III

The Formation of Christianity

1. THE GOSPELS AS HISTORICAL SOURCE

It was at about this time that Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized in the Jordan by John. No sooner had he come up out of the water than he saw the heavens torn apart and the spirit, like a dove, descending on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; my favor rests on you.” Immediately afterward the Spirit drove him out into the wilderness and he remained there for forty days, and was tempted by Satan. He was with the wild beasts, and the angels looked after him. After John had been arrested, Jesus went into Galilee. There he proclaimed the Good News from God. “The time has come,” he said, “and the kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent, and believe the Good News.”

                                                                                                          Mark 1: 9–15.

             The fundamentals of the story of Christian origins as told by Christians themselves will no doubt be familiar to most of my readers. Jesus, the Son of God and himself God, united with God the Father in substance, but with his own independent consciousness, was born as a fully human being of the virgin Mary through the Holy Spirit. In a brief ministry of no more than three years around 30 ce, he taught his Jewish disciples the true religion, performed miracles, and was crucified by the Romans as a potential insurrectionary, at the behest of Jewish leaders hostile to his claim to be the Son of God. He rose from the dead bodily, leaving an empty tomb, and appeared to his disciples for a period of time, after which he ascended to heaven to prepare his second coming, which would mark the end of this world and the beginning of the Kingdom of God. Those who have faith in Jesus as the Son of God will be resurrected themselves at the end of things, and share an eternal life in the Kingdom of God. They are forgiven their sins before God through Christ’s sacrifice on the cross in atonement for those sins. Those who do not accept Christ are doomed to an eternity in Hell, as their sins deserve, for they have no way to atone for their sins on their own. This Jesus was the promised Messiah of the Jews, but the Jews rejected him, and so his word was spread to the Gentiles.

             For a historian, of course, all this must be regarded skeptically, at least in the beginning, just as claims of supernatural origins in any religion would be. We must try to determine what the facts of Jesus’s life really were, so far as we can from the evidence available, and attempt to work out the course of development of the religious doctrines that surround his career. This must be done, moreover, from a secular point of view, without accepting the religious doctrines of Christianity as background information in the assessment of the evidence. It may turn out that the evidence supports these religious doctrines, some of them at least, and so the initial secularism might be superseded, but their acceptance must be based on the evidence, assessed from an initially naturalistic point of view, if we are to do honest history. One might despair of the task, of course, and retreat to giving an account of the beliefs of Christians at the point where we first have enough evidence to say reliably what they were, without comment on the sources or accuracy of those beliefs, but, as a matter of fact, with a willingness to speculate plausibly on some points, a reasonably probable account of Jesus’s life can be constructed, and certainty increases quickly as we leave the life of its founder and enter on the religion’s history.

             Our earliest sources for the beginnings of Christianity, the life of Jesus and the period of initial doctrinal formation in the half century following his death, are the letters of Paul. The three Synoptic Gospels, that is, Mark, Matthew, and Luke, are also generally regarded as early, though they are written after Paul’s letters, and there is some reason to place them into the second century. The Fourth Gospel, John, is generally regarded as a second-century work. There are reasons to take care in using them. The Gospels are lives of Jesus written to propagate the new Faith, and composed in Greek, and so not among those Jews who had known Jesus personally. Moreover, they were written, at the earliest, during and after the first Jewish revolt from the Romans in 66–73 ce, which is to say, some thirty-five years, or perhaps a good many more, after the events, and they take an urgent interest in dissociating Christianity from any political program. The earlier, Synoptic Gospels display little knowledge of the details of religious life in Israel, or even of the place’s geography, and, though John is better informed on this score, it is also considerably later. All the Gospels speak of Jewish religious life in terms of the Synagogue and the Pharisees, terms more appropriate to the Diaspora, and the period after the First Revolt, than to the time of Jesus in Israel proper.

