History of the Christian Church

Contents

PREFACE

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

REVISERS’ PREFACE

Period I

FROM THE BEGINNINGS TO THE GNOSTIC CRISIS

1 The General Situation

2 The Jewish Background

3 Jesus and the Disciples

4 The Early Christian Community

5 Paul and Gentile Christianity

6 The Close of the Apostolic Age

7 The Interpretation of Jesus

8 Gentile Christianity of the Second Century

9 Christian Organization

10 Christianity and the Roman Government

11 The Apologists

Period II

FROM THE GNOSTIC CRISIS TO CONSTANTINE

1 Gnosticism

2 Marcion

3 Montanism

4 The Catholic Church

5 The Growing Importance of the Roman Church

6 Irenaeus of Lyon

7 Tertullian and Cyprian

8 The Logos Theology and Monarchianism

9 The Alexandrian School

10 Church and Roman Society from 180 to 260

11 The Constitutional Development of the Church

12 Public Worship and Sacred Time

13 Baptism

14 The Eucharist

15 Forgiveness of Sins

16 Patterns of Christian Life

17 Rest and Growth

18 Rival Religious Forces

19 The Final Struggle

Period III

THE IMPERIAL STATE CHURCH

1 The Changed Situation

2 The Arian Controversy to the Death of Constantine

3 Controversy under Constantine’s Sons

4 The Later Nicene Struggle

5 The Germanic Invasions

6 The Growth of the Papacy

7 Monasticism

8 Ambrose and Chrysostom

9 The Christological Controversies

10 The East Divided

11 Controversy and Catastrophe in the East

12 The Constitutional Development of the Church

13 Worship and Piety

14 The Latin Christian Tradition

15 Jerome

16 Augustine of Hippo

17 The Pelagian Controversy

18 Semi-Pelagianism

19 Gregory the Great

Period IV

THE MIDDLE AGES TO THE CLOSE OF THE INVESTITURE CONTROVERSY

1 Missions in the British Isles

2 Christianity and the Frankish Kingdom

3 East and West in the Iconoclastic Controversy

4 The Franks and the Papacy

5 Charles the Great

6 European Christianity in the Ninth Century

7 The Papacy and the Ottoman Empire

8 The Greek Church after the Iconoclastic Controversy

9 Christian Expansion in the Early Middle Ages

10 The Reforming Papacy

11 From Reform to Revolution

12 Hildebrand and Henry IV

13 The End of the Investiture Struggle

Period V

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES

1 The Crusades

2 New Religious Movements

3 Medieval Heresy—The Cathars and Waldenses; the Inquisition

4 The Dominicans, Franciscans, and Other Mendicant Orders

5 Early Scholasticism; Anselm of Canterbury and Peter Abelard

6 The Rediscovery of Aristotle; the Rise of the Universities

7 High Scholasticism and Its Theology; Thomas Aquinas

8 Late Scholasticism; Duns Scotus and William of Ockham

9 Mysticism, the Modern Devotion, and Heresy

10 Missions and Defeats

11 The Papacy at Its Height and Its Decline

12 The Avignon Papacy; Papal Critics and Defenders; the Great Schism

13 Wyclif and Hus

14 The Reforming Councils

15 The Italian Renaissance and Its Popes; Popular Religious Leaders

16 The New National Powers

17 Humanism North of the Alps; Piety on the Eve of the Reformation

Period VI

THE REFORMATION

1 Luther’s Development and the Beginnings of the Reformation

2 Separations and Divisions

3 Ulrich Zwingli and the Swiss Reformation

4 The Anabaptists

5 German Protestantism Established

6 The Scandinavian Lands

7 The Reformation in French Switzerland and Geneva before Calvin

8 John Calvin

9 The English Reformation

10 The Scottish Reformation

11 The Catholic Reformation and Counter-Reformation

12 Confessional Strife in France, the Netherlands, and England

13 German Religious Controversies and the Thirty Years’ War

14 Socinianism

15 Arminianism

16 Anglicanism, Puritanism, and the Free Churches in England, Episcopacy and Presbyterianism in Scotland

17 The Quakers

Period VII

MODERN CHRISTIANITY

1 The Beginnings of Modern Science and Philosophy

2 The Transplantation of Christianity to the Americas

3 Deism and Its Opponents; Scepticism

4 Unitarianism in England and America

5 Pietism in Germany

6 Zinzendorf and Moravianism

7 The Evangelical Revival in Great Britain; Wesley and Methodism

8 The Great Awakening

9 The Impact of the Evangelical Revival; the Rise of Modern Missions

10 The Revolutionary Epoch in the United States

11 The German Enlightenment (Aufklärung)

12 Trends in Nineteenth-Century Protestant Thought in Germany

13 British Protestantism in the Nineteenth Century

14 Continental Protestantism in the Nineteenth Century

15 American Protestantism in the Nineteenth Century

16 Roman Catholicism in the Modern World

17 The Eastern Churches in Modern Times

18 The Growth of the Ecumenical Movement

19 The Church in the World

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SUGGESTIONS

INDEX

Maps and Charts

The Roman Empire around the Time of Hadrian

Europe at the End of the Fifth Century

The Empire of Charles the Great

The Byzantine Empire and the Crusader States (First Crusade)

Europe about 1500

Religious Divisions in Europe about 1600

Approximate Distribution of Churches in Colonial America, 1775–1776

Spread of Church Colleges in America up to 1860

Major Ecumenical Gatherings

Preface

THE FIRST EDITION of Williston Walker’s A History of the Christian Church, published in 1918, quickly became a standard, highly serviceable textbook. Walker, professor of ecclesiastical history at Yale University, achieved a rare combination of directness, competence, and balance in this work, which became an unparalleled success as a basic one-volume treatment of church history from the first to the twentieth century. After forty years, its usefulness in providing a concise coverage of the sweep of Christian history was still widely recognized. Hence, when the second (1959) edition of the work was undertaken, the aim of the revisers, Cyril C. Richardson, Wilhelm Pauck, and Robert T. Handy of Union Theological Seminary in New York, was primarily to revise those parts where some errors of fact had come to light or where the interpretation had become seriously out of date, and to do a more thorough reworking of the section on modern Christianity, where much research had been done since Walker’s time. The third (1970) edition was little changed except for additions to take account of important developments of the 1960s, with particular reference to the Second Vatican Council and the spread of the ecumenical movement.

