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A History of Christian Thought in One Volume

Abingdon Press

The Cradle of Christianity

According to a tradition reflected in the Gospel of Luke, Christianity was born in a manger, a scene we often like to paint in quiet hues. Yet the context of that manger scene was not as tranquil as we would like to think. Joseph and Mary were led to the city of David because of economic conditions at home and a decree from afar when Caesar Augustus ordered "that all the world should be enrolled" (Luke 2:1 RSV). The purpose of the census was taxation, and the world about the manger was rife with bitter complaint.

In short, from its very beginning Christianity has existed as the message of the God who "so loved the world" as to become part of it. Christianity is not an ethereal, eternal doctrine about God's nature, but rather it is the presence of God in the world in the person of Jesus Christ. Christianity is incarnation, and, therefore, it exists in the concrete and the historical. Therefore, in a study such as this we should begin by describing, however briefly, the world where the Christian faith was born and took its first steps.

The Jewish World

It was in Palestine, among Jews, that Christianity arose. Among Jews and as a Jew, Jesus lived and died. His teachings were framed within the Jewish world view, and his disciples received them as Jews. Later, when Paul traveled about, preaching the gospel to the Gentiles, he usually began his task among the Jews of the synagogue. Thus, we must begin our history of Christian thought with a survey of the situation and thought of the Jews among whom Christianity was born.

The geographical location of Palestine caused many misfortunes to the people who considered it their Promised Land. Palestine, through which crossed the trade routes from Egypt to Assyria and from Arabia to Asia Minor, was always an object of the imperialistic greed of the great states that arose in the Near East. For centuries, Egypt and Assyria fought over that narrow strip of land. When Babylon supplanted Assyria, it also inherited Palestine, eventually destroying Jerusalem and taking into exile a part of the people. After the Persian conquest of Babylon, Cyrus permitted the exiles' return and made Palestine a part of his empire. By defeating the Persians at Issus, Alexander annexed their empire, including Palestine, which came under the rule of Macedonian governors. When Alexander died in 323 BCE, a period of unrest followed for more than twenty years. By the end of that time, Alexander's successors had consolidated their power, but for more than a century the two main houses springing from Alexander's generals fought for the possession of Palestine and the surrounding region. In the end, the Seleucids gained the upper hand, but eventually the Jews rebelled under the lead of the Maccabees or Hasmoneans, and as a result they gained religious liberty and, later, political independence. Such independence, however, was possible only because of the internal division of Syria, and it vanished as soon as the next great power appeared: Rome. In the year 63 BCE, Pompey took Jerusalem and defiled the Temple, penetrating even to the Holy of Holies. From then on, Palestine was subject to Roman power, and in this condition we find it at the advent of our Lord.

Under the Romans, the Jews were notably intractable and difficult to govern. This was because of the exclusiveness of their religion, which admitted no "strange gods" before the Lord of Hosts. Pursuing its policy of respecting the national characteristics of each conquered people, Rome respected the Jewish religion. As a result, many parties in Palestine did not rebel against Rome. But not one Roman governor succeeded in becoming popular among the Jews.

Through the passage of years and of patriotic struggles, the Law had become the symbol and bulwark of the Jewish national spirit. With the decline of the prophetic movement, it came to occupy the center of the religious scene. As a result, the Law, which had been codified by the priests to regulate temple worship and the people's daily life, became itself a source of the rise of a new religious caste, distinct from the priestly, and of a new spiritual interest centered not in the Temple, but in the Law. The scribes were responsible for the preservation of the Law as well as for its interpretation. Although differences of school and temperament divided them, they produced a great body of jurisprudence concerning the application of the Law in diverse circumstances. This happened because the Hebrew religion was becoming more and more personal, at a time when interest in Temple ritual was declining. In their long struggle, the Pharisees were beginning to overcome the Sadducees; the religion of personal conduct was superseding that of sacrifice and ritual.

We must pause to do justice to the Pharisees, so badly misunderstood in later times. Contrary to what we often imagine, the Pharisees emphasized the importance of a personal religion. For this reason the more conservative Jews accused them of being innovators who eased the yoke of the Law. At a time when the vitality of Temple worship was on the wane, the Pharisees strove to interpret the Law in such a way that it might serve as a daily guide for the religion of the people. The Pharisees purposed to make religion a part of the intimate daily life. Like the Sadducees, their religion centered on the Law, yet theirs was not only the written Law but also the oral. This oral legacy, handed down through centuries of tradition and interpretation, served to apply the written Law to the concrete situations of daily life.

