Official Doctrine that Should be Declared a Heresy: Anti-Semitism in Christianity

Historical research has laid many demons in Christianity, and it is time Christianity finally and officially recognized that these demons have indeed been snuffed out. Flat out, the first matter that needs recognition: the Romans arrested, tried, tortured and put to death Jesus of Nazareth. There has never been a Jewish law nor a Jewish judicial body that orders the death of a fellow Jew because they are teaching things which fall outside the orthodox faith. The Romans, however, were quite prepared to do whatever was necessary to eliminate anyone who opposed their sociopolitical order in whatever province they controlled. The Romans carried out ethnic cleansing in many of its provinces over the history of its Empire, and even sought out and executed religious leaders who opposed their authority, such as the druids in Britain. Jesus was one of many Jewish spiritual leaders that they crucified over their long period of occupation of Judaea. Also, far from being a "reluctant" and "sympathetic" governor-prefect, Pontius Pilate had a reputation for being corrupt and amoral even among Romans. And there was never any such historical thing as a "Passover Pardon" for a convicted felon bound for execution for whom the crowds of Jerusalem could vote to obtain the prefect's award of mercy. Then there is Judas. If there is any truth to the Betrayal of Judas, then we are looking at a possible member of a radical political sect, known as the "Sicarii" (meaning, "dagger men") , and of which Judas' sobriquet, "Iscariot", seems to be a cognate. Judas could have been a violent revolutionary who was disappointed that Jesus did not seek to mount anything more than a peaceful revolution, and a highly spiritual one at that. So let's get this straight, even if there was an historical Judas, he was just an individual, and far from representing the whole Jewish people, he likely belonged to an extremist sect of which most Jews wanted no part. So, we are talking about one individual here, and as anyone with any common sense knows, there are good, bad and indifferent people ostensibly belonging to every religion, culture, "race", and nation in the world that exists and ever existed. As to why the Jews "rejected" Jesus as the Messiah, well I have shown in an earlier posting how Jesus did not fit the traditional definitions of a Messiah, and I have also shown that despite that, many Jews did embrace Jesus' teachings, and they became the first Christians. Those Jews who remained (and do remain) Jews are following the substance of Jesus' teachings, even though they don't believe Jesus was the son of God, because Jesus was teaching the traditional precepts of compassion and inclusiveness that were already for hundreds of years before him an integral part of Judaism. While it upsets some Christians that Jews do not believe that Jesus "died for their sins", we should not wonder that they should choose not to believe this. Christian doctrine teaches the ludicrous notion that everyone who ever lived and died before Jesus' crucifixion, no matter how virtuously they lived, is damned. Why would a just God ever construct such an inane cosmological scenario? Okay, the Christians invented the notion of Jesus going down to Hell between his death and resurrections to "harrow up" the virtuous souls who acclaimed his Messiahship, including Moses and all the other great Hebrew prophets. But what about the millions of others who remain nameless but must have been bright lights in this world when they lived? And how insulting that people like Moses and Jeremiah and Amos and Habakkuk would have been suffering in Hell for all those generations until Jesus came along! Additionally, a progressive minister once told me that scholars should do a new translation of the Bible wherein every time Jesus' enemies are labeled "the Jews", it should be rendered "the authorities", as this would be more historically accurate. Of course, that minister is right, because Jesus' followers were themselves Jews, and his enemies were only certain members of the Sanhedrin who thought his liberalizing teachings threatened orthodox tradition. Yet even within this very limited cross-section of the Jewish population (i.e., the small number who were members of this religious council), Jesus had sympathizers among them also! Does anyone remember Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea?! So, Christians, take a fair and honest look at the teachings of religious authority and compare them not only to the compassionate teachings of Jesus and inconsistencies in the scripture and between scripture and history, but also use your good common sense! Jesus was a Jew, and if we hadn't done such terrible things in his name against the Jews all these centuries, he would probably be an honored prophet and teacher in the Jewish tradition just like Rabbi Hillel and Nachmanides. Jews are not "second class" anything in the Judaeo-Christian Tradition. They are the equals of Christians, and indeed every Christian owes a huge debt to them not only for Jesus himself but for the Hebrew Scriptures that preceded him. So I give my thanks to every person of Jewish faith, past, present and future. AMEN.

Christian Eschatology: Heretical Abuses

As has been evident with this blog, I do not find all heresies praiseworthy, and some only partly praiseworthy. A disturbing trend in contemporary Christianity is an obsession with the Rapture, Armageddon, the Second Coming, the Last Judgment, all features of what is theologically known as the Eschaton (from Neo Greek: "End of the World"). All instances in history where Christians have become obsessed with these matters mirror times of particular and prolonged difficulties and uncertainties, often due to economic, climatological or cultural changes of a dramatic nature. Human civilization and the planet itself goes through cycles of change as the cumulative effect of an ongoing series of changes reaches critical mass, and then matters gradually re-stabilize. In earlier times, such waves of anxiety could manifest in popular movements which sought scapegoats and brought about persecution and mayhem toward vulnerable minorities. Less innocuously, but rather self-destructively, such movements as they manifested repeatedly in the 19th century caused adherents to give away all their worldly goods, quit their jobs, hand over their farms and business, leaving themselves destitute and without socioeconomic station in life when the hoped-for appearance of the messiah did not occur. Nowadays, we are reaching a fever of spiritual (and psychological) anxiety over the outcome of highly dubious trends and policies in our society and all over the world. These factors form enough of a burden if one is merely an atheist or agnostic seeking to cope on a practical level. However, for a person of faith, the burden is doubly so. The implications of any one of the multiple scenarios for a Biblically-based, theologically and cosmologically-construed Doomsday are not pleasant and run contrary to many teachings in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, which otherwise present God as a force of compassion and peace in the world. According to these eschatologies, an exceedingly small number of people will be permitted to survive the tribulations that will ensue, and of all the souls that ever lived, an exceedingly small number of them will be saved for eternal bliss and from eternal damnation. This of course runs contrary to a parallel concept that we are judged as soon as we die, rather that at the "End of Time". The prophetic tradition of Armageddon involves Divinely Willed suffering of various kinds, including famine, plague, war and deceitful political leadership on a global scale. In sheer objective terms of humanity, many innocent people will suffer and die miserably in abject terror and despair. The aforementioned war will supposedly involve a cosmic conflict between an earthly "Anti-Christ" assisted by the hosts of hell and its chief fallen angel, Satan. On the side of good, the heavenly angels (including the archangels), Jesus and God himself (of course they are dual manifestations of one Divine Being in Christian orthodoxy). Ultimately God and the Power of Good will win over Evil, and Satan will be bound away forever. Jesus will then rule as a Benign Monarch over an Earthly Paradise for a thousand golden years, until the cosmos as we know it will be transfigured and time itself dissolved. Various eschatological traditions differ (and vehemently argue) over the proper order of these culminatory events, but these are the essential elements of the affair. So where do such beliefs leave a Christian who seeks to better him or herself spiritually and lead a good life day by day? Well, these beliefs introduce ideas which are abused in terms of cultivating a healthy moral faith. For one, they make fear the fulcrum of people's Christian faith. They also make blame an insidious force in people's religious passion. Who is (or will be) the Anti-Christ? Who are his agents? What sorts of political or cultural activities represent the agenda or acquiescence to the Will of the Anti-Christ to prepare the Earth for the cosmic rule of his infernal abettor, Satan? Obviously we, being only imperfect (and necessarily imperfectly informed) mortals, cannot make clear, just, impartial, accurate or even a united determination as to what the answers to any of these questions are, and those who have the hubris to choose to act on their own subjective judgments in these matters have the potential of wreaking serious harm and injustice against people who are quite innocent. Those who make eschatology rather than compassion the center of their spirituality and religiosity turn into self-perceived "soldiers of God", and unwittingly put themselves at the disposal of very un-Christlike political agendas here on Earth. We have to remember how different the Christ of the Gospels is from the role eschatologists force him into as they construct their complex meldings of obscure prophetic passages from the Book of Revelations and various Epistles in the New Testament, not to mention the prophecies from the Book of Daniel in the Hebrew Testament. All of these selected texts from Holy Scripture are actually open to a vast range of interpretation, which one could just as easily argue that the spiritual anxieties being expressed in them belong very much to the various cultural and historical context of the times in which they were written, and otherwise 0nly have as much to do with defining the very real problems of our own time as would the symbols painted on caves fr0m the Stone Age! We've got global warming, growing poverty, intolerable social imbalances, educational decay, environmental degradation and an overall decline in the quality of democracy in the world today. To use religion as a weapon to aggravate these issues on sectarian lines, rather than coming together peacefully and ecumenically to solve them with our God-given hearts and minds, is a heresy of the worst kind.