Since then, continuing historical research and methodological changes have led to important new discoveries and to fresh interpretations of the earlier periods, necessitating a much more thorough revision. This fourth edition undertakes this. The basic outline of Walker’s original text, previously modified only for the last period, has proved to be sound, and with some emendations has been generally followed again, but there has been extensive reconception, recasting, and rewriting of the content of many sections, incorporating the result of recent scholarly work in these areas. The work was divided as follows: Professor Norris has rewritten the sections from the beginning through the early Middle Ages (Periods I-IV). Professor Lotz has recast and extensively rewritten the sections treating the later Middle Ages and the Reformation (Periods V-VI). Professor Handy has further edited the sections covering the years from Puritanism to the present (Period VII). Cross references in the text are indicated by citing the appropriate period and chapter numbers in parentheses. For example, "(see I:2)" refers the reader to period one, chapter two. For the reader’s convenience, period and chapter numbers run along the top of right-hand pages in the book. The bibliography has been redesigned; following a listing of selected general works, attention is focused on the seven main periods of the text. It is our hope that our labors wil perpetuate and add to Walker’s original achievement in his revised and considerably rewritten work.

RICHARD A. NORRIS

DAVID W. LOTZ

ROBERT T. HANDY

Union Theological Seminary, New York

September 1984

Preface to the Third Edition

A NUMBER of significant events in church history took place in the 1960’s. Therefore, though it was not advisable fully to revise this useful volume again so soon after the thorough revision of 1959, it was decided to make some changes in the latter part of the book, to add an additional chapter, and to update the bibliographical suggestions. It is instructive to observe how much of the history that is recounted in this long-standard work has been reconsidered again in the epoch-making deliberations and actions of the Second Vatican Council and the Third and Fourth Assemblies of the World Council of Churches.

ROBERT T. HANDY

Union Theological Seminary

September 1969

Revisers’ Preface

FOR NEARLY half a century Walker’s History of the Christian Church has been a standard textbook. It was written by a scholar of ripe learning, who profited especially from the rich fruits of German historical scholarship in the later 19th and early 20th centuries. Its rare combination of clarity, compactness and balance has been responsible for its unparalleled success. Moreover, despite the advances made in historical scholarship, the main text of Walker has held up remarkably well. Nevertheless, sections have inevitably become out of date, and especially in the later portions has extensive rewriting been necessary. It has been the aim of the revisers to retain the main structure of the original, and only to revise those parts where there were errors of fact or where the intepretation was seriously questionable. Occasionally sections have been added to introduce a better balance or to take note of modern discoveries. In the modern period a more radical reworking of the material has been necessary in order to bring the text up to date.

The division of labor between the revisers has been as follows: Professor Richardson has been responsible for the work to the early Middle Ages (pp. 1–215), Professor Pauck through the Reformation (pp. 219–401), and Professor Handy from Puritanism to the Modern Day (pp. 402–545). Grateful thanks are due Dr. Edward R. Hardy of the Berkeley Divinity School, New Haven, for his scholarly help on the section dealing with the Greek Orthodox Church. It is our hope that by bringing the text up to date we have added to its usefulness and so prolonged the life of a worthy and popular volume.

CYRIL C. RICHARDSON

WILHELM PAUCK

ROBERT T. HANDY

Union Theological Seminary

September 1958

Period I

FROM THE BEGINNINGS TO THE GNOSTIC CRISIS

Chapter 1

The General Situation

AT THE BIRTH OF CHRIST, the lands which surrounded the Mediterranean Sea were under the political control of Rome, whose empire embraced not only the coastal territories but their hinterlands as well. Bounded by the ocean and by the Rhine and Danube rivers to the north of the Mediterranean, it encompassed North Africa and Egypt and stretched in the East to the borders of Armenia and of the Persian Empire.

In the century and a half before the appearance of Christianity, the sway of the Senate and People of Rome was extended from Italy to include not merely Gaul, Spain, and North Africa in the West, but also, in the East, the Hellenistic monarchies which had succeeded to the empire of Alexander the Great. This time of expansion coincided with an era of growing conflict and instability in the social and political life of the Roman republic. The assassination (44 B.C.) of Julius Caesar, carried out by a party which feared his subversion of traditional republican institutions, was followed by civil wars which affected all parts of the territories ruled by Rome. It was generally with relief and hope, therefore, that people greeted the final triumph of Octavian, Caesar’s nephew and adopted son, whose task it became to reconstitute the Roman state and to reform the administration of its provinces. Preserving the form of republican institutions, Augustus (as Octavian was officially and reverently named in 27 B.C. by the Senate) eventually concentrated all effective power (imperium) in his own hands, receiving lifetime status as tribune of the people and then as consul, with the title leading citizen (princeps). Acting with this authority, he brought order to the government of the provinces and relative peace to the whole of the Mediterranean world.

The imperial system which Augustus thus established embraced peoples of many languages and cultures. In most regions of the empire, the basic political and social unit was—or came to be—the polis, a term commonly but inadequately translated into English as city. This was a corporation of citizens tending the affairs of a modest territory whose heart was an urban center of greater or smaller size. Under Roman aegis, such civic corporations—which were ruled oligarchically for the most part—were responsible for their own local affairs as well as for the taxes which supported the imperial establishment and its armies. Each city thus provided for the worship of the god or gods who were its patrons, for the administration of justice, and for the welfare of its citizens and other residents. Each was a focus of local pride, with its economic roots in the surrounding countryside.

Put together as it was out of a multitude of ethnic, cultural, and religious groupings, the empire was held together by a common political allegiance, by economic and commercial interdependence, and by a shared higher culture. Politically, everything depended upon Rome, its emperor, and its armies, both for the maintenance of internal order and for the protection of the outer frontiers of Mediterranean civilization, where most of the legions were stationed. Within the empire, the principal source of wealth was the land and its products, and agriculture was the chief industry. Communities distant from the Mediterranean and its tributary rivers lived for the most part on local produce, but the cities of the seacoast—and especially great cosmopolitan centers like Rome—were dependent on a lively trade in the staples of life: grain, wine, and olives. North African grain fed the population of Rome as, at a later period, Egyptian grain transported from the seaport of Alexandria sustained the inhabitants of Constantinople. Italy itself was a center of viniculture, and its wines were exported extensively. The Mediterranean cities, then, which were the core of the empire, were increasingly bound together in a nexus of commercial relationships.