The Sadducees were the Jewish conservatives of the first century. They accepted only the written Law as their religious authority, not the oral law that had developed out of Jewish tradition. Thus, they denied the resurrection, the future life, the complicated angelology and demonology of late Judaism, and the doctrine of predestination. In this they opposed the Pharisees, who accepted all these things, and for this reason the Talmud calls the Sadducees—though quite inexactly—"Epicureans." Their religion centered on the Temple and its rites rather than on the synagogue and its teachings. Thus, it is not surprising that they disappeared soon after the destruction of the Temple, whereas the Pharisees were hardly affected by that event.

The Sadducees and the Pharisees did not comprise the whole of first-century Palestinian Judaism. Rather, there was a multitude of sects and groups of which little or nothing is known. Among these we must mention the Essenes, to whom the majority of authors attribute the famous "Dead Sea Scrolls," and about whom, therefore, we know more than about the other groups.

Thus, there was within Judaism a wide variety of emphases, sects, and opinions. But this variety must not obscure the essential unity of the Jewish religion, which centered in the Temple, the Law, and eschatological hope. If the Pharisees differed from the Sadducees over the place of the Temple in the religious life of the people, or about the scope of the Law, this must not hide the fact that for the Jewish people both the Temple and the Law were fundamental aspects of Judaism. There was no direct contradiction between them, although the important practical difference was that Temple worship could be celebrated only in Jerusalem, while obedience to the Law could be practiced everywhere. This is why the latter aspect of Jewish religious life gradually supplanted the former, even to the point where the destruction of the Temple in the year 70 did not shatter the heart of Jewish religion.

On the other hand, all these sects partook of the two principal tenets of Judaism: its ethical monotheism and its messianic and eschatological hope. Since earliest times, the God of Israel had been the God of justice and mercy, who demanded just and clean conduct of the people, not only in the ceremonial sense but also in their social relations. This ethical monotheism continued to be the center of Jewish religion, in spite of the diversity of sects. Furthermore, through the rude blows that history had dealt them, throwing them upon the divine mercy and justice, the Jews had come to a religion in which hope played a central role. In one way or another, all expected God to save Israel from her political and moral woes. This hope of salvation took on different shades of meaning, sometimes centering in the Messiah and at other times in a heavenly being that some called the "Son of Man." The messianic hope was usually joined to the expectation that the kingdom of David would be restored in this world, and the Messiah's task consisted precisely in restoring the throne of David and sitting on it. On the other hand, the figure of the Son of Man, which appeared more frequently in apocalyptic circles, was a more universal character than the Messiah, and would come to establish, not a Davidic reign on this earth, but rather, a new era, a new heaven and a new earth. Unlike the Messiah, the Son of Man was a celestial being, and his functions included the resurrection of the dead and the final judgment. These two tendencies were drawn together over the span of years, and by the first century there had appeared intermediate positions, in which the reign of the Messiah would be the last stage of the present era, and then would follow the new era that the Son of Man was to establish. At any rate, the Jewish people were still a people of hope, and it would be wrong to interpret their religion simply in legalistic terms.

Another aspect of Jewish religion that would later develop into one of the pillars of trinitarian theology was the concept of Wisdom. Although it seems that Rabbinic Judaism had not gone as far as to fully hypostasize Wisdom, it did provide the basis for later Christian claims that Christ—or, the Holy Spirit—is called Wisdom in the Old Testament.

Judaism, however, was not confined to Palestine. On the contrary, the Jews formed important communities in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, and Rome. These Jews, together with the Gentile proselytes they had succeeded in attracting, constituted the Diaspora, or Dispersion, a very important phenomenon of first-century Judaism which contributed notably to the expansion and shaping of Christianity in its first years.

The Jews of the Diaspora were not assimilated by the population of their new homelands, but formed a separate group that enjoyed a measure of autonomy within the civil government. In the great centers of the Diaspora—as in Egypt—the Jews lived in a certain zone in the city, not so much by obligation as because they themselves wanted to do so. There they elected their own local government and established a synagogue where they could study the Law. The Empire granted them certain legal recognition and provided laws to give them due respect, such as the law that prohibited forcing a Jew to work on the Sabbath day. In this way the Jewish community became a city within a city, with its own laws and administration. This is not surprising, but rather, a common practice in the Roman Empire. On the other hand, the Jews of the Diaspora, scattered throughout the world, felt themselves united by the Law and by the Temple. Although many of them died without ever having set foot in Palestine, every male Jew over twenty years of age sent an annual sum to the Temple. At least in theory, the leaders of Palestine were also leaders of all the Jews throughout the world.