The Heresy of Full Scriptural Access

When Jerome translated the Bible into Latin from Greek, it was so that the citizens of the western half of the Roman Empire could read the Holy Scripture in their native language. His translation was called the Vulgate, literally, "that written in the common tongue". In the course of the Early Middle Ages, there were sporadic attempts by those few scholars with the ability and time to translate various parts of the Bible into the languages of formerly pagan peoples, who had not been members of the Roman Empire, when it had still existed and therefore not acquired Latin as an everyday language. Thus for example, we have Jordanes' translation of the Bible into the East Germanic tongue of Gothic. Then we have certain anonymous Anglo-Saxon monks translating parts of the Bible into Germanic-style poetry. But by the eleventh century, CE, the Church had a change of heart about making Holy Scripture accessible in the languages of the various cultural flocks across Christendom. By this point in time, Latin had become a "dead language", meaning it was actually only written, read and spoken (and sung) for scholarly and liturgical purposes. With the Gregorian Reforms that put the clergy and laity in opposition to each other under Canon Law, it was decided that no further efforts should be made to render Biblical texts into any form of vernacular. This was obviously a measure to ensure control over the laity and strengthen the indispensability of a mediating priesthood. And so what regular Medieval people were left to understand about the stories and wisdom passages of the Bible was whatever Ecclesiastical authority permitted them to know. Under such circumstances, it might be easy to conjecture even without consulting the extant homiletic manuals just what slices of the Bible an authoritarian clergy wanted the laity to know about. And then, just over a hundred years after the so-called Reforms of Gregory VII, we have evidence in quite a dramatic way of what the clergy had been leaving out of the Christian experience of the New Testament in particular. In a village in Northern France in the late twelfth century, CE, a parish priest took it into his head to translate and then read the Gospels in the native French dialect of the region, the Langue d'oil. The initial reaction to these readings was one of awe. The congregation remarked openly that here was a Jesus they had never know about -- indeed, a kind, compassionate Jesus who healed people from mental illness, social alienation and physical disease. And then a secondary reaction set in: how dare the Church keep them from knowing all these generations of this good and loving Jesus?! All they had ever been told was that God was most angry at them, of all humanity, and the poor were among the most sinful in God's eyes . The moral indignation that felt flared up into rioting, especially when the ecclesiastical authorities showed no sign of apology for their omissions of Biblical teaching, and otherwise declared that the priest had transgressed in reading to them "what they were too ignorant to properly understand". The riots turned into a full-blown revolt, as peasants and other common folk, such as the artisans of the towns, began to share the message of the "fully revealed Gospels", and the Church's conspiracy to keep the Jesus of caritas hidden from them. Unfortunately, the revolt turned quite violent. Generations of oppression by the nobility and wealthy town fathers (not to mention the social repression wrought by a largely arrogant and contemptuous clergy) erupted into a mountain of scores to settle. Castles and palaces were burned. Pillaged goods and monies were redistributed among the poor, and the leaders of the rebellion announced they were going to bring about the equal society Christ had intended for humankind. Of course, eventually the Chivalry of Northern France pulled itself together after the initial shock of this wildfire peasant uprising, and crushed the religious revolutionaries soundly. A similarly religiously-motivated uprising was to occur two centuries later in Southeastern England, the Peasant Revolt of 1381, again , fueled in part ideologically by the Lollard translations of portions of the new Testament into the native English tongue. Making the Bible accessible to people in their own everyday languages would later become a key component of the Protestant movements that arose in the sixteenth century, CE. giving literacy an added boost by providing a religious mandate for it among the laity (not to mention the purely practical incentives as the world trade grew in the Early Modern Period, causing an educated middle class to grow along with the more intense and sophisticated business opportunities that liberated them from the Medieval class system). Unfortunately today, we find ourselves falling back into the same barrier of access to the fullness of Holy Scripture, even though now every Christian (Catholic of Protestant) is supposedly freely reading the Bible. The similarity with an unhappy past of lack of access to the Bible lies in the way people are now being taught to read the Bible, especially by fundamentalist religious sects. Preachers are telling their congregation very selectively what to pay attention to in Holy Scripture, and also exactly how to interpret those select passages. They are divorcing these readings from their complete context and shutting out the inherent richness of all Biblical writing, which actually communicates meaning on multiple levels. But what fundamentalist preachers are doing now is nothing new. They are creating a barrier that induces only a semi-literate understanding of Holy Scripture and twists meaning to serve socially repressive, spiritually-handicapping purposes, which promote clerical control over the laity. A Greek Orthodox theologian and presbyter, Origen Adamantius, who taught at Alexandria's School of Catechism was a victim of such agendas early on in the annals of the Authoritarian Church. Origen, was a great scholar and teacher, promoted in his lifetime a less literalistic interpretation and a more spiritually metaphorical understanding of Holy Scripture, through exegetical techniques of analysis. He was well loved by his students, but he was expelled by the Patriarch of Alexandria for his teachings. He found exile and started a school of his own in Palestine, but the authoritarian Eastern Orthodox Church eventually found sufficient "justification" to arraign him before a local ecclesiastical court and sentence him to torture until repentant or dead. Origen chose death. The spiritually liberating implications of his teachings in terms of restoring a stronger sense of intellectual independence among individual Christians was declared heretical by the Church. Origen's many treatises were burned, and his school was dissolved. Today, all that we know of Origen, who by rights should have been acclaimed as one of the Doctors of the Church, is a description of him in Eusebius' History of the Church, and a fragmentary and corrupt translation from Italy of one of his works into Latin by a monkish student of his teachings. Literacy is thus not merely the mechanical ability to read, especially in terms of sacred religious texts. Religious literacy is the ability to understand in accordance with one' own inner light, with clergy acting only in a responsibly guiding role that does not partake of any agenda to ensure political power over their sacredly entrusted flock. Amen.

An Historical Realist Heresy: Magdalenism

The Marriage (or Wedding) at Cana is one of the miracle stories told in the Gospel of John, and it has historical implications that modern readers (and especially non-Jewish ones) may completely miss. The bride and bridegroom are not specifically named, but Jesus and his mother Mary are the hosts of the wedding reception, providing the refreshments and the servants, and Jesus miraculously replenishes the wine instantly when it suddenly runs out. The British investigative journalistic team, consisting of Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, who collectively wrote the famous (and to some, infamous) book of historical nonfiction, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and in that work, the authors point out the objective historical and cultural ramifications of this little tale: in Ancient Judaean society, absolutely only one party would, by established custom, hold the wedding reception and provide the refreshments: the groom and his family. Jesus was a Jew, whatever else you might choose to believe about him, and therefore, if this gospel account preserves a true historical memory from Jesus' actual life, then Jesus would have to have been the unnamed bridegroom. For traditional Christians, this argument has proven highly uncomfortable. For literally millennia, the Church has taught Christians to be highly uncomfortable with our physicality and sexuality, and therefore, the figure at the very center of the faith, Jesus, must be celibate and asexual to be viewed as the "pure", spiritual hero we want him to be, right? And yet, whatever encrustations of dogma that have formed around the figure of Jesus over the past twenty centuries, we must remember that, while he lived on this Earth, he was a Jew, and Judaean culture had no spiritual misgivings about devout members of their faith feeling sexual attraction for each other and enjoying sexual love with one another once marriage had occurred. Ancient Judaean society had no institution of religious celibacy, nor was it considered a moral virtue to be celibate. In fact, Jewish wisdom literature taught that neither a man nor a woman fully discovers their spiritual humanity until they have known marriage. The Canonical Gospels leave a gap in the story of Jesus' life from the age of twelve until he begins his ministry at age 30. As the writers of Holy Blood, Holy Grail pointed out, it would have been considered a major social deviation for Jesus not to have taken a wife during that time. Yet Christians, influenced by Greek Platonist ideas of the moral filth of the body and sexual feelings, never questioned that such a thing might even be possible in their highly ethereal vision of Jesus. They assumed that, for all those years, Jesus had been content to work with his father Joseph in their workshop as a "tekton" (the Greek occupational word used in the original language of the Canonical Gospels, which can either mean "stone mason" or "carpenter"). It is interesting to note that the Gospel of John claims that the miracle of the wine at Cana was the first miracle Jesus publicly performed, and so perhaps this is another clue that this event may have occurred in Jesus' life before his official ministry. Now, thanks to the collection of Christian Gnostic manuscripts recovered from Nag Hammadi in Egypt, we actually have corroborative evidence of Jesus' possible married state. In the fragmentary Gospel of Mary and in the Gospel of Phillip, we discover that Jesus most beloved disciple was Mary Magdalene, with whom he shows a social familiarity and intimacy that would only be typical of that between a husband and wife in Ancient Jewish society. In these Gnostic gospels, Mary Magdalene is presented as a disciple of apostolic quality in terms of the spiritual insight she articulates in her own right, and she exerts enough influence that she is even a source of jealousy and envy among certain members of Jesus' inner circle, who evidently already had ambitions for roles of future leadership in his spreading movement. Mary Magdalene, of course, also figures in the Canonical Gospels as a woman who became a follower of Jesus teaching, after he had "cast out seven devils from her". Very cleverly, the British authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail claim this is a covert, metaphorical reference to the fact that Mary of Magdala had been a priestess of the Seven Veils in the cult of a Semitic mother goddess, such as the Levantine deity, Astarte, and therefore this reference is code that Jesus had converted her to his brand of Yahwist Judaism. And yet, whatever patriarchal characteristics traditional Judaism had at that point, there is reason to believe that the form of Judaism Jesus promoted gave equal standing to women, not only due to the implications of such non-canonical texts as the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Thomas, but also on the evidence of the earliest accounts of the Church, including the Canonical Book of Acts, and also the older, more authoritative versions of Paul's Letters found in the New Testament texts of the Sinai Monastery Version of the Greek Bible, dating from the 5th century, CE, wherein Paul actually extols and affirms the role of women in the Church as spiritual leaders and administrators of Christian communities. There are historical accounts that Mary Magdalene left Judaea after Jesus' death and moved to the already heavily Jewish-settled region of Septimania in southeastern Gaul. There she is said to have founded what became a diocese of churches originating in a Jesus-centered Jewish cult, and indeed to this day there an unusual number of Catholic churches, in that region of what is now France, dedicated to Mary Magdalene. So there are twin ramifications to the whole possibility of Jesus' marriage: (1) Jesus, the model for all priests and ministers that followed him, had taken, like any good Jewish rabbi, a wife in all due religious honor, and (2) that wife was likely to have been Mary Magdalene, who, far from being the "reformed harlot" of popular Church dogma (such a putative status for her being drawn from no scriptural passage whatsoever), was actually a model for co-equal spiritual leadership by women with men in the religious reform movement as originally intended by Jesus. If these matters are true, then we once again see the conspiracy of a misogynistic and anti-carnal Church to shut out women except in submissive and ancillary roles. I can only assume that this stance would serve an authoritarian agenda keep their congregations psychologically off balance by declaring their sexual drives no part of what Jesus wanted for people aspiring to a truly spiritual life. And as for the Song of Songs in the Hebrew Testament, which the Church accepted as canonical for the Christian Old Testament, the good Ecclesiastical Doctors taught that this beautifully poetic book was not really a a Semitic spiritual celebration of sexual love between man and woman, but actually a complex metaphor of the marriage of the soul to the Church! So, though the Church had burned such penetrating scholarly works as Origen's treatises of deep exegetical analysis of Holy Scripture, the Church was quite capable of using those very same techniques of scriptural analysis that it often branded as "heretical", in order to suit their own purposes of an ascetically celibate form of Christianity, carefully shielded from "the filthy reproductive nature" of women and their bodies, the "weaker spiritual vessel". Most heinously, they emended the very Letters of Paul, the cornerstone documents of the Christian Church, and made them to say quite the opposite of what an older version of the Pauline Epistles indicates. If there is any fundamentalist Christian who believes that the Holy Scriptures are the pure writ of God because anyone daring to meddle with them would be instantly struck down by heavenly lightning, Biblical manuscript scholars find that this just isn't so. It's time for the original form of the Letters of Paul to be restored to the official Christian Bible, and to remove the designation of "heretical" from the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and the Gospel of Thomas, where women disciples are constructively and meaningfully portrayed. It is time to bring Christianity back into being a holistic faith, where both women themselves and a natural healthy loving sexuality between consenting adults are not seen as somehow merely "acceptably unfortunate", but as actual strengths of a whole-bodied, whole-souled, sexually-equal faith tradition.

