage.wordpress.com/books/writing-on-the-wall/. 186. Ibid. 187. Abraham J. Malherbe, Moral Exhortation, a Greco-Roman Sourcebook (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), 17; Edward Clay- 356 The Missionary World Jesus Entered communities that were well connected via shared letters and books that the emerging Christian network would have mirrored.188 In fact, much like Christianity, Piettre notes, “Epicureanism had probably acquired an image that was both academic and accessible but to a middling sort of audience: people felt honoured to be able to approach those intellectuals, especially because they were flattered they managed to understand them despite the barrier of their school’s jargon, which was quite easy to break through.”189 Philosophers, too, then, knew that the best way to ensure the dissemination of their ideas beyond their physical presence was to write them down and share those writings widely. Such a similarity would have only contributed to the scholarly reputation early Christianity began to take on—and would have encouraged those with philosophical bents to begin to merge such ideas into those espoused by the first generation of Jesus’s followers. Indeed, the proliferation of Christian texts would become so great, Larry Hurtado argues in chapter 4 of his book Destroyer of the Gods, that their constant copying would contribute to the replacement of the scroll with the more easily copied quarto, the basis for our modern page-turning book. The emergence of schools used to teach and disseminate Christian ideas would have an important parallel to the philosophical system that ultimately arguably would have the greatest influence on Christianity: Platonism. As Plato had used the grounds at the Academy in Athens to engage in philosophical study with others, lending to its popularity with other thinkers and the spread of his ideas in the fourth century BCE, so it was that when Marton, “Cicero (106–43 BCE),” sections 3–4, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://iep.utm.edu/cicero/. 188. Renée Koch Piettre, “Paul and the Athens Epicureans: Between Polytheisms, Atheisms and Monotheisms,” Diogenes 205 (2005): 49. 189. Ibid., 55. Writings 357 cus Aurelius attempted to revive philosophical schools in Athens near the end of the second century CE, even though he set up chairs for Epicureanism, Stoicism, Aristotelianism, and Platonism, the latter proved to be the focus of studies.190 The preponderance of this philosophy at a time when Christianity was wrestling with concepts related to the metaphysical nature of God and Jesus’s relationship to that would have a profound effect on the ultimate solution, as discussed in chapter 2. Platonism would also have a profound effect on another attribute of Christian belief: the afterlife, the subject of the next chapter. As Christians struggled with how to define their ultimate reward in light of their disappointment with regard to their expectation for the imminent end of the world and the return of Jesus, Plato’s philosophy would prove a useful alternative. 190. Arnaldo Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians (Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 4; Lewis TrelawnyCassity, “Plato: The Academy,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://www.iep.utm.edu/academy/. Chapter 6 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered With a few seeming exceptions, the teaching of the Jewish scriptures on life after death emphasizes a resurrection to life, most often to this earth, if indeed reference is made to life after death at all. Most scriptures on the resurrection appear in later Old Testament writings, yet hints of the doctrine emerge early on, hints that later Jewish teachers, including Jesus and his first generation of followers, would interpret as proof of the early rise—indeed, the very truth—of the belief. Yet by the end of the second century, beliefs with regard to a blessed afterlife in heaven or a cursed one in hell, arising immediately after death, would begin to emerge among Christians and by the time of Eusebius in the fourth century would begin to predominate.1 1. For a late second-century example, see the work of Clement of Alexandria, wherein he likens the New Jerusalem to an immortal state: “We have heard, too, that the Jerusalem above is walled with sacred stones. . . . By that brilliancy of stones . . . is meant the inimitable brilliancy of the spirit, the immortality and sanctity of being.” Clement of Alexandria, Paedegogus (The Instructor), 2.13, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/clement -instructor-book2.html. Eusebius, in his Life of Constantine, claims that “after a long course of years, and when [Constantine] was wearied by his divine labors, the God whom he honored crowned him with an immortal reward, and translated him from a transitory kingdom The Afterlife in the Old Testament 359 This change in point of view is yet another example of how mixing of various cultural beliefs would influence the understanding of Christians during the first two centuries after Jesus’s ministry. The Afterlife in the Old Testament Among the most well known of the Old Testament scriptures that make reference to the resurrection are passages in Daniel 1 and Ezekiel 37, though the two differ substantially in their emphases. Ezekiel, in his description of a vision he received from God, focuses on a physical reembodiment of the nation of Israel: Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live: And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the Lord. . . . And as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone. And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above . . . and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army. Then to that endless life which he has laid up in store for the souls of his saints.” Eusebius, Life of Constantine, trans. Ernest Cushing Richardson, 1.9, from Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. 1, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo, N.Y.: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1890), rev. and ed. for New Advent by Kevin Knight, New Advent, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/25021.htm. For more on the views of both figures, among other early teachers, see Chris Gousmett, “Heaven and the Eternal State,” EarlyChurch.org.uk, 008, https://earlychurch.org.uk/pdf/gousmett/chapter7.pdf. For more on Clement’s views regarding the ultimate heavenly destiny of the deceased, see Walter H. Wagner, After the Apostles: Christianity in the Second Century (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 178–179. 360 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts. Therefore prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel. And ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves, O my people, and brought you up out of your graves. (Ezek. 37:5–8, 10–13) Daniel, by contrast, focuses on the individual, emphasizing an embodied astral-like destiny for those who are righteous (and corresponding shame for those not so righteous), at a resurrection and judgment to come at the end of the age: “And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever” (Dan. 1:–3). Although many scholars see the biblical teaching regarding resurrection as developing over the course of Israel’s history, starting with national restoration (à la Ezekiel) and proceeding to personal resurrection (à la Daniel), this two-level focus can be found throughout the Old Testament scriptures and would in turn impact the interpretations made by the writers of the New Testament.2 As Kevin J. Madigan and Jon D. Levenson note in their book 2. With regard to turn from national restoration to personal resurrection, see, for example, Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020), 96, 101; and Kevin J. Madigan and Jon D. Levenson, Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), esp. 153, 163, 188. The Afterlife in the Old Testament 361 on the development of the Old Testament teaching regarding the resurrection, if biblical writers of such resurrection passages as Isaiah 24–27 “thought resurrection literally impossible, their choice of it as a metaphor for the national resurrection that they fully expected was highly inappropriate and self-defeating.”3 Thus, inherent within the teaching of national restoration was the idea that the God who created life had the power also to restore it, an idea also reflected in such passages as 1 Kings 17:17–4, wherein the prophet Elijah resurrects a woman’s dead son through the power of God. This idea of God’s power over life and death, even on an individual level, repeats itself throughout many of the scriptures that recount events surrounding the Israelite nation-state that would develop after its settling in God’s Promised Land. For example, we find Hannah, the mother of the last great judge of Israel, Samuel, declaring, “The Lord killeth, and maketh alive: he bringeth down to the grave, and bringeth up” (1 Sam. :6). Several of the Psalms credited to the second king of Israel, David, would make similar claims. “For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell,” David writes, “neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption” (Ps. 16:10), a claim later leveled by Christian writers as being about Jesus (Acts 2:27, 31). Elsewhere, David states that God “shall quicken me again, and shall bring me up again from the depths of the earth” (Ps. 71:20). Job, whom scholars place as being written across a wide array of dates, some to before even the Torah and others to as late as the second temple period but a number of whom see it as being written in Solomon’s day, would claim that “I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: and though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh 3. Madigan and Levenson, Resurrection, 198. 362 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered shall I see God” (Job 19:5–6).4 Certainly, one could take the language of such people as Hannah and David as being metaphorical (restoration of one’s physical vigor), but the power of the metaphor came from the degree to which such ideas were taken literally—that God really could restore one’s actual life. This idea could thus forge a basis for the writings of prophets such as Ezekiel and Isaiah at the end of the age of the kings promising national restoration. “Thy dead men shall live,” Isaiah would assure the nation of Judah, “together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust: for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead” (Isa. 26:19). The possibility of resurrection was enabled within Israelite culture by a general understanding among the Old Testament writers that sheol—a somewhat obscure Hebrew term that generally corresponds to the grave, in which an individual lacks consciousness and is totally disconnected 4. The Jewish Talmud makes the claim that Moses wrote Job and also that Job was written during the Babylonian exile (so after 538 BCE). Most modern scholars date Job to the early second temple period, but scholarly opinion has varied, with some preferring to date it to Solomon’s reign and others to before the writing of the Torah. The challenge of dating Job stems in part from the fact that its language points both to it being more recent and more ancient in derivation. The fact that Ezekiel 14:14 mentions Job would seem to indicate its being written before the Jewish people’s return to Palestine, though conceivably a later writer could have borrowed the name for his work; that said, borrowing such an obscure name would have been unusual, just as Ezekiel’s mentioning of Job would have been, had the story not already been well known. For fuller discussions on Job’s dating, see Elon Gilad, “Who Really Wrote the Book of Job?,” Haaretz, April 10, 2018, https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/MAGAZINE-who-really-wrote -the-book-of-job-1.5434183; “When Was Job Written?,” Biblical Hermeneutics, April 7, 2020, https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com /questions/11587/when-was-job-written; David Malick, “An Introduction to the Book of Job,” Bible.org, July 14, 004, https://bible.org /article/introduction-book-job. The Afterlife in the Old Testament 363 from the realm of the living—follows life.5 In other words, the dead were simply dead. No internal immortal soul or spirit lived on beyond the body, as most Christians believe today; rather, body and soul were thought of as a unit.6 The soul, thus, could and did die, or pass away, with the body.7 Rather than being some kind of “disembodied consciousness,” the soul was the person’s “life force” or breath.8 This is the meaning most often associated with the Hebrew term nephesh, the word commonly translated as “soul” (nearly five hundred times) in the Old Testament. Thus, when God forms Adam in Genesis, he is said to have become a “living soul” (Gen. :7)—a living nephesh—as opposed to, say, a soul, or body, that is not alive. Writing much later than the author of Genesis, Ezekiel would declare that “the soul that sinneth, it shall die” (Ezek. 18:0). Throughout, the term nephesh constitutes the essential essence of the human existence, as demonstrated by the other words into which it is commonly translated in the Old Testament: life itself (117 times), person (29 times), mind (15 times), heart (15 times), creature (9 times), body (8 times), and will (4 times). To get to a concept that even comes close to our modern ideas of the soul as distinct from the body, one might turn rather to the Hebrew term ruwach, which is usually translated as “spirit” in the Old Testament. Here, too, however, the meaning is more akin to breath, life force, or will. Thus, even though a body might be said to have a spirit, there is no sense that that spirit lives on consciously without it. Thus, in Noah’s flood, the waters are said to have 5. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell, 83; Madigan and Levenson, Resurrection, 54, 65. 6. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell, 126; Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 242. 7. Madigan and Levenson, Resurrection, 108–109. 8. Ibid., 108, 205–206; Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem, 242. 364 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered “destroy[ed] all flesh, wherein is the breath [spirit] of life” (Gen. 6:17) such that “all in whose nostrils was the breath [spirit] of life, of all that was in the dry land, died” (Gen. 7:22). Although the author of Ecclesiastes would ponder whether the “spirit of man goeth upward” (Eccl. 3:1), in the end he would claim that “all [living things] go unto one place; all are of the dust and turn to dust again” (Eccl. 3:0) and that “the dead know nothing” (Eccl. 9:5). Ultimately, as Job would claim, both “the soul of every living thing, and the breath [spirit] of all mankind” are in the hand of God (Job 12:10). As such, as C. D. Elledge puts it in his book on the concept of resurrection in early Judaism, “Resurrection . . . differ[ed] significantly from other popular conceptions of the afterlife in antiquity. Those who asserted resurrection made a specialized claim that was conscientious and selective. Above all, resurrection is distinguished by divine agency, it is an eschatological and gracious event whose ultimate cause is God.”9 Resurrection, thus, demands an act of God, indeed, an active and activating God, where the concept of an immortal soul does not.10 As such, the Jewish concept of resurrection was at least as much about the character of God himself if not more than it was “about the ultimate destiny of mortal human beings. It was about God’s righteousness, the vindication of those loyal to him, and the establishment of justice. The earth would give up its dead only in the context of the righting of Israel’s wrongs, the punishment of the wicked, the restoration of the lost, the reconstruction of the holy city and the Temple, and the universal recognition of the Lord as the faithful God of justice.”11 9. C. D. Elledge, Resurrection of the Dead in Early Judaism, 200 BCE–CE 200 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), xix. 10. Ibid., 4. 11. Madigan and Levenson, Resurrection, 7. The Afterlife in the Old Testament 365 That so much of the early Israelite focus on resurrection was on national restoration makes sense in a cultural context wherein the emphasis was on national physical blessings, as even the New Testament writers would acknowledge. Thus, the book of Deuteronomy laid out a set of national rewards if the people “hearken[ed] diligently unto the voice of the Lord [their] God, to observe and to do all his commandments which [he] command[ed them]” (Deut. 28:1), rewards that included such things as making the people of Israel “plenteous in goods, in the fruit of [their] body, and in the fruit of [their] cattle, and in the fruit of [their] ground, in the land which the Lord sware unto [their] fathers to give [them]” (Deut. 8:11). Failure to follow God led to the opposite: “It shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee: Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field. Cursed shall be thy basket and thy store. Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep” (Deut. 8:15–18). Writers of the New Testament would contrast the covenant promises made to Israel with those being offered through Jesus to the individuals who made up his church, the former being physical and the latter spiritual. Thus, Jesus, for the writer of Hebrews, would become “the mediator of a better covenant, which was established with better promises” (Heb. 8:6), including not just physical blessings but an “eternal inheritance” (Heb. 9:15). Paul in  Corinthians 3 would make a similar argument, calling himself and his aids “ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit” ( Cor. 3:6). For him, although the earlier national covenant was “glorious” ( Cor. 3:7), the new covenant “exceed[ed] in glory” ( Cor. 3:9). 366 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered Physical familial and national blessings for adherence to faith in the one God forge the major focus of reward within the Torah. Part of these physical blessings, in the Torah, as Madigan and Levenson point out, comes in the form of an escape from sheol through one’s “descendants, such as those three or four generations that Jacob, Joseph, and Job are privileged to behold just before they die. [The escape from sheol] also comes in the form of survival of the decedent’s ‘name’ (shem), which is itself closely associated with his lineage.”12 This is because, as Madigan and Levenson note, “the death of an individual has a different meaning in a culture that instinctively understands the self in familial and thus transgenerational terms more than we in the modern West do. . . . For the most part, the postmodern fulfillment of those who die in a state of blessing is realized in the form of the happy continuation of the family of which they were, and forever remain, a generational link.”13 Understanding this, one can see why Abraham, near the start of the narrative of his life, seems so concerned about the fact that he has no heir. After God tells him that he himself is Abraham’s “great reward,” Abraham asks, “Lord God, what wilt thou give me, seeing I go childless, and the steward of my house is this Eliezer of Damascus? . . . Behold, to me thou hast given no seed: and, lo, one born in my house is mine heir” (Gen. 15:1–). In other words, Abraham will have no one to carry on the family name and thus no way to live beyond his years. God’s promise is such that Abraham is to be given not just a family heir from his own bowels but “nations” (Gen. 17:6). His seed, he is told, is to be as numerous “as the stars of heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea” (Gen. :17). “All the nations of the earth” will be “blessed” through his descendants 12. Ibid., 77. 13. Ibid., 81. The Afterlife in the Old Testament 367 (Gen. :18) and “kings” will come from him (Gen. 17:6). In other words, Abraham’s longevity is assured, as his descendants will be so numerous and consequential that his name and family is certain to endure, indeed, to fill the whole earth. Abraham’s blessings had large implications for later writers, who saw in them promise of eternal life. Israel was assured restoration because God’s promises to Abraham meant that it could not be cast off forever. So, too, individuals, through Abraham’s descendent Jesus, were given the same promise. “And if ye be Christ’s,” Paul would tell the Galatians, “then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Gal. 3:9). Thus, the Torah, too, became an instrument through which resurrection was promised— and Abraham the central personage in that teaching. It is to Abraham, along with Isaac and Jacob, that Jesus points when the Sadducees, who did not believe in the resurrection, question him about its reality. “Have ye not read in the book of Moses,” Jesus asks, “how in the bush God spake unto him, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living” (Mark 1:6–7). Similarly, the author of Hebrews would claim that when Abraham “was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance” (Heb. 11:8), it was not ultimately for the promised land he was to receive that he went looking but “for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God” (Heb. 11:10), “a better country, that is, an heavenly” (Heb. 11:16), a promise that the author of Hebrews says had yet to be fulfilled (Heb. 11:39–40). Yet another passage in the Torah provides an interesting study in early beliefs of the Israelite people and how they were interpreted by later writers. It falls soon after the Israelite people make a golden calf, in violation of God’s commandment against idolatry. At this point, God tells Moses to “let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot 368 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered against them, and that I may consume them” (Ex. 3:10). Moses, however, begs for the people’s forgiveness, “and if not,” he noted, “blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written” (Ex. 3:3). This book of God is also referenced several times in the Psalms. In Psalm 69, David requests that his enemies “be blotted out of the book of the living” (Ps. 69:8). We might take this as poetic language referencing merely life versus nonlife, but the writers of the Psalms seem to refer elsewhere to the book as one of remembrance. “Thou tellest [take account of] my wanderings,” David writes in Psalm 56:8; “put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?” The late prophets would also write of a book of deeds or names taken down by God, suggesting that it had something to do with judgment and eternal life. “There shall be a time of trouble,” Daniel writes about the end of the age, “such as never was since there was a nation even to that same time: and at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book” (Dan. 1:1). Right after this, Daniel gives his account of an eternal judgment. Malachi, too, writes of “a book of remembrance . . . written before [God] for them that feared the Lord, and that thought upon his name” (Mal. 3:16). By the time Paul and John were writing, fellow Christians were the ones accounted for in this “book of life” (Philip. 