A Rabbi asks a priest a question... part 17

Continued from last week…

In 313, when the emperor Constantine issued his Edict of Toleration, he started the ball rolling to make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. The process was complete in 380, when emperor Theodosius issued Edict of Thessalonica. Christianity had been a persecuted sect that claimed to be a variation of the religion of Israel. It was founded by Jesus of Nazareth who claimed to be the Jewish Messiah. His followers said He had risen from the dead and some even claimed that He was God in the flesh. Now this rather strange little sect had managed in just over three centuries to become the official religion of the Romans.  Not only was Christianity the religion of the Romans, but a certain form of Christianity, Catholicism, was the religion of the Romans, and Catholicism came with all the baggage of a God who was three persons, yet one God, and that God had established an organization with bishops, priests and deacons in leadership with a special emphasis on the bishop of Rome, who claimed to be the spiritual and theological heir to saints Peter and Paul.

Things had come a long way since the days of squabbling Israelite sects. The first squabbling followers of Jesus had become the Official Religion of the Romans. They still managed to squabble but now the emperors of Constantinople joined the squabble. The Germanic peoples who overran the western half of the Roman Empire around 425 AD were Christians, just not Catholic Christians. They could not care less about the bishop of Rome and they thought the trinity was nonsense. They were followers of Arius, who believed Jesus was really swell, just not equal to God the Father. When the German barbarians set up their new kingdoms in Spain and France and North Africa, they had a hard time controlling things.

The contentious followers of the Humble Carpenter of Nazareth were not easy to govern. The Germans had invaded the Roman Empire, not to destroy it, but to enjoy it. They liked Roman amenities, like wine and olive oil and white bread and bathing, far better than beer, bacon fat, bugs and barley bread. If the new German aristocracy converted to Catholic Christianity it might make acceptance by the Romans easier, which is precisely what they did. And, when the king was re-baptized Catholic, you had better believe that his court, accepted the religion of the Romans.

In times past, individuals had made a decision that Jesus was the Messiah. Now the decision was made for you, if you were a Roman, or a Visigoth or a Burgundian, or a Frank. In 785 AD Charlemagne, the king of the Franks decreed that, “If any one of the race of the Saxons hereafter concealed among them shall have wished to hide himself unbaptized, and shall have scorned to come to baptism and shall have wished to remain a pagan, let him be punished by death.”

Something similar happened in Russia. Prince Vladimir of Kiev went religion shopping and chose Byzantine Christianity because the liturgy was so beautiful and, thankfully, Christianity did not prohibit the drinking of alcohol of which the Russians were, and still are, quite fond. Vladimir was baptized, married the sister of the Roman Byzantine emperor of Constantinople and upon returning to Kiev, marched the entire population down to the Dnieper River, starting with his 12 sons and the boyars (nobles). The wooden idols of the Russians were either burned or and thrown in the river as was the statue of the main Russian god, Perun. In his enthusiasm for Christianity Vladimir even baptized the gods! The Kievan Russians were now Christians, whether they liked it or not.

What a lucky break for the Romans in their shrinking empire! The Roman state, threatened in the west by the Germans and in the east by those Turks and Arabs who were not Christian (There are still many Turkic and Arabic speakers who have retained their Christianity despite a millennium of persecution) suddenly had a boatload of allies. The sect of Christians first became the Religion of the Romans. Now it was the religion of the Roman state as well the Frankish, Gothic, and eventually of the Russian states, as well as many others. Each of them came to think of themselves as uniquely chosen by God to do His will on earth by slaughtering his enemies who, coincidentally, were the enemies of the state.

To serve the interests of the state was to serve God. To refuse to serve the state was to refuse to serve God, and hence both treason and blasphemy. It was never the tradition of the church to burn heretics and blasphemers. It was most certainly the practice of the state to burn traitors. And so the horrors began. Enemies of the state were executed or expelled, and so Jews continued their wandering, first to Spain, and then, when expelled by the non-Christian Almohads around 1150, they fled to France, then from France to the Rhine valley, then to Poland and Russia, always on the edge of the society.

