Download PDF | (Oxford History of the Christian Church) Henry Chadwick - The Church in Ancient Society_ From Galilee to Gregory the Great -Oxford University Press, USA (2002).
737 Pages
INTRODUCTION
During the first six hundred years of the Christian Church’s existence many changes occurred. Of these the most dramatic and remarkable was the shift from being a persecuted sect which, in order to fulfil its destiny as a universal faith not tied to a particular race, had to sever the umbilical cord to Judaism, and so to capture society and the Roman empire. From embodying a counter-culture to being seen as a mainly (not invariably) conservative social force was an extraordinary step. The number of martyrs did not need to be very large for their ‘witness’ to be public and ‘newsworthy’. Remarkably soon the Church had recruits in high society, and as early as the middle of the second century was dreaming of a day when the emperor himself would be converted. The Christians changed the dominant form of religion in the Roman empire and thereby imprinted the most important difference between ancient and medieval society. Not that the Christians had a wholly different culture from that of ‘antiquity’.
They came out of a society which to educated Greeks and Romans could be labelled ‘barbarian’. Defenders of Christianity devoted pages to arguing for the superiority of barbarian ethics and religious ideas. By the late third and fourth centuries the Christians were supporters of the good order and law of the Roman empire. In his commentary on Paul’s epistle to the Romans Origen could say that the task of magistrates was to restrain overt and public delinquencies, whereas sins (which could be highly anti-social) had to be corrected by bishops with ecclesiastical discipline. The latter, of course, were successful only with church members acknowledging the right of the community’s representative leaders to admonish and speak in the Lord’s name. Initially belonging to the ancient world, Christianity remains the faith of a high proportion of this planet’s population. Its characteristic teachings and ideals still speak universally to mind and conscience in individuals, and still bond together communities across chasms of differences in education and race. To study the ancient Church is to watch the Christian society forming structures and social attitudes that have remained lasting and in the main stream permanent.
The aspiration to be universal is rooted in monotheism. There is always a tendency for religions to become tribal; that is, each tribe looks to its own protecting god with whom sacrifices maintain friendly relations, and cults are mainly local. The universalizing of faith became a powerful attraction for the ideology of the Roman empire, which also claimed to be world ruler. This bequeathed the now old assumption that Christianity is the religion of Europe—old and outmoded in a twenty-first century when the core of Christian membership is in other continents. From Constantine onwards we shall see emperors wanting all their subjects to share their faith and not finding it easy to tolerate those who openly rejected it. Paganism was far from being moribund when the Christian mission went out in the world. It reconquered the centre of power with the emperor Julian but for less than two years. Julian’s paganism was unsuccessful in its aspirations to be tolerant. Like the other monotheistic religions Judaism and Islam, Christian history is beset by controversy about the interpretation of tradition, especially as enshrined in sacred texts of venerable antiquity. Between church and synagogue the hermeneutic question became central. But interpretative principles were also a matter of debate within the Christian society. Monotheism affirms that the one God alone can make himself known and that he is beyond human searching (e.g. Job : ; Isa. : ). The idea of revelation is integral to the whole.
The problems may lie in the interpretation of the word of God, especially if that word is mediated through a diversity of texts written from differing standpoints. Both Jews and Christians were negative towards polytheism, and regarded belief in numerous gods as a hallmark of the Gentile or ‘pagan’ religion round them. Greek philosophers had long been moving towards belief in only one god. In Xenophon (Memorabilia . , . ) Socrates argued for the most high deity being a conclusion from the coherence and order of the cosmos. Cicero records the Cynic Antisthenes saying that human beings have numerous gods but nature has only one (De natura deorum . ). An orator of the second century ad, Maximus of Tyre (. ), observed that despite vast disagreements over religion, all agree that there is one god, Father of everything and supreme over lesser gods. Apollonius of Tyana, sage and magician of the late first century, said that one can approach the supreme being only through mind, not material words (Eusebius, Praep. Evang. . ). Tracts produced in Egypt during the early centuries of the empire ascribed to Thrice-Greatest Hermes a clear monotheism which, at some points, betrays influence from the book of Genesis.1 In general terms, the Christians were negative to pagan cult but not to philosophy or to literature unless it was pornographic, in which case many pagans were repelled too.