4:3; Rev. 3:5, 0:1, 1:7, :19) and who thus were due to gain entrance into the heavenly Jerusalem (Rev. 20:12, 22:19). The Jewish Concept of Resurrection after the Old Testament Writings Some Jewish writers during the period between the writing of the Old and New Testaments would pick up on resurrection themes present in the Old Testament and work the narrative into their writings as well. In the second century The Jewish Concept of Resurrection 369 BCE work 2 Maccabees, for example, the Jewish people of Jerusalem are threatened with death by the Greek conqueror Antiochus if they do not depart from the laws laid down for them by God. Among them is a woman with seven sons who sees each of them killed for their continuing loyalty to the law before suffering her own death. “Doubtless,” she exhorts them, “the Creator of the world, who formed the generation of man, and found out the beginning of all things, will also of his own mercy give you breath and life again, as ye now regard not your own selves for his laws’ sake.”14 Throughout the passage, the sons remark similarly with regard to the reward that awaits them when God brings them up from the dust of the ground. “Thou like a fury takest us out of this present life,” says the second son to die, “but the King of the world shall raise us up, who have died for his laws, unto everlasting life.”15 The third, after having his hands removed proclaims, “These I had from heaven; and for his laws I despise them; and from him I hope to receive them again.”16 The fourth proclaims, “It is good, being put to death by men, to look for hope from God to be raised up again by him: as for thee, thou shalt have no resurrection to life.”17 The likely first-century BCE Psalms of Solomon also alludes to a resurrection in its third psalm when the author proclaims, “The destruction of the sinner is for ever, And he shall not be remembered, when the righteous is visited. This is the portion of sinners for ever. But they that fear the Lord shall rise to life eternal, And their life (shall be) in the light of the Lord, and shall come to an end no more.”18 14. 2 Maccabees, 7.23, King James Version. 15. Ibid., 7.9. 16. Ibid., 7.11. 17. Ibid., 7.14. 18. The Psalms of Solomon, trans. G. Buchanan Gray, 3.11–12, in The Apocrypha and Pseudoepigrapha of the Old Testament in English, ed. 370 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered At the time Jesus and his apostles began to proclaim their message, resurrection was, as it had likely been for centuries, the dominant view of the afterlife among the Jewish people.19 Various first-century CE Jewish works testify to the Jewish people’s continued adherence to the belief. Among them is a work called the Sibylline Oracles. Although the Oracles were written and emended over the course of centuries by various Jewish, Gnostic, Christian, and pagan authors, making them difficult to date, most scholars believe some of the earliest sections, constituting book 3, regarding a final judgment and the rule of a Messianic king, were authored by an Alexandrine Jew in the second century BCE.20 A later passage in book 4, probably written around the end of the first century CE, references a resurrection: But when all things become an ashy pile, God will put out the fire unspeakable Which he once kindled, and the bones and ashes Of men will God himself again transform, And raise up mortals as they were before. And then will be the judgment; God himself Will sit as judge, and judge the world again. As many as committed impious sins Shall Stygian Gehenna’s depths conceal ‘Neath molten earth and dismal Tartarus. But the pious shall again live on the earth, R. H. Charles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), 2:631–652, Wesley Center Online, http://wesley.nnu.edu/sermons-essays-books /noncanonical-literature/noncanonical-literature-ot-pseudepigrapha /the-psalms-of-solomon/; dating from “Psalms of Solomon,” Early Jewish Writings, http://www.earlyjewishwritings.com/psalmssolomon .html. 19. Elledge, Resurrection of the Dead, 9–10. 20. Introduction to Sibylline Oracles, trans. Milton S. Terry (New York: Hunt and Eaton; Cincinnati: Cranston and Stowe’s, 1890), https://www.elfinspell.com/SibyllineOraclesIntro.html. The Jewish Concept of Resurrection 371 And God will give them spirit, life, and means Of nourishment, and all shall see themselves, Beholding the sun’s sweet and cheerful light. O happiest man, who at that time shall live!21 The late first-century or early second-century CE work 2 Baruch similarly references a resurrection to judgment, for both the righteous and the wicked: Then all who have fallen asleep in hope of Him shall rise again. And it shall come to pass at that time that the treasuries will be opened in which is preserved the number of the souls of the righteous, and they shall come forth, and a multitude of souls shall be seen together in one assemblage of one thought, and the first shall rejoice and the last shall not be grieved. For they know that the time has come of which it is said, that it is the consummation of the times. But the souls of the wicked, when they behold all these things, shall then waste away the more. For they shall know that their torment has come and their perdition has arrived.22 Elsewhere in the same book, the author, as he has God speak to Baruch, testifies: The earth shall then assuredly restore the dead, [Which it now receives, in order to preserve them]. It shall make no change in their form, But as it has received, so shall it restore them, 21. Sibylline Oracles, 4.5–39, https://www.elfinspell.com /SibyllineOraclesBk4.html. 22. 2 Baruch, trans. R. H. Charles, 30.2–5, in The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913), 2:481–524, Wesley Center Online, http:// wesley.nnu.edu/sermons-essays-books/noncanonical-literature /noncanonical-literature-ot-pseudepigrapha/the-book-of-the -apocalypse-of-baruch-the-son-of-neriah-or-2-baruch/. 372 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered And as I delivered them unto it, so also shall it raise them.23 Baruch goes on to note that after the judgment all will be “changed.”24 Those whom God justifies will take on “the splendor of angels,” while those who acted wickedly will “suffer torment” and “waste away.”25 The Resurrection in the New Testament Writings The first generation of followers of Jesus would proclaim similar things with regard to life after death, as would Jesus himself. Indeed, the final stage of the ministry of Jesus—and arguably its most effective element in gathering believers—was based around the miracle of his resurrection. While Jesus claimed to be “the resurrection and the life” (John 11:5), the essential component of that claim for his followers rested in the idea that those who believed in him would live even after they had died. That life was not, for the apostle John, just one that manifested itself in some kind of spiritual enlightenment in this life but a promise of a literal return to life, forever, at some future time. “Every one that seeth the Son, and believeth on him,” John quoted Jesus as saying, “may have everlasting life: and I will raise him up on the last day” (John 6:40). Jesus’s own resurrection, therefore, became a sign that a forthcoming resurrection for others was guaranteed. This sign would become a major component of Paul’s teachings also, as witnessed to within his various letters and speeches. Such an argument was the one Paul extended in Athens, Luke tells us, when he spoke to the philosophers at the Areopagus, telling them that God “hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him [Jesus] from 23. Ibid., 50.2. 24. Ibid., 51.1. 25. Ibid., 51.5, 51.2, 51.5. The Resurrection in the New Testament Writings 373 the dead” (Acts 17:31), a claim that brought mocking from the learned Greeks, who did not think much of the concept of resurrection (Acts 17:3). That Luke specifically calls out the Epicureans and Stoics (Acts 17:18), whose philosophical viewpoints focused mostly on this life, lends credence to the idea that they would approach Paul’s teachings with skepticism. Paul made a similar argument with regard to the surety of the resurrection to the Corinthians, Philippians, and Romans. To the Corinthians, he wrote, “God hath both raised up the Lord, and will also raise up us by his own power” (1 Cor. 6:14). To the Philippians, he wrote, “I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: . . . That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death; If by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead” (Philip. 3:8, 10–11). To the Romans, he would write, “If we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection” (Rom. 6:5), and also, “He that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies” (Rom. 8:11). Two of the most comprehensive arguments Paul makes regarding the resurrection appear in his first letters to the Thessalonians and to the Corinthians. Both appear to be addressing concerns among some believers that there was no such thing as a resurrection, at least not in any literal way, outside Jesus’s ascension to heaven. In the case of the Thessalonians, the fear may well have been related to a focus on a physical kingdom and the idea that Jesus was returning imminently to impose it. Thus, Paul would encourage the believers, “Be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand” ( Thes. :). In fact, Paul would tell them, the time was not quite yet— certain events had to happen first: “Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there 374 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition” ( Thes. :3). In his first letter to the Thessalonians, it is clear that some were worried about the ability of those who had already died to share in the kingdom of Jesus, on earth, to come, since they were no longer physically present. Paul’s words of encouragement were similar to those he offered to the Romans, Philippians, and Corinthians: “I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him” (1 Thes. 4:13–14). In other words, Paul’s argument was once again that since Jesus had been resurrected, so too would those who had already died. “The dead in Christ shall rise first,” Paul would go on to note (1 Thes. 4:16). Thessalonian concerns regarding the death of believers may have had similar roots, stemming from Greek culture, to that which afflicted the Corinthians. The misunderstanding regarding life after death in Corinth was likely caused by certain believers who had rejected the concept of a bodily resurrection in favor of a view that emphasized Jesus’s ascension to heaven and the concomitant possibility that his followers could also obtain to such an enlightened spiritual state sans any sort of bodily resuscitation after death.26 Such a view would have fit well within the Greek context but would have created turmoil for any ideas regarding the saints ruling with Jesus in an earthly kingdom, a promise given by the early Christian writers and by Jesus himself. After all, mention of the resurrection—and a bodily one at that—was what had caused the Athenian philosophers at Areopagus, not 26. P. Coutsoumpos, “Paul’s Teaching of the Lord’s Supper: A Sociohistorical Study of the Pauline Account of the Last Supper and Its Graeco-Roman Background” (PhD thesis, University of Sheffield, 1996), 253. The Resurrection in the New Testament Writings 375 far from Corinth, to mock Paul (Acts 17:32).27 Taking a cue from Platonic ideas that would also forge a basis of Gnostic beliefs, such followers of Paul may well have rejected the physical body as inherently corrupt and disgusting in favor of a disembodied soul that was to be nourished into a final and eternal state of spiritual bliss.28 Paul’s argument, as such, was to reconfirm that Jesus really had died and risen again, in a body that followers had seen, and that that resurrection proved what the future hope of his believers actually was: rising again at some future date to immortality in a new “spiritual body.” As Paul’s words make clear, much of Paul’s argument with regard to the resurrection had to do with countering objections regarding the inherent inferiority of the body itself. It’s not the same corruptible, fleshly body, Paul essentially says: But some man will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come? Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die: And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain: But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body. All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds. There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory. So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is 27. Ibid., 249; David H. Stern, Jewish New Testament Commentary (Clarkesville, Md.: Jewish New Testament Publications, 1992), 484. 8. Coutsoumpos, “Paul’s Teaching,” 49. 376 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered raised in incorruption: It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power: It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body. And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual. The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven. As is the earthy, such are they also that are earthy: and as is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly. Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption. (1 Cor. 15:35–50) That Jewish ideas of the resurrection seemed to offer two distinct views—one a resurrection to physical life, as evidenced in Ezekiel 37, and one to something wherein risen people resemble the stars, as evidenced in Daniel 12—creates a quandary, one that seems mostly absent in the New Testament writings. Throughout, the emphasis is on a resurrection in which, as Paul notes to the Philippians, the risen Jesus “will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body” (Philip. 3:1). However, that this is not the final fate of all people is also sometimes evident. In Matthew 25:31–32, for example, Jesus is said to refer to a final judgment, “when the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats.” The Resurrection in the New Testament Writings 377 Some, the good-doing sheep, as the passage later notes, will be told to “inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” and “eternal life” (Matt. 5:34, 46), while others, the negligent goats, “shall go away into everlasting punishment” (Matt. 5:46). Likewise, Paul in Acts 4:15 confirms his belief, shared with Pharisaical sect of the Jews, that “there shall be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and unjust.” For John, at least, this meant that there was more than one resurrection. He hints at such in his Gospel, when he quotes Jesus as saying, “The hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his [the Son of Man’s] voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation” (John 5:8–9). The author of Hebrews seems to espouse a similar view, when he notes that those who stood in faith throughout the ages did so that they “might obtain a better resurrection” (Heb. 11:35; emphasis added). That the authors are referencing distinct resurrections becomes plain in perhaps the clearest statement about the timeline of the end of the age and the judgment of God in the New Testament, a passage in twentieth chapter of Revelation, a book otherwise not known for lucidity. Here, the author writes of Satan being bound for one thousand years (Rev. 20:1–3). During this millennium, the author continues, “the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands . . . lived and reigned with Christ” (Rev. 20:4). The author then makes the fact that there is more than one resurrection explicit: “But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second 378 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years” (Rev. 20:5–6). After this period, the author says, Satan is loosed and then, after that, comes apparently a second resurrection and a final judgment: And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works. (Rev. 20:11–13) Following this resurrection, the author notes, comes a “second death. And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire” (Rev. 0:14– 15). Paul in Romans 11 made much of the fact that his own countrymen, the nation of Israel, had largely been blinded to the truths offered by Jesus (verses 7–10)—this so that salvation could be offered to the Gentiles (verse 11). For Paul, this blindness was temporal: “blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in” (Rom. 11:5), as in the end, “all Israel shall be saved” (Rom. 11:26), even as God intends to “have mercy upon all” (Rom. 11:3). Jesus, in discussing the way in which his message had been rejected in various Jewish towns despite his great miracles, noted “that it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment, than for thee” (Matt. 11:4). Given that Sodom was destroyed for The Resurrection in the New Testament Writings 379 its grievous sin (Gen. 18:20), passages such as these suggest that the day of judgment the New Testament writers referenced was perhaps not intended to be a literal day but rather a period, one in which people are judged “according to their works” at that time, for John in his Gospel noted that Jesus had not come to judge people in his own day: “And if any man hear my words, and believe not, I judge him not: for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world. He that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my words, hath one that judgeth him; the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day” (John 1:47–48). That word, arguably, would be available only after “the books were opened” (Rev. 0:1), for to his own generation, Jesus noted, he spoke in parables that “seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand” (Mark 4:1). The issue Jesus was highlighting in Matthew 11:24, therefore, was that whereas the Jewish townspeople had been provided the Jewish scriptures and miracles, both of which testified to his identity, the people of Sodom had been given neither. In rejecting what was clearly in front of them, the Jewish towns were showing a degree of stubbornness, Jesus said, that would not have been extent even within wicked Sodom, a lesson reaffirmed in his parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man: “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead” (Luke 16:31). Paul’s statements in Romans regarding Israel, thus, may have actually been working off prophecies like the one made in Ezekiel 37. Although Ezekiel focused on a physical resurrection, even he noted that the circumstances after that resurrection would be substantially different, for Israel at that time would have a comprehension not formerly available: “And ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves, O my people, and brought you up out of your graves, and shall put my spirit in you, 380 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land: then shall ye know that I the Lord have spoken it, and performed it, saith the Lord” (Ezek. 37:13–14). Elsewhere, Ezekiel noted, that God would “put a new spirit within [Israel]; and [would] take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them an heart of flesh” (Ezek. 11:19)—that is, he would remove their stubbornness. Given the differing descriptions and the ways in which the New Testament writers wrote of the judgment, the resurrections in Ezekiel and Daniel may in fact be two different resurrections, or at least were interpreted as such by some early Christians, as evidenced most clearly in John’s book of Revelation. The idea that Ezekiel’s resurrection was one only to physical life with a second death yet still possible was also not uncommon among early rabbinical teachers.29 The Concept of the Millennium among Early Followers of Jesus The tendency for the New Testament writers to focus on Jesus’s immediate return and a first resurrection available to those following Jesus in their day meant that there was also a corresponding emphasis on the soon-coming millennium in which Jesus would rule with his believers on earth. Indeed, the idea had its foundation in earlier conceptions among Jesus’s disciples that Jesus had come to restore the physical kingdom of Israel, as discussed in chapter 1. The idea also had its antecedent in Jewish apocalyptic thinking of the time in which a Messiah, “an angel in human form, . . . a pre-existent being . . . would appear upon the clouds with his angelic hosts when Jehovah finally determined to act.”30 Jesus’s death and resurrection meant that 29. Madigan and Levenson, Resurrection, 153. 30. Shirley Jackson Case, The Millennial Hope: A Phase of WarTime Thinking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1918), 113. The Millennium among Early Followers of Jesus 381 the physical kingdom earlier expected by his disciples now became the dominion of supernatural authority, with Jesus at the head.31 Thus, Luke, in writing of Jesus’s ascension to heaven would emphasize a corresponding supernatural return, when he noted that two angels commented: “Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? this same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11). Jesus’s followers would become the government figures in that kingdom. “Do ye not know that the saints shall judge the world?” Paul asked the Corinthians in his first letter (1 Cor. 6:). John would be even more explicit in Revelation, noting that Jesus had made believers “kings and priests: and we shall reign on earth” (Rev. 5:10). “He that overcometh, and keepeth my works unto the end,” the angel to the church in Thyatira—that is, Jesus—would say, “to him will I give power over the nations: And he shall rule them with a rod of iron” (Rev. :6–7), a promise that mirrors Jesus’s own destiny: “The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ” (Rev. 11:15). And thus would become the hope of Christians “for the next two generations,” which would “revolve about this primitive notion of the heavenly Christ soon to return to inaugurate a new regime upon a miraculously renovated earth.”32 We find Jesus and the saints’ rule on earth during a millennium, following a resurrection, mentioned in the writings of many of the Christians who would follow soon after the apostles’ generation. Papias, the late first-century and early second-century bishop of Hierapolis in Asia Minor who apparently learned what he knew from John and another believer, Aristion, is said to have written that “there will be a period of some thousand years after the resurrec31. Ibid., 116–117. 32. Ibid., 117. 