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.

The Survival of the Jewish Jesus

So if there is at least as much evidence that Jesus only saw himself as a rabbi seeking to reform his society, as there is for the traditional view that Jesus was God's Son and the Messiah, is there any evidence of his survival in religious faith as a Jewish Prophet? It would seem on first glance that the answer must be no, because if one looks at Judaism as it has existed for nearly two thousand years, no place has been given for Jesus among their hall of Jewish spiritual heroes. And yet there was indeed a Judaic sect where Jesus was centrally honored as an enlightened teacher, a sect as real as other contemporaneous Jewish groups, including the Essenes, Ebionites, Zealots, Pharisees and Sadducees. This Jesus-venerating group were called the Jacobean Christians, followers of the Apostle James the Just (as distinguished from the other apostle of the same first name, James the Great), who centered their cult in Jerusalem, observed the Torah, and lived among fellow Jews of more mainstream inclinations in a composite community. Please forgive a necessary explanatory digression: in his own time among the Aramaic-speaking Jews, this early Christian leader was known as Ya'akov ha Tzadik, and Ya'akov is sometimes rendered as "Jacob" rather than as the Greek form "James" -- thus the adjective, "Jacobean". So to continue the main narrative, the Jacobeans distinguished themselves in that they believed Jesus was a prophet on a par with those honored in the Hebrew Testament, and transcended death through bodily resurrection; a prophet transcending death had precedent in Jewish tradition: Elijah was bodily assumed into Heaven. However, the Jacobeans suffered and eventually died out as a sect for two scissor-like reasons: the rest of the Christian community came to reject them for continuing to observe the Torah when the Miracle of the Pentecost and the teachings of the Apostle Paul moved non-Jacobeans to abandon Jewish religious rites and strictures, while at the same time the broader Jewish community came to identify the Jacobeans with the rest of the Christian community, which was becoming a separate (and sometimes competitively hostile) religion, and therefore could no longer be identified as fellow members of what was even then a still a very diversified Jewish world. Rejected by both sides as either not being enough Jewish, or not being enough Christian, they found themselves in a religious no-man's land, and they disappeared as a going concern. But this is not the end of the story. The notion of Jesus as Great Prophet rather than as Divine Incarnation survived in several heretical sects, to see final crystallization centuries later in the faith expounded by the Arab prophet, Muhammad.

Did Christianity Begin as a Judaic Heresy?

If you read the Synoptic Gospels today, and then the most emphatically messianic, Gospel of John, even under the most accurate translation from the most authoritative Greek New Testament (and most especially one based on the recently discovered 5th century manuscript version formerly preserved at the Orthodox Christian monastery at Mt. Sinai), the reader can only conclude that, yes, Jesus' religious claims amounted to a heresy within the Jewish community into which he was born. But even then, this conclusion is based solely on his refusal to rebut the acclamation of his Disciples that he, Jesus, was indeed the long-awaited Messiah. His teachings themselves, moral, ethical, socially inclusive, all fell well within the spiritually reformist traditions of the Hebrew Prophets. He was indeed a rabbi in the ancient sense of the word (i. e., "teacher"), before the term became a formalized title of religious rank in the Jewish Community that crystallized after the fall of the Temple many decades after his death. Perhaps another argument could be made for Jesus being heterodox in his rejection of the dietary and Sabbath observance laws found in the Torah (e.g., if you would help one of your sick animals on the Sabbath, why not also administer to the sick; God cares more about how you treat your fellow human beings than whether you are fastidious about avoiding or mixing certain foods), but even there, he was merely appealing to accepted bounds of good sense and a proper prioritization of moral faith over mechanical ritual observance. But what belies the claims of the canonical Gospels was the discovery of the implicit existence of a "lost gospel" by Nineteenth Century German scriptural scholars, which they dubbed "Quelle" (i.e., "the source"), commonly known today as the "Q Gospel". This lost gospel is the source for the shared material found in both the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew. In this shared material, no messianic claims are made, nor any supernatural claim of Divine Resurrection. The strength of argument for the prior antiquity of this lost written source (no doubt based on oral traditions once found among the nascent Christian communities) was strengthened by the discovery in the 1940s at the Nag Hammadi Oasis in Eqypt of another lost Christian Gospel, which was materially preserved in a buried clay jar by Coptic Christian monks (fearing reprisals from orthodox prelates, who were sniffing about for heretical writings preserved in monastic libraries). This is the now famous, so-called "Gnostic" Gospel of Thomas, not to be confused with an Old Church Slavonic apocryphal text, also called, "The Gospel of Thomas", which supposedly chronicles Jesus' childhood. The Gospel of Thomas found at Nag Hammadi is written in Coptic, a language directly descended from the language of the Pharaohs and the common tongue of Egypt up until its conquest by Muslim Arabs in the seventh century, CE. Scholars studying this manuscript have deduced from the idiomatic formations that it is a translation of an original lost Greek manuscript of this gospel, and that this missing Greek version dates back to a time before the canonical Gospels (i. e., from the middle part of the first century, CE). What is more, the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas bears a strong relationship both in content and phraseology to the theoretical Q Gospel. The difference bewteen them lies in the "Gnostic" qualities of the former. These are more implicit than overt to the modern reader of any given contemporary English translation. To the point: the Nag Hammadi Gospel of Thomas makes no mention of Jesus as the Messiah or Resurrected Being. Nor does it describe apocalyptic prophesy or the Passion of Christ. It is all entirely constructed around a conversation of moral teachings between Jesus and his disciples, which include women (the "Salome" mentioned in the manuscript is not the same Salome who was the step-daughter of King Herod, who ordered the head of John the Baptist on a plate). Perhaps the most generally "Gnostic" quality of this manuscript is that it places the burden of spiritual revelation and salvation on each individual, with Jesus in this gospel acting more the part of a traditional rabbi of his times, teaching by word and example, but making no claims of "my way or the highway Godhood" such as one finds in the last written gospel, that of John. The Q Gospel as reconstructed by scholars of Christianity shows the greatest affinity with the Gospel of Thomas in terms of the great number of moral wisdom sayings they share. The Gospel of Thomas, for its part, has quite an original spin on these sayings ascribed to Jesus, making it quite apparent to scriptural experts that it is not merely a copy of Q, but a sibling version from an original body of oral tradition. So is there any other evidence that Jesus was not a heretic in the Jewish community while he lived? As a matter of fact, there is. There are two Arab Christian texts from the ninth century, CE, which quote a contemporary account of Jesus from Flavius Josephus' History of the Jewish People. It has long been established that the text that has come down to us in the Western Tradition is corrupt in its brief passage on Jesus' ministry. Here, in language and perspective completely alien to the writer Josephus, some busy-bodied Christianizing transcriber altered the passage so that we have Josephus, a Pharisee who remained a devout Jew all his life, triumphantly claiming that Jesus was not only the Messiah but also God! However, the two surviving Arab-language manuscripts, one from Medieval Egypt, the other from Medieval Syria, refer to on an evidently lost and uncorrupted version of Josephus' book, for the passages they preserve concerning Jesus, say exactly what was within the realm of possibility for a devout Jew who had lived in Jesus' time to have said about him. Further evidence of the veracity of these Arab Christian versions is the fact that they are neither of them perfect matches but otherwise substantially the same in content, showing that they derive from the parallel possession of versions of Josephus' manuscript in two separate communities. To paraphrase what they both say, this is essentially what they tell us: Josephus saw Jesus as a respectable and honest rabbi from the district of Galilee, who faithfully taught the holy scripture and the ways of moral choice, and healed the sick of mind and body. That's it! If you don't believe me, look up the neglected but revelatory research and analysis of Dr. Schlomo Pines, Professor of Arabic at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, during the 1960s.