The unity and cohesion of the empire, however, depended also upon the existence of a common higher culture—the Hellenistic culture which grew up in the wake of the conquests of Alexander the Great (356–323 B.C.), as Greek language, education, and civic institutions were diffused through the eastern Mediterranean world. Even Rome, in the century and a half before the birth of Christ, became a cultural and intellectual tributary of the Greek tradition. As Greek became the daily speech of city-dwellers in the East, it also became a normal second language for educated persons in the West, where Latin was the common tongue. Other languages—Aramaic, Coptic, Punic—by no means disappeared, but they tended more and more to become languages of the uneducated and of the rural population. In this way, Greek science, Greek religious philosophy, and Greek art and literature enriched and were enriched by other traditions and created the possibility of a shared world of cultural and religious values for the urban civilization of the Mediterranean area.

In this complex, variegated, and remarkably sophisticated world, religious concerns, beliefs, and practices were central in the lives both of individuals and of communities. At the same time, however, the religious currents of the time were diverse. To speak in general terms, one can distinguish three broad categories of religious belief and observance. First, there was the traditional religion of the family and community gods—what one might call the civic religion of the Roman-Hellenistic world. Second, there were the so-called mystery cults. These were for the most part oriental cults which had their mythic roots in local fertility rites, but which, in the cosmopolitan world of the Greek-speaking empire, underwent a transformation and became voluntary brotherhoods which offered their initiates salvation from the trammels of Fate and Fortune. Finally, there was the way of life which sought human fulfillment and blessedness through the pursuit and practice of philosophical wisdom: a wisdom founded upon criticism of the traditional gods of the Greek pantheon, but capable, as time went on, of offering a demythologized version of traditional religion. In practice, these different styles of religion coexisted peacefully, and some individuals were, to one degree or another, involved in all three of them. They responded, however, to different needs, and to some extent they presupposed differing perceptions of the human situation.

On one matter, however, the various types of religion were at one. People in the Roman world were acquiring—had, indeed, for the most part already acquired—a new picture of the cosmos. Gone was the flat earth and overarching heaven of ancient myth. Educated and half-educated persons alike now saw the earth as a sphere set motionless at the center of things. Around it in their orbits moved the seven planetary spheres, and around this whole system moved the heaven, the realm of the fixed stars. To the ancients, however, this cosmos was no mere machine. They perceived it rather as an ensouled—that is, a living—thing, in which orderly change and motion were maintained by divine Mind. The world was pervaded by life, and the gods who inhabited the heaven and the planetary spheres were the manifestations or representatives of the ultimate divine Power which extended to all things, even to affairs in that sector of the cosmos—earth—which was farthest removed from the divine realm.

Traditional religion in the Roman-Hellenistic world was a public and social affair, an affair of family and community. Since human well-being depended at every moment on the good will of the gods, the cosmic powers, religion sought their help for the common concerns of life: the growing of crops, the conduct of business, the difficult enterprises of war and diplomacy. Its rites were age-old and traditional, seldom rationalized, and conducted by the normal leaders of the community: the head of the family or the elected magistrates of the city. It used divination, dream, and oracle to seek the will of the powers; it used prayer and sacrifice to gain their alliance.

It is in the setting of such traditional religion that one must understand the phenomenon of emperor worship or worship of the state that grew up in the Roman Empire. The triumphs of Roman arms and the benefits which the imperial order conferred on the Mediterranean world convinced the Romans themselves, and most of their subject peoples too, that Roman power was a manifestation of the power of the gods—that Rome had a divine mission. Augustus himself, conscious that the imperial city’s destiny could only be fulfilled if she maintained her covenant with the gods, undertook a revival of traditional religion. Furthermore, just as he erected an altar to the goddess Peace in the Senate-House in Rome, so he followed earlier eastern precedent by encouraging a cult of the goddess Roma—the divine power manifested in the conquering and ordering work of the Roman state. A similar outlook lay behind the establishment and growth of the cult of the divine emperor—whose actual origins lay in the East and not in Rome itself. When first permitted in Italy, this cult took the relatively modest form of veneration of the genius of the emperor (that is, of the divine alter ego of the human ruler), or else of the deification of an emperor after death. Roman sensibilities did not originally permit the declaration that an ordinary human being was himself a god; only an acknowledged madman like Caligula (37–41 A.D.) could have taken such a step. In the provinces, however, and especially in the East, such restraint was less common. There, following age-old custom, worship was offered to the emperor in his own person as a living manifestation of the divine. This cult evoked no deep personal piety, widespread and carefully organized as it eventually was; it belonged to the realm of formal civic religion, and its role, as people generally recognized, was political. It did, however, represent a real conviction: that the basis of political order lay in the divine realm.

This traditional religion, however, was in many if not most cases irrelevant to personal needs and longings. Its rites, carefully maintained as they were, were impersonal, and its concern was with public order and public welfare. Hence the ordinary people of the cities turned to other religious cults to achieve personal security, prosperity, and a sense of having a place and a positive destiny in a confusing and impersonal world.

The cosmos as these folk experienced it was not a perfectly ordered and harmonious whole. The earth of their experience was far removed from the blessed realm of the gods. It was the realm of chance and necessity, and one in which demonic powers, whose territory was the lower region between Earth and Moon, worked their unpredictable will. Much popular religion, therefore, was concerned with understanding and control of the nonhuman powers which—often capriciously, it seemed—ruled human life. The practice of magic—the use of charms, spells, and amulets—was rife. There was also a great vogue of astrology, imported in Hellenistic times from Babylonia and diffused throughout the Mediterranean world. To consult the stars was to gain some insight into one’s destiny. It was also to confess that one’s destiny was in the hands of alien forces.

It is this situation which makes the popularity of the mystery cults comprehensible. These, as we have seen, were oriental nature religions which, in Hellenistic times, were diffused through the Mediterranean world as religions of salvation. The most popular of them were the cults of the Great Mother, which originated in Asia Minor; of Isis and Serapis, which derived from Egypt; and of Mithras, which spread at a later time from Persia. Rome originally viewed such religions with suspicion. They involved enthusiastic, even orgiastic, rites which seemed inconsistent with public decorum and morality. Nevertheless, it was the Roman authorities themselves who, at a time of crisis in the wars against Carthage, had introduced the worship of the Great Mother (suitably cleansed of its excesses) within the sacred enclosure of the Roman gods (204 B.C.); and by 80 B.C., the cult of Isis was established in the vicinity of Rome, though it endured long governmental opposition. In time, these cults were accepted even in the West as a normal element in the religious life of populace and rulers alike.