The Heresy of Medieval Kiev: An Unsought Doomsday

In Medieval times, there was not "Russia" but "The Russias". These were a loose confederation of city-centered regional states originally founded by Swedish Vikings, who set up trading towns on the riparian routes connecting the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea. The most successful of these Swedes in terms of commercial power founded princely dynasties, ruling from these trading towns , which by the High Middle Ages had become cities. The colonizing Swedes, both high and low, intermarried with the native Slavic population, and soon ceased to speak their Norse dialect, though they did give their name to the people of the new hybrid culture that emerged: the "Russians" (from an Old Swedish word, "rus", meaning "rower"; i.e., a crewman of a Viking longship). The Russian states that evolved from these Viking river towns were largely connected by a common regional network of trade, similar language and dynastic intermarriage between the leading families of the different cities. Their interconnection strengthened when they all converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, wherein they collectively pledged ultimate religious allegiance to the Patriarch of Constantinople, and with whose secular political entity, the Byzantine Empire, they formed political and economic alliances. By the 13th century, CE, one of the brightest stars to emerge among this constellation of Russian states was the city and province of Kiev. At this time, it had evolved three distinctive qualities: (1) it had become one of the key cities in the overland trade route between Europe and Asia, as well as a key trading link between Scandinavia and the Mediterranean World; (2) it had thrown off monarchy and created an elected republican form of government; (3) its clergy had gone renegade from the doctrinal strictures of the Orthodox Church. While the first two traits are utterly fascinating in and of themselves, it is the last trait that concerns us here. So in what way had the Kievan presbyters gone astray? The Patriarch of Moscow, in the neighboring Russian state of Muscovy, deemed that they were engaged in a heresy called "Judaization". The government and citizenry of Kiev not only accorded equal rights and friendship toward the Jewish population in their midst, but the Church of Kiev was preaching and practicing reforms of the Christian faith that partook of Jewish perspectives on holy scripture and expressions of spirituality. What these exactly were, we are not able to know, for these general accusations were enough to spell disaster for the Republic of Kiev. One must understand that at this time in history, the Czarist regime of the Russian city and province of Moscow had a serious ambition to throw off the Confederation of the Russias and politically (and culturally) cannibalize the other Russian city states. Kiev was a city that Muscovy had long envied. The interdict of their Patriarch was all the excuse they needed to lead a holy war against their "heretical neighbor". Kiev, having derived most of its success and stability from good civil government and prospering economic liberties, had not bothered to develop a strong military. Consequently, the Muscovites crushed them in a swift war in which the city of Kiev was burned to the ground, its clergy tried and executed for heresy, and its surviving population bonded into serfdom. When Kiev was rebuilt as an annexed portion of the Greater State of Muscovy, its resurrected Church was made to be conservatively orthodox in its ritual and dogma, and the natives were made to speak and write in the Muscovite dialect rather than their Kievan one. It was all a form of ethnic cleansing without actual total extermination, and ironically exercised by one Russian Slavic group against another. It was also the last time that a true democracy would exist on Russian soil until the fall of Communism at the end of the 20th century. Moreover, it is proof that not all Russians at all times were anti-Semitic. It is too bad that peaceful, egalitarian, Jewish-friendly Kiev had not obtained the reins of a united Russia's destiny over the long and painful centuries that followed. Perhaps those good qualities, lamentably lost when such a bright future lay ahead, were why in the Middle Ages, until its untimely doom, it was known throughout the Eurasian World as "Kiev the Great".

Folk Religion: The (Heretical) Elephant in the Room

Perhaps the most pervasive and perdurable "heresy" of them all now falls under the politically correct moniker of "folk religion". What this phrase really refers to are supplemental spiritual practices and beliefs which various Christian cultures throughout time have engaged in but which fall outside the Judaeo-Christian Tradition. In short, folk religion is really an heretical amalgamation or hybridization of pre-Christian beliefs and rites in which the ostensibly converted Christian culture still engages. In such cases one will encounter various combinations of either pagan gods and spirits being worshiped in parallel form beside the worship of the Christian God, or a rationalized association of various pagan supernatural beings with Judaeo-Christian saints and angels. Such forms of folk religion were practiced without any crisis of conscience or internalized logic in the rural regions of Europe for centuries, with only occasional outside disturbances from "witch hunters", whose most violent efforts of persecution did nothing to extinguish pagan survivals. Even before the invention of the "Holy Inquisition", which labeled all such practices "maleficia" (Latin for "evil deeds"), and ascribed them to a worship of Satan, there were laws continuously passed(for example) from king to king in England up through the 11th century, making it illegal by penalty of fine for making ritual offerings at sacred trees, stones and springs. Much later, the Puritans of Early Modern England tried to extinguish the old rural festivals of dancing, song and ritual use of alcoholic beverages at key interchanges of the agricultural year, branding them as "Papist Pagan Corruptions of Christian Society", and these busy-bodied Puritans did enough damage that the later Romantic Period antiquarians found far less folklore surviving in England than that found by their counterparts in other European countries. However, only the Industrial Revolution was able to accomplish the real erasure of folk customs, and yet gentle remnants such as ribbon charms were still being tied on the branches of "holy" trees, even into the latter-half of 20th century in England, with no linkage whatsoever to the Neo-Pagan movements begun by young counterculturalists in the late '60s and onward. Traditional folk religion such as described above still flourishes in the rural regions of Catholic Latin American countries. Why always rural? Well, let's begin with the term "pagan": it comes from the Late Latin word, "paganus", meaning "peasant". Rural people are the most culturally conservative element of any society. Yet the question remains of how people could hold onto these old beliefs so stubbornly when there is much evidence that their dedication to Christian faith was (and is, in the aforementioned Latin American countries) quite sincere and passionate? Comparisons to this cultural phenomenon can be found going back even to the Hebrew Testament, where Ancient Judaeans were persistently relapsing into the parallel worship of Baal and Astarte alongside that of Yahweh. The challenge of worshiping in an abstract monotheistic faith, whose purpose is entirely wrapped up in individual moral betterment and a successful spiritual afterlife of heavenly bliss, is that it does not always fulfill the human needs of the here and now. In the Ancient and Medieval Worlds (and indeed in the Early Modern Period before the ideology of natural science saturated even popular thinking), there were two absolutely vital concerns to which orthodox Christian doctrine and Yahwist Judaism only secondarily addressed themselves at best: the fecundity of the land and the fertility of the body (human and the animals they husbanded). Living and working in the midst of the natural world, rural folk also underwent constant influence psychologically from the mysteries of their elemental surroundings and the numinous implications of these. While it is easy for Jews and Christians to flatly state that "God in everywhere and in every thing", there is no invitation to directly explore or commune with this intuitive human awareness of the divine inhabiting the ecological realm. This has resulted for many centuries in a spiritual schizophrenia in the Western World, wherein the otherworldly and the "this-worldly" suffer an artificial separation in the human psyche. Of course, the scientific world born out of the European Enlightenment inherited this dichotomy of mutual exclusion, resulting in a thoroughly commidified perspective on the natural world as merely a collection of exploitable resources, and mechanistic concept of the human mind itself. One wonders if the two spheres of spirituality had not been segregated. whether the totally despiritualized world of today that we must now negotiate in practice would ever have resulted. Yet in both Judaism and Christianity there have existed mystical traditions that bear the seed of harmonization between the two realms (which some metaphorically designate the "Earth Mother Realm" and the "Sky Father Realm"). Among Jewish mystics there has long developed the concept of "Shekinah" (a pregnant Hebrew term with the meaning, "She who sets up the tent stakes of social interaction"). For Jewish Kabbalists, Shekinah expressed the "female" aspect of God, and represented something equivalent to the Christian concept of the "Holy Spirit", but also meant in mystical terms (and using modern parlance) the ecological flow of the Earth's chain of being. There was an analogue to Shekinah among certain mystical Christian sects of Ancient and Medieval Times, where they referred to the feminine facet of God as "Sophia" (Greek for, "Lady Wisdom"). Perhaps Christians could think of the Trinity in a way that would redeem the biosphere which our own spiritual incompleteness has brought into such sickness.

