In the 1st Century CE, there were two forms of what we retrospectively can call "Christianity", but which at the time was far less formalized as a faith distinct from mainstream Judaism. Both groups would have identified themselves as "followers of Jesus". The Jacobine camp (followers of James/Yakov the Just and his successors) believed that converts should continue to follow all the purity laws and rituals of Judaism. The Pauline Camp (the followers of Paul and his successors) believed that keeping kosher was unnecessary but Jewish moral laws should still be observed. The latter camp attracted mostly Gentile converts, while the latter (obviously) attracted mostly Jewish converts. What is interesting is that both groups thought of themselves as Jewish. In fact, they thought of themselves as the Jews who knew that the True Messiah (as prophesied in Isaiah) had arrived. Another thing they held in common was the implicit belief that Jesus was a human being. Followers of both the Apostle Paul and the Apostle James both believed that Jesus had achieved such a purity of spiritual being that he was adopted by God as His son, right after his sacred immersion in the River Jordan by John the Baptist, wherein a theophanic dove, embodying God's emanation of Holy Spirit (Sophia/Shekinah), descended upon Jesus as a sign of God's recognition of Jesus' entry into Messiahship. It must be understood that these early followers of Jesus understood the concept of "messiah" (meshiha') to be the highest form of prophethood, but not as form of deity or deification.
It was not until the final form of the Gospel of John appeared in the first quarter of the 2nd Century CE that Jesus was thought by some followers of Jesus to be God incarnate, and most of these were of Gentile heritage. By this point, these were calling themselves "Christians", while those who maintained the Jewish character of religion of Jesus' first followers, began to distinguish themselves from those who thought Jesus was more than the Messiah but actually Divine, by calling themselves by such names as "Nazoreans" (Notzrim) and "Ebionites" (Ebyonim). They are collectively called by today's scholars, "Jewish Christians".
Those who persisted in holding that Jesus was a human being whose spirit had been ennobled through theophany continued to by an accepted branch by what became mainstream Christianity until the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, when the Emperor Constantine demanded that all Christians unify under one creed. Even such figures as Jerome, an early Church Father who translated the Greek New Testament into Latin, held respect for the special sacred New Testament text that Jewish Christians studied alone and held sacred apart from all others: the Gospel of the Hebrews. Thought by some to be an important source for the Gospel of Matthew, it may well have been, unlike the Gospel of Matthew, actually written by Jesus' own disciple by that name, rather than merely attributed to him as the canonical gospel of that name has been found to be. Contemporaries attested that it was written in Hebrew characters and in the Aramaic language, the daily language of Jesus and his original followers.
Later ecclesiastical authorities decided that Jewish Christians followed an heretical concept they called "Adoptionism": that Jesus was merely adopted by God as His son rather than being one and the same as God in two separate but contiguous forms: Son and Father. Consequently, though the Gospel of Hebrews had been a respected work, admiringly quoted, and considered venerable by an array of even mainstream Christian scholars, it was declared heretical for this implicit heretical teaching, and so was systematically destroyed and no longer copied in orthodox scriptoria. Now we know it only by a few fragments and from certain passages cited in other works.
However, teachings of this truly lost gospel (emphasizing forgiveness and Jesus' human nature more than the canonical gospels, which emphasized attributed supernatural powers) were preserved among Jewish Christians safely outside the control of the Christian Roman Empire, especially in Western Arabia. Here Jewish Christians (not Christianized Jews) survived into the 7th Century CE, where they communicated to Muhammad most of what that Prophet of Islam came to determine about Jesus. Yet, even after Jewish Christians gradually became absorbed into Islam, eventually to disappear, the concept of Adoptionism would arise again repeatedly in the European Middle Ages and Early Renaissance, wholly independently, even with the long disappearance of the Gospel of the Hebrews.
It was simply more reasonable (and spiritually appealing) to some Christians that Jesus was human, that Joseph was his father, that Mary was his mother by natural means, and that in adulthood he experienced a form of theophany. This seemed to some more credible than to believe in the logically problematic concept of the Holy Trinity of a Triune God. Jesus, the Son of Man, was more spiritually heroic as a human being who came to know God in a profoundly intimate way, than to merely be an all-powerful God masquerading as a mortal. And as a human being Jesus was someone that others could actually aspire to, rather than as divine figure whose acts would always therefore be without parallel. For Adoptionists, Jesus as God led to the less desirable response of spiritual abasement by all who admired his life and teaching, instead of seeing Jesus as God's Ultimate Human Exemplar, who could be imitated in terms of one's own inner light.
More fundamentally, Jesus as a human being simply made more sense to those whose concept of Monotheism was irresistibly more exacting. However, the price for declaring and justifying this belief was the Burning Stake among communities of both Catholics and then also Protestants. Nevertheless, there are Adoptionists to this day. We have no place of worship that honors our creed, but some of us quietly attend churches of orthodox profession -- or else we merely practice our faith as spiritual solitaries. Fortunately in the democratic world, it is against the law to execute "heretics", and no longer legal to exact a profession of "orthodox" faith for acceptance into civic society.
One day, hopefully, an archaeologist will find a copy of the Gospel of the Hebrews preserved, likely as a papyrus scroll. Or perhaps someone who bought the scroll on the black market for textual antiquities will kindly give it up to a museum or university where scholars can preserve and translate it for humankind. Make no mistake: it is as much holy scripture as those books which are honored in the Bibles placed in motel nightstands.
No comments:
Post a Comment