             A second difficulty is the character of the writing. With the best will in the world, the historian has to admit that much in the Gospels is fabricated. This would not have been seen as invalidating them in the Ancient world. Historians in Rome aimed above all at a lively, circumstantial account that could have been the way it was, given what we know of human beings. The very word evidentia among them means, not our ‘evidence,’ that is, observable data making the accounts they give probably true, but rather ‘lively verisimilitude.’ To write with evidence is to transport the reader back to the events through one’s writing. History was not a science. Everyone knew that, and so to write something like the truth, to borrow a phrase from the Timaeus, was sufficient. This means that the details of Roman history can never be trusted. They are more often than not made up for effect. Moreover, it means that an incomplete story will be filled in by the writer in a plausible way, explanations of unexplained events provided, and so on. Given this manner of writing, careful research of the sort we prefer was not generally done. Once a plausible and interesting tale had been evolved, and the most obvious sources tapped, a historian was likely to pass on to other concerns. His job was finished. The Gospels, then, given the milieu in which they were written, most especially Luke and Acts, the most cultured and educated of the Gospels, were probably written as plausible stories, fitting what we know, with invented details as needed to make them readable and complete the account. The fact that they were written to spread a religious message and address certain theological questions, as we shall see, and to show that the scriptures were fulfilled in Jesus’s life, only exacerbates the problem. It is not that the Gospel writers employed deliberate imposture. There would have been no need. They told a story which they were sure was something like the truth, and not misleading on any important spiritual point, and were satisfied with that. It is just that, if that is one’s aim, one writes terribly unreliable history.

             But with all this, as historical sources the Gospels are far from worthless. They depend on accounts, oral and written, handed down from the earliest missionaries, and were composed, probably, no more than fifty years after the events they report, and though the missionaries’ words might have been modified, deliberately or unconsciously, to conform to later thinking, they would not have been altered without cause. Indeed, the Synoptic Gospels, especially Mark, are faithful enough to their sources to reveal an embarrassing reality behind the emerging Gentile Christian tradition about the past. It seems pretty clear that Mark, at least, is interested in making the account of Jesus’s life accurate, even if it reports events selectively within a narrative structure adapted to its own dramatic purposes.

             Mark is the earliest Gospel. The other Synoptics, Matthew and Luke, incorporate it and its outline of Jesus’s ministry, though they revise a number of its stories, making them less disconcerting to later Christians. Coming probably from the midst of the First Jewish Revolt, Mark lives with disappointment, persecution, death, and apparent abandonment by God. It ends starkly with the death of Jesus and the empty tomb, indicating that the plan, though it clearly was proceeding, for the Lord had risen, had not yet come to completion, and a great deal more suffering must be endured in ignorance of the details of God’s plan, and in the absence of God, before it does. Throughout it emphasizes the need to have faith in what seems impossible, and endure, for God is faithful, whatever the appearance, and can do all things. Jesus was probably executed by the Romans for sedition, but Mark focuses on the conflict between Christians and the Jews (perhaps, for the author himself, other Jews), telling a story of a battle in the war between Satan, who lies behind all the actions of the Jewish establishment against Jesus, and God, a battle in which Satan wins an apparent victory reversed by Jesus’s resurrection. Christians, Mark makes it clear, are not rebels against Rome, but neither are they unfaithful to the Jewish God. The rebels are mistaken, and it is not in the warfare with external enemies that the victory must be won, for they are only God’s instruments to punish the unfaithful, but in that against Satan’s internal subversion, whether of the Jewish nation or one’s own personality.

             Central to Mark is the notion that Jesus kept his real mission secret, so that the Jews, or most of them, at least, would reject his deliberately cryptic message. The real meaning of the message became clear, of course, only after Jesus’s death. But why keep the Jews in the dark? Perhaps it is because the end of the present world order will come when the Jews accept the Kingdom, and some way must be found to put off their acceptance to give the Gentiles a chance to come in. This might also explain why the second coming is delayed. Thus we explain the Jews’ reluctance to accept Jesus, their Messiah, and perhaps also the divergence of later conceptions of Jesus’s mission from earlier notions. Did Jesus really keep his mission and teachings secret? Perhaps Jesus’s secret was that he was to suffer and die, rather than immediately leading God’s armies against the Romans, though no doubt his suffering only prepared the way for his victorious return by making him worthy of the honor. He may well have concealed his expectations since they were unlikely to be understood or believed by most Jews, at least until he had accomplished the deed and returned. This is all rooted in Second Isaiah, in which the disbelief of the people in God’s chosen way of salvation is a recurrent theme. Jesus apparently identified himself with the Suffering Servant of Second Isaiah. Gnostics would later hold that the secret was kept from the demons that rule this world, and that things were put in the form of parables so that only the Spiritual could understand them. Of course, it may be that there was no secret at all, and later Christians introduced the notion to defend from the evidence of the tradition views of Jesus which had evolved beyond anything that he himself ever said or intended, but it seems most probable that, though Christians used the ‘secret’ in this way, they depended on some evidence in the tradition that Jesus really did have some secret or other.

