A Nearly Infallible History of Christianity

Nick Page

• Publisher: Hodder Faith
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781444750140
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Historia de la religión

From Abelard to Zwingli, via a multitude of saints and sinners, Nick Page guides us through the creeds, the councils, the buildings and the background of the Christian church in an illuminating, and perhaps ever so slightly irreverent way.Well-known as a writer, speaker, unlicensed historian and general information-monger, Nick Page combines in-depth research, historical analysis and cutting-edge guesswork to explore how on earth the Christian church has survived all that 2, 000 years of heroes, villains and misfits could throw at it (mostly from the inside) to remain one of the most influential forces in the world today.'I was predestined to read this.' John Calvin.'I felt my heart strangely warmed. Or it could have been indigestion.' John Wesley.

1 Resurrection, Rome and Revelation

Er … no

It was AD 33 and the people in charge of Jerusalem were extremely annoyed.

This was not new. There was a lot in life to annoy them – the workload, the pressures of responsibility, the sheer cost of buying the position of high priest from the ruling Romans, remembering to wear the right robes for the festivals, not to mention the fact that everyone hated them and viewed them as collaborators.

And now there was this: two Galilean fishermen who had been teaching and causing a disturbance in the temple. That was not the problem, the temple was always full of religious agitators of one sort or another: Pharisees, Essenes, would-be-Messiahs, Young Conservatives. Nor was it the fact that these men were rumoured to have performed miracles. That was supposed to happen in Jerusalem and was officially Very Good for Tourism. No, what really annoyed them was that these men were claiming that their leader had come back from the dead. And since the temple elite had gone out of their way to organise the man’s death in the first place, this was a flagrant threat to their authority.

His name was Jesus of Nazareth. Yeshua – to give him his real name – was a miracle-worker, teacher, radical preacher from Galilee. He had led his followers to Jerusalem, caused a riot in the temple, and said a lot of things the authorities found very hurtful, actually. So they had arrested him, taken him to the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate, and persuaded Pilate to have him killed. (They weren’t allowed to execute him themselves. Which was another annoying thing.)

Now the followers of this Jesus were claiming that he had risen from the dead, which was not only impossible, but was directly in contravention of their theology.¹ More, they claimed that he was the long-awaited Jewish Messiah. (Later on, his followers used the Greek word for Messiah – Christos – which means ‘anointed one’. Hence ‘Jesus Christ’. It’s not his surname; just his job description.)

The two men – Peter and John – were instructed by the high priest and the other people in charge of the temple ‘not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus’. And here is their reply: ‘Whether it is right in God’s sight to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge; for we cannot keep from speaking about what we have seen and heard’ (Acts 4.18–20).

Or, in other words, ‘No.’

And there you have it. Right at the start of Christianity we have one of its most characteristic acts: a lack of respect for authority. A refusal to be silenced. The truth is that, right from the start, authentic Christianity has been deeply, deeply annoying.

Dead man walking

The account of the hearing comes from the book of Acts. But the earliest account we have of these resurrection appearances comes from a letter written around AD 54 to a group of Christians misbehaving in Asia Minor:

Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. (1 Cor. 15.3–8)

The ‘me’ in question here is a man called Paul of Tarsus, aka Saul, of whom more, later. He’s reminding the badly behaved Christian community in Corinth that witnesses to this resurrection were still around. A number of these were key leaders of the church – Cephas, aka Peter, and James; but he also mentions the ‘apostles’, an amorphous group that generally refers to anyone who saw the risen Jesus. Twenty years later, according to Paul, many of these were still alive. By then they were telling the story to anyone who would listen (and many who wouldn’t).

The first time the wider world heard about the resurrection was forty days after the event. The followers of Jesus had gathered together in one place to pray, during the Jewish festival of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended on them. The city was full of Jews from other parts of the world: Parthians, Asians, Egyptians, Romans, Welsh – they were all there.² And with the outpouring of power Jesus’ followers started to speak about Jesus in the visitors’ languages. From the start, the Jesus movement was international.

