A Rabbi asks a priest a question... part 12

Continued from last week...

Christians like to think that the early days of the Church were a time of glorious unity and holiness, when there was one united Church of simple folk humbly worshipping the Lord with simple piety, no liturgy, no theology and all this while wearing togas and sandals and hiding out in catacombs. Don’t believe it for a minute. The first Christians were indisputably Jewish, or better put, Israelite as I have been insisting. Jews are great sticklers for theological and liturgical precision. Have you ever been to a Passover meal? Or argued with a rabbi? A good Passover meal takes about four hours, so does a good argument with a rabbi.

The first Christians were quick to adapt temple and synagogue ritual to their own beliefs in the resurrection of Jesus and his teachings.  The rituals of the temple and synagogue involved scripture reading, immersions, hand washing, priestly vestments, bread, wine, water, oil, sacrifices, lamp lighting and music The rituals of Christianity soon involved scripture reading, immersions, handwashing, priestly vestments, bread, wine, water, oil, sacrifices, lamp lighting and music.

There is a fascinating recording called The Sacred Bridge in which there is a comparison of the Sephardic Jewish melody for Psalm114, “When Israel Went Out from Egypt” with the Gregorian chant melody. The melodies are not similar. They are exactly the same. It is thought that the Psalm tones and style of music of the temple were adopted whole cloth by the early Church. The psalms were the hymns of the Church as well as of the temple and synagogue. The first Christians didn’t say, “Wait just a minute! We are Christians now and should be singing, “The Old Rugged Cross” or “How Great Thou Art!’” and not this old temple stuff!”  We kept singing the songs we knew because they spoke to us of the Messiah, the Christ.

In the Catholic Church we still sing them. We also inherited the love of a good religious argument from our Israelite forbears. Just as there were a number of sects in first century Judaism, so too there were a number of sects in the early Church. There were the Ebionites, a kind of Jewish version of Christianity that believed Jesus was the Messiah, but they weren’t so comfortable with the idea that he was the Son of God. As more Greeks and other non-Israelites entered the church all the philosophical fine points of the Greeks created chaos. There were Nicolaitans, Cerinthians, Marcions, the Montanists, the Carpocratians, to name but a few.

Then there was the “great church” or the “church of the bishops.” This largest and most wide distribution of the Christian sects taught that Jesus had formed a structured missionary organization led by elder/supervisors. (The word supervisor in Greek is “episkopos” whence comes our word in English, “bishop.”) The church conferred this episcopal authority by a “smicha,” a laying on hands, just the way the elders of Israel and the rabbis had done since the times of Moses.  By the year 100, this sect of Christians was called the “Universal Church,” that is, “Catholic” (in Greek) and by the year 180AD, it was clear that this sect of Christians looked to the heir of St. Peter, bishop of Rome as its doctrinal authority. (c.f. Against Heresies, Book III, Chapter 3) After almost three centuries of theological squabbling with these smaller sects, the Catholic Church developed a completely new headache called Arianism. In the year 311 AD, give or take, an Egyptian presbyter taught that Jesus was certainly the Son of God, but only by adoption. The Father had created Jesus in time before anything else and then adopted him. The Father was thus superior to the Son. This made the Trinity a nice tidy chain of command, much like the Greek idea of the demiurges, one being proceeding from another and much like a Roman army. 

In 313 AD, Constantine had legalized the Christians. He wanted to promote the religion, but which flavor of Christianity to promote? He liked Arianism. It was so tidy and military. He assembled as many bishops as he could get a hold of in the town of Nicaea across the Bosporus from his new capitol Constantinople. The bishops dealt with thorny problems like the ordination of eunuchs, the proper date for Easter and also that problem with Arius. The bishops told Constantine that, “No, we have always believed in a co-equal, co-eternal Trinity, and Arius is nuts.” Well, most of the bishops said that. That should have settled the matter, but it went on to tear the Church and the body politic up for the next two or three hundred years. At least Constantine and his successors had a consistent Catholic creed, the Nicene Creed with which they could figure out who was in and who was out.

Over the next century the position of the state church hardened like concrete and within a very short time the ancient Roman cult was illegal. The old Roman religion was pretty much dead anyway. Constantius, son of Constantine, followed his father Constantine on the throne. He was never quite sure if was an Arian or Catholic, but seems mostly to have been a Catholic. He was certainly no friend of the Jews. Constantius turned up the pressure on the Jews. He and his brothers when they still shared the throne, made a law limiting the ownership of slaves by Jews and forbidding marriage between Jews and Christian women. Presumably, Christian men could still marry Jewish women, who would, of course, be expected to convert. Another law which Constantius issued as sole emperor (his brothers having all mysteriously died), decreed that a person who had converted from Christianity to Judaism would have all of his property confiscated by the government. To be fair, this may have been about business. It may have been an attempt to limit the people who were available to work with Jews whose businesses were in conflict with the state in an increasingly planned economy.

Thus, life in the Roman/Christian (Byzantine) empire got a little bit worse year after year after year... After battles with barbarians, relatives, and other usurpers, he died without a clear heir, having only one posthumous daughter, Flavia. So the nephew, Flavius Claudius Iulianus Augustus, was the only possible choice for emperor. He is known to the Jews as Julian the Hellene. He is known to Christians as Julian the Apostate.