(The poet Archilochus had a bad name for errors of taste.) Their strength in society lay in their welfare for the very poor, of whom not a few were destitute. Food shortages were common in antiquity. Bishops of major cities found themselves performing a necessary function in gathering and distributing food (like Joseph in Egypt). During persecution, which tended especially to target people with reasonable resources and land, the poorest members of a congregation might suffer because the church chest was not being supplied with the means to buy food to distribute. Ancient society was awash with magic and astrology, and this affected some people in all classes of society. Ancient medicine was always hazardous, but more so when physicians normally consulted astrologers and almanacs before prescribing. The quest for restoration of health dominated many lives. Some were converted to Christianity in the hope that baptism might bring a cure; if and when it failed to do so, the family might relapse to pagan cults. Amulets were widespread and could be Christianized in the form of a tiny gospel-book. In short there was much continuity with what had gone before, but always some discontinuity.
THE FIRST FOLLOWERS OF JESUS
Jesus of Nazareth, a charismatic prophet from Galilee, gathered to himself a community of disciples to help in a reform of the Jewish religious tradition, which looked back to the Hebrew prophets and their expectation of divine intervention. The religious authorities of the time were not pleased by the reform element in his teaching, much concerned for the poor and social outcasts, critical of double standards among some Pharisees known for their punctilious observance of the finer points of the Law in separation from ‘the people of the land’. He spoke of the need to repent and of the coming kingdom of God, which alarmed the ruling class. The Roman prefect or procurator could be stirred to think him a possible source of civil disorder. Under the prefect’s authority he was crucified. But his disciples became rapidly convinced that his mission transcended death. He was a living Lord present to them in their prayers and fellowship. As they broke bread, their hearts burned within them. His tomb, surprisingly provided by a wealthy member of the Council or Sanhedrin, was found empty. Visions of the risen Master reinforced conviction that he had entrusted them with a permanent mission and by his Spirit was with them to carry it out.
He had asked them to love one another. There were initial bonds: all were Jews sharing a common set of scriptures and a sense of belonging to God’s elect with an ethic of mutual aid and purity in conscious contrast with surrounding Gentile society. They shared the passionate hope that not only through past prophets but even in the present God was intervening for the vindication and salvation of his people. So their Lord was God’s anointed or Messiah, in Greek ‘Christos’. The Christians, as Gentile outsiders came to call them at Antioch, or Nazarenes as Jews entitled them, found themselves surrounded by a society unfriendly both from the side of conservative observant Judaism and then later from Gentiles whose gods they scorned as observant Jews did. The various cults of polytheism were not mutually exclusive. A Gentile could offer incense to both Apollo and Isis and indeed to the emperor without raising an eyebrow. So people were baffled by a religion which was addressed to all nations and tribes and, nevertheless, was marked by a specificity and exclusive particularity that set believers apart from others.
Aversion towards them manifested by ‘outsiders’ was a factor in encouraging close bonding. In this respect they already had the experience of a degree of ostracism by virtue of being Jews in the Roman Empire, who were not socially integrated and were often not much liked.1 But some of the most severe problems for Christians were internal. They did not always find it easy to love one another, as Jesus commanded them. Because from a very early stage of development they understood their faith to carry universal significance for all, whatever their ethnic origin, they could not be content to remain as they began, an energetic group within a Judaism which already had several distinct religious associations—Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, or even groups encouraging the maximum of assimilation to the surrounding customs of Gentile society, highly cultivated individuals like Philo of Alexandria or Josephus who made their own the literature and philosophy of Hellenistic society but at the same time wanted to remain loyal and practising Jews. There was a problem of a special kind in relation to such groups of orthodox Jews, namely that ‘Nazarenes’ (Acts : ) were distinctive in their faith that Jesus of Nazareth was God’s Anointed, the fulfilment of prophecy that the Messiah would come and establish the Kingdom of God on earth. Messianic belief carried with it revolutionary implications for society. Believers in Jesus had a fervent expectation of the possibility of change.