             Matthew is the most Jewish of the gospels, careful about the prophecies and endorsing the Law, but also stressing, more than the other Gospels, the crimes of the Jews. Probably Jewish Christians in the Diaspora formed a significant part of its audience, and so we find a respect for Jewish roots joined to an insistence that it was not the Jewish nation itself, but the corrupt, mainstream Jewish establishment, that is, the Pharisees and Saducees, the Rabbinic establishment that came to rule Jewish life after the failure of the revolt in the 60's, that was responsible for the breach between orthodox Judaism and Christianity. The Gospel relies almost entirely on Mark for its narrative material, but is fairly free in introducing revisions, sometimes because the point of Mark’s story is not one the author can credit. For instance, the story of Jesus’s tolerance of other prophets when he says “he that is not against us is with us” is reconstructed to omit the offending sentiment, which is then flatly contradicted later. In general, Matthew seems uncomfortable with the intensely human Jesus in Mark, and omits phrases indicating too much emotion, or a need to seek information. (This tendency persists in Luke, and is much intensified in John, which removes any trace of vulnerability from Jesus, depicting him as God, absolutely calm and in perfect, omniscient control of every situation.) The Gospel also softens or removes the not infrequent criticisms by Jesus of his disciples for their lack of comprehension and prideful disputes among themselves, and tends to improve the miracles where it can.

             Luke, in contrast to Matthew, is directed exclusively to Gentiles, and cultured Gentiles at that, and contains much not found in the other Synoptic Gospels. It is really only the first half of a two part work, the second half being Acts, emphasizing missionary activity with a universalistic overtone, and denying Jesus’s exclusive concern with the Jewish nation. Luke attributes much of Jewish hostility to Jesus to the universality of his message, extending salvation to the Gentiles, and he suggests that this salvation is achieved with the coming of Jesus, not awaited as an event to come some time after Jesus’s death. His own viewpoint is obscured, however, by the respect with which he treats Mark, not daring to add his universalistic touches to the Marcan material itself. Nonetheless, he trims that material, particularly in the account of the events leading up to the crucifixion, omitting the references to the future destruction of the temple, and abbreviating the story of the cleansing of the temple to leave out Jesus’s violent actions. He wants to soften the impression that Jesus precipitated his own crucifixion by confronting the priests, and to emphasize that Jesus was crucified because he claimed to be the Messiah, but not a Messiah of the sort the Jews expected.

             John can be dated to the beginning of the second century, and is generally thought to be later than the other Gospels. Its account of Jesus’s life is quite at variance with that of the Synoptics, making the center of his activity Jerusalem instead of Galilee and extending the bare year of ministry in Mark into three years. It is generally supposed that John is not of much use in reconstructing the actual career of Jesus. Indeed, John not only writes some time after the events, and for a Gentile audience, he reworks Jesus’s sayings, and the events of his life, in terms of later practices such as the Eucharist, making them fit his own view of what Jesus must have meant and done. Moreover, his Jesus is an entirely supernatural figure, always in complete control, calculating every action for the delivery of his message. But embedded in this work there may be the report of an eye witness, perhaps even one of Jesus’s disciples, which the Synoptic Gospels do not know. Moreover, John is well informed about the customs of the Jews and the details of geography of Jerusalem and Galilee, and his Greek is that of a Greek-speaking Jew. So it may be well to pay some attention to the Gospel of John in reconstructing the events of Jesus’s life.

             We have almost no early material critical of the Christian movement, and very little from branches of the early movement whose views were later repudiated, for the obvious reason that later Christians, even if they did not destroy such materials deliberately, certainly had no reason to preserve them. A text that ceased to be copied generally ceased to exist in only a few hundred years as the old copies were destroyed, or simply crumbled into dust. So, lacking the control of differing viewpoints, we have to be especially alert to bias and distortion in the Christian tradition.

2. JESUS’S EARLY LIFE

…and so it was that John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.