What did they offer? For one thing, they offered, in their rites of initiation and in worship, an experience of the Divine which touched and evoked deep emotions of awe, wonder, and gratitude. The initiates of these secret mysteries saw the god and entered into fellowship with a divine being who had reached out to care for them. At the same time, these cults offered the gift of a blessed immortality in fellowship with the gods. Rooted as they generally were in the myth of a dying and rising god, they provided an experience of rebirth to a new quality of life. The initiate, become a sharer in the life of the god, was raised above the earthly realm controlled by fate and chance and so was liberated for the immortality proper to those who enjoy fellowship with the Divine. The mystery cults, then, were religions of salvation which both drew and fed on a sense of the transcendent.

A third way which people could follow in their search for a fulfilled and happy life was the way of philosophical wisdom. In the Roman-Hellenistic era, philosophy was not the name of an academic discipline concerned with a special range of abstract questions. Rather, it denoted the quest for an understanding of the cosmos and of the place of humanity within it—an understanding which was achieved only by participation in a certain way of life and which issued in happiness or beatitude. The philosopher’s vocation, then, was not for everyone. It entailed a life of intellectual and moral discipline which only the few could pursue. On the other hand, the pictures of the world and of the human situation which philosophy evolved had a way of turning into commonplaces of popular religion and morality. In the end, philosophy provided the framework of understanding which made sense of the myths and rituals of religion.

The origin of the Roman-Hellenistic philosophical schools is found in the fourth century before Christ, in the movement of inquiry and speculation stimulated by the teaching of Socrates at Athens. This movement had its first great leader in Plato (d. 347 B.C.), whose ideas were communicated in popular form in his series of dialogues. The Academy which he founded—and which was finally closed only in 529 by the Christian emperor Justinian—was the first of the great schools of Hellenistic philosophy. Plato’s pupil Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) broke away from the Academy after Plato’s death and became the founder of the Peripatetic school, but the influence of Aristotle’s teaching was most strongly felt in the Christian era, after the republication of his scientific and philosophical works in the first century B.C. Subsequently, there appeared the school of Epicurus (342–270 B.C.) and that of the Stoics, so named from the Porch (stōa), a public hall in Athens where its founder, Zeno (d. ca. 264 B.C.), originally taught. Each of these schools became, in effect, a continuing brotherhood which expounded and developed its founder’s teachings. The differences among them involved a wide range of issues: epistemology, cosmology, and theology as well as ethics. The focal problem which was debated in the Hellenistic age, however, was that of the nature of the happy or fulfilled human life.

The school of Epicurus taught that pleasure—in the negative sense of absence of mental disturbance (ataraxia)—was the highest human good. The good life is the life which maximizes pleasure by minimizing the pain attendant upon unnecessary desire and anxiety. Thus, paradoxically, the greatest pleasure is attained by a life of quiet, retirement, and restraint: a life characterized essentially by self-control. Epicurus and his followers regarded religion—fear of the gods and anxiety about an afterlife—as one of the principal sources of disturbance and pain. They believed, however, that all such religious fears were baseless. The gods exist, they taught, in an empyrean world of their own and have no responsibility for, or interest in, the affairs of human beings. Death, moreover, marks a mere end to human existence and is therefore not evil, since with death awareness of pleasure and pain disappears. This doctrine admirably fitted the Epicurean conviction that the cosmos is formed, as Democritus (d. ca. 380 B.C.) had earlier taught, by the fortuitous and ever-changing combination of eternally existing atoms within the Void. This philosophy enjoyed a brief vogue in the first century B.C. in aristocratic circles at Rome and its greatest literary product is the brilliant poem De rerum natura of the Roman Lucretius (d. 55 B.C.). In Christian times, Epicurus’s doctrines were not influential or widespread, but they were often unfairly pilloried, by Christians and others, for polemical purposes.

Much more influential, especially in the Latin West, was the philosophy of the Stoics with their teaching that the sole human good is virtue or the life according to nature. The doctrines of Zeno, expanded and developed by his successors Cleanthes (d. ca. 232 B.C.) and Chrysippus (d. ca. 207 B.C.), found notable western exponents in Lucius Annaeus Seneca (d. 65 A.D.), the former slave Epictetus (d. ca. 135 A.D.), and the emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–180 A.D.). Like the Epicureans, the Stoics were materialists. Roughly speaking, they conceived the cosmos to be composed out of two kinds of stuff or substance: a passive matter, and the active, fiery spirit or breath (pneuma) which transfuses matter, forms it, and causes it to cohere. This pneuma functions in the cosmic body much as soul does in the human body; that is, it is the source of life and of harmony. Called God or Fate or Reason (logos), this spirit is the indwelling divinity whose outflowing powers are the gods of popular religion. The human soul, itself rational, is a spark or portion of the divine Reason.

The good for human persons, then, consists in their being fully what they are—that is, in living and acting according to their interior nature and identity, which is logos. Only such a life is the excellent (or, in other words, virtuous) human existence. What is more, only the virtuous life is free, for it alone is within people’s power to achieve, and it alone lets people be truly themselves. Whatever depends, therefore, on external circumstance—health, for example, or worldly success, or sensual pleasure—is no essential part of the human good. In fact, dependence on external circumstance alienates the person from himself. It is a sickness of the soul which the Stoics called passion (pathos), because the person who is subject to it is passive in relation to influences stemming from outside and to that degree unfree and unfulfilled. This outlook led the Stoics to the view that differences of rank and status are secondary. All persons are ultimately equal, fellow citizens with one another and with the gods in a cosmic city.

In the Hellenistic era, it was Epicurean and Stoic teachings which were most widespread. The future, however, was to belong to Platonism, which underwent a revival in the first century before Christ, though in a significantly altered form. The teaching of Plato was based ultimately on his distinction between that-which-is (Being) and that-which-comes-to-be (Becoming). Searching for the true basis of order in the moral, political, and natural realms, Plato discerned it in the system of Ideas or Forms—the models or originals of empirical reality. These Forms were characterized by two essential qualities. First, they were seen simply to be, unchangeably, self-identically, and hence eternally. Second, they were seen to be intelligible, capable of being grasped by mind. In contrast to this realm of Being and Intelligibility, Plato saw the visible world of immediate experience as a realm of continual Becoming—a world about which it was impossible to have stable knowledge because it was always slipping through one’s mental fingers.