382 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered tion of the dead, and that the kingdom of Christ will be set up in material form on this very earth.”33 Justin Martyr, in the second century, would write an entire discourse on the resurrection, only fragments of which survive. For him, the resurrection and the millennium went hand in hand, as he would claim that he “and others, who are right-minded Christians on all points, are assured that there will be a resurrection of the dead, and a thousand years in Jerusalem, which will then be built, adorned, and enlarged.”34 Indeed, Justin would tell his Jewish acquaintance Trypho that those “who do not admit this [truth], and venture to blaspheme the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob; who say there is no resurrection of the dead, and that their souls, when they die, are taken 33. Eusebius, Church History, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert, from Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. 1, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo, N.Y.: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1890), 3.39.7, 3.39.12, rev. and ed. by Kevin Knight for New Advent, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/250103.htm. Papias wrote five books titled Expositions of Oracles of the Lord; unfortunately, only a few small fragments survive through the works of Irenaeus and Eusebius, the latter of whom did not think much of him, likely because he thought Papias’s ideas on the millennium were a “misunderstanding of the apostolic accounts, not perceiving that the things said by them were spoken mystically in figures” (Church History, 3.39.12). There is some question as to whether the John Papius knew was the apostle or another, as Eusebius calls him John the Presbyter, though other passages reference the apostles (Eusebius, Church History, 3.39.5–6). A short summary of how Papias’s views were likely representative of those of the early church, see Michael J. Vlach, “The Early Witness to Premillennialism,” Master’s Seminary Blog: Doctrine, Discourse, Doxology, May 18, 2015, https://blog.tms.edu/early _witness_to_premillennialism. 34. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, chap. 80, Early Christian Writings, http:// earlychristianwritings.com/text/justinmartyr-dialoguetrypho.html. Fragments of his On the Resurrection can be found at Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/justinmartyr -resurrection.html. The Millennium among Early Followers of Jesus 383 to heaven; do not imagine that they are Christians.”35 For Justin, the resurrection was most definitely one that was bodily, as he would note in his First Apology: “We expect to receive again our own bodies, though they be dead and cast into the earth, for we maintain that with God nothing is impossible.”36 Theophilus of Antioch, writing in the late second century, would likewise testify to one unbeliever this way, “For God will raise thy flesh immortal with thy soul; and then, having become immortal, thou shalt see the Immortal, if now you believe on Him; and then you shall know that you have spoken unjustly against Him.”37 The views on the millennium of the mid-second-century heresiologist Irenaeus, though distinct from those of John in Revelation, shared similarities with regard to the ultimate reward of the righteous. In the fifth book of his Against Heresies, Irenaeus would lay out this chronology: the resurrection of the just . . . takes place after the coming of Antichrist, and the destruction of all nations under his rule; in [the times of] which [resurrection] the righteous shall reign in the earth, waxing stronger by the sight of the Lord: and through Him they shall become accustomed to partake in the glory of God the Father, and shall enjoy in the kingdom intercourse and communion with the holy angels, and union with spiritual beings; and [with respect to] those whom the Lord shall find in the flesh, awaiting Him from heaven, and who have suffered tribulation, as well as escaped the hands of the Wicked one. For it is in ref35. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, chap. 80. 36. Justin Martyr, First Apology, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, chap. 18, Early Christian Writings, http://www .earlychristianwritings.com/text/justinmartyr-firstapology.html. 37. Theophilus of Antioch to Autolycus, 1.7, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/theophilus.html. 384 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered erence to them that the prophet says: “And those that are left shall multiply upon the earth,” And Jeremiah the prophet has pointed out, that as many believers as God has prepared for this purpose, to multiply those left upon earth, should both be under the rule of the saints to minister to this Jerusalem, and that [His] kingdom shall be in it.38 In other words, as in the writings of John and other New Testament authors, the righteous, after resurrection, would reign on earth with Jesus. Conceivably, Irenaeus was claiming that the saints would be beings similar in nature to the angels, while physical humans who survived the destruction of the last age before the resurrection would be subject to the saints in an idealistic utopian kingdom that Irenaeus would describe in terms similar to those of the ancient Israelite prophets.39 More likely, as most scholars present his views, Irenaeus was claiming that the saints, after a physical resurrection, would interact with the angels and God on earth during the millennium, on their way to conforming more fully to perfection.40 However, the eventual state of the righteous, after the millennium, Irenaeus makes clear, is to have glory like unto God, as he expresses in this passage regarding the new Jerusalem, which Irenaeus sees as an initially literal physical restoration during the millennium: 38. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, 5.35.1, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, Early Christian Writings, http://www .earlychristianwritings.com/text/irenaeus-book5.html. 39. See, for example, Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 5.34, in which he notes that “the whole creation shall, according to God’s will, obtain a vast increase” (5.34.), in the context of quoting extensively from utopian passages in Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Daniel. In 5.33.3, he notes that Israel’s blessings were never completely fulfilled in this world and thus must be consummated in the millennium. 40. See, for example, Case, Millennial Hope, 164–165; A. Skevington Wood, “The Eschatology of Irenaeus,” Evangelical Quarterly 41, no. 1 (January–March 1969): 30–41; and Wagner, After the Apostles, 232. The Millennium among Early Followers of Jesus 385 Of this Jerusalem the former one is an image—that Jerusalem of the former earth in which the righteous are disciplined beforehand for incorruption and prepared for salvation. And of this tabernacle Moses received the pattern in the mount; and nothing is capable of being allegorized, but all things are stedfast, and true, and substantial, having been made by God for righteous men’s enjoyment. For as it is God truly who raises up man, so also does man truly rise from the dead, and not allegorically, as I have shown repeatedly. And as he rises actually, so also shall he be actually disciplined beforehand for incorruption, and shall go forwards and flourish in the times of the kingdom, in order that he may be capable of receiving the glory of the Father. Then, when all things are made new, he shall truly dwell in the city of God.41 After the millennium, Irenaeus goes on to note, “there shall be the new heaven and the new earth, in which the new man shall remain [continually], always holding fresh converse with God.”42 That said, Irenaeus saw the ultimate reward of the righteous as being staggered according to their value: “Those who are deemed worthy of an abode in heaven shall go there, others shall enjoy the delights of paradise, and others shall possess the splendour of the city.”43 Meanwhile, Irenaeus’s views with regard to the wicked appear to be that they would cease to exist: “Those who, in this brief temporal life, have shown themselves ungrateful to Him who bestowed it, shall justly not receive from Him length of days for ever and ever.”44 The view of 41. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, 5.35.2. 42. Ibid., 5.36.1. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., 2.34.3, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text /irenaeus-book2.html. 386 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered Irenaeus with regard to the millennium mirrored those of other writers such as the author of the Epistle of Barnabas, as both of them saw the millennium as the thousand-year earthly interregnum between a six-thousand-year period of man’s domination of the earth and the fullness of the Kingdom of God—the new heavens and new earth—that would come after.45 A major rationale for Irenaeus’s views on the resurrection and the millennium was his insistence that believers would receive back their physical bodies, at least for a time, an idea that would also contribute significantly to the views about the resurrection of the late second-century– early third-century writer Tertullian. For Tertullian, the resurrection was not so much a return to consciousness as a reunion of the soul with the body and a reinstatement of a person’s full “perceptions and feelings.”46 Such a view derived from his ideas about the soul itself, which Tertullian saw as akin to a life force given to humans at their birth, along with their body.47 This soul, Tertullian believed, was immortal not in itself but because God willed it to be so continually.48 “The soul is rather the offspring of God than of matter,” Tertullian noted. “. . . The soul . . . we define to be sprung from the breath of God, immortal, possessing body, having form, simple in its substance, intelligent in its own nature, developing its power in various ways, free 45. Ibid., 5.28.3; Epistle of Barnabas, 15.3–5, 8. The weekly cycle, and the concept of a day as a thousand years for God, were key to such interpretations. Irenaeus put it this way: “For in as many days as this world was made, in so many thousand years shall it be concluded” (Against Heresies, 5.38.3). 46. Wagner, After the Apostles, 192. Tertullian’s views regarding the soul, the resurrection, and the nature of the afterlife are presented most at length in two of his works, A Treatise on the Soul and On the Resurrection of the Flesh. 47. Tertullian, A Treatise on the Soul, trans. Peter Holmes, chap. 4, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com /text/tertullian10.html; Wagner, After the Apostles, 191. 48. Wagner, After the Apostles, 191. The Millennium among Early Followers of Jesus 387 in its determinations, subject to be changes of accident, in its faculties mutable, rational, supreme, endued with an instinct of presentiment, evolved out of one (archetypal soul).”49 At death, the body would rest or decay, while the soul (save for that of a few martyrs, who would go directly to heaven) would go to Hades, where it would pay off penalties for sins committed during a person’s life, up until the last days, when the body would be reconstituted, the soul raised, and the two reunited.50 The just, at that point, would receive rewards in their body, along with their soul, 49. Tertullian, Treatise on the Soul, chap. 22. 50. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell, 249–250; Wagner, After the Apostles, 19. “The soul,” Tertullian notes, “as being always in motion, and always active, never succumbs to rest,—a condition which is alien to immortality: for nothing immortal admits, any end to its operation; but sleep is an end of operation. It is indeed on the body, which is subject to mortality, and on the body alone, that sleep graciously bestows a cessation from work.” Tertullian, Treatise on the Soul, chap. 43. “All souls . . . are shut up within Hades. . . . In short, inasmuch as we understand ‘the prison’ pointed out in the Gospel to be Hades, and as we also interpret ‘the uttermost farthing’ to mean the very smallest offence which has to be recompensed there before the resurrection, no one will hesitate to believe that the soul undergoes in Hades some compensatory discipline, without prejudice to the full process of the resurrection, when the recompense will be administered through the flesh besides.” Tertullian, Treatise on the Soul, chap. 58. “No one, on becoming absent from the body, is at once a dweller in the presence of the Lord, except by the prerogative of martyrdom, he gains a lodging in Paradise, not in the lower regions.” Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Flesh, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, chap. 43, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com /text/tertullian16.html. In the resurrection, “the flesh shall rise again, wholly in every man, in its own identity, in its absolute integrity. Wherever it may be, it is in safe keeping in God’s presence, through that most faithful ‘Mediator between God and man, (the man) Jesus Christ,’ who shall reconcile both God to man, and man to God; the spirit to the flesh, and the flesh to the spirit. Both natures has He already united in His own self; He has fitted them together as bride and bridegroom in the reciprocal bond of wedded life. Now, if any should insist on making the soul the bride, then the flesh will follow the soul as her dowry. The soul shall never be an outcast.” Tertullian, On the Resurrection, chap. 63. 388 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered while the wicked in a like state would be punished forever; the righteous would eventually be sent to the heavenly Jerusalem, while the wicked would be banished to a place below Hades.51 Like Irenaeus, Tertullian also believed in a millennium during which believers would continue to live on the earth; this period would occur between the return of Jesus and the final judgment.52 “We do confess that a kingdom is promised to us upon the earth,” Tertullian would write in his book Against Marcion, “although before heaven, only in another state of existence; inasmuch as it will be after the resurrection for a thousand years in the divinely-built city of Jerusalem, ‘let down from heaven.’”53 Tertullian saw the resurrection as one occurring over a span of time, according to one’s worthiness: “Of the heavenly kingdom this is the process. After its thousand years are over, within which period is completed the resurrection of the saints, who rise sooner or later according to their deserts there will ensue the destruction of the world and the conflagration of all things at the judgment: we shall then be changed in a moment into the substance of angels, even by the in- 51. Wagner, After the Apostles, 192; Ehrman, Heaven and Hell, 248– 249. “If, therefore, any one shall violently suppose that the destruction of the soul and the flesh in hell amounts to a final annihilation of the two substances, and not to their penal treatment (as if they were to be consumed, not punished), let him recollect that the fire of hell is eternal—expressly announced as an everlasting penalty; and let him then admit that it is from this circumstance that this neverending ‘killing’ is more formidable than a merely human murder, which is only temporal. He will then come to the conclusion that substances must be eternal, when their penal ‘killing’ is an eternal one.” Tertullian, On the Resurrection, chap. 35. 52. Case, Millennial Hope, 165–167. 53. Tertullian, Against Marcion, 3.25, trans. Dr. Holmes, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text /tertullian123.html. The Millennium among Early Followers of Jesus 389 vestiture of an incorruptible nature, and so be removed to that kingdom in heaven.”54 Interestingly, although Tertullian would see the ultimate destiny of humans as being analogous to that of the angels, he would also see it as a mirror to them. Whereas the angels were spirits that could take on flesh as so desired, resurrected humans would be flesh that could take on spirit as so desired: If therefore angels, when they became as men, submitted in their own unaltered substance of spirit to be treated as if they were flesh, why shall not men in like manner, when they become “equal unto the angels,” undergo in their unchanged substance of flesh the treatment of spiritual beings, no more exposed to the usual solicitations of the flesh in their angelic garb, than were the angels once to those of the spirit when encompassed in human form? We shall not therefore cease to continue in the flesh, because we cease to be importuned by the usual wants of the flesh; just as the angels ceased not therefore to remain in their spiritual substance, because of the suspension of their spiritual incidents.55 The final state of the righteous, for Tertullian, however, is in heaven, to which the divinely built heavenly Jerusalem eventually recedes.56 Thus we begin to see the foundation of doctrines, as the second century draws to a close, that would eventually come to dominate the Christian church. Though the resurrection and millennium were still functional concepts, immortal rewards in heaven or immortal punishment in hell began to take on an increasing empha54. Ibid. 55. Tertullian, On the Resurrection, chap. 62. 56. Tertullian, Against Marcion, 3.25. 390 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered sis, as did the idea that the soul and body were separate, with the former never dying or losing consciousness. Alternative Jewish Ideas about the Afterlife Resurrection was not the only manner in which Jewish people of the second temple period thought about the afterlife, and as such, it was also not the only manner in which Christian writers, after the apostles, would come to view the start of their eternal destination. Other views with regard to happenings after death were evident among the Israelites, even before the first temple. Were such not so, warnings against speaking to the dead would not be present in the Old Testament. “There shall not be found among you any one that . . . useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch. Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer,” the author of Deuteronomy 18:10–11 warns. Centuries later, Saul would seek advice from the dead prophet Samuel by consorting with a medium (1 Sam. 28:7–25). Although the medium at first refused, because Saul had earlier “cut off those that have familiar spirits, and the wizards out of the land” (1 Sam. 8:9), the very need to abolish those of such profession and the ability to inquire of such a woman years later demonstrates the continuing presence of alternative beliefs in the afterlife within Israelite territory. Such beliefs, the author of Deuteronomy suggests, were at least to some extent the result of Israel’s mixing with the cultures of the people who had previously inhabited the Promised Land (Deut. 18:9, 12). Disparities of belief would continue into Jesus’s time. Indeed, one of the main ways that Josephus distinguishes among the three sects he describes among the Jewish people is through their differing views regarding life after death. Although the Pharisees, as discussed in chapter 1, believed that the righteous would eventually “revive and Alternative Jewish Ideas about the Afterlife 391 live again,” a view likely shared by the majority of the Jewish people at the time of Jesus, the views of the Sadducees and Essenes differed markedly.57 The Sadducees believed, Josephus notes, “that the souls die with the bodies” and have no belief in “immortal duration of the soul, and the punishments and rewards in Hades.”58 The Essenes, by contrast, held “that bodies are corruptible, and that the matter they are made of is not permanent; but that the souls are immortal, and continue for ever; and that they 57. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, trans. William Whiston, 18.1.3, Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/848/848 -h/2848-h.htm. In the same passage quoted, Josephus’s description of Pharisaical resurrection beliefs actually sounds much like Tertullian’s views: “They . . . believe that souls have an immortal rigor in them, and that under the earth there will be rewards or punishments, according as they have lived virtuously or viciously in this life; and the latter are to be detained in an everlasting prison” (that is, with a soul but without the body that the righteous receive back on earth). In The War of the Jews, Josephus would likewise state that the Pharisees believe that “the souls of good men only are removed into other bodies,” as if they were believers in reincarnation. Josephus, The War of the Jews, trans. William Whiston, 2.8.14, Project Gutenberg, https://www .gutenberg.org/files/850/850-h/850-h.htm). In Against Apion, however, all implication of an immortal soul is gone, when Josephus claims that the Jewish people believe that “the reward for such as live exactly according to the laws [of God] is not silver or gold; it is not a garland of olive branches or of small age, nor any such public sign of commendation; but every good man hath his own conscience bearing witness to himself, and by virtue of our legislator’s prophetic spirit, and of the firm security God himself affords such a one, he believes that God hath made this grant to those that observe these laws, even though they be obliged readily to die for them, that they shall come into being again, and at a certain revolution of things shall receive a better life than they had enjoyed before.” Josephus, Against Apion, trans. William Whiston, 2.31, Project Gutenberg, https://www .gutenberg.org/files/849/849-h/849-h.htm. The differing explanations may be related to Josephus’s intended audience. As Martin Goodman notes of the first two quotes, “Josephus may have colored the Pharisee view in order to appeal to his Greek and Roman gentile readers.” Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem, 245. 58. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 18.1.4; Josephus, War of the Jews, 2.8.14. 392 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered come out of the most subtile air, and are united to their bodies as to prisons, into which they are drawn by a certain natural enticement; but that when they are set free from the bonds of the flesh, they then, as released from a long bondage, rejoice and mount upward. And this is like the opinions of the Greeks.”59 Thus, the reward of the good is to “have their habitations . . . in a region that is neither oppressed with storms of rain or snow, or with intense heat . . . ; while . . . bad souls [are confined to] a dark and tempestuous den, full of never-ceasing punishments.”60 As Josephus makes explicit, the Essene view was one shared by the Greeks, but as will be shown, one might also see the Sadducean view as likewise affiliated with Greek ideas. Both the Sadducean and the Essene views can be found within Jewish writings dating to or near the second temple period. For the Sadducean view, one might turn to Joshua ben Sira’s book of wisdom, commonly known as Sirach or Ecclesiasticus, probably written around 190 to 170 BCE.61 Hints of Greek influence on ben Sira, likely a scribe with extensive knowledge of the Jewish scriptures, are evident throughout his book.62 As Crawford Howell Toy and Israel Lévi denote in their entry in The Jewish Encyclopedia, ben 59. Josephus, War of the Jews, 2.8.11. 