Many people joined the new movement that day. But what, exactly, were they joining? The church itself, let alone many of its core doctrines, hadn’t been invented. These converts didn’t go home with an informative tract, a copy of the Gideons’ Bible and a newsletter giving times of the church services. All they had was the story of what happened: what people had seen Jesus do and heard him say. Things that had been passed on.

Pass it on

Paul says of Jesus’ resurrection appearances that he didn’t invent them: they have been ‘handed on’ to him. He is quoting a Christian statement of faith – a kind of creed. He learned other things as well:

For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. (1 Cor. 11.23–26)

From the start Christians learned the story of Jesus. This was an age when, for the most part, you couldn’t look anything up. Most people couldn’t read. That, and the fact that the internet wouldn’t be invented for another two thousand years or so made Googling something pretty tricky. There were libraries but these were for posh people with togas. So ordinary Christians learned by memorising and repeating. And, in one of Christianity’s best innovations, they also learned through eating, which is absolutely my favourite kind of learning. The story was embedded in a meal, which Paul calls ‘the Lord’s supper’. It became known as ‘the Eucharist’ – from the Greek word for thanksgiving. It was a thank-you meal.

The meal was both symbolic and practical. Christians from all social classes shared the food, to demonstrate that ‘we who are many are one body’ (1 Cor. 10.17). And it was a proper meal. Today, when communion consists of something that claims to be wine but that manifestly isn’t, and something that claims to be bread but is either (a) a day-old Hovis, or (b) a bit of cardboard called a wafer. We forget this. Their meal was actually, you know, a meal.

In their meetings they did other things as well. They prayed, read and discussed the Scriptures, and sang stuff as well. Indeed, from another of Paul’s letters we get what is probably an ancient Christian hymn. The lyrics tell about Jesus being ‘in the form of God’ but choosing to become a slave, taking human form and dying on the cross. And therefore God ‘highly exalted him’ and every knee will bow, ‘every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father’.³

These are radical views. And though Paul is writing a couple of decades after the events, very early on the central contradictions of all this must have been clear. These people were following a man who had died on the cross – a death reserved for slaves and foreign rebels. They claimed that he was not just their Lord, but the Lord of everything and everybody, which would come as a bit of a shock to a few Romans, to say the least. Most of all, Jesus was, in some way, ‘in the form of God’.

These were not the kinds of views that were going to go down well. As Paul admitted, Jesus was ‘a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles’ (1 Cor. 1.23). Which has everyone more or less covered.

As the conflict with the Jerusalem temple authorities shows, some Jews reacted badly to all this. But not all Jews, of course. Because these first followers of Jesus were Jewish. And they carried on with many Jewish practices – going to synagogue, praying at the set times, eating ritually clean food, feeling guilty, phoning their mothers regularly, etc. This was to cause conflict once non-Jews started to adopt the faith. But Jesus’ first followers did not know that they were starting a new religion: they thought they were fulfilling the old one.

Indeed, the relationship of Christianity to Judaism lies behind much of the writing of their most influential early thinker: Paul of Tarsus.

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PAUL

Paul, from a third-century medallion. Presumably this must have been after one of his shipwrecks, as he appears to have some kind of squid attached to his jaw

Name: Paul of Tarsus.

Aka: Saul.

Nationality: Greek-speaking Jew from Cilicia.

Dates: c.1–c.68.

Appearance: Bald, bandy-legged, monobrowed, hook nosed. But apart from that, curiously attractive.

Before he was famous: Tent-maker. Rabbinic student.

Famous for: Letter writing. Planting churches. Being very hard to understand.

Why does he matter? Defined many of the fundamental theological ideas of Christianity.

Could you have a drink with him down the pub? Definitely. Although he would probably try to convert someone, and there might be a fight.