These two realms of Being and Becoming, however, were not in Plato’s view divorced. The empirical world images and participates in the eternal world of Being. That it does so, moreover, is owing to the activity of living, self-moving soul, which is a denizen of both spheres. As soul contemplates and internalizes intelligible Being, conforming its own life to that truth, it orders and harmonizes the world of Becoming, so that the temporal order becomes a moving image of eternity. The cosmic order is thus the product of the contemplation and action of the Soul of the World; the vocation of human beings, themselves rational souls, is to imitate that contemplation and action: to rise to knowledge of the Forms, of that-which-is, and in that knowledge to confer moral and political order on human affairs.

Plato’s immediate successors in the Academy carried on his tradition of thought and the mathematical inquiries which had arisen out of his theory that the Ideas or Forms were archetypal numbers. With Arcesilaus (315–241 B.C.), however, and Carneades (213–128 B.C.), the Academy took a new turn. Convinced that Socrates and Plato had never propounded a positive, dogmatic system but had always examined issues from all sides without reaching firm or final conclusions, these thinkers taught the doctrine of suspension of judgment (epochē). In this spirit, they mounted critical attacks on belief in the gods and on the dogmas of other philosophical schools (especially those of the Stoics), teaching that the wise man finds in probability, not certainty, the only guide of life. This spirit of Academic doubt much impressed the Roman philosopher Cicero (106–43 B.C.) and through him the young Augustine of Hippo.

In the end, however, skepticism did not reign in the Platonist Academy. In the first century before Christ—and at roughly the same time as Aristotle’s philosophical and scientific works were rediscovered and beginning to circulate—a movement, generally known as Middle Platonism, appeared which sought a return to the positive teachings of Plato, especially as those were set out in the dialogue Timaeus. It was typical of this movement, however, which in the course of the first and second Christian centuries rose to virtual dominance, that its understanding of Plato fused his ideas with themes drawn from Stoicism and, increasingly, from Aristotle.

Thus Middle Platonism took over from Aristotle the idea of formless matter as the ultimate substratum of all visible things, as well as the conception of a transcendent God understood as Mind (nous). This God had the Platonic Forms as the content of his thought and so was identified with Plato’s realm of Being. The visible cosmos is shaped as the eternal World-Soul, formed and enlivened by its contemplation of God, in its turn confers form and harmony on formless matter. It follows from this account of things that the philosopher who seeks self-fulfillment by conforming his way of being with ultimate reality must take the cosmos and its order as the starting point of his search, for the cosmos is the image and reflection of eternal truth. In the end, however, he must transcend the visible world. He must rise in his thought to its original, the everlasting Good. There the multiplicity of the time-and-space world is harmonized in an ultimate unity, and there the rational soul finds its proper companion and the fully worthy object of its love. For the soul, too, is eternal and immortal, and its natural affinity is not for the passing world of time and space, but for Being. Thus the end of the philosophical quest is likeness to God: a knowledge of God which amounts to a sharing in the divine way of being.

As has already been said, this philosophic quest was not for everyone. The philosopher’s way to self-fulfillment involved not only long education and study, but also a moral discipline (askēsis) designed to cleanse the soul of the passions which prevented it from being its true self. Yet the philosophical quest as it was understood in the era of the early empire had more than a little in common with the mood of popular religion, especially as the latter was expressed in the vogue of the mystery cults. Both sought a kind of salvation from the changes and chances of life on earth. Both envisaged this salvation as a liberation—whether from the passions which bound people to the space-and-time world or from indifferent or hostile cosmic powers. Both, finally, saw the human person as capable of a transcendent destiny in the fellowship of the Divine. It is no surprise, therefore, that a Platonist philosopher like Plutarch of Chaeronea (d. ca. 120 A.D.) should be able and willing to make philosophical sense of the myth of Isis and Osiris—to see it as an allegory of humanity’s situation and destiny. No more is it surprising that when another oriental religion of salvation—Christianity—began to make its way in the social and cultural milieu of the Hellenized cities of the Roman Empire, it should find sympathetic resonances in the philosophy and the religion of that era.

Chapter 2

The Jewish Background

IN THE SIX CENTURIES prior to the birth of Christ, the Jewish people were subjected to the rule of the series of empires which controlled Syria and Palestine. After Israel’s deportation to Babylonia by Nebuchadrezzar (586 B.C.), a portion of the people returned to Judaea under Ezra with the blessing of the new Achaemenid (Persian) monarchy, and there, under the authority of a local satrap, was left undisturbed in the practice of its own religious customs and under the rule of its own law. This tolerant policy of the Persians was continued by Judaea’s Hellenistic rulers, the Ptolemies of Egypt, and then, after 200 B.C., the Seleucids with their power bases in Syria and Mesopotamia. Judaea in the Hellenistic period thus had in effect the political status of an ethnarchy, ruled in domestic affairs by a hereditary high priest and his advisers. It was a tiny state, isolated both by geography and by culture from the increasingly Hellenized areas along the seacoast and to the north, and it had at first little share in the prosperity of its neighbors.

This same period—in particular the centuries of Ptolemaic and Seleucid rule—saw a marked expansion in the number of Jews who lived outside of Judaea in the so-called Diaspora. Since the conquest of Jerusalem by Nebuchadrezzar, there had been a substantial community of Jews in Babylonia, and even prior to that time there had been small settlements in Egypt. During the Hellenistic era, however, both the Ptolemies and the Seleucids discovered the Jews to be useful subjects and able soldiers and gladly settled them, or allowed them to settle, outside their heavily overpopulated homeland. Thus Egypt, Asia Minor, and Syria came to have large Jewish populations. By the first Christian century, perhaps as much as a third of the population of Alexandria was Jewish, and there were settlements not only in the East but in Rome and other western cities as well. Diaspora Jews did not ordinarily become citizens of the towns where they settled, for to do so they would normally have had to participate in the worship of the civil gods. They retained their national and religious identity and formed specially privileged communities of resident aliens (metoikoi), or else, as in Alexandria, a politeuma—that is, a civic corporation within a larger community. Their relative isolation caused them to be objects of interest and sometimes of envy and distrust to other inhabitants of the cities where they settled.