Next week: Sometime you eat the bear. Sometimes the bear eats you. Jews make a couple unfortunate decisions.

A rabbi asks a priest a question... part 8

Continued from last week…

There were three uprisings by Israel against the Romans. The first resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem. In 70 AD, the second, the Kitos uprising in 115 AD which ended in the death of hundreds of thousands and more in Alexandria, Cyprus and the Holy land and then in 132AD the third Jewish war, the re bar Kochba revolt which ended in the complete destruction of Jerusalem, the definitive end of the temple sacrifice and the building of a Roman city on the ruins of Jerusalem to which Jews were forbidden entrance.  It was probably at this period that a steady flow of Israelites, or as we would call them, Jews, accepted the messiahship of Jesus of Nazareth. The Pharisees continued to reject the possibility that Jesus might be the messiah, but things were not going very well for Israel. The idea that the rejection of Jesus had been the cause of the disaster, seems to have taken root among the Nazarenes now universally called Christians. 

Some of these first and second century Christian came from non-Israelite nation, but many, perhaps most for the first century were ethnically and genetically Judean and Israelite. Take for instance, Melito of Sardis, a bishop of the Greek speaking city, located in present day Turkey, just west of Ephesus. Melito was possibly born around 100AD and died around 180.  He was ethnically Jewish, but probably grew up in that period when Christianity and Israel were not thought of as completely opposed to each other. The stresses of the destruction of the temple and the three Jewish wars put an end to the less hostile relationship. Melito, someone we would call a Jewish Christian, could seem remarkably anti-Semitic. Here is an excerpt from his Sermon on Easter:

 “Why was it like this, O Israel? You did not tremble for the Lord. You did not fear for the Lord. You did not lament for the Lord, yet you lamented for your firstborn. You did not tear your garments at the crucifixion of the Lord, yet you tore your garments for your own who were murdered. You forsook the Lord; you were not found by him. You dashed the Lord to the ground; you, too, were dashed to the ground, and lie quite dead.”

Pretty strong stuff!  It is clear that there was an increasing hostility between the Nazarenes and the rabbinic Pharisees. It is now that conclusively we can begin to talk about Jews and Christians. They are no longer part of the same household.

Take for instance, Marcion of Sinope (85-160 AD). He was a bishop in Pontus, now a region of northern Turkey. He taught that the God of the Hebrew Scriptures was not the God of the New Testament. Jesus came to defeat the evil Hebrew God. Around 144, Marcion developed a canon of scripture that excluded the Old Testament and some of the New Testament. He would not be the last to do so. The other bishops denounced Marcion, so he started his own church. It is thought that Marcion’s rejection of the Hebrew Scriptures is a major cause of the development of the Christian canon that emphatically includes the Hebrew Scriptures. Melito criticized his own. Marcion was a true anti- Semite. 

Romans believed that a religion of antiquity should be respected. Novel superstitions were not to be tolerated. They defined an ancient religion as one that existed before the founding of the city of Rome in 753 BC.  By that definition, the religion of Israel was a venerable and tolerated religion, no matter how difficult its adherents had been for the Roman Empire. In most of the empire the community of Israel produced good citizens who caused no trouble. Christianity was a different matter altogether.

Christianity was something new and something troubling. Israel pretty much kept to itself and didn’t publicly condemn the religious system of the Greco Roman world. Christians however loved to tell the Romans that they were all going to hell and that the world would end in fire. When the city of Rome had burned in 64 AD, the Emperor Nero found it convenient to blame this new sect for the tragedy. The Roman historian Tacitus writes the following his book the Annals of the History of Rome:

 “Therefore, to stop the rumor (that he had set Rome on fire), he (Emperor Nero) falsely charged with guilt, and punished with the most fearful tortures, the persons commonly called Christians, who were (generally) hated for their enormities. Christus, the founder of that name, was put to death as a criminal by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea, in the reign of Tiberius, but the pernicious superstition - repressed for a time, broke out yet again, not only through Judea, - where the mischief originated, but through the city of Rome also…. Accordingly first those were arrested who confessed they were Christians; next on their information, a vast multitude was convicted, not so much on the charge of burning the city, as of ‘hating the human race.’  In their very deaths they were made the subjects of sport: for they were covered with the hides of wild beasts, and worried to death by dogs, or nailed to crosses, or set fire to, and when the day waned, burned to serve for the evening lights.”

Christians were now a proscribed sect in the empire. They insisted that they were part of the ancient religion of Israel, and therefore legally entitled to the rights conceded to Israel, which included freedom from emperor worship and from military service.  The Romans were smart enough to know that they would never get the Hebrews to worship a mere human being even if he were the divine emperor of Rome and, still worse, they would not, fight or even carry a pack on Sabbath, so they were wisely exempted from any military service.  It was just the Christians and the Jews left, and now the Romans were hell-bent on destroying this religion of Christ which both the exiled Judeans and the Romans agree was a novel superstation. 

So the Pharisees were the last group left standing after the chaos in the Holy Land had swept away the temple, the priestly party of the Sadducees, the Essenes and the Zealots who had started the wars. No matter what the Christians said, Rabbinic Phariseeism was legally the only form of the religion of Israel. To be an Israelite, was to be a Jew was to be a Rabbinic Pharisee, and so it remained until our times.

Next week: More history, more weeping