60. Ibid. Of course, as with his account of Pharisaical teachings on the afterlife, Josephus may also have gone out of his way to make the Essenes sound more Greek in their points of view than they were. Hippolytus of Rome describes them as believing in a resurrection of the flesh to be reunited with an immortal soul, like Tertullian. Hippolytus of Rome, The Refutation of All Heresies, 9.22. 61. Crawford Howell Toy and Israel Lévi, “Sirach, The Wisdom of Jesus the Son of (Hebrew, Hokmat ben Sira; Latin, Ecclesiasticus),” in The Jewish Encyclopedia, https://jewishencyclopedia.com /articles/13785-sirach-the-wisdom-of-jesus-the-son-of; Francis Gigot, “Ecclesiasticus,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909), New Advent, http://www.newadvent.org /cathen/05263a.htm. 6. Toy and Lévi, “Sirach.” Alternative Jewish Ideas about the Afterlife 393 Sira’s familiarity with Greek philosophical tenets, in addition to Jewish writings, is clear.63 In his work, he often draws on the customs of Greek society rather than Jewish, references foreign thinkers, argues against the ideas of the Stoics and the Skeptics, dwells on subjects common to Greek playwrights and other writers, and adopts Greek rhetorical strategies, such as chapter headings.64 “The exclusion of Ecclesiasticus from the Hebrew canon,” Toy and Lévi conclude, “was due in part to this imitation of the Greeks and these literary affectations.”65 Perhaps most important among those elements of affinity, however, was ben Sira’s views with regard to death, which most mirrored those of the Greek philosopher Epicurus—that is, for ben Sira, there was no afterlife, so one’s focus should be on making this life the most productive it can be.66 “When a man is dead,” ben Sira would write, “he shall inherit creeping things, beasts, and worms.”67 Thus, ben Sira would advise his readers: “Remember that death will not be long in coming, and that the covenant of the grave is not shewed unto thee. Do good unto thy friend before thou die, and according to thy ability stretch out thy hand and give to him. . . . Give, and take, and sanctify thy soul; for there is no seeking of dainties in the grave. All flesh waxeth old as a garment: for the covenant from the beginning is, Thou shalt die the death.”68 Similar to Abraham’s concern in Genesis, ben Sira associates any concept of “afterlife” with one’s progeny: “Though his father die, yet he is as though he were not dead: for he hath left one behind him that is like himself.”69 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Sirach, 10.11 (King James Version). Ibid., 14.12–13, 16–17. Ibid., 30.4. 394 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered Such views accorded well with those of the Sadducees, which Hippolytus of Rome, in his Refutation of Heresies, would similarly equate to Epicurean ideas in “his larger apologetical program of explaining later pagan philosophies as the distortions of originally Jewish beliefs.”70 “(They maintain) that the notion of the resurrection has been fully realized by the single circumstance,” Hippolytus would write, that we close our days after having left children upon earth. But (they still insist) that after death one expects to suffer nothing, either bad or good; for that there will be a dissolution both of soul and body, and that man passes into non-existence, similarly also with the material of the animal creation. But as regards whatever wickedness a man may have committed in life, provided he may have been reconciled to the injured party, he has been a gainer (by transgression), inasmuch as he has escaped the punishment (that otherwise would have been inflicted) by men.71 As such, the Sadducees, like the Epicureans, as Hippolytus would put it, “are actuated by self-love.”72 Jewish writings from around the time of Jesus that would correspond more closely to Essene and Greek ideas with regard to the immortality of the soul include the Testament of Job, the Testament of Abraham, and 4 Maccabees. The first of these three works focuses on the biblical character of Job near the end of his life. While the biblical book of Job serves as an exploration with regard to why bad things happen to good people as it recounts the trials of 70. Elledge, Resurrection of the Dead, 103. 71. Hippolytus of Rome, The Refutation of All Heresies, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, 9.24, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/hippolytus9.html. 72. Ibid. Alternative Jewish Ideas about the Afterlife 395 Job that result after Satan claims that Job would renounce his faith if God would just remove his blessings, the Testament retells the tale chiefly from the point of view of Job as he lays on his deathbed. The original account of Job seems to support an end-of-days resurrection theology, as noted already in Job 19:5–7. “Man lieth down, and riseth not,” Job notes of the immediate destiny of people after death, “till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep” (Job 14:1). In the Testament, by contrast, Job recounts seeing “longed-for children [carried by angels to heaven]” when they die during Satan’s attacks on him.73 Later, Job’s wife claims that the daughters of Job will not be found because “they are in the keeping of their Maker and Ruler,” and indeed, when some go to search for their bodies, they receive a vision in which they see the “children with crowns near the glory of the King, the Ruler of heaven.”74 As Job himself dies in the conclusion, he sees “the holy angels come for his soul,” which soars upward, while his body descends to the grave.75 Hinting of a reunification of the soul with the body, the tale ends with the words, “It is written that [Job] will rise up with those whom the Lord will reawaken.”76 Thus, the resurrection in the Testament is transformed into a reunification of the body with the soul, with the latter residing with God, consciously, in heaven after death until the last days. The Testament of Job was likely written in Egypt and, thus, reflects influences the Greek and Egyptian world had on the Jewish diasporic community.77 Although some scholars 73. Testament of Job, trans. M. R. James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1897), 5.10, Wesley Center Online, http://wesley .nnu.edu/sermons-essays-books/noncanonical-literature /noncanonical-literature-ot-pseudepigrapha/testament-of-job/. 74. Ibid., 9.8, 9.13. 75. Ibid., 12.5, 12.9–10. 76. Ibid., 12.19. 77. “Pseudepigrapha Saturday: The Testament of Job,” Biblical Review, December 12, 2015, https://thebiblicalreview.wordpress 396 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered argue that Christians later reworked the tale, enough similarities exist between the theological views of the Christian Montanist sect often identified as the work’s editors and the Jewish Egyptian Therapeutae sect often identified as the source of the author that telling the two views apart is difficult.78 The Testament of Abraham, another Jewish work probably originating in Egypt, this one in the late first century CE, provides a detailed account of Abraham’s death that likewise reflects separation of the soul from the body, with an immediate ascent of the soul to heaven upon death, at least for the righteous, rather than resurrection in the last days.79 In the story, Abraham, shortly before his death, is taken on a tour of heaven, where he finds “two gates, the one broad on the broad way, and the other narrow on the narrow way. And outside the two gates there he [sees] a man sitting upon a gilded throne, and the appearance of .com/2015/12/12/pseudepigrapha-saturday-the-testament-of-job/; Phillip J. Long, “What Is the ‘Testament of Job’?,” Reading Acts, June 26, 2017, https://readingacts.com/2017/06/26/what-is-the -testament-of-job/; introduction to Testament of Job, Early Jewish Writings, http://www.earlyjewishwritings.com/testjob.html. 78. Long, “What Is the ‘Testament of Job’?”; introduction to Testament of Job, Early Jewish Writings. On Hasidic Jewish ties to the work, see Crawford Howell Toy and Kaufmann Kohler, “Job, Testament of,” Jewish Encyclopedia, https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com /articles/8694-job-testament-of. 79. On the Jewish origins, see Louis Ginzberg, “Abraham, Testament of,” Jewish Encyclopedia, https://www.jewishencyclopedia .com/articles/364-abraham-testament-of. On the likely Egyptian provenance, see Philip Schaff, introduction to Testament of Abraham, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 9, Christian Classics Ethereal Library, https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf09.ix.ii.html; and introduction to Testament of Abraham, Early Jewish Writings, http://www .earlyjewishwritings.com/testabraham.html. Schaff makes the case for the writer being a Jewish Christian. An excellent summary of the work, fuller than what’s provided here, can be found in Ehrman, Heaven and Hell, 140–142. Alternative Jewish Ideas about the Afterlife 397 that man [is] terrible, as of the Lord.”80 He observes “many souls driven by angels and led in through the broad gate, and other souls, few in number, . . . taken by the angels through the narrow gate.”81 The narrow gate, we are told, “is that of the just, that leads to life, and they that enter through it go into Paradise,” while souls entering the broad gate go to destruction.82 At one point, Abraham is confronted by a set of angels, one of whom writes down the righteousness of persons and another the wickedness.83 Still another uses a balance to weigh the two items “with the righteousness of God.”84 The works of men are tried in fire, and those whose works are completely burned up are carried “away to the place of sinners, a most bitter place of punishment. But if the fire approves the work of anyone, and does not seize upon it, that man is justified, and the angel of righteousness takes him and carries him up to be saved in the lot of the just.”85 In one case, the sins and righteousness are found to be equal, and Abraham then prays for the soul so that it can be carried into Paradise.86 Finally, at the end of the work, Abraham dies and is buried, but we are told that “the angels received his precious soul, and ascended into heaven, singing the hymn of thrice holy to the Lord the God of all, and they set it there to worship the God and Father.”87 Although various details in the work 80. Testament of Abraham, trans. W. A. Craigie, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 9, ed. Allan Menzies (Buffalo, N.Y.: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1896), revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight, version 1, chap. 11, New Advent, http://www.newadvent.org /fathers/1007.htm. All references are to and quotes from version 1, the long recension. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid., chap. 12. 84. Ibid., chap. 13. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid., chaps. 12–14. 87. Ibid., chap. 20. 398 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered suggest a strong familiarity with rabbinical teachings and thus Jewish origin, the work’s final appeal to “the Father, Son and Holy Ghost” in some versions shows that it was, at some point, modified by Christians, if not written by Jewish Christians. Indeed, the mention of three judgments (one by humans, one by Israel, and one by God) presents a rather muddled view of the end of time and life after death, suggesting multiple influences.88 One of the most interesting accounts of a person’s destiny after death comes in 4 Maccabees. Although largely a philosophical discourse, this one written likely just before the fall of Jerusalem in 135 CE, what makes the work so intriguing is that it recounts some of the same events that appear in 2 Maccabees to make its points.89 However, whereas in 2 Maccabees Jewish martyrs look forward to a resurrection, in 4 Maccabees, the Jewish martyrs look toward an immediate translation to heaven—and there is a corresponding threat of eternal torment for those who kill them. Thus, the seven sons put to death in both books warn their persecutor, Antiochus, in 4 Maccabees: “You, because of your bloodthirstiness toward us, will deservedly undergo from the divine justice eternal torment by fire.”90 After the deaths of the first six brothers, the youngest son again notes to Antiochus, “Justice has laid up for you intense and eternal fire and tortures, and these throughout all time will never let you go.”91 Following their deaths, the sons and their mother are said to “stand in honor before God and are firmly set in heaven,” having “received pure 88. Ibid., chap. 13; Ehrman, Heaven and Hell, 142. 89. 4 Maccabees, 1.1, Revised Standard Version, https://quod.lib .umich.edu/cgi/r/rsv/rsv-idx?type=DIV1&byte=4496061; Crawford Howell Toy, George A. Barton, Joseph Jacobs, and Israel Abrahams, “Maccabees, Books of,” Jewish Encyclopedia, https://jewish encyclopedia.com/articles/10237-maccabees-books-of#anchor15. 90. 4 Maccabees, 9.9. 91. Ibid., 12.12. Non-Jewish Conceptions of the Afterlife 399 and immortal souls from God.”92 No mention is made of the resurrection or a day of judgment. Non-Jewish Conceptions of the Afterlife Such differences in point of view regarding death and afterlife were evident in other cultures as well, as the cultures mingled among one another. Early Greek culture, and Roman culture likewise, largely had a more austere view of death for most people than did later Greek culture; in this sense, Greek and Roman views were rather typical of many ancient cultures, which generally held out little hope for life after death.93 While some Jewish thinkers espoused death as final, early Greeks saw the afterlife as one that offered little in the way of joy or, conversely, pain.94 Former humans continued on in Hades, the underworld, as mere shadows, having “the form but not the substance of human life.”95 As such, “the afterlife [was] not life. It [was] death. . . . Shades [had] no bodies, no strength, no knowledge of anything happening in the world above. And . . . they [were] not immortal. . . . Deceased humans [were] dead, not alive.”96 Such views are accounted for in works such as Homer’s Odyssey, written around the eighth century BCE. In one section of the work, the main character, Ulysses, journeys to the underworld, where he meets with those who died before him. There, after offering sacrifices, he is told that while he may talk with the dead, they only have substance insofar as he interacts with them: 92. Ibid., 17.5, 18.23. 93. Ramsay MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 35–37, 136; Ehrman, Heaven and Hell, xx. 94. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell, 37. 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid., 40. 400 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered . . . Any dead man whom you allow to enter where the blood is will speak to you, and speak the truth; but those deprived will grow remote again and fade.97 Though he is able to talk with his dead mother, when he attempts to embrace her—three times—he finds her “impalpable / as shadows are, and waving like a dream.”98 “All flesh and bone are here,” she tells him, “none bound by sinew, . . . dreamlike the soul flies, insubstantial.”99 Those who were not buried properly might suffer a conceivably even worse fate, wandering the earth in their shadowlike state as ghosts.100 While most people were slated for this shadowy fate, “it was widely assumed,” as Martin Goodman puts it, “that . . . a few, exceptional individuals might continue to exist after death.”101 In Greek thinking, if one were related to a god or, as in later practices discussed in chapter 2, became one, this could take the form of residence in heaven; conversely, if we take Homer’s Odyssey literally, a few unfortunates who did something particularly offensive to the gods might be forever tortured.102 The few blessed humans found noteworthy enough to live on, however, generally did so not in heaven but in the Elysian Fields, a utopian paradise in a remote region of the earth.103 Hesiod, in his 800 97. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage, 1990), 11.164–167. 98. Ibid., 11.231–232. 99. Ibid., 11.249, 11.252. 100. Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem, 239; Ehrman, Heaven and Hell, 44–45. Ehrman draws on the example of the soldier Elpinor in Homer’s Odyssey, 11.60–87. 101. Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem, 239. 102. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell, 43–44, 45–46; Homer, Odyssey, 11.660–689. 103. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell, 43–44; Prof. Geller, “Elysian Fields,” Mythology.net, January 0, 017, https://mythology.net /greek/greek-concepts/elysian-fields/. Non-Jewish Conceptions of the Afterlife 401 BCE text Works and Days, would describe such an area this way: “And they live untouched by sorrow in the islands of the blessed along the shore of deep swirling Ocean, happy heroes for whom the grain-giving earth bears honey-sweet fruit flourishing thrice a year.”104 For Hesiod, those who had gone to the Islands of the Blessed were from the Heroic Age, one of five ages of humankind, each of which had followed the gods who created them to differing degrees. For their efforts, those of the Golden Age were likewise accorded a reward after death, that of being “pure spirits dwelling on the earth, and are kindly, delivering from harm, and guardians of mortal men; for they roam everywhere over the earth, clothed in mist and keep watch on judgements and cruel deeds, givers of wealth.”105 Those of the less god-honoring Silver Age had become “blessed spirits of the underworld,” while those of the even less honorable Bronze Age had passed to “the dank house of chill Hades, and left no name.”106 Of Hesiod’s own Iron Age, he notes that the great god “Zeus will destroy this race of mortal men also when they come to have grey hair on the temples.”107 Such dire views with regard to death for the majority of people were not to remain the only belief about the afterlife in Greek culture, however. In the late sixth century BCE, the Greek philosopher Pythagoras would begin to introduce the concepts of the immortal soul and reincarnation into Greek society, ideas that Plato, a few centuries later, would also profess.108 Both philosophers, as denoted 104. Hesiod, Works and Days, 11.156–169b, in Homer and Hesiod, Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, ed. Hugh G. Evelyn-White, 2008, updated 2020, Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org /files/348/348-h/348-h.htm#chap0. 105. Ibid., 11.121–139. 106. Ibid., 11.140–155. 107. Ibid., 11.170–201. 108. Alan Knight, Primitive Christianity in Crisis (Antioch, Calif.: A.R.K. Research, 2003), 5; Ehrman, Heaven and Hell, 284. 402 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered in chapter 2, spent a portion of their lives studying in Egypt, from which they likely derived many of their views. Indeed, the fifth-century BCE Greek historian Herodotus would claim as much regarding “certain Hellenes”: “The Egyptians are also the first who reported the doctrine that the soul of man is immortal, and that when the body dies, the soul enters into another creature which chances then to be coming to the birth, and when it has gone the round of all the creatures of land and sea and of the air, it enters again into a human body as it comes to the birth; and that it makes this round in a period of three thousand years. This doctrine certain Hellenes adopted, some earlier and some later, as if it were of their own invention, and of these men I know the names but I abstain from recording them.”109 Ancient Egyptian ideas regarding the afterlife are well documented in the architectural remnants, the pyramids and other crypts, scattered across the landscape to this very day. Upon death, the pharaohs were entombed with worldly goods, and their body was preserved. This was because the being, or soul, of a pharaoh was seen as having nine distinct elements—the body (kha or khat), the personality (ba), the true name (ren), the vital essence (ka), the shadow (shuyet), the heart (jb), the immortal self (akh), the spiritual body (sahu), and the life energy (sechem).110 Preserving each of these elements was essential for ensur109. Herodotus, The History of Herodotus, vol. 1, trans. G. C. Macaulay (London: MacMillan and Company, 1890), 2.123, Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/707/707-h/707 -h.htm#link22H_4_0001. 110. Joshua J. Mark, “The Soul in Ancient Egypt,” World History Encyclopedia, March 2, 2017, https://www.worldhistory.org /article/1023/the-soul-in-ancient-egypt/; Sarah P. Young, “Nine Parts of the Human Soul According to the Ancient Egyptians,” Egypt Forward, August 20, 2019, https://egyptfwd.org/Article/6/559 /Nine-Parts-of-the-Human-Soul-According-to-the-Ancient; Caroline Non-Jewish Conceptions of the Afterlife 403 ing a smooth journey into and through the afterlife, which was a paradisaical mirror of one’s life on earth.111 Although the physical body decayed while the other eight elements of the soul lived on, Egyptians believed that the dead body was linked to the immortal existence and that nourishing it, in turn, nourished the soul that continued—thus, the practice of mummification and of offerings made to the dead.112 Of particular note with regard to the soul were the ka, the ba, and the akh. The ka perhaps comes closest to modern conceptions of the soul.113 At death, it left the body, but each night it would receive sustenance from the ba, which served as a link between the immortal realm and the mortal one, between the afterlife and the corpse, to which it constantly returned.114 The akh was a supernatural alliance of these two parts, a higher soul that lived among the gods in the heavens.115 Over the course of Egyptian history, such views developed and changed, and eventually ideas of a paradisiacal afterlife were extended beyond nobility to everyone, who if found worthy by the gods, would live on in the form of an akh.116 Plato’s views on the soul and the body were likewise dualistic, as well established in previous chapters. That the soul had to be immortal, Plato reasoned, was rooted in the fact that the body was not: Seawright, “The Ancient Egyptian Concept of the Soul,” Tour Egypt, http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/soul.htm. 111. Mark, “Soul in Ancient Egypt”; Young, “Nine Parts.” 11. Mark, “Soul in Ancient Egypt”; Young, “Nine Parts”; Seawright, “The Ancient Egyptian Concept of the Soul.” 113. Mark, “Soul in Ancient Egypt.” 114. Ibid.; Young, “Nine Parts.” 115. Mark, “Soul in Ancient Egypt”; Young, “Nine Parts”; Seawright, “The Ancient Egyptian Concept of the Soul.” 116. Robert Garland, “Afterlife in Ancient Egypt: When the Dead Live,” The Great Courses Daily, July 26, 2020, https://www.thegreat coursesdaily.com/afterlife-in-ancient-egypt-when-the-dead-live/. 