A Heresy for the Protestants: The Anabaptists

The purported reason for the Reformation was the desire among certain groups of Christians to recreate the original and uncorrupted Early Church. And yet, whether we are talking about the emergence of the Lutherans or the Calvinists, we are seeing movements largely constituted of prosperous, educated merchants and urban professionals. In short, these two religious revolutions were fueled by the nascent middle class of the Early Modern Period. But what about the urban working class and the peasants of the countryside? Many of these folk were equally fed up with the abuses of the established Church and its dogmatic ratification of a class system ("The Three Estates"), as though it had been ordained by God as much as the inflexible differences in physiology between man and woman. When it comes to the question of the would-be Protestant group known pejoratively (and inaccurately) as the "Anabaptists" (i.e., "those opposed to baptism"), we discover one of the key moral failures of the Reformation, because the Anabaptists found themselves rejected by Protestant and Catholic alike, though certainly the Anabaptists fulfilled all the theoretical notions of a legitimate Protestant movement. As hinted above, their name is a misnomer. Anabaptists actually believed in the sacrament of baptism, perhaps even more strongly than any other Christian sect. In fact, they took their cue from the Judaic cult of John the Baptist himself, where baptism is a rite of spiritual transformation and commitment administered when a person is in the fully knowing state of adulthood. To perform baptism upon a baby (as prescribed by Catholics and all other Protestant groups) was considered by the Anabaptists to be a wasted effort. According to their doctrine, infants and children have not yet reached the state of complete moral cognizance. Anabaptists were not hung up on the dogmatic (and superstitious) idea that baptism must be performed as soon as possible after a child is born. This precept stemmed from the belief that in order to prevent the infant soul from passing into the cosmic no-mans-land of Limbo, if it should die before reaching the age of seven, when it would receive the sacrament of Christian Confirmation. In Anabaptist belief, babies and children were viewed as spiritually innocent in the eyes of God, and so had nothing to fear in terms of either Limbo or damnation. But there was something far more distinctive about Anabaptists with respect to other Protestant movements: they consisted mostly of the working classes and rural tenant farmers. Their leaders sought an alliance with Martin Luther for protection against the Catholic powers, who viewed Anabaptists and Lutherans alike (both of them German religious movements) as mortal enemies. To the dismay of the Anabaptists, Luther rejected them. As for the Calvinists in Switzerland, that Protestant movement held the belief that the saved were those favored by God with prosperity. So why should this be an impediment? Individual Anabaptists could be prosperous peasants and artisans. However, the Predestinationist Calvinists rejected the Anabaptists because of their communal economic streak. The Anabaptists, like other Protestant movements, aspired to be like the Early Christians, so another distinguishing feature of their sect was what they borrowed an idea from the recorded organizational practice of Early Christian communities: mutual assistance to whomever was in need within the congregation. For Calvinists, this was cheating God of His Will to judge each person according to his individual merits, and mete out prosperity or financial misfortune accordingly. So there you have it: Switzerland was not a refuge either. On the other hand, Luther needed the support of the nobility and the wealthy merchants, and if he welcomed the socialist-minded Anabaptists into the fold, the wealthy members of Lutheranism would withdraw support because of their psychological need for a system of socioeconomic differentiation. Equality in Heaven perhaps, but they could not entertain the idea of equality on Earth. Rejected by all sides, the Anabaptists had nothing to do but fight. In their struggle, they even managed to temporarily gain control of an entire city, and elected a shoemaker to be its mayor. But in the end, they lacked the resources to win. Some went underground, paying lip service to whatever official faith held sway in whatever German province they found themselves in. These would bide their time and eventually settle in the new world where they would find refuge in the Quaker Colony of William Penn, where they became known as the "Pennsylvania Dutch". Others would settle in England and win adherents there, especially during the reign of the Puritans, but their beliefs would often prove too radical even for the Puritans, who imprisoned any one of them who became too vocal about social revolution. One of these radicals was the preacher, John Bunyan, who wrote (while incarcerated) one of the greatest religious allegories in the English language: The Pilgrim's Progress (a book that would become as essential reading among the common folk in America as the King James Bible itself). Of course, in England, they asserted a more accurate form of name for their movement, and called themselves, "the Baptists". Yet how many Baptists today would be surprised to discover that they share a common religious heritage with the Mennonites and the Amish!

Plutonic Christianity: A New and Disturbing Heresy

The most fast-growing and flourishing Christian movement in America, the Mega Church, fits neither into the Protestant nor the Catholic mold, though its origins stem from evangelical fundamentalism. I call it a heresy (though no official church will officially deem it so), because the common doctrine of the Mega Churches, wherever they may be located, is a worship of Mammon in the guise of Christ. In short, whereas in the old days Christians spoke of "building our treasure in Heaven", we now have that message turned on its head, and their preachers speak of "building our treasure on Earth". All you have to do is "get right with the Lord", and trust He will take care of your financial needs -- if only you will believe in him enough. Thousands swarm to this sort of message, because it fits so well with the socioeconomic politics of unbridled capitalism that currently compels the thinking of just over half of the actively voting public in America. If socialism is the "work of the Devil", then capitalism must be what God loves, never mind the communal economy practiced by all the religious communities of Early Christianity. The politically-vociferous leaders of the Mega Churches also violate the law, which states that any member of religious clergy who takes an active role in politics or voices explicit political opinions nullifies their clerical immunity from taxation. And yet there is no government official who will enforce this law against them. The preachers of these churches make untold millions from the collection plate, which is represented to their congregations as a form of "investment" in the future riches that will come to them because of this material act of faith in God the Provider. This heresy attracts mostly upper middle class folk who want to feel good about their prosperity (however they came by it), as well as lower and working class folk who aspire to be like their betters (who are not their moral betters, only their socioeconomic betters). All of this plutonic sort of theology (from the Greek word, ploutos, meaning "wealth, riches") has a thread going back to one branch of the Reformation: Calvinism, which among other things of a more noble nature, taught that a person's worldly prosperity was a sign of God's spiritual favor for their future salvation. Conversely, the Calvinists taught that those who faltered economically were among those that could be counted out of God's favor. This precept came out of the pernicious theological argument first promulgated by Augustine of Hippo, who in turn deduced it from the implications of the Ten Plagues of Egypt. In the Book of Exodus, Pharaoh was prepared to free the Hebrews from bondage after each punishing plague meted out by their divine protector, Yahweh, but each time Yahweh "hardened Pharaoh's heart", so that Pharaoh reneged, resulting in more plagues that could be wrought upon the Egyptian people for their centuries-long persecution of the Hebrew minority in their midst. From this story, Augustine determined that God must will whether a person is saved or not, and therefore must actively participate in people's moral failure or success. From this seminal interpretation we eventually get, centuries later, a doctrine encouraging people to give of their hard-earned money to invest in the ethereal bank of the Mega Church, whose banker, Mr. or Mrs. Preacher, will use this "tithe" to both enrich him or herself, and otherwise ostensibly use it to play the heavenly stock market to help you win the material dividends of God's plutonic favor.

Paul versus Jesus: Redemption Through Repentance, or Discovery of Moral Purpose?

Whence came the Apostle Paul's concern with the redemption of the soul predicated on its purification? We must recall that Paul was once Saul, a religious officer assigned to hunt down and bring to rectification Jews lapsing into heretical practices. So much of orthodoxy in Judaism, then as now, concerned itself with obtaining and maintaining ritual purity in terms of cleanliness of dietary intake, personal cleanliness, cleanliness of abode, cleanliness of sanctuary, and sexual cleanliness. Should we be surprised that when Saul of Tarsus became Paul the Visionary, and joined the heretical Christian Jews he once persecuted, that he should take these native concepts of cleanliness to the next level? If Jesus was the Messiah, and his messianic mission was the redemption of humankind for an afterlife in God's grace, then how might human beings facilitate this? The Hereafter was concerned not with the earthly body but the soul. But if the soul had become soiled by the sinful temptations of the Earth while it inhabited a physical body, how might it be made clean and pure again for the afterlife? If the story of Adam and Eve's casting out from the Garden of Eden had for Jews been largely one to explain the doleful imperfection of Man's earthly existence, Paul took it one step further and used it to explain why God had to send a sacrificial manifestation of himself as the "Son of Man" in order to make it possible for human souls to regain "Eden" in Heaven. In short, we are all disposed toward sin, because our souls are soiled from birth by a hereditary sin from the original parents of humankind, the disobedient Adam and Eve. This line of interpretation may have been reinforced by the fact that Paul was also a Hellenized Jew, meaning his teachings reflect the influence of Hellenic philosophical doctrine, including Platonist notions of the cosmic separation of the spiritual and material worlds, and the separateness of the soul from the body it temporarily inhabits. Such an un-holistic approach (in fact, a dichotomous approach) tends to assign the moral good to matters spiritual and to fostering the independence of the soul from the needs and desires of the body. In this scheme, the physical and material universe tends to get associated with impurity and moral filth, that part of the cosmos representing the most distant and therefore corrupted emanations of creation from the Godhead. Thus material forces and concerns represent impediments to moral clarity and salvation in Platonist thinking. Extreme meditations on this dichotomization of reality led some men and women to seek and construct lives of varying degrees of asceticism, as either communal monks or self-denying hermits, living in the materially dead worlds of the desert or other marginal landscapes, or even in artificial ones created in the midst of fertile places of worldly society, such as by sitting for years upon tall pillars set above the hubbub of humanity (forgive my irreverence -- impurity of thought, if you will, but as I understand that food and drink were hoisted up by these so-called "Pillarists", provided by devotees below, where did the feces and urine of these ascetics go? -- oh, the philosophical irony of it all, but I digress!). If Paul had not fallen under the influence of polarized Greek philosophical teaching, he might have been more like Jesus. Although Jesus was concerned with cultivating proper inward moral attitudes toward others, such as that of men toward women, he was more concerned with encouraging people to construct a living, working moral society ("the Kingdom of the lord is at hand all around you!"). The question of salvation, if we limit it to what Jesus taught while he was alive here on Earth, seems to be more about cultivating moral fellowship with all people, whatever Paul later claimed about the supernatural efficacy of Jesus' death. In fact, Jesus betrays a contempt for the theoretical (and supernatural) notions of purity, which obsessed the Platonist Greeks. Jesus denied (and even defied) the right of Man to pronounce ultimate judgment on any fellow human being, whether it be upon a husbandless woman who sold her body to feed herself and her children, or a socially ostracized tax collector who had enriched himself from skimming off the top of his fiscal territory. For Jesus, no one was lost to the power of any stain upon one's soul, self-inflicted or otherwise. Implicitly, one comes away with the feeling that Jesus believed in our fundamental goodness, because he demonstrated that everyone could be brought back into the Kingdom of spiritual siblinghood through compassionate inclusiveness. If we were fundamentally sinful creatures, irrevocably polluted by Adam's Fall from God's Grace, inherently unworthy of salvation but by the acceptance of Divine Sacrifice, such simple teachings of forgiveness and befriendment that Jesus taught could have no moral efficacy. Jesus does not ask people to hate themselves as fallen creatures, or hold themselves in contempt, such that we deny our own individual capacity to bring goodness into the world . In fact, Jesus urged us not to "hide our light under a bushel basket"! Grace for Jesus was not waiting for him to be crucified and then celebrating his sacrificial death as our means to salvation. Grace for Jesus was simply accepting the extended hand of spiritual love, a social act of grace and redemption between human beings. In compassionate fellowship with each other, human beings could discover their true moral nature. Perhaps the Pelagians were less wrongheaded than at first glance. Recall the Book of Ruth from the Hebrew Testament, where a lone and bereft foreign woman of moral potential brings herself into a social fold of mercy and friendship and loving betrothal with a community of committed spirituality. Jesus would have been raised on this story, the quintessential parable of spiritual salvation through social grace, a central and reforming tenet of the Jewish Prophets, which they had been instilling in their people for centuries. Jesus as a prophet on Earth was of this lineage, however much the Gospel of John may seek to deny it. Paul, however, did not entirely fail to grasp the original simplicity and Jewishness of Jesus' primary message; just recall what Paul said of love in his Letter to the Romans.