Oddly, the Jews of Italy were the safest Jews in Christendom until the Second World War and the Jewish community of Rome exists to this day. The popes may have said unfortunate things but usually protected the Jews of Italy, as did Pope Pius XII in the Second World War. (C.f. Rabbi David Dahlen: The Myth of Hitler’s Pope) The Jews had become the un-chosen people, a stateless nation, once chosen, now rejected.

How does one convince ten or twenty national ethnic groupings that they are each God’s new chosen people? Easy! You have a pope! The Papacy managed to hold all these chosen nations and their anointed sovereigns together in a crazy quilt of chosen-ness by cobbling together a super-nation called Christendom. The aggression and arrogance of kings were limited by the threat of excommunication. No one could quite get the upper hand, because “all must kiss the foot of the Roman Pontiff” or so says the Dictatus Papae, published by Pope Gregory VII in 1075. The Dictatus is a list of twenty-seven statements pointing out what sovereigns owed the Pope. In addition to kissing the foot of the pope, the Dictatus said the pope may depose emperors, and that “…he may absolve subjects from their fealty to wicked men.” This meant that the pope could dissolve any government in Christendom and release the subordinate of any emperor, king or nobleman from their obligation of obedience to the local authority.

Amazingly, people took all this seriously. It meant that there was some non-violent international control over the avarice and aggression of the upper classes. The system worked, at least until the Reformation in 1525, when certain German and French theologians decided that the papacy was useless. With no pope to threaten excommunication, the monarchs of Europe were free to impose their superior chosen-ness on their neighbors. Europe dissolved into a century of war in which half the population of certain areas perished. Strangely, Europe lost its religion during the wars of religion. To be Protestant, Catholic, or none of the above was no longer a matter of choice. Your religion was a matter of a political unit that was hell bent on proving its superiority to those a little less chosen than itself.

The mayhem started in 1525 when the German theologians reinvented Christianity and dumped the papacy. The Great Peasants' War or Great Peasants' Revolt devastated Central Europe from 1524 to 1525. The peasants decided that, if the priests and aristocrats didn’t need popes and bishops, they didn’t need the aristocrats and priests. They slaughtered thousands of the German governing class. The governing class who, after all, had the money and the weapons returned the favor by slaughtering perhaps 300,000 of the peasants.

This was just a warm up. A century later, the Thirty Years War, punctuated with bouts of witch burning and cannibalism, killed about a third of the population of large parts of Europe. It started as a religious conflict when the Protestant town council of Prague threw the representatives of the Catholic emperor out a window (This is called the “Defenestration of Prague.” You’ve got to love the name, no?) 

It started out Protestant versus Catholic, but by the end Catholic France was allied with protestant Sweden against Catholic Austria. The war spilled over from Germany into France, Holland, England and the Americas.

When it was all over the nation-state was supreme, Christendom was gone and 11 million people were dead. No pope got his foot kissed by any monarch any more. The worship of God faded into the worship of the state. The state was no longer chosen by God. It was just chosen. European Christianity was completely separated from the idea of conversion and started to die.  And the Jews? They were not part of any chosen state no matter how hard they pretended.

Next week: Just when things couldn’t possibly get worse…

A Rabbi asks a priest a question... part 13

Continued from last week…

For some reason or other Jews felt more and more uncomfortable in the Roman Empire. Judaism flourished east of the Jordan River, back in old Babylon there were great opportunities for Jews. A lot of the locals were monotheist Persian followers of the prophet Zoroaster, people spoke Aramaic, there were fewer of the pesky Christians insisting that you could be a good Israelite and eat pork, but above all, there was a thriving Jewish community. There had been one for at least 600 years. They had their own laws and were led by a descendant of King David called the exilarch, the respected leader of the Jewish community. 

It seems that when the exiles returned to Zion at the beginning of Persian rule in the area, a few stayed behind, quite a few it seems. Just as in 1949 everyone was ready to go back to the Holy Land and fight for the new Jewish state. 

Everyone? 

“Well, I’ll be there next year. Be sure to write. I’ll send money. I just have to wrap a few things up back here in New York.” 

As it is now, so it was then. They had good lives in Babylon. Business was good. It seemed you found fewer and fewer Jews in places like Rome and Athens and Corinth. Some had the idea, “Christian, Jew, what’s the difference?”