The foci of Jewish identity were the temple at Jerusalem and the Law of Moses, which functioned not only as a religious but also as a civil code. Jews of the Diaspora paid an annual tax to the temple until its destruction (70 A.D.), and temple worship was the formal center of national life. In Judaea as well as in the Diaspora, however, the functioning bulwark of Israel’s identity, its sense of being a separate people dedicated to the Lord in holiness, was the Law. To study, understand, and keep the Law was the calling and the delight of the serious Jew.

This overriding concern to understand and keep the practical wisdom of the Law found outward expression in two institutions. The synagogue, whose origins probably go back to the exile, was typically an assembly of all the Jews in a given district, presided over by a group of elders who often had a ruler (archōn) at their head. This assembly gathered to pray and to bless the name of God, but also to read and interpret the Law and the Prophets. The officials of the synagogue were responsible for the administration of the Law and thus for the punishment or excommunication of offenders. Further, however, the need to interpret the Law and to sanctify the community’s life by bringing all aspects of it under the Law’s rule produced a class of religious functionaries called scribes, of whom Ezra himself was counted the first. These men, who in Judaea and elsewhere became the real religious leaders of the people, sought both to expand the range of the Law’s application and to guard against its violation by interpreting it in the most cautious and stringent way possible (building a fence around the Law). Consequently, they gradually evolved an oral tradition of interpretation (to be incorporated much later in the Talmud), whose content was for practical purposes treated as part of the law itself. It was out of these scribal circles that the Hasidic and Pharisaic movements subsequently arose.

The great crisis of Jewish life in the Hellenistic age arose in the middle of the second century B.C. out of a conflict within the Judaean community itself, a conflict which had both economic and religious sources. One party in the community, drawn from the landowning aristocracy in Jerusalem, sought and gained, from the Seleucid monarch Antiochus IV Ephiphanes, permission to alter the constitutional basis of Jewish life by making Jerusalem a Greek-style city, with the new name of Antioch. In accord with this policy, Greek educational institutions—a gymnasion and ephebeion—were established to train new citizens; but above all, the Mosaic Law, under this arrangement, lost its status as the constitution of the community, since legislative power was now lodged in the newly created (and no doubt carefully restricted) citizen body. This attempt on the part of the monied classes to bring Israel up to date enjoyed no support from the common folk of Jerusalem or of the countryside, and certainly not from the scribes and devotees of the law. It was destined to fail, with tragic consequences. When the reforming party made the mistake of replacing the high priest, the people rose. Their successful rebellion, however, compelled the intervention of Antiochus IV, who to assure the safety of his realm took the strongest possible line by way of punishment. He abolished the practice of Judaism and installed the worship of Zeus Olympios in the Jerusalem temple.

In this way, a religious struggle over Hellenization among Jews in Judaea became tied in with the larger political problems of the weakening Seleucid Empire. Antiochus’s abolition of Jewish worship provoked the revolt of the Maccabees (167 B.C.), whose guerrilla tactics ultimately compelled him and his successors, distracted as they were by war and by dynastic struggles, to compromise with the Jewish leaders. The final result of all this was threefold. The worship of the Lord was restored in a cleansed and rededicated temple, and with it the traditional constitution of the Jewish ethnarchy. The Hasmoneans—that is, the family of Judah the Maccabee—who in the person of Judah’s brother Jonathan assumed the high priesthood with Seleucid support (152 B.C.)—became after 140 B.C. the hereditary rulers of Judaea. At the same time, the Jewish state, which in 142 B.C. had become effectively independent, grew in military power until, under John Hyrcanus (135–105 B.C.), it came to control the whole of Palestine. In this process, however, the aims of the original rebellion were frustrated. The high priesthood itself grew into a Hellenistic monarchy, and the religious forces which had impelled and supported the revolt against Antiochus found themselves in growing opposition to the Hasmonean dynasty.

This era of the Maccabean revolt and Hasmonean rule was the matrix of the religious parties and the religious ideas that dominated Palestinian Judaism in the time of Jesus. The advent of the Romans in 63 B.C. under Pompey the Great changed the situation only by rendering the internal conflicts more acute. Rome began by intervening to settle a struggle over the succession in the Hasmonean house. It solved the problem by putting most of the Jewish kingdom under the rule of its propraetor in Syria, but Jerusalem itself was constituted a temple-state, its domestic affairs governed by the Hasmonean high priest. This system might have worked, had Rome not changed its mind and violated Jewish sensibilities by installing Herod, called the Great, as a vassal king (37–4 B.C.) over the former territories of the Hasmoneans. An Idumaean whose people had been forcibly converted to Judaism in the days of Hasmonean power, Herod was almost universally hated, in spite of his magnificent reconstruction of the Jerusalem temple, his contributions to the material prosperity of the land, and his occasional interventions at Rome to protect Jewish interests. His very presence as king violated the Jewish people’s traditional theocratic constitution. He was, moreover, not only a foreigner but a manifest if sometimes cautious Hellenizer. Above all, however, his taxation impoverished the peasantry, drove more land into the possession of the great landowners, and forced many common folk into beggary or brigandage. Rome tried to retrieve its error by making Judaea a province under a Roman procurator (6 A.D.), but the damage was done. The religious, political, and economic strife which had been triggered under Antiochus IV and continued under the Hasmoneans was only exacerbated by Roman policy. It is no wonder that the first response to the Roman census of 6 A.D. was a local rebellion led by the founder of the Zealot party, Judah the Galilean.

It is against this general background that one must understand the division which arose in Hasmonean times between an aristocratic, priestly party and a popular, devout, and religiously more exclusive party: the Sadduces and the Pharisees. The former were the group with which the Hasmoneans gradually became associated. This was an essentially worldly party, whose attitudes were determined more by an interest in political and commercial expansion than by strong religious conviction. Most of the religious principles it stood for were simply conservative. The Sadducees were loyal to the Law, for example, but would not accept the oral tradition of the scribes. They denied recently popularized doctrines of resurrection or immortality, and they rejected the notion of good and evil spirits. Though very influential politically, they were unpopular with the mass of the people, who saw them as representing economic oppression, as open to foreign influences, and as lax in their attitude toward the Law.