404 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered That which is ever in motion is immortal; but that which moves another and is moved by another, in ceasing to move ceases also to live. Only the selfmoving, never leaving self, never ceases to move, and is the fountain and beginning of motion to all that moves besides. . . . For the body which is moved from without is soulless; but that which is moved from within has a soul, for such is the nature of the soul. But if this be true, must not the soul be the self-moving, and therefore of necessity unbegotten and immortal?117 As discussed in chapter 2, the ultimate destiny of this soul was a return to the divine realm in the heavens from which it had originally derived. But the process was a long one, involving thousands of years and many lives, punctuated by journeys either to heaven or to hell, to which souls were consigned upon death for one thousand years before being reincarnated in another body.118 Directly after death, Plato seems to suggest in his Laws, came a judgment: “When we are dead, the bodies of the dead are quite rightly said to be our shades or images; for the true and immortal being of each one of us which is called the soul goes on her way to other Gods, before them to give an account—which is an inspiring hope to the good, but very terrible to the bad.”119 As hinted at here, Plato seemed to extol the idea that those who did well would be treated well in the afterlife (or, rather, in between earthly lives) and those who did badly not so well. 117. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. by Benjamin Jowett, Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1636/1636-h/1636 -h.htm#link2H_4_0002. 118. Plato, The Republic, book 10. 119. Plato, Laws, trans. Benjamin Jowett, book 12, Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1750/1750-h/1750 -h.htm#link2H_4_0015. Non-Jewish Conceptions of the Afterlife 405 The idea of two immediate destinies based on one’s earthly deeds arises in various other works as well. In his Gorgias, Plato denotes, through the voice of Socrates, the following: “Now in the days of Cronos there existed a law respecting the destiny of man, which has always been, and still continues to be in Heaven,—that he who has lived all his life in justice and holiness shall go, when he is dead, to the Islands of the Blessed, and dwell there in perfect happiness out of the reach of evil; but that he who has lived unjustly and impiously shall go to the house of vengeance and punishment, which is called Tartarus.”120 Plato sees in Tartarus, or hell, the following purpose: Now the proper office of punishment is twofold: he who is rightly punished ought either to become better and profit by it, or he ought to be made an example to his fellows, that they may see what he suffers, and fear and become better. Those who are improved when they are punished by gods and men, are those whose sins are curable; and they are improved, as in this world so also in another, by pain and suffering; for there is no other way in which they can be delivered from their evil. But they who have been guilty of the worst crimes, and are incurable by reason of their crimes, are made examples; for, as they are incurable, the time has passed at which they can receive any benefit. They get no good themselves, but others get good when they behold them enduring for ever the most terrible and painful and fearful sufferings as the penalty of their sins—there they are, hanging up as examples, in the prison-house of the world below, 120. Plato, Gorgias, trans. Benjamin Jowett, Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/167/167-h/167-h.htm#linkH_4 _0002 406 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered a spectacle and a warning to all unrighteous men who come thither.121 Near the end of The Republic, Plato posits a similar destination for souls after death when he recounts the the myth of Er, a slain soldier who has the opportunity of returning to life to tell people what he experienced during his twelve days in the afterworld: He said that when his soul left the body he went on a journey with a great company, and that they came to a mysterious place at which there were two openings in the earth; they were near together, and over against them were two other openings in the heaven above. In the intermediate space there were judges seated, who commanded the just, after they had given judgment on them and had bound their sentences in front of them, to ascend by the heavenly way on the right hand; and in like manner the unjust were bidden by them to descend by the lower way on the left hand; these also bore the symbols of their deeds, but fastened on their backs. He drew near, and they told him that he was to be the messenger who would carry the report of the other world to men, and they bade him hear and see all that was to be heard and seen in that place. Then he beheld and saw on one side the souls departing at either opening of heaven and earth when sentence had been given on them; and at the two other openings other souls, some ascending out of the earth dusty and worn with travel, some descending out of heaven clean and bright. And arriving ever and anon they seemed to have come from a long journey, and they went forth with gladness into the meadow, where they 121. Ibid. Non-Jewish Conceptions of the Afterlife 407 encamped as at a festival; and those who knew one another embraced and conversed, the souls which came from earth curiously enquiring about the things above, and the souls which came from heaven about the things beneath. And they told one another of what had happened by the way, those from below weeping and sorrowing at the remembrance of the things which they had endured and seen in their journey beneath the earth (now the journey lasted a thousand years), while those from above were describing heavenly delights and visions of inconceivable beauty. . . . He said that for every wrong which they had done to any one they suffered tenfold; or once in a hundred years—such being reckoned to be the length of man’s life, and the penalty being thus paid ten times in a thousand years. If, for example, there were any who had been the cause of many deaths, or had betrayed or enslaved cities or armies, or been guilty of any other evil behaviour, for each and all of their offences they received punishment ten times over, and the rewards of beneficence and justice and holiness were in the same proportion.122 Plato’s descriptions in this work of what was to happen to those who had done wickedly in life are especially harrowing: “Whenever any of these incurable sinners or some one who had not been sufficiently punished tried to ascend; and then wild men of fiery aspect, who were standing by and heard the sound, seized and carried them off; and Ardiaeus and others they bound head and foot and hand, and threw them down and flayed them with scourges, and dragged them along the road at the side, carding them on 122. Plato, The Republic, trans. Benjamin Jowett, book 10, Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1497/1497-h/1497 -h.htm#link2H_4_0013. 408 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered thorns like wool, and declaring to the passers-by what were their crimes, and that they were being taken away to be cast into hell.”123 As various scholars point out, Plato’s visions of the afterlife were not entirely consistent. Plato, in recounting such tales, however, was attempting not to tell a literal truth about the afterlife but rather to present larger principles about the way in which one should live.124 Radcliffe G. Edmonds III puts it this way in an article about the afterlife in Plato’s writings: Plato uses the familiar pattern of the afterlife as a mirror that reflects or refracts the differentiated statuses of people in this life, but he manipulates the traditional mythic elements of judgement, superior and inferior regions, and even the rewards and punishments found therein to illustrate his ideas about the nature and activities of the human soul in life. Each myth is tailored to the dialogue in which it is set, and the inconsistencies in the way Plato depicts the soul in the afterlife stem from the varying uses to which he puts the myths.125 The overall goal, however, was firm. As Plato himself would conclude near the end of his Republic: Let each one of us leave every other kind of knowledge and seek and follow one thing only, if peradventure he may be able to learn and may find some one who will make him able to learn and discern between good and evil, and so to choose always and everywhere the better life as he has opportu123. Ibid. 124. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell, 62, 64. 15. Radcliffe G. Edmonds III, “A Lively Afterlife and Beyond: The Soul in Plato, Homer, and the Orphica,” Études platoniciennes 11 (2014), DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesplatoniciennes.517. Non-Jewish Conceptions of the Afterlife 409 nity. He should consider the bearing of all these things which have been mentioned severally and collectively upon virtue; he should know what the effect of beauty is when combined with poverty or wealth in a particular soul, and what are the good and evil consequences of noble and humble birth, of private and public station, of strength and weakness, of cleverness and dullness, and of all the natural and acquired gifts of the soul, and the operation of them when conjoined; he will then look at the nature of the soul, and from the consideration of all these qualities he will be able to determine which is the better and which is the worse; and so he will choose, giving the name of evil to the life which will make his soul more unjust, and good to the life which will make his soul more just; all else he will disregard. For we have seen and know that this is the best choice both in life and after death. A man must take with him into the world below an adamantine faith in truth and right, that there too he may be undazzled by the desire of wealth or the other allurements of evil, lest, coming upon tyrannies and similar villainies, he do irremediable wrongs to others and suffer yet worse himself; but let him know how to choose the mean and avoid the extremes on either side, as far as possible, not only in this life but in all that which is to come. For this is the way of happiness.126 Thus, as Bart Ehrman puts it, “Plato’s overarching concern is not to give the geography and temperatures of heaven and hell but to show people how they should live in the present life as they pursue virtue and truth for the well-being of their souls.”127 Yet even so, Plato’s use of such myths shows 126. Plato, Republic, book 10. 127. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell, 60. 410 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered that “he [was] not making up the idea of postmortem rewards and punishments on which [they were] based. He [was] using an understanding of the nature of the afterlife that would have been perfectly believable to a Greek audience in the fourth century BCE.”128 A Shift in Thinking about the Afterlife among Some Jewish People and Followers of Jesus For Jewish thinkers in the diaspora, trying to fit in with the larger Greek culture or influenced by it or both, such ideas about the afterlife and the permanency of the soul would prove difficult to resist. Thus would result works like the Testament of Job, the Testament of Abraham, and 4 Maccabees, the wider views of the Essenes, and suppositions like this one from the Alexandrian Jewish writer Philo, who would similarly see the soul and body in a dualistic fashion: “The natural death is that one by which the soul is separated from the body. But the one which is inflicted as a punishment, is when the soul dies according to the life of virtue, and lives only according to the life of vice. . . . Now, when we are alive, we are so though our soul is dead and buried in our body, as if in a tomb. But if it were to die, then our soul would live according to its proper life, being released from the evil and dead body to which it is bound.”129 Thus for Philo, “The death of the good is the beginning of another life; for life is a twofold thing, one life being in the body, corruptible; the other without the body, incorruptible. Therefore one wicked man surely dies the death, who while still breathing and among the 128. Ibid., 64. 129. Philo, The First Book of the Treatise on the Allegories of the Sacred Laws, after the Work of the Six Days of Creation [Allegorical Interpretation], 1.33.107–108, The Works of Philo Judeus, trans. Charles Duke Yonge (London: H. G. Bohn, 1854–1890), Early Jewish Writings, http://www.earlyjewishwritings.com/text/philo/book2.html. A Shift in Thinking about the Afterlife 411 living is in reality long since buried, so as to retain in himself no single spark of real life, which is perfect virtue. But a good man, who deserves so high a title, does not surely die, but has his life prolonged, and so attains to an eternal end.”130 Thus, for Philo, the reward of the good is a return the heavenly sphere—there is no mention of a resurrection in his work.131 Immortality is conferred on humans by virtue of the fact that the soul has a divine origin, and as such, each human includes a part of God.132 Do well, and one will be freed of the body in which the soul is “buried” and continue to exist as a personalized being akin to the angels; fail, and one ceases to exist—resolved back into the divine.133 The soul, thus, while seen as immortal, is neither “ungenerated nor indestructible, an assumption,” C. D. Elledge notes, “that may distinguish Philo from Plato,” allowing Philo to inhabit a sphere between Greek and Jewish ideas, wherein God remains the supreme creator who sustains life but also wherein the embodied human is a corrupted emanation of the One trying to return to the heavenly realm.134 Such a dualist view, in which the soul survives to return to heaven but the body does not, may also have had its correspondence among the Samaritans.135 Indeed, Philo’s views with regard to the soul in many ways 130. Philo, A Volume of Questions, and Solutions to Those Questions, Which Arise in Genesis [Questions and Answers on Genesis], 1.16, The Works of Philo Judeus, trans. Charles Duke Yonge (London: H. G. Bohn, 1854–1890), Early Jewish Writings, http://www .earlyjewishwritings.com/text/philo/book41.html. 131. Wagner, After the Apostles, 83–84; Elledge, Resurrection of the Dead, 113. 132. Elledge, Resurrection of the Dead, 113–114. 133. Ibid., 116. 134. Ibid., 114. 135. Alan F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism (Leiden: Brill, 1977), 198; James Alan Montgomery, The Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect: Their History, Theology, and Literature (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1907), 187. 412 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered mirror ideas attributed to the Samaritan Simon Magus— the divine within each person and the lack of death for those who find it—described in chapter 3. Such views also accorded well with those who have come to be called Gnostics, as discussed in chapter 4. The heavy emphasis on dualistic thinking regarding body and soul was rooted in large part in the idea that humans were descended from the divine and had a goal of returning to heaven. Thus, one of the many complaints the heresiologist Irenaeus would launch against the majority of the heretical teachers he described was precisely the fact that “despising the handiwork of God, and not admitting the salvation of their flesh, . . . [they] affirm that immediately upon their death they shall pass above the heavens. . . . Those persons, therefore, . . . disallow a resurrection affecting the whole man”—that is, both the flesh and the soul or spirit.136 Examples of the idea that the spirit or soul of chosen humans goes directly to heaven after death, while the body wastes away, abound in Gnostic works. In the second-century Dialogue of the Savior, for instance, a collection of Jesus’s supposed teachings, we find Jesus instructing his disciples like so: Matthew said, “Tell me, Lord, how the dead die, and how the living live.” The Lord said, “You have asked me about a saying . . . which eye has not seen, nor have I heard it, except from you. But I say to you that when what invigorates a man is removed, he will be called ‘dead.’ And when what is alive leaves what is dead, what is alive will be called upon.” Judas said, “Why else, for the sake of truth, do they [die] and live?” 136. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, 5.31.1. A Shift in Thinking about the Afterlife 413 The Lord said, “Whatever is born of truth does not die. Whatever is born of woman dies.”137 In other words, the flesh passes away but the soul lives on. One of the best summations of this particular idea comes in the late second-century Treatise on the Resurrection, a work that concludes that the resurrection, for believers, is definitively not one of the flesh: “But there are some (who) wish to understand, in the enquiry about those things they are looking into, whether he who is saved, if he leaves his body behind, will be saved immediately,” the author writes. “Let no one doubt concerning this. . . . Indeed, the visible members which are dead shall not be saved, for (only) the living members which exist within them would arise.” And to where will those members within rise? “We are drawn to heaven by him [the savior], like beams by the sun,” the author notes, “not being restrained by anything. This is the spiritual resurrection which swallows up the psychic in the same way as the fleshly.”138 For the author of this treatise, heaven is the future Christian/Gnostic abode; the resurrection is completely spiritualized and immediate on death. Views such as this were common enough throughout the first and second centuries that various Jewish sects, non-Jewish peoples, and Gnostic thinkers espoused in numerous ways that the soul was immortal and destined to ascend to heaven, if not also to descend alternatively to hell. This fact meant that the majority of Christians, rooted in a Jewish faith that spread well beyond Jewish peoples, would eventually accept the same teaching. Ter137. Dialogue of the Savior, trans. Stephen Emmel, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/dialoguesavior .html. 138. The Treatise on the Resurrection, trans. Malcolm L. Peel, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com /treatiseres.html. 414 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered tullian’s views with regard to the duality of body and soul, the immortality of the latter (though created by God), the purifying and/or punishment of souls in hell, and the ultimate reward of saints in heaven certainly points that way, but a late second-century author whose views accord even more closely with Plato and those of many Gnostics was Clement of Alexandria. Unlike Tertullian, Clement held no illusion that there would be a millennial reign of Jesus with his saints on earth, let alone a return of Jesus, a reunification of a specific physical body with the soul, or a specific day of judgment.139 Instead, like Philo, Clement argued for a kind of preexistence of the soul, rooted in God himself, and the body, though not physical when not on earth, was thrown off gradually as one ascended various angelic ranks toward the divine.140 After life on earth, a further enlightened soul “simply transferred . . . from one classroom to another . . . until it reached its consummation among the gods. The grades a soul entered on its ascent depended on the improvement it had made at the previous level.”141 Taking a page out of Plato’s timeline, Clement taught that those “humans who start being transformed into angels are instructed by the angels for a thousand years, in order to be restored to perfection. Then the instructors are translated into archangelic authority, while those who have received instruction will in turn instruct those among humans who are transformed into angels; thereupon they are, at the specified period, reestablished 139. Wagner, After the Apostles, 232–233. 140. Ibid., 178; Dato Gomarteli, “Reincarnation as the Soul’s Way to God. Salvation Teaching by Clement of Alexandria,” RGDN.info, November 27, 2015, https://rgdn.info/en/perevoploscheniya_-_put _dushi_k_bogu._uchenie_o_spasenii_klimenta_aleksandriyskogo_. 141. Wagner, After the Apostles, 178. A Shift in Thinking about the Afterlife 415 into the proper angelic state.”142 In other words, Clement espoused a kind of reincarnation, with promotions slated roughly every thousand years. The ultimate goal, Clement noted, was a beatific vision in a divine or angelic state: “When the soul, rising above the sphere of generation, is by itself apart, and dwells amidst ideas . . . now become as an angel, it will be with Christ, being rapt in contemplation, ever keeping in view the will of God.”143 While reincarnation was perhaps too radical to catch on among greater Christianity, Clement’s ideas did at the least speak to the changing ideas among Christians about what was to happen to them—and others—after death. The early third-century work The Passion of the Holy Martyrs Perpetua and Felicitas, possibly at least in part written by Tertullian, but the majority of which was purportedly written by Perpetua herself, with another short section written by another martyr, Saturus, transforms the hope of Christian martyrs from a resurrection to an immediate sojourn in heaven, much as 4 Maccabees transformed the hope of the seven martyred brothers in 2 Maccabees.144 In the work Perpetua, along with several other believers, is condemned to be cast to wild animals for being a Christian. Shortly before her death she has a vision of her brother Dinocrates, who had died when he was still a child. Apparently, he is in hell, at least as Tertullian conceived of it, 142. Clement of Alexandria, Eclogae Propheticae, 57.5, quoted in Bogdan G. Bucur, “The Other Clement of Alexandria: Cosmic Hierarchy and Interiorized Apocalypticism,” Vigiliae Christianae 60, no. 3 (2006): 251–268, DOI:10.1163/157007206778149510. 