Donatism: The Priests Must be Pure

If Pelagianism was an utter rejection of the Pauline Doctrine of Original Sin, then the Donatist heresy (named after its most articulate proponent, a Berber cleric called, "Donatus") was its polar opposite. Donatism took Paul's concept of the fundamentally fallen state of human beings to obsessive extremes of thought. The basic principle of the Donatists was this: a person could not obtain salvation simply through accepting Christ as his or her savior and repenting of his or her sins. A person must thenceforward live an absolutely sinless life in thought, word and deed. How this is even humanly possible is another question entirely. However, the greatest anxiety Donatists had following this line of reasoning was the horrific implication of "spiritually impure" priests administering the sacraments. The Donatists concluded that such sacraments so administered, whether it be baptism, communion, extreme unction, or what have you, would be not only non-efficacious but sources of spiritual contamination. So Donatists demanded that any priest found to be engaged in perceived sinful practices, or suspected of such, be defrocked for the protection of the flock. The Church's response to this petition was rather clever: the sacraments, if properly performed according to the established ecclesiastical strictures and instructions, were inherently efficacious as mechanistic connections to Divine Benediction, regardless of the condition of the soul of the priest performing such rites. This counter-argument satisfied many (most of whose adherents came from western North Africa), for indeed the heresy gradually died out after a brief schism between the Church in Mauritania and the Church in Rome. However, this heresy was a warning to the Church that, if it ever chose to over-emphasize the Stain of Adam in its catechism, it could arouse a spiritual neurosis among its congregations with reflexively destructive effects in terms of the fundamental tenets of trust and faith. As it was, the puritanical spiritual bent of the Berber people, evidenced in their particularly stubborn schismatic adherence to Donatism, would later make them a militant fundamentalist arm of the Islamic Empire, when the Berbers converted from Christianity to Islam in the 7th century, CE. Indeed, religiously puritanical Berbers were responsible in the 11th century, CE, for destroying by force of arms and dictatorship the multicultural unity that had flourished in the Moorish Emirate of Spain since the 8th century, CE, wherein Christian, Muslim and Jew had formerly lived in harmony and mutual enrichment.

Pelagianism: Purity from Innocence

Christianity was (and remains) vexatiously concerned with the purity and purification of the soul. The answer as to why there is injustice in the world was answered by the Apostle Paul, who declared human beings to be fundamentally sinful creatures. And why is that? Paul responded that it is because we all carry the "stain" of Adam's disobedience to God by eating of the Tree of Knowledge. This spiritual stain with which every child is born would prevent any of us, as Paul argues, from obtaining salvation, despite our best intentions and efforts. It is only through God's sacrifice of his Son in the form of Jesus that we have the hope of salvation. Acceptance of the gravity of this sacrificial gift and repentance of one's sins are the necessary ingredients to salvation. Yet Paul, though an Apostle, was not one of Jesus' original disciples. Paul never knew Jesus while Jesus lived as an earthly being. Despite this, Christianity as we know it is more a creation of Paul's theology than of Jesus' own teachings. Yet the difference did not go unnoticed by some Christians, chief among them, the Pelagians. Pelagius, their eponymous founder, was a Celtic Christian of Roman Britain, and in the Ancient world, he started the only heresy native to Britain during that age of history. Incidentally, there was not to be another heresy to arise in that Island until many centuries later during the Middle Ages in the form of Lollardy. Pelagius' teachings represented a heresy in that it went directly against Paul's fundamental precept that we are all born into sin. Pelagianism argued that we are all born innocent and carry no stain from any primal ancestor such as Adam, nor even our own parents, however fallen into moral error they might be. Pelagius taught that we are faced with a variety of challenges to our moral being in this world, and in every case, it is in our power to surmount these challenges, whether immediately through disciplined fidelity to to one's true, natural, God-given soul, or in self-rectification after initial failure. Jesus, provided us with the tools in his teachings alone to carry out the means to our salvation in our own spiritual hands. Because we are all born pure, it is a far easier matter to cleanse ourselves and recover our natural virtue despite the negative effects of the worldly environment in which we must live. For Pelagians, there was no inescapable cosmic inheritance predisposing us to a sinful nature. Sinfulness lay not at the heart of our being, as Paul would have it, and therefore we do not need to abase ourselves before some grand Christological sacrifice. Rather, salvation comes from cultivation of the childlike innocence Christ prescribed to restore the proper orientation of the soul for it moral purpose in life.

Medieval Catholic Christianity's Finest Hour: The Acceptance of Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone

The transformation of Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone into St. Francis of Assi comes across very much like that of Prince Siddhartha Gautama into Mahatma Buddha, in that they both started out as privileged children of wealth and then willfully chose to embrace the life of holy ascetic service to the beleaguered folk of the world while preaching proper spiritual priorities to a venal world. Francesco was born to a wealthy Italian family, his father a successful cloth merchant. Francesco fell in love with the lyrics and romances of the troubadors, took up knighthood, fought in wars, and otherwise led a blithe lifestyle with a circle of fashionably minded, culturally educated friends. Yet an increasing awareness of the suffering of others, and the temporary though signal shocks of grave personal illness and meditative suffering during captivity in war began to loosen Francesco's commitment to the narrow and selfish concerns of his elite class. And then it all came together in his mind through a mystical transformation in the figure he called "Lady Poverty", his most "beauteous bride". He literally threw off the fine clothes of his social station to symbolize this break, and people were moved to clothe his nakedness in humble robes. Francesco began caring for the outcasts of his society, the pitiful lepers, the refugees of abject poverty, the outcasts of a society that valued only wealth and power. Men and women flocked to him, moved by the example of his selfless devotion. He begged for his needs and the needs of the poor folk to whom he gave aid. He began preaching to those who sought to understand the forces that had moved him to take up such a radical life, encouraging them to literally follow the teachings and examples of Jesus. Francesco taught that every living thing was sacred to God, and deserved the respect and understanding of every human being. He taught that self-imposed poverty gave spiritual clarity and an open sense of compassion. He practiced vegetarianism, and animals did not fear him but came to him, literally flocked to him, to express and receive serene affection. The Church suddenly recognized that this layperson was bestirring a religious movement in their midst. Was he a heretic such as the Cathars of southwestern France with whom the Church was initiating a bloody war to wipe out the sect, or was he a man they could proclaim as "holy" to the people of Christendom? There are scholars of religious history who say that if St. Francis had been born a little too soon, or a little too late, he would have taken up his calling during cycles of homogeneous religious conservatism among Church authorities that would have branded him a heretic and gotten him burned at the stake. And yet, the catalyst for Francesco's final transformation as a holy man came from hearing a sermon of orthodox doctrine: Jesus' call in the Gospel of Matthew to abandon wealth, take to the road with a walking stick, heal the sick in heart and of body, and proclaim the good news that the Kingdom of Heaven exists to be built here on Earth. In the end, the Church chose to recognize Francesco and his followers and have them organized into an order of mendicant friars (the Franciscans) with an allied female sisterhood (the Order of St. Clare), similar in nature to the order of friars they had already created just a few years before, the Dominicans. Yet how great the difference in function between the two! The Domincans, though they could play the role of benign teachers who could gently guide people out of harmful (yet innocent) misinterpretations of the Christian faith, they were also the masters of the Inquisition, which hunted down, tortured and burned recalcitrant, knowing heretics. On the other hand, the Franciscans existed only to help the suffering, and had no punitive function. The Church's ratification of their movement made their ability to receive material help much more easily from devout Christians of charitable mind untroubled by limited finances, and so the Franciscans engaged in more ambitious projects to help the downtrodden and sick in a more systematically effective way. Francesco worked ceaselessly and died relatively young from the sheer exhaustion of laying down the foundation of what he hoped would become a permanent force of service in the world and righteous voice in Christianity. He was immediately proclaimed a saint after he passed -- a rare thing indeed. The war against the Cathars would continue for four more bloody years after St. Francis died, sparing neither man, nor woman, nor child, ravaging cities in the French region of the Aquitaine, the center, at the time, of the highest culture in Western Christendom for poetry, music and art. The Crusading knights who had enlisted in the Papal call to arms became greatly wealthy from the spoils from this holy war against a heretical sect that only wanted to live and let live. Whatever Christians outside the conflict might have perceived as the wrongheadedness of the Cathars, there was a terrible shock as to what the Church was willing to demand and condone against their fellow Man in the name of doctrinal obedience. The figure of St. Francis was a healing and reassuring one for those suffering a pessimistic reaction to the lack of compassion in such an authoritarian Church. St. Francis of Assi has and will continue to inspire people, Catholic and Protestant, Christian and non-Christian, for untold generations. As a sad footnote, his order later began to suffer from the corrupting influence of donated properties, which were causing the order to evolve a venality comparable to the monkish orders. In reaction, a splinter movement of Franciscans seeking to restore the original priorities of the order, calling themselves the "Fraticelli" ("Little Brothers") emerged in the latter end of the thirteenth century, and were quickly branded heretics. Timing is everything I suppose, even with spiritual truth.