When at Thessalonica the mission of Paul encountered opposition from conservatives in the synagogue, the accusation against the apostle was that by proclaiming Jesus to be Messiah ‘these men have turned the world upside down’ (Acts : ). There had been other claimants to messiahship recorded by Josephus, Pharisee and historian, and their activities had been disturbingly seditious. Jews who wanted a quiet life whether in the study of the law of Moses or in commerce could not be enthusiastic about excited movements, especially if they were thought to involve hostile action against Roman authorities in Judaea or Galilee or against members of the Herod family put in as puppet governors. In the year the Zealot faction finally began war against the Romans, and at first was successful. But Vespasian and then Titus mobilized larger forces against them, and the Jewish cause suffered catastrophic damage ending in the sack of Jerusalem in the year . 2 The reverberations of this disaster can be discerned at points in the gospels. Josephus, who deplored the revolt, lamented the city’s ruin in language often close to that used by Jesus foreseeing the probable outcome.
The followers of Jesus dissociated themselves from the Zealot struggle. They were not the only Jews to do so. In retrospect the Nazarenes interpreted the fall of Jerusalem as divine wrath for the crucifixion of the Messiah. Pharisees interpreted the disaster as divine punishment for too much lax observance of the Mosaic law and the traditions. Among the lax observers were those Nazarenes who concluded from the call to take the gospel of Jesus to the Gentile world that this universal faith did not require of Gentile believers that they be circumcised, keep the sabbath and Jewish feasts, and observe the food laws. In hostile eyes Jewish abstinence from pork was odd, circumcision repulsive, sabbath observance an excuse for idleness. Gentiles, however, could also be impressed by the ethical quality of Jewish lives and the coherence of their families. Their monotheism had strong appeal, and their ancient sacred books commanded respect. In reply to the anti-Semitic Apion Josephus proudly reports that in every town, both Greek and barbarian, there were people who shared the custom of not working on the seventh day, kept Jewish fasts and even their food laws (2. 282). People respected Jewish rejection of abortion and sodomy (199, 202). Many inscriptions in Asia Minor record non-Jewish monotheists, worshippers of ‘the most high god’.
Messiah
By the title ‘Messiah’ Jews, especially Zealots, often (not necessarily always) expected a military, nationalist leader who was to ‘restore sovereignty to Israel’ and to establish a theocracy. The Messiah was to be ‘the Son of David’. Among the first Christian generation several voices took the Son of David title to refer to Jesus, and this usage was familar to the apostle Paul (Rom. : ) as well as being taken for granted in the genealogies in Matthew and Luke or Luke’s infancy narrative attached to Bethlehem as ‘the city of David’. At Jesus’ entry to Jerusalem ‘Hosanna to the Son of David’ caused excitement alarming to authority. Yet Mark 12: 35–7 preserves an anecdote about Jesus which reads like a disowning of this title. Jesus was called the ‘Nazarene’ (Mark 14: 67), and Nazareth was not a town where Jews expected something good to come from (John I: 46; 7: 52). Messiah was not a title of great precision. The name ‘Jesus’, the Greek form of Joshua, ‘Saviour’, was common and in itself carried no necessarily messianic significance, though Matt. 1: 21 shows that it was capable of being so understood.
Jesus and the Pharisees The first disciples of Jesus were not socially influential and would be classified as ‘people of the land’. Jesus drew only a few individuals from the Sadducee ruling class in Jewish society, a conservative group known for not accepting belief in resurrection to describe the life to come. The impassioned seriousness of his teaching impressed some Pharisees, believers in resurrection but primarily marked out by their dedication to precise strictness in observance of the Jewish law, and also some ‘scribes’ professionally concerned with the correct exegesis of the Law’s prescriptions. That relations between Jesus and the Pharisees were or could be close and friendly may be deduced from Luke : , where Pharisees warn Jesus of hostile intent in Herod Antipas. Several other sentences in Luke imply good relations with Pharisees. Mark : – records scribes who positively welcomed what Jesus said about the Law.