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The bandy-legged, monobrowed angel

Paul’s life is a microcosm of the transformative power of early Christianity. He was born in Tarsus, a cosmopolitan city on the south coast of Cilicia in what is today Turkey. He was a Roman citizen by birth, and a tent-maker or leather-worker by trade. His family were orthodox Jews, and Paul went to Jerusalem and studied under rabbi Gamaliel. (Not literally, obviously. Although, having said which, the life of rabbinic students did involve copying their teacher closely: there is an account of one rabbinical student who followed his master so closely that he actually hid under the bed of the rabbi and his wife. When the rabbi protested, the student said, ‘But this is Torah [the law] and I must learn it.’ It’s certainly an approach that would make the TV show The Apprentice a lot more interesting.)

Anyway, soon after the Pentecost experience the Jewish authorities lost patience with this new sect. Riots broke out and one of their number – a Greek-speaking Jew called Stephen – was killed. Paul was part of this persecution. But then his life changed. On the way to Damascus to close down a new Christian group there, he was hit by a kind of spiritual speed camera: a light flashed around him and he heard the risen Jesus saying, ‘Why do you persecute me?’ This orthodox Jewish persecutor of Christians became the leading apostle to the Gentiles.

Fig. I. On the Damascus Road, Paul initially mistakes the cause of the supernatural event

His background fitted him perfectly for missionary work: he was a Roman citizen from a Greek city, who was trained as a Jewish Pharisee. His first language was Greek, but he spoke Hebrew and had studied Torah – the Jewish law. He had other important qualities as well, notably an irresistible passion, drive and sheer bloody-mindedness and an ability to endure a large amount of personal violence. He had the talent for getting into hot water that is the sign of the true radical. Unusually for these apostolic figures, we may even know what he looked like. An early church story called the Acts of Paul and Thecla is a made-up story, but it contains a portrait of Paul that is so unflattering it very well may be original: ‘Paul … a man small in size, bald-headed, bandy-legged, well-built, with eyebrows meeting, rather long-nosed, full of grace. For sometimes he seemed like a man, and sometimes he had the countenance of an angel.’

After his conversion he didn’t go to Jerusalem to consult any of the embryonic church leadership (probably because he realised that the authorities would not be hugely delighted that he had joined the enemy. Or maybe his bandy legs were giving him trouble). Instead, he went to Arabia for a few years – which means the region around Damascus, rather than somewhere on a great big sand dune eating Turkish Delight. We don’t know much about what Saul got up to, but it seems to have made him some enemies. Because he was forced to flee Damascus in the night, escaping over the wall in a laundry basket.⁴ After three years he finally went to Jerusalem where he met Peter, James and the other leaders of the church. Unsurprisingly, they were nervous – but Paul was vouched for by Barnabas.

Once this meeting was over he did what he did best: he got into trouble. Acts records that he went out from the meeting and started ‘speaking boldly’ with the Hellenists. These were Greek-speaking residents of Jerusalem: the immigrant community, in fact. It was not what you’d call a success: the Hellenists responded to Paul’s message by trying to kill him. So Paul was ‘encouraged’ to leave Jerusalem by the rest of the apostles. He went north, back to Tarsus, for a while.

Death and life

Rewind a bit. The death of Stephen was the first salvo in an outbreak of violence against the Greek-speaking Christians in Jerusalem. Christianity had been making inroads among this community – indeed there had been some friction internally between the two groups – but when the violence broke out it seems from the biblical accounts that the Jewish Christians – including leaders such as James and Peter – managed to remain in the city, while the Greek-speaking ‘Hellenists’ had to leave.

One of them, Philip, took the gos...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction
• Prologue
• 1. Resurrection, Rome and Revelation
• 2. Marcion, Montanism and Monks
• 3. Constantine, Councils and Creeds
• 4. Barbarians, Byzantium and Benedict
• 5. Dark Ages, Dating and Divorce
• 6. Crusaders, Cathedrals and Cathars
• 7. Beguines, Bibles and Black Death
• 8. Print, Protestants and Peasants
• 9. Calvinism, Counter-Reformation and Commonwealths
• 10. Revolution, Reason and Radicals
• 11. Mormons, Missionaries and Monkeys
• 12. Fundamentalism, Fascism and Females
• Conclusion
• Timeline
• Index
• Footnotes