The Promise of Early Christianity: Dismantled in Two Major Stages

In 1381, when the Lollard priest, John Ball, got the crowds of the Peasant Revolt chanting, "When Adam delved and Eve spun, who was then the better one!" it was a slogan born of a central tenet stemming from centuries-long frustrations endured by the human spirit in Medieval Christendom, and which had came to a head in the socially-shocking wake of the Black Death (bubonic plague): did not God intend that all people should be free and equal? Indeed, this is what the earliest Christian communities believed. The hundreds of Christian congregations that arose so quickly all over the Mediterranean World and its depending regions, even though they alone were a banned sect out of literally scores of choices for possible spiritual paths, were built upon this very notion. How else could the Early Church have grown so quickly, and why else would it have consisted so overwhelmingly in those nascent times mostly of women, slaves, artisans, simple merchants and educated people of altruistic bent? Early Christian bishops called for the humane treatment of slaves, arguing that their souls were valued no less in God's eyes than those of their masters, and perhaps more. In the Early Church, women could be religious leaders (Greek: diakona). Social equality reigned in the congregations, and those in want, need or sickness were aided by their fellow members. The Church consisted equally of the laity and the clergy in complementary roles. This aspect of social liberation was very attractive to a world spiritually weary of the soulless exploitation of women, slaves and plebeians (common folk). Decade by decade, century by century, despite state-sponsored terrorism against the outlawed sect, Christianity stubbornly, defiantly grew. At last the Empire recognized the wisdom of using what had become a significant (and firmly united) portion of the population as a political tool by at first legalizing this sect, and then shortly thereafter making it the official (and exclusive) state religion. When this occurred in the fourth century, CE, many of the very traits that had made it such a powerfully attractive faith were undermined. Rome, if nothing else, had been highly hierarchically-minded, and women were definitely to be subordinated. In switching from their brand of paganism to Christianity, the Roman Imperial authorities would impose a strict order of patriarchal and socioeconomic-based stratification. There would be no more women priests, and there would be no more congregations of collective economy. The traditional order of the Roman State would not be threatened by the example of an alternative form of doing things. The Church leaders were so grateful to be not only free and clear of ever being oppressed again but also the very masters of the religious destiny of the Empire, that they were quite willing to give up much of the egalitarian spirit that had been its source of former strength. For a time, this was as far as the compromise went, which was quite a loss in terms of its repercussions to the vulnerable people of society. And then, seven hundred years later, in the eleventh century, came the Gregorian Reforms of Pope Gregory VII. Up until that point in Western Catholic Christianity, priests had been allowed to marry, with their male children usually growing up to be priests in their turn. Also during this interval of centuries, women had found alternative paths in order to play an important role in the Church by becoming nuns or abbesses. Those who rose to the rank of abbess had been given access to the best education and played advisory political roles in cultural, reformist and educational affairs of state and diocese (e.g., Hroswitha of Gandersheim). The laity had also retained some of the egalitarian power of the Early Church, by acting in equal partnership with the priesthood in decisions of how parishes and dioceses should be led and nourished. The Gregorian Reforms struck two significant blows in the name of cleansing the Church of "corruption". The first was that women were declared vessels of filth, and therefore those seeking ordination as priests would also have to take monkish vows of celibacy on top of their priestly vows of pastoral service. Women's roles in the Church both from the laity and the monastic world were denigrated in value, though some, like Abbess Hildegard von Bingen would, in the succeeding century, use their brilliance to belie the presumptions of the Gregorian Reform and prove once again the vital importance of the female gender in the affairs of Christendom. The other highly significant act of the Gregorian Reform was to demote the power of the lay congregation to that of humble servants to the priesthood. In short, "The Church" was only the clergy. On the other hand, the people were the unclean children of fallen Adam. This "reform" more than anything else would lead to the sundering of Christianity, step by step, "heresy" by "heresy", to the Reformation, whose protestant sects made equalization between clerics and the people in the pews a tantamount concern. In the aftermath of the Gregorian Reform, it was inevitable that the human spirit would seek to rectify the imbalance by creating such Medieval separatist sects as the Cathars, the Waldensians, the Bogomils, the Beguines and the Lollards. It is inevitable that every human being born has opportunities to recognize by their own lights that they each are a child of God, no less than people of the most worldly power or fabulous wealth. It is interesting to find that another response to the Gregorian Reform is that religious artists began creating beautifully sympathetic images of Jesus and Mary as recognizable people like themselves. The human spirit craved a faith that was about compassion and dignity for all, rather than the abject subordination of one's being before a cold and scathing authority.

Heresy Medieval English Style: Lollardy

Lollardy is the only significant and native form of Christian heresy to emerge and find practice in Medieval England. The name of the movement (a pejorative one) comes from a very significant habit of its adherents, the Lollards: they lolled their tongues as they read aloud the holy scripture. The significance of their name lies not so much in how they moved their tongues, as in what they did with them: they read religious literature and the Bible in their native tongue of English. This was a highly significant act in and of itself in Medieval Christendom, whose authoritarian Church wanted to keep such things as liturgy, biblical texts and theological treatises in Latin or Greek, and thereby out of direct access to the masses. But the Lollards came onto the scene at a rather exciting time in European history in general and in England specifically. In the 14th century, CE, there was significant upward mobility for the common folk, who could now afford to have their children educated. The government of society itself by now required a larger secular clerical class to manage emerging and expanding bureaucracies, and common folk properly educated found professional positions en masse. This greater involvement of commoners in government and cultural affairs meant that the vernacular tongue (English) began to see more official use. Educated professionals, however lowly with respect to the nobility (who still ultimately controlled society), began to take pride in their abilities and their class for its increasingly important contributions in the legal, administrative and legislative (Parliamentary) spheres of the Kingdom. Many of them were also no longer willing to endure the abuses of churchmen, which by the Late Middle Ages had grown rampant. You need not look far for this general discontent: Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are replete with satirical attacks on the corrupt practices of the Church, William Langland's Piers Plowman is an allegorical (sometimes bitterly humorous, sometimes serenely beautiful) folk epic on how to liberate oneself from a world corrupted by a cynical Church. Then there is John Wycliffe. Wycliffe was an Oxford Don and a Doctor of Theology. He was most articulately fed up with the abuses of the Church. He began to engage in an act that anywhere else in Christendom would have gotten him burned at the stake: he began writing learned treatises attacking the Church and its dogma. Fortunately for him, there were powerful men, devout Christians among the nobility, who were equally fed up. One in particular became his champion: John of Gaunt, a royal prince of England and sovereign duke of the shire of Lancaster. Taking advantage of this political protection against even the highest clerics of the land, Wycliffe enlisted his learned followers to begin translating the Bible into English, a project he knew would bring the literate but unlearned into a shared conviction that the Church had not been representing Christianity to them as Christ had intended. Before Wycliffe had died of natural causes, he had indeed spawned a popular movement, which was to dominate religious affairs in England for the latter half of the 14th century, culminate in a rebellion against severe political repression during the 'Teens of the 15th century, and persist in underground cells among literate common folk right into the emergent years of the Reformation movements of the 16th century. When John of Gaunt's nephew became king, that is, Richard II of England, Lollardy saw its golden age. Though King Richard himself was a devout Catholic and lover of high church ceremony, he was also, in practice, a tolerant man of Lollards. His wife, Queen Anne of Bohemia was equally so. Queen Anne herself was a religious scholar in her own right, reading holy scripture in Latin, Czech and in English! She also publicized the fact of her reading the Bible in English to her subjects. The royal court was full of Lollard knights, and no one critical of the Church's abuses was censored, much less persecuted. But Lollardy was more than just a reformist movement. The Fourteenth Century would be wracked by several waves of the Bubonic Plague, the worst taking place in the middle of that century. The sheer number of deaths (anywhere from three quarters to two thirds of the population, depending on the region, in the first wave alone) caused many people to question the assumptions about God, justice and the order of the world that the Church had led them to make. With such an horrific death toll, and priests telling them they were being punished by God for their sins, many people all over Europe sought a closer connection with and more intimate understanding of God. Mystical movements sprang up everywhere, and largely derived from a new devotion to contemplative prayer among the laity. In England, we have several mystical texts still extant that came out of the Post-Plague era of spiritual reawakening, two of them definitely written by women and all of them in English: Pearl, an anonymous poem about the death of a loved one written by the same man who wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Cloud of Unknowing (another mystical poem of anonymous authorship), Showings by Julian of Norwich (who was a woman and religious anchorite who experienced powerful and moving visions that ran contrary to Church dogma), and the Book of Margery Kempe (a common woman of the merchant class who wrote an emotive autobiography of her own spiritual awakening). Lollardy was part and parcel to all this, but it was also clearly heretical in two significant ways: (1) it took up Wycliffe's reasoned argument that transubstantiation did not occur with the bread and wine during Communion (that is, they did not turn into the Body and Blood of Christ, (2) it took up Wycliffe's reasoned call for the Church to divest itself of material property and secular power. Because of these two positions above all else, Lollardy came on hard times indeed when King Richard II was deposed and starved to death, and a far more conservative regime took over. Under the succeeding king, Henry IV, edicts were issued outlawing Lollardy. Under his chief ally, Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, the Inquisition of the Dominican Order was allowed to set foot on English soil for the first (and last) time during the whole of the Middle Ages. Lollards were hunted down, summarily tried in courts of canon law, tortured, and finally burned at the stake for heresy. Lollard texts had to go underground and be exchanged in secret, which they were for fully a century more. A minor Lollard nobleman, Sir John Oldcastle, even lead a rural rebellion between 1413 and 1417, before his execution, in resistance to the political persecution of his sect. After that, the Lollards dwindled and practiced in secret in private gatherings in each other's homes. Yet Lollardy did not have an entirely pathetic end in terms of its legacy. During its happier era under Richard II, an educational exchange program occurred under the sponsorship of King Richard and Queen Anne, wherein, bright native Czechs from Anne's maiden home of Bohemia, were awarded scholarships for advanced study at the University of Oxford in England. There, these exchange students found the writings of one scholar particularly attractive: those of John Wycliffe. When they returned to their native Bohemia after completion of their studies, they brought back translations of Wycliffe's treatises in Czech, and the Czech people answered Wycliffe's call in a far more successful way than the Lollards: they founded the Hussite movement, which after several wars against the militantly repressive Papacy, they won autonomy and political recognition for their religious sect, the only heresy to successfully do so within Catholic Christendom. Needless to say, the Czechs beat the German Lutherans by a century in having their liturgy, hymnody and holy scripture in their native tongue.

