A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (13 page)

But Christianity had no special reason to prosper as one Jewish sect among many. It took Saul of Tarsus, a Greek-speaking convert from Phariseeism, who lived outside Palestine and worked as a travelling artisan, a tentmaker, to grasp that there was an enormous audience for new religious ideas in the cities of the empire. He consciously set out to reach people half-attracted to Judaism but put off by the stringency of its rules. On conversion, he changed his name from the Hebrew ‘Saul’ to the Roman name ‘Paul’. In the face of resistance from ‘Judaic Christians’ based in Jerusalem, he insisted the new religion had no need of the old circumcision and dietary rules, while an increased emphasis on the resurrection of the dead meant that salvation no longer depended on the victory of the defeated Jews of Jerusalem.

Finally, Christianity incorporated emotive elements from other religious cults which were flourishing at the time. The notion of the redemption of the world by the death and rebirth of a god was already found in many popular religions, such as the Adonis, Osiris and other fertility cults (the rebirth of a dead and buried god signified the onset of spring just as Easter came to symbolise it for Christians). The story of the virgin birth found in the gospels of Luke and Matthew (which contradicts Matthew’s claim to trace Jesus’s ancestry back through Joseph, his father, to the Jewish king David) brought to Christianity an element from the popular Egyptian mystery cult of Osiris, who was supposed to have been born of a virgin cow. The image of the ‘Holy Mary’ bears remarkable similarity to the role played by the goddess Isis in the Egyptian religion, addressed as ‘most holy and everlasting redeemer of the human race…mother of our tribulations’.
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It does not require much rewriting to make this into a Christian prayer to ‘the mother of God’.

The early Christians, then, took the elements which were already leading Judaism to reap converts, dropped the strict rules which deterred people and added popular motifs from the mystery religions. It was a winning combination. This does not at all mean that the early Christians were cold, calculating manipulators of emotive symbols they did not believe in. Far from it. They were driven to the religious life by greater than usual sensitivity to the insecurities and oppression of life in the empire’s cities. Precisely for this reason they could sense the elements in other religions which would synthesise with their residual Judaism to give some meaning to the anguish of those around them. The New Testament credits the apostles with ‘speaking with tongues’—in ecstatic speeches which gave expression to their innermost feelings. It was in precisely such a state that they were most likely to synthesise a new religious vision out of elements from older ones.

Who was the audience for the new religion? It was not, in the main, made up of the poorest people in the empire, the mass of agricultural slaves, since early Christianity (unlike the Essenes) did not oppose slavery on principle. Saint Paul could write that a slave should stay with his master, even if they were ‘brothers in Christ’. It was not made up of the peasantry, either, for religion spread outside Palestine through the towns—certainly that is what the Acts of the Apostles tells us.

The audience seems to have been the mass of middling town dwellers. This was a layer well below the ruling class families who made up only abut 0.2 percent of the population.
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The ancient city, like many present-day Third World cities, contained a vast mass of small traders, craftspeople, petty clerks and minor officials—a broad layer merging into the lumpenproletariat of beggars, prostitutes and professional thieves at the bottom and into the very thin stratum of rich merchants and higher officials at the top. This whole layer would have felt oppressed to a greater or lesser degree by the empire, but would usually have felt too weak to challenge it openly. Christianity offered a message of redemption, of a new world to be brought from on high, that did not involve such an open challenge. At the same time it preached that even if its message did lead to individual suffering—martyrdom—this would speed up salvation.

The poorer artisans and tradespeople could certainly be attracted to such a message—especially since, like the Jewish synagogue, it brought them into a social milieu which could help them cope with some of the material uncertainty of this world without necessarily having to wait for the next. There were also some better off people who were attracted. One study identifies ‘40 persons’ sponsoring ‘Paul’s activities’, ‘all persons of substance, members of a cultivated elite’.
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Such people could finance the preaching of the apostle and provide the early Christian groups with meeting places in their houses.
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Paul went out of his way to woo them: ‘It is significant that Paul, although he knew the majority of his converts came from among the poor, personally baptised only people from the higher strata’.
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Christianity may have been a religion which appealed mainly to the poor, but from very early on it tried to combine this with an appeal to those who were richer. As time went on, it even attracted some people of real power and wealth who felt discriminated against by the senatorial elite—wealthy traders, independent women of wealth, freedmen (ex-slaves and children of slaves) who had prospered, and officials in the emperor’s own household who came from lowly backgrounds.
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The New Testament was compiled in the 2nd and 3rd centuries from earlier writings which expressed the changing beliefs of Christianity as the sect expanded. This explains the contradictions to be found on virtually every page. Yet these contradictions helped it to appeal across class lines. There was the sense of revolutionary urgency, of imminent transformation, that came from the experience of the Jewish rebels in Palestine before the destruction of Jerusalem. The most bitter resentment could find an outlet in the vision of the apocalypse, which would witness the destruction of the ‘whore of Babylon’ (easily understood to mean Rome) and the reign of the ‘saints’, with the high and mighty pulled down and the poor and humble ruling in their place. Yet by projecting the transformation into the future and into a different, eternal realm, the revolutionary message was diluted sufficiently to appeal to those whose bitterness was combined with a strong fear of real revolution. The trader or workshop owner with a couple of slaves had nothing to fear from a message which preached freedom in the brotherhood of Christ rather than in material terms. The rich merchant could be reassured that the ‘eye of the needle’ was a gate in Jerusalem which a camel might just find it possible to get through.
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The well to do widow or independent wife of a rich Roman could be attracted by biblical passages in which Paul insists women and men are ‘one’ in the sight of God, while the Christian husband could be reassured that in this world his wife had to service him, ‘That the head of every woman is man’.
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The Christian message provided consolation for the poor. It provided a sense of their own worth to those of the better off who were despised for their humble origins. And it provided a way in which the minority of the rich who were revolted by the world around them could discharge their guilt while keeping their wealth.