143. Clement of Alexandria, The Stromata, or Miscellanies, 4.25, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com /text/clement-stromata-book4.html. 144. On authorship of the piece, see the introduction to Acts of Perpetua and Felicitas, at Early Christian Writings, http://www .earlychristianwritings.com/actsperpetua.html. 416 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered where those who had not lived righteously enough had to atone for their sins. Perpetua writes: I saw Dinocrates going out from a gloomy place, where also there were several others, and he was parched and very thirsty, with a filthy countenance and pallid colour, and the wound on his face which he had when he died. This Dinocrates had been my brother after the flesh, seven years of age? who died miserably with disease—his face being so eaten out with cancer, that his death caused repugnance to all men. For him I had made my prayer, and between him and me there was a large interval, so that neither of us could approach to the other. And moreover, in the same place where Dinocrates was, there was a pool full of water, having its brink higher than was the stature of the boy; and Dinocrates raised himself up as if to drink. And I was grieved that, although that pool held water, still, on account of the height to its brink, he could not drink. And I was aroused, and knew that my brother was in suffering. But I trusted that my prayer would bring help to his suffering; and I prayed for him every day. . . . Then, on the day on which we remained in fetters, this was shown to me. I saw that that place which I had formerly observed to be in gloom was now bright; and Dinocrates, with a clean body well clad, was finding refreshment. And where there had been a wound, I saw a scar; and that pool which I had before seen, I saw now with its margin lowered even to the boy’s navel. And one drew water from the pool incessantly, and upon its brink was a goblet filled with water; and Dinocrates drew near and began to drink from it, and the goblet did not fail. And when he was satisfied, A Shift in Thinking about the Afterlife 417 he went away from the water to play joyously, after the manner of children, and I awoke. Then I understood that he was translated from the place of punishment.145 Perpetua’s intersession and own righteousness, in other words, releases Dinocrates from worse situations in the afterlife. Soon, she would herself come to experience death, but any fears she might have about it are assuaged by the visions she and Saturus have of others who have already lost their lives to the anti-Christian authorities. Saturus writes of his vision: We were gone forth from the flesh, and we were beginning to be borne by four angels into the east; and their hands touched us not. And we floated not supine, looking upwards, but as if ascending a gentle slope. And being set free, we at length saw the first boundless light; and I said, “Perpetua” (for she was at my side), “this is what the Lord promised to us; we have received the promise.” And while we are borne by those same four angels, there appears to us a vast space which was like a pleasure-garden, having rose-trees and every kind of flower. And the height of the trees was after the measure of a cypress, and their leaves were falling incessantly. Moreover, there in the pleasure-garden four other angels appeared, brighter than the previous ones, who, when they saw us, gave us honour, and said to the rest of the angels, “Here they are! Here they are!” with admiration. And those four angels who bore us, being greatly afraid, put 145. Tertullian, The Passion of the Holy Martyrs Perpetua and Felicitas, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, 2.3–4, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text /tertullian24.html. 418 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered us down; and we passed over on foot the space of a furlong in a broad path. There we found Jocundus and Saturninus and Artaxius, who having suffered the same persecution were burnt alive; and Quintus, who also himself a martyr had departed in the prison. And we asked of them where the rest were. And the angels said to us, “Come first, enter and greet your Lord.” And we came near to place, the walls of which were such as if they were built of light; and before the gate of that place stood four angels, who clothed those who entered with white robes. And being clothed, we entered and saw the boundless light, and heard the united voice of some who said without ceasing, “Holy! Holy! Holy!” And in the midst of that place we saw as it were a hoary man sitting, having snow-white hair, and with a youthful countenance; and his feet we saw not. And on his right hand and on his left were four-andtwenty elders, and behind them a great many others were standing. We entered with great wonder, and stood before the throne; and the four angels raised us up, and we kissed Him, and He passed His hand over our face. And the rest of the elders said to us, “Let us stand;” and we stood and made peace. And the elders said to us, “and enjoy.” And I said, “Perpetua, you have what you wish.” And she said to me, “Thanks be to God, that joyous as I was in the flesh, I am now more joyous here.”146 No doubt, such descriptions worked off biblical accounts such as Stephen’s vision of Jesus at the Father’s right hand as he was facing his own martyrdom (Acts 7:56) and the book of Revelation’s account of the blood of the martyrs 146. Ibid., 4.1–2. A Shift in Thinking about the Afterlife 419 calling out for God’s vengeance, who are said to “rest yet for a little season” until other martyrs join them (Rev. 6:10–11); here, however, the martyrs themselves are the ones who are translated to the throne room of God in heaven, where they are rewarded immediately for their loyalty to the Christian cause. If the scholar Dimitris J. Kyrtatas is correct, the transformation in the views regarding the afterlife might also be evident in traces left behind in the very text of The Apocalypse of Peter, a work that probably originated within a Hellenistic setting in Egypt in the early second century but for which we have only manuscript fragments dating back to the fifth century and later and some quotations in the work of other writers, including Clement of Alexandria’s Prophetical Extracts (Eclogae Propheticae).147 Our various versions, however, as Kyrtatas denotes, “make it perfectly clear that, like all apocryphal documents, the Apoc. Pet. was being constantly revised and reworked to serve the needs of developing and even conflicting ideas.”148 In a fifth-century Egyptian version of the Apocalypse that has come down to us, the twelve disciples make the following request of Jesus: “Show us one of our righteous brethren that had departed out of the world, that we might see what manner of men they are in their form, and take courage, and encourage also the men that should hear us.”149 In response, Jesus shows them first a vision of heaven, which proves to be “a very great region outside this world exceeding bright with light, and the air of that place illumi147. Dimitris J. Kyrtatas, “The Origins of Christian Hell,” Numen 56, no. 2/3 (2009), 289, 293, Jstor, https://www.jstor.org/stable /27793793; introduction to Apocalypse of Peter, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/apocalypsepeter.html; The Apocalypse of Peter, trans. M. R. James (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), Early Christian Writing, http://www.earlychristianwritings .com/text/apocalypsepeter-mrjames.html. 148. Kyrtatas, “Origins of Christian Hell,” 90. 149. Apocalypse of Peter, B. The Akhmin Fragment, verse 5. 420 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered nated with the beams of the sun, and the earth of itself flowering with blossoms that fade not, and full of spices and plants, fair-flowering and incorruptible, and bearing blessed fruit. And so great was the blossom that the odour thereof was borne thence even unto us. And the dwellers in that place were clad with the raiment of shining angels.”150 Afterward, however, Jesus takes them to view another place, a place of punishment, and they that were punished and the angels that punished them had their raiment dark, according to the air of the place. And some there were there hanging by their tongues; and these were they that blasphemed the way of righteousness, and under them was laid fire flaming and tormenting them. And there was a great lake full of flaming mire, wherein were certain men that turned away from righteousness; and angels, tormentors, were set over them. And there were also others, women, hanged by their hair above that mire which boiled up; and these were they that adorned themselves for adultery. And the men that were joined with them in the defilement of adultery were hanging by their feet, and had their heads hidden in the mire, and said: We believed not that we should come unto this place. And I saw the murderers and them that were consenting to them cast into a strait place full of evil, creeping things, and smitten by those beasts, and so turning themselves about in that torment. And upon them were set worms like clouds of darkness. And the souls of them that were murdered 150. Ibid., verses 15–17. A Shift in Thinking about the Afterlife 421 stood and looked upon the torment of those murderers and said: O God, righteous is thy judgement. And hard by that place I saw another strait place wherein the discharge and the stench of them that were in torment ran down, and there was as it were a lake there. And there sat women up to their necks in that liquor, and over against them many children which were born out of due time sat crying: and from them went forth rays of fire and smote the women in the eyes: and these were they that conceived out of wedlock (?) and caused abortion. And other men and women were being burned up to their middle and cast down in a dark place and scourged by evil spirits, and having their entrails devoured by worms that rested not. And these were they that had persecuted the righteous and delivered them up.151 The passage continues by describing the specific punishments meted out for various other types of sinners. One curious thing about The Apocalypse of Peter, however, is that a similar passage, save for the beginning and end, can be found in the second book of the Sibylline Oracles, which as noted earlier, were composed and revised over the course of centuries by various authors of differing cultural extractions. In this version of the account of men’s eternal fate, however, the righteous are given the opportunity to redeem those who have been sent to hell: Then to the pious will the almighty God Grant yet another thing, when they shall pray For men to be saved from devouring fire And lasting torments; and this he will do.152 151. Ibid., verses 21–27. 152. Sibylline Oracles, .393–396, https://www.elfinspell.com /SibyllineOraclesBk2.html. 422 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered The reward of such rescued people, however, is not life in heaven with the righteous but rather “another and eternal life, / In fields Elysian,” the Greek hereafter for those who are not gods.153 As Kyrtatas notes, what happens to those not so rescued, the Oracles give no indication, but one might suspect that they are eventually “annihilated.”154 “Thus,” as Kyrtatas concludes, what we see in the development of the description of hell in The Apocalypse of Peter over time is that “the fire originally introduced in the Christian world as a metaphor for death was subsequently presented as a purifying element, leading to salvation, only to become an instrument for eternal torture.”155 Tertullian’s concept that hell was a holding place for immortal souls and Clement of Alexandria’s idea that souls were continually developing in a school-ward thrust toward divinity also drew into question the idea that the whole of Jesus had actually died during his three days and nights in the grave. After all, even if Jesus’s body had passed away, his soul would have had to go somewhere, just as such authors posited that human souls do. And so would arise the concept of the harrowing of hell, an idea testified to as early as the late second century in Clement’s Stromata: The Lord descended to Hades for no other end but to preach the Gospel. . . . since God’s punishments are saving and disciplinary, leading to conversion, and choosing rather the repentance [than] the death of a sinner; and especially since souls, although darkened by passions, when released from their bodies, are able to perceive more clearly, because of their being no longer obstructed by the paltry flesh. . . . 153. Ibid., 2.400–401. 154. Kyrtatas, “Origins of Christian Hell,” 91. 155. Ibid., 296. A Shift in Thinking about the Afterlife 423 If, then, He preached the Gospel to those in the flesh that they might not be condemned unjustly, how is it conceivable that He did not for the same cause preach the Gospel to those who had departed this life before His advent?156 Clement, however, wasn’t alone in this conviction. His argument in Stromata isn’t so much about whether Jesus preached in Hades but whether he preached to both Jewish and non-Jewish people, as the preaching itself was a given. An addition to The Acts of Pilate, a work dated variously to sometime during the second, third, or fourth centuries and featured as part of the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, likewise recounts Jesus descending into hell and delivering those who have been constrained there by death and Satan. Among those saved are the very first man, Adam. In the account, Jesus says to those who have died, Come unto me, all ye my saints which bear mine image and my likeness. Ye that by the tree and the devil and death were condemned, behold now the devil and death condemned by the tree. And forthwith all the saints were gathered in one under the hand of the Lord. And the Lord holding the right hand of Adam, said unto him: Peace be unto thee with all thy children that are my righteous ones. But Adam, casting himself at the knees of the Lord entreated him with tears and beseechings, and said with a loud voice: I will magnify thee, O Lord, for thou hast set me up and not made my foes to triumph over me: O Lord my God I cried unto thee and thou hast healed me; Lord, thou hast brought 156. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 6.6, http://www .earlychristianwritings.com/text/clement-stromata-book6.html. 424 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered my soul out of hell, thou hast delivered me from them that go down to the pit.157 The language is very much reminiscent of biblical passages like Psalms 30:3 (“thou hast brought up my soul from the grave”) and 86:13 (“thou hast delivered my soul from the lowest hell”), such that the entire episode in The Acts of Pilate might be seen as an extended metaphor, working off ideas not unlike John’s statements in Revelation 0:14, wherein “death and hell” themselves are “cast into the lake of fire.” Still, such accounts were enough to convince some of the literalness of such an event, such that scriptures like Ephesians 4:9 (“he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth”) and 1 Peter 4:6 (“For this cause [the judgment] was the gospel preached also to them that are dead”) came to be read as referring not to Jesus’s burial or his preaching to people who had since died but to literal preaching to the dead while in the grave. Thus, Docetism entered the mainstream of Christian teaching. Clearly, the growing popularity of such views with regard to the afterlife within Christianity mirrored the manner in which similar ideas were being increasingly accepted across cultures, be they Jewish or non-Jewish. The dissent within Jewish communities against Roman authorities, however, also played a significant role in the timing of such changes. Major Jewish uprisings occurred in Jerusalem in 66 and 132 CE and in Crete, Cyprus, and Egypt in 115 CE, and riots occurred periodically. Such dissent, though generally localized and intermittent, led to problems between the ruling classes and the ruled such that authorities could little tolerate further incursions of the Jewish religion, be it of any sect, among the general 157. The Gospel of Nicodemus, or Acts of Pilate, from The Apocryphal New Testament, trans. M. R. James, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), part 2, chap. 8 (24), sec. 1, Early Christian Writings, http:// www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/gospelnicodemus.html. A Shift in Thinking about the Afterlife 425 non-Jewish populace. As Ernest L. Abel puts it in his book The Roots of Anti-Semitism, “Judaism plainly undermined the ancient Roman religion because it alerted the people to a new and different morality. Its greatest threat, however, was the possibility that the religion might unify the people against the prevailing political order.”158 Christianity, as one of the fastest growing of those Jewish sects among non-Jewish peoples, came under considerable scrutiny, especially among those who were not born Jewish. As Abel goes on to explain, “Since the ancient Roman religion was associated with the destiny of Rome, a Roman who worshipped any deities other than those sanctioned by the Roman senate, would be disloyal to the Roman people. . . . Hence, one finds throughout the history of the empire, laws passed not against the Jews, but against ‘Judaizers’—non-Jews observing Jewish practices.”159 Persecutions, thus, were aimed not primarily at people born Jewish but at those people “who had adopted Judaism.”160 To avoid such persecution, non-Jewish Christians moved increasingly away from tenets that seemed Jewish, and the doctrine of resurrection, which was mostly unique to the Jewish faith, was one of those. The destruction of the temple in Jerusalem during one of the Jewish uprisings also contributed to significant changes in Christian views. The first generation of Jesus’s followers, early on, viewed Jesus’s return as imminent, as demonstrated in the writings of Paul and Luke and in the Gospels. Paul’s expectations are evident in one of his first letters to the Thessalonians, discussed earlier. Of particular note in that letter is Paul’s explanation of the order of the resurrection: “For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and 158. Ernest L. Abel, The Roots of Anti-Semitism (Rutherford: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975), 74. 159. Ibid., 140–141. 160. Ibid., 140. 426 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air” (1 Thes. 4:16–17). Paul clearly believed, at the time, that he and many of those he preached to would still be living when Jesus returned. Similar expectations are set up in many passages by the writers of the Gospels. One of the questions the disciples asked Jesus before his ascent to heaven is whether he was about to restore his kingdom (Acts 1:6); the question comes after Jesus tells them “that they should not depart from Jerusalem” (Acts 1:4). Jesus tells them that God’s promise is about to be fulfilled. Even though Jesus is talking about the gift of the Holy Spirit, the disciples’ minds are clearly still fixated not on the promise of the Spirit at that time but on the promised restoration— that is, resurrection—of the kingdom of Israel. An even more telling, and significant, passage is Matthew 24:3, wherein the disciples ask regarding “end of the world” and the “sign of [Christ’s] coming.” The question comes in the context of Jesus talking about the coming destruction of the temple, suggesting, as denoted in chapter 1, that in the disciples’ minds the various events were connected. Jesus went on to explain how those in Judea would need to “flee to the mountains” (Matt. 4:16) and how soon after they would “see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven” (Matt. 4:30). If we are to believe the witness of Eusebius, Christians did indeed receive a sign to flee Jerusalem shortly before the temple’s destruction: “But the people of the church in Jerusalem had been commanded by a revelation, vouchsafed to approved men there before the war, to leave the city and to dwell in a certain town of Perea called Pella. And when those that believed in Christ had come there from Jerusalem, then, as if the royal city of the Jews and the whole land of Judea were entirely destitute of holy men, the judgment of God A Shift in Thinking about the Afterlife 427 at length overtook those who had committed such outrages against Christ and his apostles, and totally destroyed that generation of impious men.”161 However, contrary to expectation, Jesus’s return did not soon follow. The disappointment likely led to various changes in viewpoint among Jesus’s followers. Witness of such an oncoming change in perspective falls in the writings of both Paul and Peter.162 Whereas Paul had counted himself among those still to be living at the time of Jesus’s return to the Thessalonians, to Timothy some ten to fifteen years later, he would see his death as inevitable: “For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing” ( Tim. 4:6–8). Likewise, Peter would write his second letter with the expectation that he “shortly . . . must put off this . . . tabernacle, even as our Lord Jesus Christ hath shewed,” and with the goal of putting, after his death, “these things always in remembrance” for his followers ( Pet. 1:14–15). Later, in the same letter, he even describes some scoffing, 161. Eusebius, Church History, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert, from Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. 1, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo, N.Y.: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1890), 3.5.3, rev. and ed. by Kevin Knight for New Advent, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/250103.htm. 162. Ernest L. Martin and Paul R. Finch both see Paul’s and Peter’s realization as arising before the actual fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple based on the idea that early Christians had read into the book of Daniel the year 63 CE as being the start of the fulfillment of various end-time prophecies, which did not come to pass by the predicted date. See Ernest L. Martin, Restoring the Original Bible, esp. chaps. 13 and 14, https://www.askelm.com/restoring/res016 .htm, and https://www.askelm.com/restoring/res019.htm; Paul R. Finch, Beyond Acts: New Perspectives in New Testament History (Palm Bay, Fla.: Sunrise Publications, 2003), esp. chap. 6. 