Jesus in Islamic Eyes

Some Christians may be amazed to learn that Jesus is an important figure in the Koran, and up until the eighteenth century, CE, he was an important Islamic saint in popular tradition. The Muslim Arabic form of Jesus' name is "Isa", a name still given to male Muslim children. The Prophet Muhammad was in deep religious conversation and debate with Christians and Jews before he founded the Islamic faith, and learned much about their traditions. Muhammad saw Jesus as the penultimate prophet of the Abrahamic Tradition, an important and necessary precursor to his own mission as a prophet. Before Muhammad, the Arab peoples could be found in two religious camps: one was "pagan" and practiced a native religious tradition that dated back to Ancient times, wherein the principle deity worshiped was a mother goddess; the other was Christian, often followers of sects deemed heretical by the Orthodox Church, such as the Nestorians (by the way, Christian Arabs called Jesus, "Yasu"). So, while the pagan traditions were thoroughly rejected by Muhammad and his Islamic followers, they had a comfortable familiarity with Christianity, and incorporated some of Christianity's traditions and principles into the texts and practices of their new monotheistic faith of Islam. Jesus in the Koran is presented as a beloved saint (along with his mother Mary), and it designates Jesus as one of the Prophets who will accompany God (Allah) to Earth to serve Him during the Apocalypse. In short, Muslims do not see Jesus as God, but view him with much the same veneration as the Jews extend toward the Prophet Elijah. From the Koran and the residual oral traditions of Christian Arabs from Pre-Islamic times, Jesus was embraced by Arab, Persian and Turkish Muslims as an important figure of religious folklore. Above all Muslim sects, the Sufis venerated Jesus the most, writing down apocryphal anecdotes of the wandering healer and teacher, Jesus, for purposes of moral instruction. For them, Jesus was envisioned as a Pre-Islamic Sufi saint, because, after all, Jesus prescribed many of the things for himself and his disciples valued by Sufism: self-imposed poverty and rebellion against social exclusivity. The Sufi tales of Jesus continued to be recorded in their moral treatises through the 1600s, CE, and then suddenly they stopped. It was around this time that European Colonialism began to seriously penetrate the Islamic World, and with the mercantile imperialists came Christian missionaries. It would seem that the version of Jesus the missionaries tried to impose on Muslims spoiled their own venerable tradition about him. Most fundamentally for Muslims, a man (or woman) simply cannot be God, however saintly that person may be. Allah transcends all fleshly being, just as Yahweh does also for the Jews. In this respect at least, Jews and Muslims have more in common with each other than they do with their third partner in the Abrahamic Tradition: the Christians (for whom God can be a man).

Little Messiah/Big Messiah

The most important thing to understand in terms of the difference between Judaism and Christianity is the concept of the term, "Messiah" (which means, "the Anointed One" one in Hebrew; "Christos" is the Greek translation of the word). First of all, it originally referred to the person selected by a prophet (who in turn was inwardly directed by God) by anointing upon the head with holy oil to be the leader of the Hebrew Nation. Thus King Saul and King David were, in this sense, "messiahs"; this is what I playfully mean by "little messiah", as they were worldly practical leaders of a free and independent nation. Later, when the Jewish people came under the domination of others (Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, etc.), the Jewish prophets began to evolve a new concept of the messiah. This is what I playfully refer to as the "Big Messiah". This new sort of messiah was someone who would come to liberate the Jews from their bondage under another nation. Arguably, the Maccabees were the first such messiahs, freeing the Jews from the religious and political oppression of Hellenistic overlords. Then of course later, there were men such as Bar Kochba, who arose to liberate Judea from the Romans; he was proclaimed "Messiah", and he gave the Romans a real run for their money despite his ultimate failure. His revolt was really a question of a tiny nation fighting very well with such resources as they had against the vast resources of the most powerful empire the world had ever known. And yet, there was another concept of "Big Messiah" that had been evolving (and would continue to evolve) among Jewish prophets, rabbis, exegetical scholars, and mystics, which had truly cosmic implications: there would one day arrive a messiah to end all messiahs. This Messiah would not merely liberate the Jewish People politically, but bring peace and justice and prosperity to the whole world forever. When Jesus died (and perhaps while he yet lived -- the acclamations of later written accounts not withstanding), there was a group of Jews that decided he fulfilled this mystical notion of messiah. Most Jews rejected Jesus as the Messiah, because when he died, the Jews had not been liberated from the Romans, and there still remained injustice and oppression in the world. The Christian Jews rebutted this argument by saying that Jesus' Kingdom, whether on Heaven or Earth, was a transcendental one: it was a kingdom of higher vision and conscience that bound together increasing numbers of people in a spiritual siblinghood. These Jewish Christians felt that this messianic kingdom (while obtained by every person of faith in the afterlife) would also one day encompass the whole world of the living, because what Jesus did while he yet lived on Earth was merely to start the beginning of the process of spiritual renewal of the world. Yet this interpretation was not compelling to most of their fellow Jews, especially after the Fall of the Second Temple, when most were forced out of Judea by the repression and tightening military control of the Romans. To lose their most holy place, Jerusalem, and their remaining collective claims on the province that had once been their sovereign kingdom was simply too much for most any Jew to ever imagine that Jesus had been the Messiah, even if his supporters claimed the liberation he brought was more an inward one for each individual of faith and only gradually would become also political by sheer propensity of shared belief and social being. This was the first true divide between Jews and Christians; Emperor Constantine would create a second divide by setting up an imperial authoritarian Church with exclusive political claims to salvation and ratification of humanity, which in effect branded Jews the chief impediment to the promise of the Messiah. If there had been any possibility that Jesus might have been honored in some Jewish circles as at least a credible Jewish prophet, misunderstood by Christians as the Messiah, that possible means of connection between the two faiths was now destroyed by this political perversion of Christianity. The figure of Jesus would now be used as a weapon by Catholic/Orthodox Christianity against the Jews. What a terrible and incredible irony.

