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.

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.