Tradition and Diversity

Christianity in a World Context to 1500

Karen Louise Jolly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317453437
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This text is designed to serve as a primary source reader. It addresses medieval Christendom in the context of world history. It combines the traditional approach (the medieval Christian tradition found in the church hierarchy and theological development) with the newer approach to cultural diversity - diversity within European Christianity (women mystics, heretics, and popular religion), and diversity without, in a world context (non-European Christianity and relations with Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism).

Part 1

Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy

Foundations of Christianity, circa 50–450 C.E.

The roots of Christian traditions are diverse and complex. Exploring how the religion arose and the forces that influenced it involves the study of Jewish, Persian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman ideas, among others. This chapter organizes these diverse forces into two categories, both aspects of Christianity’s early origins that establish an important duality in succeeding ages: orthodoxy and heterodoxy, or tradition and diversity. Orthodoxy means the “right teachings” as established by some official group with the authority to decide the true doctrines. The need for an orthodoxy arose over the first five centuries in response to heterodoxy, the condition in which many diverse opinions coexisted and competed. The formation of orthodox opinions involved not only establishing the “truth” but declaring opposing views “heresy.” Thus the mainstream traditions of later ages, western Catholicism in Europe and eastern Orthodoxy in Byzantium, were the products of the formation of orthodoxy in the Roman world; both represent a common tradition of Greek- and Roman-influenced Christianity embodied in the canon of New Testament documents, in carefully formulated doctrine, and in codified ritual practices. But this orthodoxy emerged from a dynamic and multicultural environment in which many different versions of Christianity flourished (Gnostic, Arian, and Nestorian, for example) and some established their own churches in regions that were, or became, independent of the Roman domain (Syria, Persia, Egypt, Ethiopia, China, and Europe, the primary focus of this book).

The four chapters of this part follow the development of this orthodoxy amid diversity. The first chapter, “Jew and Gentile,” explores the foundation of Christian belief and practice as found in the New Testament documents and early ritual practice; these documents reveal the Jewish and Roman roots of early Christianity as it moved from being a Jewish sect to a world-converting religion. The second chapter examines the issue of conflict between “Christian and Roman” within the empire, with the conversion of the emperor as a turning point for the establishment of orthodoxy. The third chapter, “Heterodoxy and Orthodoxy,” explores the formation of heresy by examining several of the alternative interpretations of Christian ideas put forward by Gnostics, Origenists, Arians, and Nestorians. The fourth chapter brings together these themes by exploring one important issue in Christian thought, attitudes toward “life and death.”

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Jew and Gentile

Early Origins of Christianity

Christianity arose in the first century C.E. as a Jewish sect in Roman-controlled Palestine, and these two conditions form the predominant elements in the development of early Christianity. These Jewish and Greco-Roman elements are visible in the documents (the New Testament canon) and rituals (baptism, Eucharist) that constitute the basis of orthodox doctrine and practice in the Christianity of the Roman Empire by the end of the fourth century C.E.

The canon of the twenty-seven books found today in the New Testament became the established collection of books orthodox churchmen believed to be “Scripture” or divinely inspired texts by the late fourth century, although earlier lists and collections indicate consensus on most of the books. The formation of the canon of the New Testament and the development of orthodox doctrines proceeded together: doctrines evolved out of these texts (and others), and texts were chosen as Scripture based on their conformity to doctrines. The struggle to define right ideas and texts amid the plethora of documents and interpretations was part of the larger issue of authority within the church, and the development of a hierarchy and a tradition for handing down this authority.

Given the politically charged atmosphere in which these documents evolved after the events they describe, modern scholars debate the authenticity and reliability of the New Testament books as historical sources for the life of Christ and his early disciples. Nonetheless, at the very least these texts represent the ideas and views of a dominant group of Christians in the first few centuries of the religion’s development. Christian theologians formulated orthodox doctrines based upon learned interpretations of these New Testament Scriptures (in Greek and later in Latin), and their Jewish predecessors, the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament Scriptures (in Hebrew, and also in Greek, later Latin). The New Testament includes two important categories of writings, the Gospels and the Pauline epistles. (The New Testament also includes the historical account of the Acts of Apostles, letters by other authors, and the Revelation of John.) The Four Gospels (“Good News”), credited to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, are accounts of the life of Jesus written in the first century C.E. These books illuminate the Jewish ideas associated with Jesus and his immediate followers. Paul, the Jewish-Christian leader who took Christianity to the Gentiles or non-Jews, wrote letters to various churches and individuals explaining Christianity’s message and ethics. These letters reveal much about the Romanization of Christianity and the Greek influence on the development of Christian theology. The selections below illustrate these two major areas: the Jewishness of Jesus, and the Romanizing theology of Paul.

At the same time that these books were copied and disseminated within the Roman Empire as sources for Christian belief, the Christian communities also developed ritual practices to express their faith. Rituals were symbolic ways of acting out truths shared by the body of believers as they gathered together; having consistent rituals not only endorsed orthodoxy but ensured continuity and fostered a sense of collegiality or belonging. The third document gives an example of one practice, baptism, the initiation ritual into the religion.