Over against this group stood the Pharisees—the Separated. This party stood in the tradition of the ancient scribes and of the Hasidim, who had originally rallied to the support of the Maccabean revolt. Its primary concern was with the sanctification of life through a minute and joyous observance of the Law. It evinced no great interest in political action (though the party of Zealots, who advocated rebellion against the power of Rome, seems to have sprung out of the Pharisaic movement), yet it did take stands on issues affecting political life. The Pharisaic party not only broke with the Hasmoneans over the latter’s policy of national expansion, but also questioned their title to the high priesthood, the very basis of royal power. The Pharisees were influential and widely admired, so much so that the Hasmoneans were eventually forced to give them representation on the Sanhedrin, the high priest’s council of advisors. Nevertheless, they were not numerous, since most people lacked either the education or the leisure to devote themselves utterly to the Law. They stood for certain popular beliefs that had grown naturally out of Jewish religious experience since the time of the Exile. They held strongly to the existence of good and evil spirits and to a doctrine about angels and Satan which was partly the product of Persian influence. By the same token, they taught belief in resurrection of the body and in future rewards and punishments: eschatological beliefs which, together with messianic hopes, flourished in the intense and troubled era of the two centuries before the birth of Christ.

Connected with the Pharisaic party in its opposition to the Hasmonean settlement of religious (and therewith political) affairs were the Essenes. The teachings of this sect are known to us chiefly through a library of scrolls discovered at Qumran, on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. There one community of the sect lived a quasi-monastic life in isolation from the rest of Israel. The origins of the movement are obscure. Previously it was known only from reports of Philo, Josephus, and Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century A.D. The community at Qumran, however, whose buildings possibly date back to around 135 B.C., seems to have assembled as the result of a conflict over the high priesthood. Its members looked back to a Righteous Teacher as their founder and set him in opposition to a Wicked Priest—perhaps an illegitimate high priest whose assumption of office represented, at least to a small body of the pious, a repudiation of the religious foundation of Israel’s existence. Some historians have sought to identify Simon the Maccabee’s recognition as hereditary high priest (140 B.C.) as the offense that generated the sect. In any case, this movement, unlike that of the Pharisees, withdrew from the mainstream of Jewish life, refusing to have anything to do with the worship of the temple and believing that it alone was the true congregation of Israel, the faithful remnant. Its members esteemed the Law and claimed, by following the Righteous Teacher, to preserve the Law’s correct meaning as against current perversions. They observed periodic lustrations, an annual rite of entering and renewing the Covenant, and a sacred meal of bread and wine. They lived under a strict discipline, which is preserved for us in The Manual of Discipline—a work which also reflects the careful organization of the community, with its overseers, priests of Zadok, elders, and others. Above all, though, they looked forward fervently to the future redemption of Israel. They expected the appearance of a messianic figure or figures who would arise to gather the scattered hosts of Israel together, to defeat her enemies, and to inaugurate the age of God’s rule.

Such hopes were not confined to the Dead Sea sect. The religious, political, and economic frustrations of popular Judaism in Palestine generated a mood of combined despair and hope—despair of the present and hope in a future, decisive intervention of God to set things right. This mood was reflected above all in the rich apocalyptic or revelation literature of the first and second centuries B.C. (and later). Such writings recorded visions in which the mysteries of the heavenly world, of the course of human history, and of God’s plan for overthrowing wickedness were revealed—almost invariably to an ancient sage. The best known of these is the canonical Book of Daniel, composed in the setting of the struggle against Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Alongside it one can set such other examples of the genre as The Book of Enoch, The Assumption of Moses, and the later Christian Revelation to John. The burden of this apocalyptic literature is the assurance that God himself will visit and redeem his people¹ to frustrate the cosmic and earthly powers of evil and to assert his own righteous kingdom. There were of course variant accounts of how this could come about. In some sources, God himself was expected to step in; in others, he was to act through the agency of an angelic or supernatural being. In some quarters, as we have seen, there is mention of the Lord’s Messiah, a human king in the Davidic line who was expected to restore the kingdom of his father. Whatever the form of the expectation, however, it reflected a belief not only that God would act, but also that God’s action alone was sufficient to overcome evil.

Equally prominent in post-exilic Jewish life was the genre of thought and literature concerned with the theme of wisdom. Wisdom traditionally meant the practical insight necessary for the successful conduct of the affairs of life, and the wise were people who saw into the structures and meanings of things.² In later Judaism, this meant in particular understanding of God’s law, which was equated with wisdom and thus became the basis for inquiries into cosmological and anthropological as well as moral and legal questions. Such human wisdom, however, was thought to be the result of openness to the inspiration of a divine Wisdom, who was both God’s plan and God’s agent for creation, and who is described in The Wisdom of Solomon as a pure effluence from the glory of the Almighty . . . the flawless mirror of the active power of God and the image of his goodness.³ Wisdom (not unlike the Stoic logos or the Platonist World-Soul) orders creation, but she also seeks out and summons people to understanding and makes them friends of God. She, too, is thus a saving agent, though one conceived in a framework of thought different from the saving figures of apocalyptic expectation.

These literatures were known and pondered not only in Judaea and Palestine but in the Diaspora as well, where the great majority of Jews was to be found. Under the Romans, Judaism was an authorized religion (religio licita), not only in Palestine but in Greek and Roman cities, and Roman law protected the communities of Jewish farmers, craftsmen, and traders throughout the empire. This protection was necessary, since the Jews’ religious exclusiveness, their legal privileges, and their unwillingness to participate in civic life sometimes made them unpopular. In fact, Diaspora Jews had made many adjustments to the Hellenistic world, most notably in the matter of language. They spoke Greek almost universally, even in their synagogues; and by the time of Augustus, the Greek version of the Scriptures known as the Septuagint (LXX) was completed and everywhere employed. Further, the Diaspora Jewish communities entered into dialogue with pagan religion. As a result, they not only made converts (proselytes) but gathered about them a large penumbra of partially Judaized inquirers (God-fearers), which was to serve as a recruiting ground for much of early Christian missionary propaganda.