428 The Heavenly World Jesus Entered “Where is the promise of his coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation” ( Pet. 3:4). Although many scholars see both these letters as being written eponymously, after the deaths Paul and Peter, later in the first century or in the second century, even if that be so, the writings still demonstrate the changing perspective of the early followers of Jesus and the concern regarding his failure to return within the lives of the first generation.163 As Shirley Jackson Case puts it in her book on millennial beliefs, “The lapse of time proved that the vivid expectancy of earlier days had not been justified, and the success of Christianity on the present earth lessened the demand for an early catastrophic end of the world. With the passing of the years believers became increasingly content to hope for a blessed abode in heaven to be attained by individual souls immediately after death.”164 The move toward belief among Jesus’s followers in a heavenly reward upon death rather than an interregnum period followed by a resurrection to a physical kingdom on earth thus demonstrates yet another way in which the forces of varying cultures ultimately laid siege to the teachings that Jesus and his earliest direct followers actually promulgated. Although Jesus’s teachings would radically change the manner in which people worshipped, focusing them on a version of the Hebrew God of the Jewish people, the cultural influences of the various peoples who adopted such beliefs would also shape what we would come to think 163. On the late dating and inauthenticity of 2 Timothy and 2 Peter, see the introductions to the respective works at Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/2timothy.html and http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/peter.html. For a differing perspective on 2 Peter, see Michael J. Kruger, “The Authenticity of 2 Peter,” JETS 42, no. 4 (December 1999): 645–671, https://www.etsjets .org/files/JETS-PDFs/4/4-4/4-4-pp645-671_JETS.pdf. 164. Case, Millennial Hope, 155. A Shift in Thinking about the Afterlife 429 about Jesus and the worship he entreated. Both Jewish and Christian thinkers would inculcate, among others, Greek, Persian, Roman, and Egyptian religions and philosophies around them as they mused on the nature of the God of the universe and the purpose of being. Likewise, social and historical forces would push the religions of Jesus’s followers and of the Jewish people toward varying ends, as both aimed to distance themselves from one another to avoid persecution and to ward off compromise with the “impure” teachings of the other that would bring about the disapproval of their God. Rather than radically transforming the world, Jesus would be molded by that world into whatever shapes were necessary to allow for its continued domination by humankind, its kingdoms, and its ideas. Index to Full Citations This index denotes the first citation to a given work in the book and, thus, the full citation. If only one work by a given author has been referenced and no other author shares the same family name, only the author’s name is included. Anonymous works are not listed. Abbott, Elizabeth, 258n73 Abel, Ernest L., 134n206 Acharya, S, and D. M. Murdock, 145n241 Alexander, Philip S., 186n78 Alikin, Valeriy, 290n21 Anderson, Graham, 142n229 Anderson, Robert, and Terry Giles, 189n87 Apuleius, 142n228 Aristides, 347n166 Aristocles apudEusebius, 69n38 Armstrong, Garner Ted, 80n81 Armstrong, Karen, 20n32 Associated Press, 143n235 Athenagoras of Athens, 138n216 Bacchiocchi, Samuele: From Sabbath to Sunday, 147n243; Women in the Church, 328n123 Baker, Meg, 146n242 Balch, David I., 261n82 Bartlett, John R., 288n18 Bauckham, Richard, 100n128 Baumgarten, Albert, 12n18 Becking, Bob, 158n1 Berchman, Robert M., 110 Berger, Jonah, 279n1 Bhandari, Vidush, 287n17 Bohm, Matina, 207n141 Boyarin, Daniel, 102n133 Brake, Elizabeth, 260n81 Brandon, S. G. F., 39n72 Branick, Vincent P., 130n193 Bruce, F. F., 4n4 Brumberg-Kraus, Jonathan D., 27n53 Bucur, Bogdan G., 415n142 Budin, Lynn, 292n27 Burton, Henry Fairfield, 149n50 Cairus, Aecio, 253n56 Cantor, Ron, 323n115 Case, Shirley Jackson: The Millennial Hope, 380n30; “The Nature of Primitive Christianity,” 144n239 Chancey, Mark A.: Greco-Roman Culture and the Galilee of Jesus, 166n21; The Myth of a Gentile Galilee, 83n90 Cicero, M. Tullius: On His House, 331n130; The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, 331n130 Clayton, Edward, 355–356n187 Clement of Alexandria: Eclogae Prophetica, 415n142; Exhortation to the Heathen, 149n248; Paedagogus, 124n164; The Stromata, 108n91 Cohen, Marc, “Plato’s Cosmology,” 92n111 Cohen, Shaye J. D., From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, 23n36 Collins, Adela Yarbro, 47n86 Collins, John J.: Between Athens and Jerusalem, 40n75; “Dead Sea Scrolls,” 4n4 Coulter, Fred R., 309n82 Coutsoumpos, P., 85n93 432 Index to Full Citations Davidson, David, 73n51 Davis, Glenn, 352n181 DeBoer, Martinus C., 288n18 de Jonge, Henk Jen, 303n54 DeWitt, Norman Wentworth: “Epicureanism and Christianity,” 67n9; St. Paul and Epicurus, 66n28 Dinger, Ishtar Babilu, 293n32 Downing, F. Gerald, 79n76 Eddy, Paul Rhodes, 79n77 Edmonds, Radcliffe G., III, 408n15 Ehrman, Bart D.: Heaven and Hell, 360n2; Lost Christianities, 220n193 Eissenman, Robert, 5n6 Ekroth, Gunnel, 142n231 Ekstrand, D. W., 301n51 Elledge, C. D., 364n9 Engberg-Peterson, Troels, 64n22 Epictetus, 77n70 Epiphanius of Salimis, 258n70 Ermatinger, James W., 142n230 Esler, P. F., 288n18 Eusebius: Church History, 209n145; Life of Constantine, 359n1 Faber, Riemer, 76n66 Fabri, Luana, 305n64 Feather, Robert, 5n5 Fieser, James, 78n74 Finch, Paul R., 276n131 Fisher, E. J., 293n30 Fortman, Edmund J., 121n153 Fossum, Jarl, 190n90 Frank, Tenney, 227n218 Franz, Gordon, 40n76 Frede, Dorothea, 87n101 Fredriksen, Paula, 54n90 Garland, David E., “The Dispute over Food Sacrificed to Idols,” 98n44 Garland, Robert, “Afterlife in Ancient Egypt,” 403n116 Geller, Prof., 400n103 Gibbons, Edward, 100n127 Gilad, Elon, 362n4 Gilbert, George Holley, 28n56 Ginzberg, Louis, 396n79 Goodblatt, David, 173n39 Goodman, Martin: Rome and Jerusalem, 59n1; State and Society in Roman Galilee, 182n68 Gormateli, Dato, 414n140 Gousmett, Chris, 359n1 Grafton, A. T., and N. M. Swerdlow, 249n43 Grant, Frederick Clifton, “St. Paul and Stoicism,” 64n0 Grant, Robert M., Gods and the One God, 76n125 Haar, Stephen, 51n88 Hall, Bruce, 189n86 Hanrott, Robert, 66n27 Hays, Jeffrey, 93n34 Hegg, Tim: “An Investigation of the Lord’s Table,” 303n54; “The Public Reading of the Scriptures in the 1st Century Synagogue,” 301n51 Hengel, Martin: The “Hellenization” of Judaea in the First Century after Christ, 82n90; Judaism and Hellenism, 60n6; The Zealots, 14n25 Herodotus, 402n109 Heschmeyer, Joe, 15n29 Hesiod, 401n104 Hierocles, 133n205 Hillar, Marian: From Logos to Trinity, 96n114; “Philo at Alexandria,” 351n179 Hiltunen, Chelica, 287n13 Hippolytus or Rome, 9n11 Hirsch, Emil G., and Crawford Howell Toy, 294n37 Hirschbert, Peter, 324n116 Hislop, Alexander, 316n103 Hoffman, Carl, 178n51 Homer, 400n97 Horsley, Richard A., 163n12 Hurtado, Larry: At the Origins of Christian Worship, 114n149; Destroyer of the Gods, 129n187; One God, One Lord, 95n112 Ignatius of Antioch: Epistle to the Magnesians, 148n246; Ignatius to Index to Full Citations Polycarp, 276n93; Ignatius to the Smyrnaeans, 278n134; Ignatius to the Trallians, 270n112 Irenaeus of Lyons, 209n145 Ilany, Ofri, 4n4 Jackson, Wayne, 169n32 James, George G. M., 62n12 Jenkins, Philip, viiin2 Jeremias, Joachim, 24n39 Jervell, J., 288n18 Josephus: Against Apion, 345n158; Antiquities of the Jews, 8n8; War of the Jews, 9n9 Justin Martyr: Dialogue with Trypho, 149n247; First Apology, 111n140; On the Resurrection, 382n34 King, Karen L., 229n1 Knight, Alan, 88n104 Knoch, A. E., 105n135 Kohler, Kaufmann, 70n44 Kohler, Kaufmann, and Lewish N. Dembitz, 252n55 Kohler, Kaufmann, and Adolf Guttmacher, 330n126 Korak, Carl, 87n99 Kruger, Michael J.: “The Authenticity of  Peter,” 48n163; “The Complete Series,” 76n11; The Question of Canon, 276n112 Kyrtatas, Dimitris J., 419n147 Laertius, Diogenes, 62n14 Landman, Solomon, with Benjamin Efron, 27n51 Langdon, S., 250n46 Larsen, Matthew David, 317n106 Lebreton, Jules, 350n175 Lenard, Joseph, 312n88 Lighthouse, J. B., 228n223 Long, Phillip J., 396n77 MacDonald, Dennis R., 98n123 MacMullen, Ramsay, 128n180 Madigan, Kevin J., and Jon D. Levenson, 360n2 Malherbe, Abraham J., 355n187 433 Malick, David, 362n4 Maloney, Raymond, 315n99 Mark, Joshua J., “Isis,” 146n4; “Pythagoras,” 34n151; “The Soul in Ancient Egypt,” 40n110 Martin, Ernest L.: The People That History Forgot, 147n245; “Rejection of the Apostle John,” 313n93; Restoring the Original Bible, 16n29; “Synagogues and Ekklesias,” 300n47 Matassa, Lidia D., 284n5 McDowell, Sean, “Did the Apostles Have a Resurrection Faith?,” 34n6; The Fate of the Apostles, 34n62 McGowan, Andrew, “The Myth of the ‘Lord’s Supper,’” 97n4; “Rethinking Eucharistic Origins,” 306n73 McGrath, James F., and Jerry Truex, 110n138 McNamara, Martin, and Paul V. M., Flesher, 294n37 McNamer, Elizabeth, 6n7 Mead, G. R. S., 210n147 Meeks, Wayne A., 73n52 Megasthenes, 344n156 Metzger, Bruce M., 394n37 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 59n1 Montgomery, James Allen, 15n29 Mylonas, G. E., 316n101 Naddaf, Gerard, 231n7 Nadler, Allan, 323n115 Nash, Ronald, 72n46 Neal, Philip, 20n32 Neusner, Jacob, 27n52 Origen: Commentary on John, 124n167; Contra Celsus, 91n109; De Principiis, 125n170 Pagels, Elaine, 229n1 Pearse, Roger: “Mithras and Christianity,” 145n41; “The Roman Cult of Mithras,” 145n40 Perkins, Pheme, 37n68 Philo: The Decalogue, 313n91; The First Book of the Treatise on the 434 Index to Full Citations Philo (cont.) Allegories of the Sacred Laws, 410n129; On the Life of Moses, 346n162; Questions and Answers on Genesis, 97n118; The Special Laws, 330n125; A Volume of Questions, and Solutions to Those Questions, Which Arise in Genesis, 411n130; Who Is the Heir of Divine Things, 96n117 Philostratus, 341n148 Piettre, Reneé Koch, 67n29 Pigliucci, Massimo, 72n47 Plato: Gorgias, 405n120; Laws, 404n119; Phaedrus, 87n100; The Republic, 407n122; Timaeus, 88n103 Pliny the Elder, 59n3 Pliny the Younger, 317n104 Plutarch, 202n131 Presley, Stephen O., 254n60 Price, Richard M., 264n96 Pritz, Ray A., 41n78 Pseudo-Plutarch, 157n122 Purvis, James D., 189n84 Radl, Karl, 4n4 Richardson, Peter, 152n264 Roberts, Nickie, 289n20 Robertson, A. T.: Harmony of the Gospels for Students of the Life of Christ, 172n36; Luke the Historian in the Light of Research, 54n91 Robinson, John A. T., 100n128 Roller, Duane W., 166n22 Ross, Allen, 15n27 Rouwhorst, Gerard, 318n107 Ruse, Michael, 259n77 Safrai, Shmuel, 328n123 Schaff, Philip, 396n79 Schenk, Kenneth, 98n121 Schulz, Matthias, 292n28 Schürer, Emil, 170n34 Seawright, Caroline, 402–403n110 Segal, Alan F., 95n113 Seneca, 76n68 Sicker, Martin, 165n18 Skinner, Andrew C., 177n47 Sly, Dorothy I., 292n29 Smith, Andrew Phillip, 258n72 Spigel, Chad, 296n39 Spitzer, Jeffrey, 89n19 Spurgeon, Charles, 40n77 Stambaugh, John E., and David L. Balch, 99n124 Standage, Tom: Writing on the Wall, 354n184; “Writing on the Wall,” 355n185 Stern, David H., 289n19 Stowers, Stanley, 73n53 Strabo, 162n6 Tacitus, 175n41 Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self, 78n73 Taylor, Lily Ross, The Divinity of the Roman Emperor, 149n250 Tebes, Juan Manuel, 158n1 Tertullian: Against Marcion, 388n53; The Apology, 139n218; On the Resurrection of the Flesh, 387n50; The Passion of the Holy Martyrs Perpetua and Felicitus, 417n145; A Treatise on the Soul, 386n47 Theophilus of Antioch, 138n217 Thompson, Silouan, 3n2 Thorsrud, Harald, 69n37 Thorsteinsson, Runar M., 74n59 Toy, Crawford Howell, George A. Barton, Joseph Jacobs, and Israel Abrahams, 398n89 Toy, Crawford Howell, and Richard Gottheil, 61n9 Toy, Crawford Howell, and Kaufmann Kohler, 396n78 Toy, Crawford Howell, and Israel Lévi, 392n61 Trelawny-Cassidy, Lewis, 357n190 Trobisch, David, 276n131 Tuggy, Dale, 112n145 Vander Laan, Ray: “Fertility Cults in Canaan,” 93n31; “He Went to Synagogue,” 300n49 Vlach, Michael J., 382n33 Index to Full Citations Wagemakers, Bart, 218n187 Wagner, Walter H., 215n172 Welch, John W., 164n15 Wellhousen, 13n22 White, L. Michael, 12n19 Wood, Skevington, 384n40 Wylen, Stephen M., 15n29 435 Yamauchi, Edwin M., 266n101 Young, Brad H., Paul, the Jewish Theologian, viiin1 Young, Sarah P., “Nine Parts of the Human Soul According to the Ancient Egyptians,” 40n110 Index to Scriptures GENESIS 1:1 112 1:21 93 1:24–25 93 1:26 93, 272 1:27 255 2:7 97, 254, 255, 363 3:21 255 6:17 364 7:22 364 14:18–20 102–103 15:1–2 366 16:7–13 94 17:6 366, 367 18:20 379 22:11–18 94–95 22:17 366 22:17–18 366–367 25:25 157 25:27 157 25:29–34 157 26:34–35 157 27 157 27:46 157 28:9 157 28:10–19 192 31:38 157 33 157 41:8 115 EXODUS 3 3:2 3:6 3:14 19:5 19:6 31:3–4 32:10 216 103, 212 103 103 27 27 115 367–368 32:32 33:20 33:22–23 368 104 104 LEVITICUS 23 192 NUMBERS 11:25–29 116 20 21 24:18 25:7–8 30:3–9 157 112 158 38 330 DEUTERONOMY 18:9 390 18:10–11 390 18:12 390 18:15 190, 213 18:18–19 206, 213 18:20–22 213 27:4 191 28:1 365 28:11 365 28:15–18 365 32:3–4 103 32:18 103 33:2 161n5 JOSHUA 13:33 19:10–16 19:17–31 19:32–39 330 174 174 174 JUDGES 1:30–33 2:1 174 94 2:3 2:12–13 5:4 6:11–22 6:22–23 6:34 13:22 RUTH 1:14 174 174–175 161n5 95 104 116 104 330 1 SAMUEL 1–4 2:6 4:1–18 10:6 14:47 28:7–25 28:9 191n92 361 191n92 116 158 390 390 2 SAMUEL 2:7–11 2:10 3:1 4:5–8 5:1–3 8:14 175 176 176 176 176 158 1 KINGS 11:13–22 11:15–16 12:1–20 12:28–29 12:31–32 17:6–18 17:17–24 18 18:40 19:18 158 158 176 192 192 175 361 175 38 192 438 Index to Scriptures 2 KINGS 15:29 17:24–25 17:25–26 17:27–28 17:29–34 17:32–33 17:41 18:11 176 193 193 193 193 193 193 177 1 CHRONICLES 11:1–3 18:13 176 158 2 CHRONICLES 11:14–15 11:16–17 18:12 25:20 30:10 30:11 30:11–12 PROVERBS 8:22–30 8:23–25 94 108 192 192 158 161 176 176 192 ECCLESIASTES 3:20 3:21 9:5 364 364 364 ISAIAH 1:13 6:2–3 24 25 26 26:19 27 255 125 361 361 361 362 361 EZRA 4:2 4:5 4:12–16 4:23–24 5:5 6:8 9:1–2 10:8 10:18–43 195 195, 196, 197 196–197 197 197 197 197 198 198 NEHEMIAH 4:8–23 13:23–24 13:25 13:28 13:29 JOB 12:10 14:12 19:25–26 19:25–27 PSALMS 16:10 27:1 196 197 197 198 198 364 395 361–362 395 361 147 30:3 33:6 56:8 69:28 71:20 84:11 86:13 110:1 137 137:7 424 93–94 368 368 361 148 424 93 158 158 EZEKIEL 8:1–2 147–148 11:19 380 14:14 362n4 18:20 363 25:13–14 158 37 359, 376, 379–380 37:5–8 359 37:10–13 359–360 37:13–14 379–380 44:27 256 DANIEL 7 7:9 7:13 7:22 12 12:1 12:2–3 93, 104, 272, 272n121 93 93 93 359, 376 368 260 HOSEA 4:6 233, 234 OBADIAH 11 158 HABAKKUK 3:2 3:4 125 148 MALACHI 1:7 1:12 3:16 4:2 311 311 368 148, 149 MATTHEW 2 2:1–2 2:1–3 2:3–6 3:5–6 3:7–8 2:7–12 2:13–15 2:16 2:22 3:1 3:5–6 3:6 4:1 4:8–9 4:23 5:17–19 5:27–28 5:48 6:25 6:31 6:31–33 6:33 7:21 8 8:2–4 8:5–13 8:10 8:20 9:2–7 9:9 9:9–11 9:11 168 168 40 168 336 337 168 17n31 168 169 12, 336 336 12 117 48 79n78 84 74n56 74 80 78 49 78 74 20–21 21 205 205 80 223 184 325 184, 325 Index to Scriptures 9:14–15 10:4 10:5–6 10:5–15 10:18 10:20 10:39 11:5 11:19 11:24 11:27 12:1–8 12:14 12:24 12:40 13:10–18 13:24–30 14:1–2 14:2 14:3–4 14:5 14:6–11 14:9 14:14–21 14:19 15:2 15:21–28 15:24 15:29–38 15:30 15:33–38 15:36 16:13–16 16:18 16:24–26 17:24–27 18:15–17 18:17 18:20 18:23–25 19:17 20:1–16 21:12–13 21:33–45 22 22:15–22 22:16–17 22:21 22:23–30 22:29 295 40n77 55, 203 325 55 119 78 2 184 378, 379 107 12n20 172 224 231 233 216 171 171 169 170 170 171 337 306 32 56, 204 55, 183, 204 337 2 1 306 42 145 239–240 184 184 184 328 183 74, 76 183 12, 45 183 184 46–47, 83 165 47 20 20 22:44 93 23 12, 30, 80n78, 239 23:3 183 23:4 23 23:15 28, 163 23:28 74 23:37 172 24:3 43, 426 24:16 426 24:30 426 25:31–32 376 25:34 376–377 25:46 377 26:31 44 26:33 44 26:35 44 27:56 132n204 27:61 132n204 28:1 132n204 28:9–10 132n204 28:19 55 MARK 1:4 1:12 1:15 2:1–4 2:1–12 2:14–15 2:16 2:19 3:6 3:7–9 3:18 4:1 4:10–12 4:12 6:8–11 6:14 6:16 6:17–18 6:20 6:21–28 6:26 7:1–5 7:8 7:8–9 8:1–9 8:34–38 10:35–37 172 117 172 337 223 184 184 295 165, 172 337 40n77 337 233 234, 379 325 171 171 169 170 170 171 32 32 32 337 240n23 43 12 12:1–12 12:13–14 12:26–27 14:27 14:29 14:31 14:50 15:34 15:40 15:47 16:1–8 439 184 183 165 367 44 44 44 44 269 132n204 132n204 132n204 LUKE 1:3–4 354 1:77 234 1:78 148 2:5 6n7 2:25–38 40 2:49 108 3:19 169 4:15–27 302 4:16 79n78 4:28–29 318 5:17–25 223 5:27 184 5:27–29 333 5:30 184 5:33–35 295 6:15 40 6:17 79n78, 337, 340 6:27–36 48–49 7:1–10 56 7:2–10 205 7:5 284n9 7:9 205 7:36–50 33 8:1–3 132 8:10–11 233 8:26 240 8:33 240 9:1–5 325 9:3–4 80 9:9 171 9:10 337 9:10–11 79n78 9:23–26 240n23 9:51–58 204 9:58 12 10:1–11 325 440 Index to Scriptures LUKE (cont.) 10:25–29 205 10:30–37 205 11 30, 239 11:13 116, 117 11:18 203 11:37 79n78, 325 11:37–40 33, 299 11:39–42 30 11:43 30 11: 46 30 11:52 30, 233 12:13–21 183 13:14 318 13:17 318 13:31 172 14:1 79n78, 325 14:1–6 33 16:19–31 183 16:31 379 17:11–19 203, 204 18:10–14 184 19:30–38 44 20 184 20:17 145 20:19–22 165 20:19–26 46–47, 83 20:20 47 20:25 47 20:46 30 22:15 312 22:24 44 22:33 44 22:49 44 22:51 44 23:6 46 23:8 56, 171 23:55–56 132n204 24:1–10 132n204 24:21 45 JOHN 1:1 1:3 1:9 1:18 1:41 1:44 1:48–49 3:1 105, 109 102 148 90, 104, 108 42 46n83 42 31 3:2 4:1–30 4:9 4:17–19 4:20 4:21 4:22 4:23 4:26 4:39–42 4:42 4:49–53 5:22–23 5:23 5:26 5:28–39 6 6:2 6:5–13 6:15 6:18 6:26 6:38 6:40 6:44 6:59 7:41 7:52 8:32 8:48 8:58 9:22 11 11:1–45 11:25 11:48 12:12–18 12:20–21 12:42 12:43 12:44 12:47–48 14:6 14:8 14:9 14:16–17 14:20 14:23 14:26 15:1–6 31, 172 205 206 207 207 207 207 207 207 205 207 331 107 107 108 377 80n78 340 1 46 104–105 172 108 372 107, 117 79n78 46n83 46n83 70, 233 204 103 319 2 44–45 372 31–32 44 56 31 31 107 379 71, 233 118 108 118 118 118, 235 118 216 15:26 16:28 16:33 18:8 18:10 18:20 18:33–34 18:37–38 19:18 19:25 20:1–2 20:11–18 20:28 21:1–3 21:2 ACTS 1:4 1:6 1:8 1:11 1:13 2 2:5 2:7–8 2:9–11 2:16–18 2:27 2:31 2:33 2:34 2:41 2:43 2:46 4:4 4:7 4:13 4:27 5:12 5:15–16 5:25 5:29 5:36–37 5:37 5:42 6:5 6:7 7:56 8 8:1 119 108 77 44 44 79n78, 285 49–50 70 31 132n204 132n204 132n204 108 45 46n83 426 50, 426 207 381 40 1 6n7 57 57 116 361 361 118 93 335 340 285, 303, 324 335 21 179 172 340 340–341 286 83 39 181 285–286, 324 246 32 104, 418 328 207 Index to Scriptures 8:2 6n7 8:3 325 8:5–8 207 8:8–11 208 8:9 204n134 8:9–10 211 8:9–11 220 8:13 209 8:14 207 8:14–19 209 8:20 209 8:25 207 8:26–29 117 9:2 286 9:20 286 9:31–32 207 9:43 328 10 54 10:2 6n7, 331, 333 10:6 328 10:14 84 10:19 117 10:28 84 10:47 331 12:1 173 12:3–4 174 12:21–23 154–155 13 319 13:14 286 13:15–16 302 13:42–50 319–320 13:44 335 13:45 335 13:50 6n7 14 320 14:1 286 15 54–55, 247, 288, 296, 298, 299 15:3 207 15:5 32 15:20–21 247 15:21 288 15:29 288 16:1 332 16:13 334 16:14–15 331, 333 16:15 328 16:30–34 332 17 343 17:1 286 17:2 286 17:7 328 17:10 286 17:17 338 17:18 373 17:18–21 338 17:28 75–76 17:31 372–373 17:32 373, 375 18:4 320 18:7 284n9, 320 18:8 32, 286, 320, 326 18:11 286 18:19 286 18:21 249 19:8 286, 320 19:8–10 343 19:9 321, 336 19:10 321 19:11–12 341 19:19 335 19:24–27 335, 346 20:16 249 20:20 325 20:29–30 274–275 21:4 117 21:16 328 21:23–26 53–54 21:39 75 22:12 6n7 23:60 33–34 24:15 377 ROMANS 1:7 1:13 1:19–20 1:20 3:20 5:3 6:5 7:12 7:14 7:24–25 8:3 8:7 8:9 8:10 8:11 8:18–19 114 353 344 71 234 76 373 84–85 85 85 269 76 119 235 373 89–90 8:29 11:7–10 11:11 11:25 11:26 11:32 12:1 13:1 13:1–2 13:1–7 13:6–7 14:1–3 16:1–2 16:3–5 16:5 16:23 16:27 441 108 378 378 378 378 378 35 137 50 83 50 298 328 327n120 325–326 326 106 1 CORINTHIANS 1:1–5 103–104 1:3 114 1:9 104 1:10–17 54 1:11 326 1:12 326 1:14 326 1:16 326 1:24 86n98 2:2 234–235 3:16 35 3:23 106 4:17 355 5 85, 326 5:7 309 5:8 249, 309 5:9–11 295 6 326 6:2 381 6:14 373 7 263 7:1 263 7:2 264 7:5 264 7:7–8 263 7:12–13 132 7:12–15 332 7:19 299 7:25–27 263 7:32–34 263 8:11–12 298 442 Index to Scriptures 1 CORINTHIANS (cont.) 9:20–22 81 9:27 77 10 306 10:4 145 10:21 311 10:25 297–298 10:27–28 296 11 308, 326 11:2 295 11:20 297, 308, 308–309nn79–80 11:20–26 297 11:21 310 11:22 297, 310 11:23 297, 311 11:26 297 11:33 310 11:34 310 15:5–7 2 15:17 34 15:19 34, 78 15:27 108 15:32 65 15:35–50 375–376 15:49 90 16:2 326 16:10 328 16:19 326 2 CORINTHIANS 1:2 114 3:6 365 3:7 365 3:9 365 3:18 82 5:17 90 10 350 10:5 70, 117 10:13 350 11:3–4 274 13 350 13:5 235 GALATIANS 1:1 1:15–16 2 2:2 2:4 114 235 52 52 53 2:7–8 2:9 2:11 2:12 2:13 2:14 3:29 3:28 4:6 4:8 4:8–10 4:9 4:10 4:17 51 53 53 53, 327n120 53 53, 299 367 299 119 249 248 249 249 327n121 EPHESIANS 1:2 2:20–22 3:19 4:9 6:5 6:21 114 35 71, 234 424 117 328 PHILIPPIANS 1:2 1:9 1:19 2:6–7 2:9–11 3:8 3:10–11 3:21 4 4:3 4:11–12 114 234 119 90 106 373 373 376 78 368 73 COLOSSIANS 1:2 1:7 1:15 1:16 1:27 2:1 2:2–3 2:8 2:8–9 2:16 2:16–17 2:17 2:18 114 354–355 108 102 235 353 234 68, 70 269 327n121 246 248 248 2:18–23 2:20 2:22 2:23 4:6 4:7 4:9 4:15 4:16 4:18 247–248 248 248 248 354 328, 355 354 326 354 353 1 THESSALONIANS 1:1 114 4:13–14 374 4:16 374 4:16–17 425–426 2 THESSALONIANS 1:2 114 2:1–3 275 2:2 373 2:3 373–374 1 TIMOTHY 1:2 2:4 3:4–5 4:1–3 5:19–20 6:1 114 70–71, 234 332 257–258 328 133 2 TIMOTHY 1:5 2:3 4:6–8 332 221n195 427 TITUS 3:4–6 PHILEMON 2 10–11 11 16 22 HEBREWS 1:5–6 5:5 7:1–3 118 326 332 133 133, 332 328 108 108 103 7:3 8:6 9:15 11:1 11:3 11:8 11:10 11:16 11:35 11:39–40 12:39–40 13:9 JAMES 1:1 2:6–8 1 PETER 1:2 1:11 1:17 1:21 2:5 2:7–8 2:9 2:13 2:13–14 3:20–21 109 365 365 71 71 367 367 367 377 367 90 109 114 21 117 119 106–107 107 34 145 34 137 50, 83 231 Index to Scriptures 443 329 355 4:6 4:11 424 107 2 PETER 1:1 1:4 1:13–15 1:14–15 3:4 3:15–16 3 JOHN 9–10 12 114 235 354 427 428 275 JUDE 4 12 1 JOHN 1:1 1:1–3 1:3 2:4 2:23 3:2 3:14 4:1–3 4:6 4:8 4:13 269–270 109 114, 269–270 244 107–108 89 234 270 235 71 119 2 JOHN 7 10 100, 355 328–329 243, 244, 355 308 REVELATION 1:8 1:19 2:6 2:15 2:26–27 3:5 5:10 6:10–11 11:15 20:1–3 20:4 20:5–6 20:11–13 20:12 20:14 20:14–15 21:27 22:19 109 109 246 246 381 368 34, 381 418–419 381 377 377 377–378 378 368, 379 424 378 368 368 General Index Abel, Ernest L., 425 Abraham, 366–367 Acts of John, 266–267 Acts of Paul, 264 Acts of Peter, 266, 270, 317n105 Acts of Pilate, The, 423–424 Acts of Thomas, 264–265 adoptionism, 271 Aenesidemus, 69 afterlife, 342; annihilation, 385, 422; in The Apocalypse of Peter, 419–422; Christian views of, 280, 281, 358–359, 427–428; Clement of Alexandria on, 358–359n1, 414–415, 422; Egyptian views of, 402–403; Elysian Fields, 400–401; Epicurean view of, 373, 393, 394; Essene views of, 9, 391–392; within family, 366–367; Greek views of, 399–410; in heaven, 387–388, 389; Irenaeus on, 383–386; Jewish views of, 358, 368–372, 376, 379–380, 390–399; in Odyssey, 399–400; in Old Testament, 359–368; Pharisaic views of, 33–34, 377, 390–391, 391n57; Philo on, 410–412; Platonic views of, 375, 403–410; punishment in, 387–388, 389, 420–422; Roman views of, 399; Sadducean views of, 14–15, 190, 391, 394; Samaritan views of, 190, 411; Stoic views of, 78, 342, 373; in Sibylline Oracles, 421–422; Tertullian on, 386–389, 413–414, 415–419, 422. See also millennium; resurrection Against Apion (Josephus), 391n57 Against Celsus (Origen), 15n29, 139 Against Heresies (Irenaeus), 383–386 Against Marcion (Tertullian), 388 Agrippa I, 154–155, 173–174 Alexander the Great, 16, 60, 150, 199–200, 223 Alexander, Philip S., 186 Alexandria, 64, 98, 351–352 Alikin, Valeriy A., 304n61 allegory, 98–99, 217–218, 230–233 Ancyra, Council of, 265 Anderson, Graham, 142 Andrew (apostle), 42 angels, 214, 230, 269, 273 Anicetus, 314 Anthony, 161 Antioch of Syria, 53, 68, 187 Antiochus Epiphanes, 17–18, 200, 369 Antipas (Herod the Great’s son), 169–172, 181 Antipater (Herod the Great’s father), 19, 159 Antipater (Herod the Great’s son), 168 Antiquities of the Jews (Josephus), 7–8, 14, 22–23, 36, 198, 391n57 antisemitism, 424–425 Apocalypse of Peter, The , 419–422 Apocalypse of 2 Enoch, The, 251– 252n54 Apollonius of Tyana, 338, 341 Apology, The (Tertullian), 138–139, 307, 347–348 Apostalic Tradition, 317n105 Apuleius, 140–142, 339 Aramaic language, 60, 179–180 Aratus, 75–76 Arcesilaus, 68–69 Archelaus, Herod, 19, 169, 202 Arian, 108 Aristides, 137, 347 Aristides, Aelius, 339 Aristion, 381 446 General Index Aristobulus, 96, 345 Aristobulus (son of Herod the Great), 165 Aristobulus I, 178 Aristobulus II, 18 Aristotle, 344–345 armed forces, effect on culture, 60 Arrian of Nicomedia, 344 Artapanus, 96, 345 asceticism, 239–240, 242–250 associations, 304, 346–349 Assyria, 175, 193 Athenagorus, 137–138 Athens, 64 Augustus, 128, 150–151, 152–153, 161, 201, 202 Aurelian, 146–147 Aurelius, Marcus, 356–357 Authoritative Teaching, 245 Babylon, 159, 164; afterlife ideas, 34; days and, 50; influence on Greek ideas, 60, 216, 221; sexual rites at, 290–291, 292; spread of people from, 226–227 Bacchiocchi, Samuele, 314n96 Balch, David L, vii, 261, 349–350 Bauckham, Richard, 276n131 Bar Kochba revolt, 184, 208, 424 Baruch, second book of, 371–372 Basilides, 245 Baur, Ferdinand Christian, 51n88 ben Sira, Joshua, 392–394 Berchman, Robert