Almost from the beginning, differences began to spring up between Palestinian Judaism and that of the Diaspora. Of these the most important was language. Both in the Diaspora and in Palestine the use of Hebrew was declining, and it was more and more difficult to understand the Scriptures in their original language. As might be expected, the loss of Hebrew was much more rapid among the Jews of the Diaspora than among those who continued to live in Palestine. Whereas among the Palestinian Jews the Old Testament soon began to be translated into Aramaic—first orally and later in written form—this process of translation was much more rapid and complete in the Diaspora, where the successive generations of Jews were losing the use of Hebrew and beginning to use the local tongues, especially Greek, the language of government and of commerce.

It was at Alexandria that this linguistic Hellenization of Judaism reached its apex. This was a great center of Hellenistic culture, and, as we shall see later, the Alexandrian Jews wished to present their religion in such a way that it might be accessible to their educated neighbors. From this end arose the Greek translation of the Old Testament which was called the Septuagint—commonly known as "the LXX."

The LXX played an important role in the formation of Hellenistic Jewish thought. In order to translate ancient Hebrew concepts, it was necessary to use Greek terms already bearing connotations foreign to biblical thought. On the other hand, educated Gentiles could now read the Old Testament and discuss its validity and significance with Jews. Jews were therefore obliged to acquaint themselves better with the philosophical literature of the day, and to interpret the Bible in such a way that its superiority would be evident. Thus they even reached the point of affirming that the great Greek philosophers had copied the best of their wisdom from the Bible.

As for the history of Christianity, the significance of the LXX was incalculable. The LXX was the Bible of the first known Christian authors, the Bible that almost all the writers of the New Testament used. Thus, the LXX was the matrix in which the language of the New Testament was molded, and it is one of the best instruments we now possess to understand that language.

The LXX was also a symptom of the state of mind of the Jews of the Diaspora, particularly those of Alexandria. The Hellenizing tendency had caught hold of them, and they felt obliged to show that Judaism was not as barbaric as one might think, but rather that it was closely linked to genuine Greek thought.

The greatest expression of this intent on the part of Jews to harmonize their tradition with the Hellenistic culture is found in Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Jesus, who strove to interpret the Jewish Scriptures in such a way that they might be compatible with the teachings of the Academy. According to Philo, the Scriptures teach the same things that Plato does, although they use allegories to do it. Thus, the wise interpreter's task is to show the eternal sense that may be found behind the scriptural allegories. Thus Philo could assert the infallible revelation of the Scriptures, and at the same time free himself from those aspects that were the most difficult to harmonize with Platonism. We should point out, however, that Philo did not deny the historical and literal meaning of the Law—such denial would have been apostasy from Judaism—but rather insisted that, in addition to its literal sense, the Law also had an allegorical meaning.

The God of Philo is a combination of Plato's idea of the beautiful and the God of the patriarchs and prophets. God is absolutely transcendent, so that no direct relationship exists between God and the world. Moreover, as Creator, God is beyond the ideas of the Good and the Beautiful. God is essential being, and is not to be found in time or in space, but rather, these are found in God. Because God is absolutely transcendent and because—in his more Platonic moments—Philo conceives of God as an impassive being, the relationship between God and the world requires other intermediate beings. The main one of these is the logos or Word, which was created by God before the creation of the world. This logos is the image of the divine and is God's instrument in creation.

On the subject of the end of the human creature, Philo declares—in typically Platonic fashion—that it is the vision of God. We cannot understand God, since understanding implies a certain mode of possession, and we can never possess the infinite. But we can see God in a direct and intuitive way. Ecstasy is the goal and culmination of a long, ascending process, through which the soul is purified. The body serves as ballast to the soul, and reason opposes the senses. Purification consists, then, in freeing oneself from the sensual passions that enslave the soul to the body. Here Philo introduces the Stoic doctrine according to which lack of passion, or apathy, is to be the goal of every human being. Yet in Philo apathy is not—as among the Stoics—the goal of morality, but rather the means that leads to ecstasy.

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Excerpted from A History of Christian Thought in One Volume by Justo L. González. Copyright © 2014 Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
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