Welcome to What This Is

The purpose of this blog will be to introduce its visitors to various forms of Christianity practiced throughout the history of the faith since its inception under the Galilean Jewish religious teacher, Jesus of Nazareth, otherwise known in his own time as Yeshua ben Maryam, Aramaic for "Joshua son of Mary". This blog will talk of all the forms of Christianity which have arisen, not only in comparison to one another, but also in terms of their inherent qualities. In part, this is to remedy the fact that too much of Christian religious history would lead one to believe that the only forms of the faith seriously practiced over the centuries were Constantine-mandated Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, and then later, Protestant Reformationist sects, ratified by various and sundry Early Modern European states. During the supremacy of state-supported Papal and Patriarchate Christianities in the West and East of Europe and the Mediterranean Basin, respectively, these alternative Christianities would have been those described as "heretical". Yet before state sponsorship of the faith at the Council of Nicaea in the 4th century CE, even much of the way mainline Christianity had been practiced would have been retroactively described as heretical if the subsequent form of Christianity as codified by the Imperial Government had taken the trouble to judge it according to the new terms of practice established at Nicaea. In short, all previous "errors" were forgiven, so long as you adhered to the new creed approved by the regime of Emperor Constantine. Alternative Christianities continued throughout the Middle Ages, and even after Protestant sects emerged and stabilized under political protection. In the Protestant-controlled spheres of Early Modern Europe, those religious reform movements that did not win the approval of some respectable political entity were usually called "separatists" rather than heretics, but it meant essentially the same thing: ostracism and the brand of outlawry. In Catholic-controlled territories, Protestant movements continued to emerge and be repressed throughout much of the Early Modern Period, until the atheism of the Enlightenment replaced it in frustration. Then of course there are the heresies of Early Christianity, which before the political protection of that branch of Christianity which was deemed orthodox, were no less valid in practice or appeal than those forms that later contributed to the victorious amalgam that emerged after the Council of Nicaea. All these alternative branches of Christianity have been unduly neglected in surveys of the Faith, and mostly it is because scholars assume (unconsciously following the barnacled cues of past dogmatists), that these other forms were somehow spurious and spiritually unsatisfying or unfulfilling. This blog will seek to correct such mistaken assumptions. In fact, hopefully the readers of this blog will discover that most of the worthwhile alternatives of Christian expression belong as much to the trunk of the Christian Family Tree as those that we today consider "appropriate".