M., 91, 122– 124 Berger, Jonah, 279–280, 281 Birkat ha-Minim, 323–324 Boethus, 164 book of life, 367–368, 378 Book of Thomas the Contender, The, 238–239, 240, 261 Boyarin, Daniel, 101–102 Brandon, S. G. F., 39, 40–41, 41– 42n78, 45, 45–46nn81–82 Branick, Vincent P., 346 Bruce, F. F., vii Brumberg-Kraus, Jonathan D., 27–29 Budin, Stephanie, 291, 292–293n30 burial societies, 347–348 Caesar, 150 Caligula, 173 Cambyses, 196 canonization of Bible, 275–276n131, 275–277; writing of New Testament, 353–355, 427n162 Carpocrates, 243–244 Case, Shirley Jackson, 144, 428 celibacy, 258–265 Celsus, 135–137, 339–340 Cerinthus, 271 Chaldean Oracles, 217 Christianity, reasons for spread of, 279–282 Christology. See trinity Chrysostom, Dio, 338 Cicero, 221, 331, 355 circumcision, 299 Claudius (emperor), 173 Cleanthes, 74 Clearchus of Soli, 344–345 Clement of Alexandria, 149, 317n105; afterlife views of, 358–359n1, 414–415, 422; Doceticism of, 270–271; eighth day and, 255, 256–257; Holy Spirit and, 124; Paedegogus, 358n1; Platonism’s influence on, 91–9, 1, 13, 352–353; Stromata, 245–246, 352–353, 422–423; use of scripture, 276n131 Clement of Rome, 114–115 Cleopas, 45 clubs (associations), 304, 346–349 Cohen, Shaye J. D., 283–284, 287 Collins, John J., 12–13 “Conjugal Precepts” (Plutarch), 131–132 Constantine, 185, 226 Contagious (Berger), 279–280 Coptic Apocalypse of Peter, The, 267– 268 Cornelius, 54, 333 Coutsoumpos, P., 85, 305n62 Cynicism, 78–86; in Galilee, 82; Jesus as practitioner of, 79–81, 82; missionary practices, 283, 335, 338–339; Paul and, 81–82; problems with Christian–Cynic General Index connection, 83–86; Stoicism’s relation to, 78–79 Cyrus the Great, 16, 195 Daniel, 360, 368, 376, 380 Darius, 197 Davidson, David, 76–77 days, ominous, 249–251 Dead Sea, 4, 11, 157, 169 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbons), 99, 280–281 demiurge, 92–93, 95, 112, 123 Destroyer of the Gods (Hurtado), 356 DeWitt, Norman W., 67, 68 Dialogue of the Savior, 261–262, 412–413 Dialogue with Trypho (Justin Martyr), 148–149, 186, 304, 350– 351 Didache, 317, 329 Diogenes, 82, 338 Dionysus, 315–316 Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth, 253 divine fire, 15–17, 31–3 Docetism, 30, 66–71; crucifixion and, 267–269; in early Christian teaching, 270–271; harrowing of hell, 422–424 Dositheans, 258 Downing, F. Gerald, 79–81, 85–86, 344 Ebionites, 271 Ecclesiasticus (ben Sira), 392–394 Eddy, Paul Rhodes, 85, 86, 282 Edmonds, Radcliffe G., 408 Edomites. See Idumeans Egypt: afterlife ideas, 342, 402–403; influence on Greek ideas, 59, 62–63, 127, 221, 401–402; Isis worship, 145–146; Leontopolis, 164; sexual rites in, 291, 292; trinity in, 126–127, 145 Ehrman, Bart D., viii, 409–410; Lost Christianities, 244–245 eighth day, 250–257; in Christian thinking, 255–257; in Gnostic think- 447 ing, 252–255; in Hellenistic thinking, 250–251, 256–257; in Jewish thinking, 251–252 Eisenman, James, 5 Ekroth, Gunnel, 298 Elledge, C. D., 364, 411 Elysian Fields (Islands of the Blessed), 400–401, 405 Engberg-Peterson, Troels, 75 Enoch, second book of, 251–252n54 Epictetus, 75, 77 Epicureanism, 65–68, 342, 355–356, 373, 393, 394 Epicurus, 65–67 Epiphanius of Salamis, 258, 277 Epistle of Barnabas, 255–256, 386 Essenes, 3–13, 60; afterlife views of, 9, 391–392; celibacy, 258–259; Dead Sea Scrolls and, 4–6; Jesus and John the Baptist as, 5–6, 7, 12–13, 61–62; Josephus on, 7–11; Philo on, 11; Pliny the Elder on, 11; practices and beliefs described, 7–11, 316; Qumran community of, 4–6; reaction to Roman rule, 11–12 Eucharist, 303–318; breaking bread as, 305–307; Didache and, 317; “Lord’s supper” term, 308–311; origins of, 304–308, 315–316; timing of, 316–317 Euripedes, 63 Eusebius, 185, 188, 209, 224, 225, 275–276n131, 314, 351– 352, 426–427; afterlife views of, 358–359n1; on millennium, 382n33 Eutecnius, Julius, 339 Ezekiel, 359–360, 376, 379–380 Ezra, 195–198 Felicitas and Perpetua, 415–419 Finch, Paul R. 427n162 First Apology (Justin Martyr), 110– 112, 137, 383 Fortman, Edmund, 119 Fossum, Jarl, 211–212, 214 Frank, Tenney, 226–227 Fredriksen, Paula, 286, 287 448 General Index Galilee, 174–188; Canaanite traditions in, 174–175; as crossroads, 180–181; depopulation of, 176–177; Jewish conquering of, 178–179; northern Israelite kingdom and, 174–177; popularity of Cynicism in, 82; rabbinic Judaism in, 187–188, 322; taxes in, 181–184; as Zealot enclave, 46, 181 Gaius, 152 Garland, David E., 298n44 Genius, 151 Geography (Strabo), 161–162 Gerizim, Mount, 190, 191–192. 198, 199, 202, 204, 208 Gibbons, Edward, 99, 129, 280–281 Gill, John, 43, 52 Gnostic Gospels, The (Pagels), 235 Gnosticism: allegory and, 230–233; asceticism, 239–240, 242–250, 258–265; angels in, 269; biblical writers against, 243, 244, 246– 249; celibacy, 258, 261–263; days and, 49, 5–55; definition of, 229–230; Docetism, 266–271; dualism, 412–413; knowledge as key to, 233–242; lasciviousness, 242–245; numerology, 252–255; Simon the magician as father of, 209; sin and, 236–238; vegetarianism, 258 God-fearers, 286–299 Golden Ass, The (Apuleius), 140–142, 339 Goodman, Martin, 65, 400 Gorgias (Plato), 405–406 Gospel of Mary, 236–237, 245 Gospel of Nicodemus, 423–424 Gospel of Philip, 262–263nn88–89 Gospel of Thomas, 236 Gospel of Truth, 237–238 government, Christians and, 137–140 Grant, Frederick Clifton, 74–75 Greek language, 60–61, 300 Guttmacher, Adolf, 330 Haar, Stephen, 223 Hadrian, 208, 313 Hall, Bruce, 211 Hananeel, 164 harrowing of hell, 422–424 Hasmoneans, 17–18 heaven. See afterlife Hegg, Tim, 301n51, 310n84 hell. See afterlife Hellenism, 58–65, 321; armed forces and, 60; astronomy’s influence on, 50–51; Babylonian influence on, 60, 216, 221; education, 61–62, 64– 65, 349–351; Egyptian influence on, 59, 62–63, 221, 401–402; in Galilee, 178, 179–180; Jewish influence on, 96, 344–346; language, 59–60; logic and ways of thinking, 63; Persian influence on, 59–60, 221, 223; religion, 58–59; as Roman influence, 58–59, 63; worship of rulers, 149–150 “Hellenization” of Judaea in the First Century after Christ, The (Hengel), 300n50 Hengel, Martin 37–38, 39–40, 45, 45n81, 46, 82, 167–168, 225; The “Hellenization” of Judaea in the First Century after Christ, 300n50; Judaism and Hellenism, 221 Heraclitus, Pseudo-, 82 Heraclitus of Ephesus, 216–217, 231 Herod Agrippa I, 154–155, 173–174 Herod Antipas, 169–172 Herod Archelaus, 19, 169 Herod the Great, 19, 152–153, 159–161, 170; building program, 163–167, 201; conversion to Jewish religion, 163; devotion to imperial cult, 163–164, 201; family tree of, 160; Messiah and, 168–169; taxation by, 165–167 Herodias, 169–170 Herodotus, 250, 402 Herod Philip I, 169 Hesiod. 249; Works and Days, 400– 401 Hidden Gospels (Jenkins), viiin2, 6n7 Hierocles, 133 Hillar, Marian, 111, 113, 126–127 Hippolytus of Rome, 9n11, 15n29; on Jewish sects, 392n60, 394; on Si- General Index mon the Magician, 209–210, 212, 213, 215, 219–220, 230 Hislop, Alexander, 316n103 Histories (Tacitus), 175 Holy Spirit: in Clement of Alexandria, 125; early Christian views of, 113– 115, 116–121; Old Testament views of, 113, 115–116; in Origen, 124–125; in Tertullian, 125–126; World-Soul and, 121–122 Homer, 99, 231; Odyssey, 399–400 Horsley, Richard A., 167, 176, 185 house churches, 324–333; association as, 324–325; leadership of, 327–332; problems with, 326–327; size of, 332–333, 334; synagogues as, 324, 333 household, 130–134, 329–332; mixed faiths in, 332 Hurtado, Larry, 95, 101, 102, 113–114, 129; Destroyer of the Gods, 356; One God, One Lord, 95 Hyrcanus, John, 156, 159, 162, 178, 201 Hyrcanus II, 18–19 Idumeans, 157–174, 179, 201; animosity with Israelites, 158–161; biblical descent, 157; conversion to Jewish religion, 161–163; Maccabees and, 159–161; in Old Testament, 157–158; religion of, 161– 163 Ignatius of Antioch, 115, 119–121, 148, 186–187, 270; on church government, 277–278; on marriage, 263–264 immortal soul: divine fire and, 31– 232; Plato on, 88–89, 241–242; in Simon the Magician’s views, 220, 230 imperial cult, 149–155, 163; danger to Christians, 153–155; eastern origins of, 149–150, 151–152; Roman adoption of, 150–151 Irenaeus of Lyons, 188, 243–244, 245, 253–254, 263, 274, 277; on afterlife, 383–386; Against Heresies, 383–386; on Simon the Magician, 449 209–210, 214, 219–220, 230; use of scripture, 276n131 Isis, 145–146, 292 Iturea, 163, 177 James (apostle), 43; killing of, 174 James (brother of Jesus), 52 James, George G. M., 223 James the Brother of Jesus (Eisenman), 5 Jamnia, 185, 322 Jannaeus, Alexander, 18, 178 Jason (priest), 16–17 Jenkins, Philip, viiin2, 6n7 Jeremias, Joachim, 24–25, 30, 162, 164, 313n91 Jesus: allegory and, 231; Cynicism and, 79–81, 8; differing views about identity of, 282; as Essene, 5– 6, 7, 12–13; among Gentiles, 55–57; as Jewish sage, 86; on knowledge, 233–235; as magician, 223–224; meeting in homes, 325; miracles of, 340; Old Testament identification of, 102–105; published preaching of, 337; resurrection of, 372; return of, 380–381, 425–426; Samaritan interaction with, 202–207; as second power in heaven, 102–109; Stoicism and, 73–74; synagogue preaching of, 285, 302, 318–319; on taxes, 46–47; women and, 132; as Zealot, 45–49 Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (Bauckham), 276n131 Jesus and the Zealots (Brandon), 40–41 Job, writing of, 362n4 John (apostle), 43, 52; as biblical writer, 100n128; concept of Father and Son, 105, 107, 109; cast out of church, 329; knowledge of Greek thinking, 99–102; on resurrection, 372, 377–378; truth and, 70–71 John the Baptist: as Essene, 5–6, 7, 12–13, 391–392; Herod and, 169– 171; public preaching of, 336–337 Josephus, 58; on afterlife, 358, 390– 392, 391n57; Against Apion, 391n57; 450 General Index Josephus (cont.) Antiquities of the Jews, 7–8, 14, 22–23, 36, 198, 391n57; on Essenes, 7–11, 391–392; on Jewish sects, 3; on Pharisees, 22–23, 390–391; on philosophy borrowing from Jewish ideas, 344–345; on Sadducees, 14–16, 391; on Samaritans, 193–194, 195, 198–200; War of the Jews, 8–11, 14, 391n57; on Zealots, 35–37, 42 Jubilees, 289n19 Judaism and Hellenism (Hengel), 221 Judas the Galilean, 36, 37, 39, 181 Justin Martyr, 145, 188, 315; Dialogue with Trypho, 148–149, 186, 304, 350–351; First Apology, 110–112, 137; as philosopher, 350–351; on resurrection, 382–383; on Simon the Magician, 209–210, 216; trinity and, 110–111; on worship service, 302, 303, 304 Kabbalah, 217 Kasher, Aryeh, 162 Knoch, A. E. 105–106 Kohler, Kaufman, 330 Korak, Carl, 89 Kyrtatas, Dimitris J. 419, 422 Larsen, Matthew David, 317n106 Laws (Plato), 404 Lazarus, 44 Leontopolis, 164 letter writing and sending, 353–356 Levenson, Jon D., 360–361, 366 Lévi, Israel, 392–393 Life of Apollonius of Tyana (Philostratus), 338 Lord’s supper. See Eucharist; Passover Lost Christianities (Ehrman), 244– 245 Lucian, 338–339 Lucilius, 240 Maccabees, 17, 159–161 Maccabees, books of the: First, 177– 178; Second, 368–369, 398, 415; Fourth, 398–399, 410, 415 MacMullen, Ramsay, 224, 342 Madigan, Kevin J., 360–361, 366 magic, 59, 220–225 Malchus, 44 Malthace, 201 Manahem, 39 Manasseh, 198–199 Marcion, 219, 276–277 Marcosians, 253–255 Mariamme I, 165, 168, 173 Marka, 213 Martin, Ernest L., 226–228, 299–300, 427n162 McGowan, Andrew, 297n42, 308n78, 317–318n106, 318n108 McNamer, Elizabeth, 5–6 Mead, G. R. S., 210, 217 meals: among Christians, 303; contents of, 306; dining practices, 332– 333; among Jews, 303, 304, 305– 306, 315; among non-Jewish people, 296–297, 303–304, 306–307, 308, 315–316. See also Eucharist meat, 295–298 Megasthenes, 344 Menalaus (priest), 17 Messianic expectations: among disciples, 42–45; among Jewish people, 39–40 millennium, 377–378, 380–390; Epistle of Barnabas on, 386; Eusebius on, 382n33; Ireneaus on, 383–386; Justin Martyr on, 382–383; Papias on, 381–382; Tertullian on, 388; Theophilus of Antioch on, 383 Milman, H. H., 99–101 miracles: of apostles, 340–341; of Jesus, 1–2, 281, 340; of pagan preachers, 341–342 Mithraism, 144–145, 315 Moloney, Raymond, 315n99 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 64, 129, 131–132 monotheism: in Greece, 98–99; in Judaism, 127n179, 271–272 Montgomery, James Alan, 194, 198– 199, 211 More, Henry, 229 Moses, 190, 206 myth, Greek and Roman, 58–59 General Index Nabatea, 159, 161–162, 164, 170, 174 Nasaraeans, 258 Nathanael (apostle), 42 Natural History (Pliny the Elder), 221 Nehemiah, 197–198 Neocaesarea, Council of, 265 Nero, 75, 154 New Testament History (Bruce), vii New Testament in Its Social Environment, The (Stambaugh and Balch), vii Nicaea, Council of, 185 Nicaso, 198–199 Nicolaitanes, 246 Noachide laws, 288–289 Odyssey (Homer), 399–400 Ogdoad, 252–253, 254 On Duties (Hierocles), 133 One God, One Lord (Hurtado), 95 Onias (priest), 16 On the Contemplative Life (Philo), 351 On the Resurrection (Tertullian), 387n50, 388n51 Origen: Against Celsus, 15n29, 139; celibacy and, 265; Doceticism of, 270; Holy Spirit and, 124–125; Platonic ideas in, 91–92, 122, 123–124, 352 Orpheus, 250, 345 Osthanes, 60, 62 paganism, 127–149; in daily life, 130– 144, 296; economy and, 142–143, 296; in household, 130–134, 151, 296, 330–331; Isis, 145–146; versus Jewish faith, 143–144; meals associated with, 297–298; meat associated with, 295–298; missionary work, 334–335, 338–339; Mithraism, 144–145; versus philosophy, 127–129; prostitution and, 290–294; Sol Invictus, 146–149; spread of, 129–130; as stabilizing force, 128–144, 425; town layouts and, 140; wonder working associated with, 341–342. See also imperial cult 451 Paganism in the Roman Empire (MacMullen), 342 Pagels, Elaine, 270; The Gnostic Gospels, 235 Panarion (Epiphanius of Salamis), 258 Pantaenus, 351–352 Papias, 381–382 Passing of Peregrinus (Lucian), 338– 339 Passion of the Holy Martyrs Perpetua and Felicitas, The, 415–419 Passover, 297, 304; Eucharist as replacement for, 317; as Lord’s supper, 308–312; timing of, 312–315 Paul: allegory and, 230; on celibacy, 261, 263, 264; Cynicism and, 81–82; on Gnosticism, 247–248, 257–258, 274; letters of, 353–355; on marriage, 132; versus Peter, 7, 51–54; public preaching of, 338; on resurrection, 372–376, 377, 378, 379, 425–426, 427; Skepticism and, 70–71; on slaves, 132–133; Stoicism and, 74–76; synagogue preaching of, 286, 302, 319–321 Perpetua and Felicitas, 415–419 Persia, 159, 177, 178; influence on Greek ideas, 59–60, 221, 223 Peter: allegory and, 230–231; on death, 427–428; Messianic expectations, 42, 44; versus Paul, 7, 51–54; reason for writing, 354; versus Simon the Magician, 209; as source for Gospel of Mark, 275n131 Phaedrus (Plato), 88, 241, 259–260 Pharisees, 21–35, 183–184; afterlife views of, 33–34, 377, 390–391, 391n57; compared with Christians, 31–35; as conversionist sect, 28–29, 162–163, 179; as followers of Jesus, 31–32; Josephus on, 22–23; Passover timing of, 312; popularity of, 23; priesthood of believers and, 26–27, 29–30, 34–35; as rabbinical Judaism source, 23, 35, 184–188, 203, 272, 321–322; scribes’ relation to, 23–26, 30; Sadducees versus, 26–27, 60; struggle with Sadducees over power, 19–20; table fellow- 452 General Index Pharisees (cont.) ship, 28–29, 32–33, 296; taxes and, 165–166; Zealot parallels, 37–38 Phiabi, 164–165 Philip (apostle), 42, 208–209 Philip (Herod Philip I), 169 Philip the Tetrarch, 169 Philo, 101, 321n110; on afterlife, 410–412; allegory and, 217, 231; on Essenes, 11; influence on early Christian thinking, 111, 113; on Jewish origins of Greek ideas, 96, 345–346; On the Contemplative Life, 351; on Passover, 312–313, 329–330; on soul and body, 96–98, 410–412 Philostratus, 338, 341 Phoenicia, 177, 227–228 Piettre, Reneé Koch, 355–356 Pilate, 70 Plato; 97, 240, 241–242, 250, 257; Academy of, 68–69, 356; on afterlife, 375, 403–410; on demiurge, 92–93, 95, 112, 123; Gnosticism and, 232, 375; on goal of humans, 89–90; Gorgias, 405–406; ideas on virtue and happiness, 87; Laws, 404; on the One, 87–88, 92, 98; Phaedrus, 88, 241, 259–260; The Republic, 257, 406–409; on sex, 259–261; on soul, 403–404; as student in Egypt and Persia, 63, 221, 401–402; Timaeus, 87–88, 92–93, 112; World-Soul concept of, 121–122 Platonism, 86–93, 110–113, 121–127, 342; in Christian writings, 91, 121–127; popularity of, 357. See also Plato Pliny the Elder, 11, 59, 62, 221, 222– 223, 224 Pliny the Younger, 154, 316–317 Plotinus, 122 Plutarch, 82, 89, 249; “Conjugal Precepts,” 131–13 Polycarp, 115, 137, 263, 314 Pompey, 162 Pontifex Maximus, 151 Presley, Stephen O., 254 Psalms of Solomon, 369 Pseudo-Clementines, 213 public spaces, 334–342; for church meetings, 334; Jesus in, 337–338; John the Baptist in, 336–337; for missionary work, 334–338; for synagogues, 334 Pyrrho, 68–69 Pythagoras, 250, 342, 345; on sex, 259, 261; as student in Egypt, 62–63, 221, 401–402; on vegetarianism, 258 Quadratus, 137 quarto, 356 Quirinis, Suplicius, 37 Randall, John Herman, Jr., 74 Redating the New Testament (Robinson), 276n131 Refutation of All Heresies, The (Hippolytus of Rome), 9n11, 15n29, 394 Republic, The (Plato), 257, 406–409 resurrection: in Baruch, Second, 371– 372; book of life and, 367–368, 378; Justin Martyr’s views on, 382–383; in Maccabees, Second, 368–369; as manifesting God’s nature and power over life, 361–362, 364; as multiple, 376–380; national, 359– 361, 365–366; in New Testament, 372–380; after Old Testament writings, 368–372; personal, 360–361; in Prophets, 359–360, 362, 368; in Psalms of Solomon, 369; in Sybilline Oracles, 370–371; Tertullian on, 386, 388–389; in Testament of Job, 395–396; in Torah, 365, 367–368; in Writings, 361–362, 368. See also afterlife; millennium rhetoric, 349–350 Richardson, 164–165, 166 Roberts, Nickie, 289–290 Robinson, John A. T., 101; Redating the New Testament, 276n131 Roman religion, 58–59, 425; decline of, 63–64, 127–129; Sol Invictus, 146–147; syncretism of, 129–130, 143–144. See also paganism Rome: as center of philosophical thinking, 64; Stoicism popular in, 75, 227–228 General Index Rome and Jerusalem (Goodman), 65 Roots of Anti-Semitism, The (Abel), 425 Rouwhorst, Gerald, 317–318 Rufus, Musonius, 75 ruwach, 363–364 Sadducees, 13–21; afterlife views of, 14–15, 391, 394; beliefs of, 14–16; early Christians and, 21; Jesus and, 20–21; Josephus on, 14–16; Passover timing of, 312; Pharisees versus, 26–27, 60, 187–188; struggle with Pharisees over power, 19–20 sage figure: in Jewish culture, 86; in Stoicism, 73–74 Salome, Alexandra, 18 Samaria, 176, 201 Samaritans, 187, 188–208; afterlife views of, 190, 411; beliefs of, 189– 190; definition of, 189; diaspora of, 226; early Christians and, 207–208; as former Israelite northern kingdom, 194–195; Jesus’s interactions with, 203–207; Jewish conquering of, 201 ; as Jewish sect, 202–203, 207–208; Messiah and, 205–206, 207; origins of, Jewish view, 192–194; origins of, Samaritan view, 191–192; temple rebuilding and, 195–199; tensions with Jewish people, 200–201, 202–203, 204; tensions with Roman Empire, 202. See also Simon the Magician Sanballat, 198–199 Schechem, 176, 200 schools, Christian, 321, 349–353, 356 scribes, 23–26, 30, 184. See also Pharisees Second Treatise of the Great Seth, The, 267, 268 Segal, Alan F., 95, 101; Two Powers in Heaven, 322–323 Seneca, 75, 76, 77, 82; letter to Lucilius, 240–241 sex: as metaphor in Christian and Jewish faiths, 294–295; mores in Roman world, 289–290; in pagan religion, 290–294 Shammai, 162 453 sheol, 362–363, 366 Simon the Magician, 208–228, 340, 412; Acts account of, 208–209; allegory and, 217–218, 230; on angels, 214, 230; Christian parallels in beliefs of, 0, 30; divine fire and, 215–217; dualism in, 215–216; as “great power of God,” 11–14; hedonism of, 218–220; Helen/Ennoea and, 214–215; historicity of, 209–210; magic and, 220, 224–225; as originator of heresy, 209, 225; as Samaritan, 210–213 Simon the Zealot, 40–42 Sirach (ben Sira), 392–394 Skepticism, 68–71; in Christian thought, 70–71; history of, 68–69; views of, 69–70 slaves, Christian, 132–133 Sly, Dorothy I., 349 Socrates, 338 Sol Invictus, 146–149 Sophia of Jesus Christ, 253 soul: Clement of Alexandria’s views on, 414–415; early Jewish views on, 362–364; Egyptian views of, 402– 403; gnostic views on, 412–413; Philo’s views on, 410–412; Plato’s views on, 403–404; Tertullian on, 386–388, 413–414 Stambaugh, John E., vii, 349–350 Standage, Tom, 355 Stoicism, 71–78, 240–241, 261; afterlife views of, 78, 342, 373; Christian thought and, 73–78, 344; Cynicism’s relation to, 78–79; divine fire and, 31–3; Eastern origin of, 227–228; fate and, 72–73; Jesus and, 73–74; materialism of, 72; Paul and, 74–76; trinity and, 125–126 Stowers, Stanley, 73 Strabo, 290–292; Geography, 161–162 Stromata (Clement of Alexandria), 245–246, 352–353, 422–423 Sybilline Oracles, 370–371, 421–422 synagogue, 187–188, 272, 283–302; architecture of buildings, 284, 284n6, 333; as association, 304, 345–346, 348–349; Christian missionary work in, 85–86; defini- 454 General Index synagogue (cont.) tion of, 283–285; in home, 324, 333; meeting structure, 285–286, 299–302; non-Jewish people at, 285, 286–287n12, 286–299, 320– 321; in open space, 334; separation of Christians from, 318–324, 333 Tabor, James, viii Tacitus, 175 Talmud: on Jewish sects, 3; on Noachide laws, 289n19; Song of Solomon in, 294 Tarsus, 68, 75 taxes, 37–38, 46–47, 165–167, 176, 181–184 Taylor, Lily Ross, 152 temple, destruction of Jerusalem, 16n31, 43, 54, 275–276n131; antisemitism and, 424–425; ascent of Pharisaic power and, 23, 29, 184, 187, 7, 31–3; flight of Christians before, 426–427; Zealots and, 35, 41n78, 51 Tertullian, 125–126, 145, 277, 317, 317n105, 422; Against Marcion, 388; The Apology, 138–139, 307, 347–348; On the Resurrection, 387n50, 388n51; The Passion of the Holy Martyrs Perpetua and Felicitas, 415–419; on resurrection, 386, 388–389; on soul, 386–388, 413– 414; Treatise on the Soul, 387n50 Testament of Abraham, 396–398, 410 Testament of Job , 394–396, 410 Testimony of Truth, The, 262 Thales, 62 Theagenes of Rhegium, 231 Theophilus of Antioch, 138, 155, 383 Therapeutae, 316, 351, 396 Theudas, 39 Thorsteinsson, Runar M., 74 Tiberius, 56, 152, 181 Timaeus (Plato), 87–88, 92–93, 112 Titus (Christian), 52 Toy, Crawford Howell, 392–393 Traditions of Matthias, The , 245–246 Trajan, 154, 316 Treatise on the Resurrection, 413 Treatise on the Soul (Tertullian), 387n50 trinity: development of, 110–127, 271; in Justin Martyr’s work, 110–113; in Simon the Magician’s views, 212–213, 220 Trobisch, David, 276n131 True Word, The (Celsus), 135–137 Tuggy, Dale, 112, 122 Two Powers in Heaven (Segal), 322– 323 Two Powers in Heaven concept, 93– 95, 102, 322–323 Tyrannus, 321, 343, 349 Usha, 322 Valentinus, 243, 262–263, 273–274, 275, 277 vegetarianism, 258 Vespacian, 175 Victor (Roman bishop), 314–315 War of the Jews (Josephus), 8–11, 14, 391n57 Wellhousen, Julius, 25–26 women: Christian, 132; as elders, 39n13; sexuality of, in first century, 289–290n20, 289–292 Works and Days (Hesiod), 400–401 worship service, Christian, 302, 303, 304 writing: of New Testament, 353–355; in Roman world, 355–356 Xenophanes, 99, 217, 231 Zealots, 35–54; biblical reasoning of, 38–39; founding of, 36; in Galilee, 46, 181; Jesus as, 45–49; Jesus’s disciples as, 41–45, 49–51, 54; Josephus on, 35–37; Pharisaic parallels, 37–38; popularity of, 39–40; taxation and, 37–38, 46–47 Zeno, 72n46, 227–228 Zoroastrianism, 59–60, 217