In Babylon, a Jew was a Jew, a member of a respected community. The Romans were always worried about the Jews rising up, and then the Romans became Christians. Judaism found itself increasingly under pressure in the Greco-Roman world. There were three choices: Tough it out, join the Christians, or move. Then there was a brief moment of hope! In 361, there was new emperor, Flavius Claudius Iulianus Augustus (331-363) born in Constantine’s new capital and raised as a Christian, the nephew of Constantine the Great. As soon as he was emperor, he renounced Christianity with all its ridiculous theological squabbles and restored the old Roman religion dressed up in Greek philosophy. He also decided that it would be useful to rebuild the Jewish temple in Jerusalem in order to refute the claim that the Church was a superior spiritual temple, and that God had rejected the old temple and its adherents. The proposal was met with great enthusiasm by the Jews. It didn’t work out so well. The whole thing was a mess. It sounds like something from a low budget action film:

“He [Julian the Apostate] planned at vast cost to restore the once splendid Temple at Jerusalem, which after many mortal combats during the siege by Vespasian and later by Titus had barely been stormed. He had entrusted the speedy performance of this work to Alypius of Antioch... But though this Alypius pushed the work on with vigor, aided by the governor of the province, terrible balls of fire kept bursting forth near the foundations of the Temple and made the place inaccessible to the workmen, some of whom were burned to death; and since in this way the element persistently repelled them, the enterprise halted.” (Ammianus Marcellinus (330-395) Res Gestae Book 13) Goodness Gracious! Great Balls of Fire!

Note that Ammianus was a contemporary. There were a lot of contemporary authors who commented on the attempt to rebuild the temple and they add wind and storm and earthquake to the script. My favorite is St. Gregory Nazianzen in his “Second Invective against Julian” they just don’t write like that anymore. Julian died fighting the Persians after just three years on the throne.  Pierced by a spear, it is rumored his dying words were “Thou hast conquered, pale Galilean.”  He probably just said “Uhhhhh…”  But the “pale Galilean” stuff makes good copy. The Galilean had conquered and the Jews had egg on their face.  More restrictions were placed on the Jews and more of them gave up and accepted baptism. The center of Jewish life was clearly now on the east side of the Jordan in Babylon where the sages were busy compiling the Babylonian Talmud and codifying a Jewish way of life.

In 380, the emperor Theodosius issued the Edict of Thessalonica, which declared Nicene Trinitarian Christianity to be the legal imperial religion. He also ended state support for the traditional Roman religious cult, in effect making Roman paganism, illegal. He also had no great love for the Jews who remained in the west. In 404, Jews were barred from most governmental jobs. In 418, they were completely excluded for civil service and the military positions. In 425, they were banned from all government jobs, except of course from one: tax collector. If you are going to hate someone, might as well be a Jew and not a Roman. Still Judaism itself was never made illegal. Jew’s in the west made another mistake 300 years later.

The Romans and the Persians had never had an easy time of it and a war with the Persian or their kinsmen the Parthians had simmered since the times of Julius Caesar. This was one of the reasons that the Roman state had issues with the Judeans and their Jewish descendants. The Jews got along quite well with the Persians. The Persians, after all, had been the ones who freed them from Babylonian captivity in the old days and allowed them to rebuild the temple centuries before the birth of Jesus. There was always a chance they might do it once again. The Sassanid Persian dynasty had been good to the Jews. The Babylonian Talmud was composed between the third and sixth centuries in Sassanid Persia and the great Jewish centers in Sura and Pumbedita were the home of the best Jewish scholarship. War broke out once again between the Romans and the Persians in 602 and in 613, the Persian army captured Damascus with the help of Jews. They took Jerusalem in 614, burned Constantine’s magnificent Church of the Holy Sepulcher and captured the relics of the True Cross. The city was back in Jewish hands after five centuries of exile. Hopes were high, but in 622 the Emperor Heraclius launched a counter offensive and in 629 Heraclius recaptured Jerusalem, repaired the church of the Holy Sepulcher and restored the True Cross to Jerusalem in a majestic ceremony. The hopes of the Jews lay in Babylon, not in the west. The Persians and Romans were bankrupt and exhausted by the wars.

No one noticed a storm blowing up from the Arabian Desert, the storm called Mohammed.

Next week: meanwhile in the west.