This dialogue produced its most remarkable fruit in the Jewish community at Alexandria in Egypt, where, in the work of Philo (d. ca. 42 A.D.), themes from the Jewish scriptures were combined in a remarkable syncretism with Stoic and Platonist philosophical ideas. A faithful Jew, Philo sought to show that the Law—that is, the Pentateuch—intimated a wisdom which agreed with the best in the teaching of the philosophical tradition. To do this, he used the method of allegorical interpretation well known to Hellenistic exegetes of Homer, and by this means uncovered in the pages of Moses not only an ethic but also a philosophical doctrine of God and of creation. According to Philo, the cosmos is the product of God’s outflowing goodness. Incomprehensible in his transcendence, God is linked to the world by the divine powers. Of these, the highest is the Logos, which flows out of the being of God himself and is not only the agent through whom God created the world but also the source of all other powers and the ultimate model of the spiritual and visible creations. Philo’s picture of the Logos thus fuses together elements from many sources: from Jewish Wisdom speculation, from Platonist ideas about an intelligible realm of Forms, and from the scriptural notion that God creates by his Word (Logos). This kind of thinking, which has less sophisticated parallels in New Testament ideas of God’s Word and Wisdom, was to prove a fertile model in the development of later Christian theology.

1. Luke 1:68.

2. Wisd. of Sol. 7:17–21.

3. Wisd. of Sol. 7:25.

Chapter 3

Jesus and the Disciples

THE WAY WAS PREPARED for Jesus by an apocalyptic-messianic movement led by John the Baptist, who in the thought of the early Christians was the forerunner of the Messiah. Ascetic in life, John, in the region of the Jordan, preached that the day of judgment upon Israel was at hand and that the Messiah was about to come. In the spirit of the ancient prophets, he proclaimed the message: Repent, do justice. He baptized his disciples in token of the washing away of their sins, and he taught them a special prayer. Jesus, we are told, classed him as the last, and among the greatest, of the prophets. Some of John’s disciples later became followers of Jesus, but his movement continued to have an independent life.¹

Materials are lacking for any adequate biography of Jesus. The Gospel records are primarily testimonies to the divine event of Jesus the Christ, and their details have doubtless been colored by the differing experiences, situations, and memories of early Christian communities. Scholars are thus divided concerning the accuracy of many incidents recorded in the Gospels. Nevertheless, the career and teaching of Jesus stand out on the pages of the Gospels in their essential outlines.

Jesus was brought up in Nazareth of Galilee. This land, though despised by the more purely Jewish inhabitants of Judaea because its people were of mixed racial stock, was loyal to the Jewish religion and traditions, the home of a hardy, self-respecting population, and particularly pervaded by the messianic hope. Here Jesus grew to manhood through years of unrecorded experience. From this life he was apparently drawn by the preaching of John the Baptist. He went to John and was baptized by the prophet in the Jordan River. With his baptism there came the conviction that he was appointed by God to fulfill a special role in proclaiming the kingdom soon to be inaugurated by the heavenly Son of Man. Whether Jesus actually viewed himself as Messiah is a much contested question. In any case, he seems to have rejected popular conceptions of the messianic office and to have anticipated not political triumph but suffering as his own lot, even while believing that in his ministry the power of the coming kingdom was already at work.

After his baptism—or, as Matthew would have it,² after the arrest of the Baptist—Jesus began an itinerant ministry of preaching and healing whose message was the near approach of God’s kingdom and the consequent necessity for repentance and faith. He gathered a company of associates—the Twelve, symbolizing the fullness of the tribes of Israel—and attracted a larger group of less closely attached disciples. His ministry was brief: it lasted for three years at the most, and perhaps no more than one. It aroused opposition from the religious authorities, and no doubt from others as well, because Jesus’ actions and teaching made him seem blasphemously critical of the Law and its traditional interpretation. He journeyed northward toward Tyre and Sidon, and then to the region of Caesarea Philippi, where the Gospels record that his disciples acknowledged his messianic mission. He judged, however, that at whatever peril he must bear witness in Jerusalem. There, in the face of growing hostility, he went; and there he was seized and crucified, certainly in the administration of the procurator Pontius Pilate (26–36 A.D.) and probably in the year 29. His disciples scattered to their homes, but speedily gathered once more at Jerusalem, in the glad conviction that God had raised him from the dead.

The kingdom of God, in Jesus’ teaching, meant the manifest assertion of God’s loving and righteous rule. Hence, in those who discern its nearness it demands practical acknowledgment of God’s sovereignty and fatherhood. This comes about only through a complete reorientation of values and attitudes (repentance and faith), which issues in love of God and neighbor and is crowned and empowered by divine forgiveness. To live in view of the coming kingdom is, as Jesus portrays it, a costly and demanding business. It entails willingness to relinquish all lesser goods, to transcend the normal moral demands of the Law, and to practice unlimited forgiveness toward others. The fulfillment of such a life is an unending fellowship with God and his holy ones. For those, on the other hand, who fail to discern and understand the kingdom which is dawning in Jesus’ ministry, there is only destruction.

Most of Jesus’ teachings have parallels in the religious thought of his age, yet their total effect was disturbing and revolutionary—the more so, apparently, by reason of the style in which he taught. He taught them as one that had authority, and not as the scribes.³ He could say that the least of his disciples is greater than John the Baptist, and that heaven and earth should pass away before his words. He called the heavy-laden to him and offered them rest. He promised those who confessed him before men that he would confess them before his Father. He declared that none knew the Father but a Son, and he to whom the Son should reveal the Father. He proclaimed himself Lord of the Sabbath, than which, in popular estimate, there was no more sacred part of the God-given Jewish Law. He affirmed that he had power to pronounce forgiveness of sins. On the other hand, this teacher-with-authority experienced all the limitations of the human condition. He prayed and taught his disciples to pray. He declared that he did not know the day or the hour of the ending of the present world-age, which was known to the Father alone. It was not his to determine who should sit on his right hand and his left in the kingdom. He prayed that the Father’s will, not his own, be done. On the cross, he cried out: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?⁴ In reporting all these utterances, the Gospels in effect confess their sense of the mystery of his person: the person of one who is on the one hand a normal human being and on the other the bearer of God’s authority and active presence.

What Jesus taught and did was, in the experience of his disciples, vindicated by his being raised after death to the life of the kingdom which he had proclaimed. The how of this conviction is one of the most puzzling of historical problems. The fact of it is unquestionable. It seems to have come first to Peter,⁵ who, in that sense at least, was the rock leader on whom the church was founded. All the early disciples shared it. It was the turning point in the conversion of Paul. It