The very growth of what was initially a small sect brought about more growth. Like Judaism, Christianity provided a network of contacts for any artisan or trader visiting a city. Its weekly gatherings provided the poor with a sense of prestige from mixing with those wealthier than them, and the wealthier with a chance to exchange business news with each other. Growing within the framework of the trade routes and administrative centres which held the Roman Empire together, over time it became the shadow of that empire—except that through the trade routes it could spread to regions which the empire rarely or never touched (Armenia, Persian Mesopotamia, Ethiopia, south Arabia, even southern India).

The growth of the religion was accompanied by its bureaucratisation. The first apostles preached without anyone exercising control over what they said, and relied upon the willingness of local supporters to provide them with food and lodging as they went from city to city. But as the number of preachers and supporters grew, collecting funds and administering the group became a major preoccupation in each city. So too did the danger of ‘false prophets’ who abused people’s hospitality.

The solution for the local groups was to centralise fundraising and administration in the hands of ‘deacons’ who were overseen by ‘presbyters’ and bishops. ‘Within two generations’, writes Chadwick in his history of the church, a hierarchical organisation had grown up with ‘bishops, presbyters and deacons at the top’ rather than apostles and prophets.
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At first, election of the bishops was in the hands of ordinary Christians. But it was not long before the preachers alone had a say. At the same time meetings of bishops began to determine what was correct doctrine and who was entitled to preach it.

This process was hastened by a great controversy over Christian doctrine—the question of ‘Gnosticism’. It arose from an issue of interpretation which must seem obscure to anyone without religious belief—where evil came from. But it had profound practical consequences. Christian theology held that there was only one god, who had created everything. This meant he must have created evil as well as good—a disturbing conclusion for believers who always bracketed ‘God’ and ‘good’ together. The response of orthodox Christianity has usually been to try and dilute the problem by placing lots of intermediaries between God and evildoing (fallen angels, demons, disobedient humanity). When this does not carry conviction, it declares that the very fact God knows the answer to this problem while we do not shows how much greater is his understanding than ours.

There was, however, a more logical answer. This was to say that there was a continual struggle in the universe between two principles, one of good and one of evil. This was the answer posed, at least partially, by the Gnostics. Spirit, they said was good, the material world and the human body were evil. Christians could only be pure if they freed their souls of bodily concerns. This was not a completely original conclusion—it is implied by many passages in the New Testament. But it had implications which were bound to worry the church authorities. If the mind alone was pure, then the only good Christians were those who turned their backs on the material world—ascetics who starved themselves and lived in rags. This was hardly the recipe for winning the whole of humanity to the gospel, or for raising funds from rich people for the local church. Worse, however, some Gnostics came to an even more radical conclusion. If the mind was pure, then it did not matter what the body did, since anything it did was impure. Their slogan became ‘to the good, everything is good’. It permitted them to live as luxuriously as they wanted, to despoil the goods of others (especially the rich) and, most horrifying of all to the church elders, to engage in free love.

The struggle over the issue raged through the Christian congregations for decades and was only resolved by the bishops asserting that they alone, as successors to the apostles, could pronounce on issues of doctrine.
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The argument erupted again in the 3rd century when a Syrian, Mani, began to build a religion (‘Manicheism’) from elements of Gnostic Christianity, Buddhism and Persian Zoroastrianism. For a time it even won over Augustine of Hippo, later the dominant figure in mainstream Christian thought.

In the struggle against such ‘heresies’ the church bureaucracy moved on from controlling administration to controlling the doctrine which the organised churches were allowed to follow. In doing so, it made it more difficult for contradictions in the Bible to provide a focus for rebellious sentiments which might upset wealthy elements aligned with Christianity.

If Christianity was the slightly dissident shadow of the Roman Empire, the church hierarchy was turning into a shadow bureaucracy—a second empire-wide administrative structure standing alongside the first. But it was a shadow bureaucracy which could provide services to the population of the cities that the empire could not. Its ‘intense sense of religious community’ enabled it to remain moored in every town through the crisis of the late 3rd century.
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‘During public emergencies such as plague or rioting, the Christian clergy were shown to be the only unified group in the town able to look after the burial of the dead and to organise food supplies…To be a Christian in 250 brought more protection from one’s fellows than to be a Roman citizen’.
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By this time there were only two things which could disrupt the growth of the church’s following and influence—repression from the state or dissent from within.

Apologists for Christianity always make much of its survival in the face of persecution and repression. Martyrs who died for their faith are saints as much as those who supposedly worked miracles. But the repression of the church in its early years was intermittent. The few supposed Roman Christians of the time suffered under Nero as scapegoats for the burning of Rome. But that wave of repression did not outlast his own early demise. From time to time other Christians were imprisoned or even faced execution at the hands of hostile provincial governors, usually for refusing to take part in imperial cults. But much of the time the imperial authorities tolerated the parallel organisation that was growing beneath them, with 3rd century emperors like Alexander Severus and Philip the Arab even favourable to the church.

However, by the late 3rd century the church had attained a degree of influence which meant it could no longer be ignored. The emperors had the choice of destroying the parallel organisation or cooperating with it. Maximus felt it was time to clamp down on a network of influence that reached right into the imperial bureaucracy. Diocletian, emperor after 284, went further. He was persuaded that Christianity threatened the unity of the armed forces and responded by knocking down the cathedral opposite his imperial palace in Nicodemia, issuing an edict for the destruction of all churches, ordering the arrest of all clergy and threatening the death penalty to anyone who would not sacrifice to the gods. There was a wave of persecution in the eastern empire.