1.1 Jesus Was Jewish:
John’s Story of the Samaritan Woman at the Well

According to the Gospel accounts, Jesus was born to a young Jewish woman under humble and yet miraculous circumstances (probably between 6 and 4 B.C.E.); he died some thirty-three years later, under humiliating and tragic circumstances, followed by a miraculous resurrection from the dead. The portrait of Jesus that emerges from these four Gospel accounts, written by followers of Jesus after the events, contains a duality essential to later theology: he was both divine and human, full of power and yet humble, perfectly sinless and yet full of humanity. In the brief time, three or four years, between the beginning of his ministry and his death, Jesus was an itinerant teacher and miracle-worker who gathered around him a group of twelve disciples, as well as a larger group of followers. The teachings of Jesus recorded by the Gospel writers emphasized this same mixture of power from God and humble sympathy for the human condition; similarly, the miracles of healing recorded by the Gospel writers established the power he had from God and the compassion he felt for the weak.

The story of Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman excerpted here from John’s Gospel, composed circa 90–100 C.E., also displays this mixture of divine power and humble compassion for human frailty. In this story, Jesus and his disciples have crossed into Samaria, a central region of Palestine inhabited after circa 400 B.C.E. by a separate group of Jews who had their own edition of the Scriptures and, for a time, their own temple (destroyed 128 B.C.E.). The person Jesus meets at the well is not only one of these excluded Samaritans and a woman, with whom Jesus as an orthodox man should not be associating, but is also a woman of questionable lifestyle by the moral standards of the day. What does one who claims to be the Messiah (the anticipated savior in Jewish tradition) say to a woman who represents in this society the lowest rungs of humanity?

Questions

1. In what ways is Jesus portrayed as both human and a man of divine power?

2. How does the writer show Jesus crossing social and religious boundaries?

3. According to the author John, what does this Messiah offer to the woman and others like her?

The New Testament, The Gospel According to John

The Pharisees heard that Jesus was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John, although in fact it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples. When the Lord learned of this, he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee.

Now he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about the sixth hour.

When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)

The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)

Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?”

Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to everlasting life.”

The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”

He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.”

“I have no husband,” she replied.

Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”

“Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”

Jesus declared, “Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.”

The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”

Then Jesus declared, “I who speak to you am he.”

Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But no one asked, “What do you want?” or “Why are you talking with her?”

Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ?” They came out of the town and made their way toward him….

Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I ever did.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. And because of his words many more became believers.

They said to the woman, “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.”

John 4:1–30, 39–42. Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION^®. NIV^®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

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1.2 The Gospel According to Paul: Jew and Gentile in Galatians

According to the account in the New Testament Book of the Acts of the Apostles and his own account in some of his letters, the apostle Paul was an early and zealous persecutor of Christians, who converted to Christianity after the death of Jesus through a miraculous vision. He subsequently became a major leader in the nascent church as a missionary to the Gentiles and as the author of many letters incorporated into the New Testament of the Bible. Thus Paul, in many ways the founder of the religion of Christianity, stands as an anomaly among the early leaders: he did not know Jesus during Jesus’s lifetime, but nonetheless he became the major spokesman of ideas that formed the basis of later orthodoxy.

Paul was both a highly educated Jew and a Roman citizen—deeply committed to the Jewish traditions and laws but also a member of the cosmopolitan environment created by Rome, in which many were seeking personal salvation. Consequently, it was Paul who bridged the gap between the Jewish basis of Christianity and the Greco-Roman world by offering conversion to Gentiles free of Jewish restraints, despite considerable opposition from other Jewish-Christian leaders. In Paul’s hands, Christianity began to change from a Jewish sect into a world religion. The process by which Paul shaped Jewish-Christian ideas into a meaningful message understandable by non-Jews is exhibited in the following selections from his letter to the believers in Galatia (a province in Asia Minor), written around the middle of the first century. Paul establishes in it a liberating Christian doctrine for Gentiles, as opposed to “Judaizers” who would have the Gentiles become Jews (be circumcised) before converting to Christianity.

Questions

1. How does Paul present himself and his relationships with other leaders in the early church?

2. In Paul’s theology, what new message does Christ offer to both Jew and Gentile?

3. What does “freedom” mean for Paul in the context of the constraints of Jewish law and the confines of earthly existence under Roman rule?

The New Testament, Paul’s Letter to the Galatians

Fourteen years later I went up again to Jerusalem, this time with Barnabas. I took Titus along also. I went in response to a revelation and set before them the gospel that I preach among the Gentiles. But I did this privately to those who seemed to be leaders, for fear that I was running or had run my race in vain. Yet not even Titus, who was with me, was compelled to be circumcised, even though he was a Greek. This matter arose because some false brothers had infiltrated our ranks to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus and to make us slaves. We did not give in to them for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might remain with you.

As for those who seemed to be important—whatever they were makes no difference to me; God does not judge by external appearance—those men added nothing to my message. On the contrary, they saw that I had been given the task of preaching the gospel to the Gentiles, just as Peter had been given the task of preaching the gospel to the Jews. For God, who was at work in the ministry of Peter as an apostle to the Jews, was also at work in my ministry as an apostle to the Gentiles. James, Peter and John, those reputed to be pillars, gave me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship when they recognized the grace given to me. They agreed that we should go to the Gentiles, and they to the Jews. All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do.

When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was in the wrong. Before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray.

When I saw that they w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part 1. Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy: Foundations of Christianity, circa 50–450 C.E.
• Part 2. Patterns of Accommodation in Late Antiquity, circa 350–750
• Part 3. Christian Society in the Early Middle Ages, circa 600–1050
• Part 4. The Spirit of Order and Prophecy, circa 1050–1200
• Part 5. New Paths of Order and Prophecy, circa 1200–1300
• Part 6. Change And Contact in the Late Middle Ages, circa 1300–1500
• Recommended Readings
• Index