The majority of Jesus’ first followers are described as Galilean fishermen and tax-collectors who collaborated with the government and were unloved by most Jews. On the opposite side, one was a former Zealot (ultranationalist) named Simon. In Jesus’ teaching there was a defiant bias towards the poor and despised, to harlots and men with haunted consciences, all called to repentance and faith. The Anointed of God had brought forgiveness of sins and healing to the brokenhearted. This was inherent in the process of realizing the kingdom of God. Something greater than Jonah’s preaching, greater even than King Solomon, was now here (Matt. 12: 41–2). Rabbinic sages used to say that where ten were together engaged in the study of the Torah, the glory of God was with them (Mishnah, Aboth 3. 6). For believers in Jesus, where two or three were gathered in his name, he was present in their midst (Matt. 18: 20)
Son of Man A problematic self-designation in the sayings of Jesus is the title ‘Son of man’. The phrase was evidently being used with overtones of meaning that the disciples were expected to grasp. On the one hand it could stress the reality and spontaneity of his humanity. On the other hand in the apocalyptic vision of Daniel , ‘the son of man’, a human figure contrasted with animal figures earlier in the vision, represents the people of God being vindicated despite all their oppression and suffering, and ascends to be seated at God’s right hand and to share in the office of Judge. The phrase therefore expressed faith that present suffering would be the path to future glory. There are rabbinic and other Jewish texts in which Daniel’s ‘Son of man’ is taken to refer to Messiah.
Reform Judaism or a Gentile Mission? One stream of the traditions about Jesus preserved in the written gospels, which became for the community standard sources for his life and teaching, records that he interpreted his mission as being limited to the Jewish people, the elect race, and hardly envisaged any extension to the Gentile world. Yet Old Testament prophets, especially Isaiah (e.g. : ), had positively interpreted the Babylonian captivity to be a providential instrument to bring the light of God’s holy law to enlighten the Gentile world. More than one ancient Hebrew writer had warned against the assumption that Yahweh’s choice of Israel implied indifference to other races. So it would be natural for some of the missionaries sent out by Jesus (and therefore called the ‘sent’, ‘apostles’) to understand the message as needing to be carried beyond Israel to the Samaritans and beyond them to the Gentile peoples.
Had this not seemed natural, there would have been no necessity for sayings such as Matt. : – expressly directing that those now sent out should (initially?) confine their labours to ‘the lost sheep of the house of Israel’. The choice of twelve disciples, called to judge the tribes of Israel (Matt. : ), presupposed a mission for the renewal of true religion within Judaism. The two contrasting standpoints reflect a disagreement within the earliest Christian community. The congregations or house-churches for whom Matthew wrote his gospel clearly consisted mainly of Jews but with Gentile adherents. Among the Christian Jews some felt unable to support the mission to the Gentiles unless the converts submitted to the laws of the Torah in the manner of synagogue-proselytes, accepted circumcision, and observed sabbaths, feasts, and food laws.
They were against the more liberal position associated with a one-time zealot in opposing the followers of the Nazarene, Saul or Paul of Tarsus, one of a number of Pharisees who adhered to the community but who was convinced that the Mosaic law could not be imposed upon Gentile converts if the Church of Jesus was to become universal. He even supplied the community with a rationale for a breach with the observant synagogue by developing a radical doctrine of ‘justification by faith’; that is to say, the way of salvation is not through ethical achievement in observing the law and the traditions, constituting a right or merit before the Lord, but through faith in the mercy and love of God manifested in the sacrifice of Jesus’ crucifixion, then vindicated by God raising him from the dead. Notwithstanding the divisive social consequences of this certainly profound way of putting things, Paul insisted that his missionary strategy included being ‘as a Jew to Jews’ as well as Gentile to the Gentiles (1 Cor. 9: 20). Five times he had preferred to accept severe synagogue discipline rather than be excluded (2 Cor. 11: 24). The structure of his thinking about God and salvation was often strikingly similar to that found in rabbinic texts.
In religious faith those with whom it is usually hardest to achieve rapport are those whose position is nearest. One would suppose that Matthew’s Jewish Christians could have had friendly relations with Pharisees, with whom they shared much. Matthew shows that relations were tense. This may reflect the situation after the Roman sack of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple when the Pharisees emerged as the leading group within the synagogues of observant Judaism and regarded the Christian believers as rivals for the soul of the elect nation. The Christian Jews found themselves severely harassed by observant fellow-countrymen, and offence caused by the Gentile mission was considerable ( Thess. : –).5 The supreme issue was whether or not it was true that Messiah had come. That he had was an axiom for the followers of Jesus, whether Jew or Gentile. That this lay in the future was axiomatic for most adherents of the synagogue. Yet there long remained Christians who worshipped with the synagogue on Saturday and with the Church on Sunday and ignored admonitions that they should make a choice. The practice distressed Ignatius of Antioch in Syria, and was still being debated late in the fourth century. In Paul’s Gentile congregations it was a leading issue (Gal. : ; Col. : ). Towards the end of the first century the rabbis adopted a formula of exclusion to keep Christian Jews out of observant synagogues. To believe Jesus to be Messiah was already to be deemed an outsider, even if one’s blood was wholly Hebrew.