The Two Minimal Standards for Christian Gnosticism

Gnosticism (from a Greek verb meaning "to know") was an intellectual (and sometimes lunatic fringe) form of esoteric mysticism that predated Christianity and dates back to the multicultural cosmopolitan ferment of the Hellenistic World. When Christianity emerged in the Mediterranean cultural scene, many Gnostics found certain aspects of the new faith very attractive and germane to their own thoughts, and so combined them. Gnosticism was a thoroughly decentralized movement, and no less so when forms of Gnostic Christianity began to emerge. Therefore, whether as "pure" Gnosticism or Christian Gnosticism, there were a plethora of forms. However, there are two basic (though complex) principles that unify them all: (1) the world we presently live in is not the world intended for our souls; it is in fact a "false world" created by a very sophisticated being posing as "God" who has lured souls to this material realm in order to control us; this false god is called, "The Demiurge" or "Rex Mundi", and assisting him are a group of powerful beings serving as his cosmic lieutenants, called, "The Archons"; the way to know when you are dealing with one of these supernatural charlatans is that they are concerned with manipulating the ebb and flow of worldly power; thus any form of purportedly holy scripture that contains an account where "God" or "a god" is intervening in human political, military or economic affairs, you are are seeing the record of the manipulative practices of The Demiurge or one of his Archons managing the "prison" we call Earth; (2) salvation of the soul is tantamount to freeing it from the trap of this false world by acquiring the proper knowledge of the truth; the truth is that we mortals are almost entirely cut off from the True God, who is a loving, benign, just and healing being; if we can cultivate an awareness whereby we cease to be manipulated by the cues and pressures created and promulgated by the False God and his adherents, our soul can pass freely to the heavenly world of perfect joy and not get recycled back into another material body prone to this world of grief, injustice, corruption and oppression. The special spin that Christian Gnostics put on Gnosticism was that Jesus was a higher being sent by the True God as a piloting agent to provide us with the teachings to liberate ourselves from the False World. The matter of his crucifixion, however, is variously interpreted by various Christian Gnostic camps. For some it was felt to be masterminded by the Demiurge and his Archons working through Roman Imperial authorities in order to thwart Jesus from completing his mission. For others, it was a part of Jesus' plan, whereby his crucifixion would mark his life in a signal fashion to others, because after dying a mortal death, his soul and its ethereal body could re-emerge before mortals and show them that the mortal hold the Demiurge has upon us is only temporary and not capable of retaining its grip on their actual souls. Our souls in fact, properly belong to the True God, and we can become free through acquiring the right knowledge of our beloved relationship with the True God. So, while Gnostic Christians were concerned with social justice and moral conduct, they also wrote commentaries and gospels which were esoteric readings of scriptural tradition. These esoteric readings were designed to obtain the knowledge of true salvation, which comes not by Jesus' crucifixion as a form of ultimate religious sacrifice, but by Jesus' example as world-transcending being through the proof of his Resurrection and his consistent teachings on how to throw off the yoke of worldly values -- worldly values promoted to our detriment by the Demiurge and his Archons. In short, Gnostic Christians had found a solution to the vexing question of why God is Good but there is injustice in the world: the Earth is not the proper home of our souls and we have mistaken notions of who God is. This world is one giant slave plantation for which we were never intended by the True God, and it is run by renegade demonic overseers.

The Super Jesus of Docetism: A Heresy for the Egomaniacal

Not all heresies address themselves to points of concern inadequately dealt with by the authoritarian sect. Docetism was a rival sect in Early Christianity, and it persisted as an underground doctrine among renegade religious circles in the Near East centuries after the Council of Nicaea, going on to influence the Koran's view of Jesus' fate. The term for this heresy comes from a Greek word meaning "to seem", and refers to the central concept of the Docetists: Jesus only seemed human. In short, there were people who became Christians, for whom the latent paganism of their cultural heritage could not admit to worshiping or venerating anything or anyone with human or mortal characteristics. For them, Jesus only put on the illusion of being human to carry out his supernatural mission. In fact, he did not even die on the cross, but only pretended to and was actually whisked up into heaven while a phantom body appeared to die from crucifixion. Jesus pretended to live as a human being, but was really wholly omniscient and omnipotent and ectoplasmic the whole time. In Docetic thought, there was no room for those most beautiful moments in the Gospels where we get to see Jesus grow as a human being: the adolescent Jesus forgetting to meet back with his parents because he is so thrilled to be discussing holy scripture with Temple rabbis; Jesus' spiritual awakening during his baptism in the Jordan River by John the Son of Anne; Jesus going out into the desert for forty days and forty nights on a vision quest to discover the mission of his soul and discipline it for the tests of the world; Jesus totally losing his temper when he encounters the profiteering moneychangers at the Temple; Jesus suffering doubt, fear and an overwhelming sense of burden while praying for strength in the Garden of Gethsemane; and finally Jesus crying out to God while he dies, feeling utterly abandoned by both high and low, despite all the good he sought to accomplish. Jesus' humanity for some Christians is as powerful and moving and inspiring as any of the miracles he performed or cogent moral lessons he taught. The Docetists must have been an over-proud lot to have robbed the story of Jesus of these vital frailties that give the figure of Jesus an earthly approachability and sympathetic quality to so many Christians through the ages. Without these qualities of humble growth and earth-bound experience that gave Jesus the strength to do more than other men, Christians would never have conceived the very telling phrase, "Darling Jesus". We would not love him so. We would only fear him. Jesus would be too distant. He would be the ethereal figure utterly bereft of humanity that we encounter in Revelations, a book that some Church Councils did not think befit the Holy Scripture, but it eventually got in. There were just enough leaders in the Church who wanted more of a Super Jesus to close out the Bible, rather than a Jesus whose wounds we can so tenderly touch. So in a way, the Docetists got their way with the Church Authorities. Today one hears less about the Jesus who gathered the children about him to praise their innocent approach to the world. Far more often, we hear of the Jesus of Revelations, who wreaks vengeance upon the world like some sort of Olympian god.

How Orthodox Christianity Inflicted a Mortal Wound Upon the Byzantine Empire

Iconoclasm was a persistent and important religious position in Eastern Christianity for many centuries. It held that no image should ever be made of God, Jesus, or the Saints, as this was tantamount to idolatry. Icons were (and are) sacred painted images very important in the Orthodox Church, and they were (and indeed still are) venerated as religious conduits to holy powers of whom the praying venerator seeks aid. Iconoclasts formed popular reform movements in the Near Eastern provinces of the Byzantine (or Eastern Roman) Empire; Iconoclasm flourished as a heresy in Anatolia (modern Turkey), Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt. Repeatedly the iconclasts were crushed by the imperial military authority and the judicial officers of the Orthodox Church. On rare occasion candidates for the Imperial Throne in Constantinople even supported the cause, creating full-blown civil war and fueling bloody inter-dynastic feuds. The Iconoclasts had at least as ancient a religious heritage as any other form of Christianity. Many of their religious communities had been originally Jewish centers going back to Roman and Hellenistic times. And of course, religious imagery is forbidden in Judaism, just as it was among heavily Jewish sects of Christianity like the Jacobeans mentioned in an earlier posting in this blog. While the Iconodules (the image-venerating party) won the struggle in the short term, it would cost the Empire heavily in the long term. All those regions that had preferred iconoclastic forms of worship did not forget how badly treated they had been at the hands of the Byzantine religious and secular authorities. When the Muslim Arabs came knocking at their doors, the Eastern Provinces welcomed them as liberators. Their new Islamic masters allowed them to worship as they preferred, and the Byzantine Empire lost its richest provinces of trade, natural resources and agricultural products. The Orthodox Byzantines for their part put up a brilliant fight, and sometimes temporarily won back territory from Islam. But their days were now clearly numbered. People will always prefer freedom of worship than bloody oppression by an Official State Religion.

Arianism: The Great Could-Have-Been of Christendom

Arius, Presbyter of Alexandria in Egypt, created one of the great controversies in Christendom with his heretical movement, which came to be outlawed by the Council of Nicaea and the Imperial Government of the Roman Empire under Constantine the Great. The basic premise of Arianism is this: God is the Father, while Jesus was a man, although a great one, and a son of God only in the sense that he was a human being who recognized profoundly the kinship of his soul with that of God the Creator, the fount of all souls; Jesus understood the spiritual affinity within each of us for the energy of good in the world, and having attained that fully in himself, he had become God's spiritual offspring. Jesus for the Arians was the perfect saint and an exemplar to all human beings. He died unjustly on the cross as a mortal man, an enemy of the State of Rome. Arians did not believe the Jewish People carried any moral onus for Jesus' death. Arius and his followers were ejected from the Empire, and they took ship across the Black Sea and landed in the Crimea. There they encountered not only safe havens in towns dominated by Jewish merchants and artisans, but also a tribe called the Goths, who inhabited an unbroken area in what is now the Ukraine and Romania. The Goths were much impressed with Arian Christianity, and they converted wholesale. All outside the northern borders of the Empire, the influence of the Goths continued to grow. The tribe itself had to split in two in order to manage its affairs as a semi-nomadic people. So there were the Ostrogoths ("East Goths") and the Visigoths ("West Goths"), both of them robustly Arian Christian peoples, and many other tribes took their cue and also converted to Arianism through the efforts of Arian clerics, who could freely proselytize and had no social stigma outside the Empire. At one point there were two vast realms of opposed Christian sects: the Trinitarian Christians inhabiting the Empire and the Arian Christians inhabiting what the Romans liked to call, "The Barbaricum". As the political and military strength of Rome began to weaken, the two Gothic groups began to conquer or annex large sections of the Western half of the Empire, including what is today all of Italy, southwestern France and the whole of Spain. Into these regions they brought Arianism, and though Catholics were allowed to exist, Papal Authority was declared null and Catholics had a more difficult time obtaining high office. Under Arian law, Judaism was not an alienated religious community, and indeed, Jews were equal subjects with Christians under Gothic Law, with equal rights and privileges. This happy situation of mutually friendly coexistence lasted for several centuries, wherever Arian monarchies held sway. But gradually, this humane situation came to an end. Tribes who had converted to Catholic Christianity overthrew the Ostrogoths in Italy (i.e., the Catholic Lombards) and the Visigoths in Gaul (i.e., the Catholic Franks). Catholic political power in Western Europe was reasserting itself, and soon there remained only one last enclave of sturdy Arian political strength: Visigothic Spain. In the late sixth century, the Pope began to send emissaries to the Spanish Visigothic Court, pressuring the Visigothic monarchy and its nobility to give up Arianism and become Trinitarians and thereby partake freely of the fruits of becoming a member of Catholic Christendom, which now once again dominated all other parts of the f0rmer Western Empire. At last, in the seventh century the Visigoths began to capitulate, Catholic missionaries flooded in, and Canon Law Courts were set up. Successive kings were then pressured to change the secular laws of their kingdom, and most decidedly to take away all rights and privileges from the Iberian Jewish populations that had so flourished under their protection. Gradually, the kings acceded to these pressures, issuing more and more severe edicts, until the Jews of their kingdom were reduced to serfdom and utter vulnerability before any judicial court. The happy days of Judaeo-Christian coexistence had come to an end, and Christian Spain would evolve into one of the most anti-Semitic realms in all of Christendom.