We have the paradox that strict rabbis wanted to expel Christian Jews ( John : ), and Gentile Christian bishops wanted to expel believers too sympathetic to the Synagogue; both were finding this task difficult. In Matthew’s gospel there is a surprising absence of reference to circumcision. Jesus is the new Moses whose sermon on the mount does not so much replace the commandments from Sinai as become superimposed. The prominence given by Matthew to the leading role assigned to Peter may readily suggest a tradition in which Paul was almost marginalized (cf. Cor. : ). In both Matthew and Paul there is no denial that Israel remains an elect people. Paul (Romans –) interprets the Gentile mission as fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecies and as a parenthetic moment in the divine plan for human history designed to provoke the Jewish people into realizing the truth of Jesus’s message and authentic messiahship as he increasingly wins converts in the wider world. Antithetical as both writers appear in the spectrum of primitive Christianity, they were unanimous that without the traditions of Judaism Jesus cannot be correctly understood.
The admission of Gentiles The disagreement whether Gentile converts should be required to observe the Torah of Moses was not for ever settled by the conference between Paul and the ‘pillar apostles’, Peter, James, and John, described in Galatians from a Pauline standpoint and with a later retrospect in Acts . Central was the question whether or not Jewish and Gentile believers could constitute a single Church and, if they could, on what terms. The account in Acts describes the apostolic conference as reaching a generous conclusion, that Gentile converts were not required to keep the observances of strict Judaism, but must keep clear of idolatry, unchastity, and major breaches of the food laws (which would make common meals with Jewish believers difficult).
Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church shows that these were indeed prominent issues for him and for them; but while in practice his instructions to the Corinthians come to much the same thing as the Apostolic Decree of the Jerusalem conference, there is no reference to the authority of that decision, and the reasons given for abstaining from eating meat offered in sacrifice to idols or for chastity could have astonished and alarmed Jewish believers at Jerusalem under the aegis of James, ‘the Lord’s brother’.
Jerusalem’s centrality
Nevertheless, Paul would have lost much for his missionary congregations of Gentiles if he had not come into line with the requirements of the Jerusalem church and their leaders. Had his work failed to gain their recognition (‘the right hand of fellowship’), he would have ‘run in vain’.
That saying implied that Paul, no less than Matthew, understood the Jewish believers at Jerusalem to be a necessary touchstone of communion in the one Church of Jesus, and that for him as much as for anyone else in the community Jews and Gentiles were alike constituent members in a single society. A similar assumption continues in later writings of the New Testament, most obviously in the Acts and in Romans – and in the epistle to the Ephesians, at least in part postPauline. In the apostle’s lifetime it had concrete expression in the collection for the saints, money contributed by the Gentile congregations to sustain the poor believers of Jerusalem, perhaps because an experiment in communism failed.
The first-century aspiration to keep Jewish and uncircumcised Gentile believers within one single community was difficult to maintain. The epistle to the Ephesians already presupposes that the problems were severe. In the middle years of the second century Justin Martyr (Dialogue –) knew of Jewish Christian communities who believed Jesus to be Messiah and observed the prescriptions of the Torah, perhaps also the traditions of the elders, and did not expect Gentile Christians to be circumcised or to observe the sabbath and food laws. He also knew of other Jewish groups whose only point of difference from the synagogue was belief in Jesus the Messiah. Justin was sad that Jewish and Gentile believers had ceased to be able to worship .
together, and that the numerous Gentile Christians were in many cases failing to grant full recognition to their Jewish brethren. John Baptist Second-century evidence shows that a sect long survived attached to John the Baptist as leader. John’s following at the time of Jesus was very considerable, when his washing in Jordan offered purification to a people who evidently felt stained by the Herods. But it seems evident that a large proportion of the disciples of Jesus were recruited from those who, like Jesus himself, had received baptism in Jordan from John. Like Jesus, John was executed. The gospels are probably correct in representing him as disowning the title of Messiah and his death as a result of Herodias’ anger. A second-century sect called Mandeans claimed to continue the sect.
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