Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire

In Memoriam

Dorothy Eleanore Cooper Hartshorne

1904–1995

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

In the Beginning …

Paradise on the Earth

CHAPTER TWO

In the Beginning …

God So Generously Loved

CHAPTER THREE

So Great a Cloud

CHAPTER FOUR

The Church as Paradise in This World

CHAPTER FIVE

The Portal to Paradise

CHAPTER SIX

The Beautiful Feast of Life

CHAPTER SEVEN

Gods Seeing God

CHAPTER EIGHT

Hidden Treasures of Wisdom

PART TWO

CHAPTER NINE

The Expulsion of Paradise

CHAPTER TEN

Peace by the Blood of the Cross

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Dying for Love

CHAPTER TWELVE

Escape Routes

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Weeping Encounters

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Struggle for Paradise

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

Prologue

It took Jesus a thousand years to die. Images of his corpse did not appear in churches until the tenth century. Why not? This question set us off on a five-year pilgrimage that led to this book.

Initially, we didn’t believe it could be true. Surely the art historians were wrong. The crucified Christ was too important to Western Christianity. How could it be that images of Jesus’s suffering and death were absent from early churches? We had to see for ourselves and consider what this might mean.

In July 2002, we traveled to the Mediterranean in search of the dead body of Jesus. We began in Rome, descending from the blaze of the summer sun into the catacombs where underground tunnels and tombs are carved into soft tufa rock. The earliest surviving Christian art is painted onto the plaster-lined walls of tombs or carved onto marble sarcophagi as memorials to the interred.

In the cool, dimly lit caverns, we saw a variety of biblical images. Many of them suggested rescue from danger. For example, Abraham and Isaac stood side by side in prayer with a ram bound next to them. Jonah, the recalcitrant prophet who was swallowed and coughed up by a sea monster, reclined peacefully beneath the shade of a vine. Daniel stood alive and well between two pacified lions. Other images suggested baptism and healing, such as the Samaritan woman drawing water from a well, John the Baptist dousing Jesus, depicted as a child, and Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. Jesus also appeared as a shepherd carrying a lamb on his shoulders like Orpheus.

We could not find a dead Jesus, not even one. It was just as the angel had said to the women looking for Jesus at his tomb, Why do you look for the living among the dead? (Luke 24:5). He is not here (Mark 16:6). He most certainly was not.

Emerging from the underworld, we traipsed the dusty streets of the city to continue our investigation of the mystery of the missing corpse. Some art historians said there was a Crucifixion carved on the doors of St. Sabina Church, so we trudged up the hill from the Tiber to see it late one sweltering afternoon. Under the church’s covered entrance were two huge, fifteen-hundred-year-old cypress doors with thirty-two scenes from the Bible. Each carved relief panel was about eighteen by twelve inches. Among them, we were told, would be one of the oldest known representations of the Crucifixion, created around 425.

We spotted it in the far upper left corner. Three robust, bearded men faced forward: a large central figure flanked by two smaller ones. They wore loincloths and stood firmly, unwounded and unbowed. They raised their stout, strong arms to the side, elbows slightly bent, hands shoulder high. We’d seen this familiar stance in the catacombs. Art historians call it the orant, the ancient position for prayer, a posture of both strength and openness, as if the arms were ready to embrace the viewer. Abraham, Isaac, and Daniel had stood in such a position in the catacombs. In this image on the door, the open palms of Christ and the two thieves were nailed to small blocks of wood behind their hands. The blocks were the only trace of crosses. They stood before what appeared to be a brick wall with an open window on the upper left side. Their wide-open eyes gazed at the viewer. This image, we realized, depicted victory over death. Jesus was definitely not dead.

From Rome we went to Istanbul and then to a remote part of northeastern Turkey where the crumbling remains of ninth- to eleventh- century monastery churches could be found upon high mountains. We failed to find even one dead Jesus. Returning to Italy, we lingered for several days in Ravenna to examine its beautifully restored fifth- and sixth-century mosaics.

In the sixth-century St. Apollinare Nuovo Church, at the edge of the old city, we found the earliest surviving life story of Jesus depicted in images. Near the ceiling on both sides of the basilica nave, thirteen rectangular mosaics marched from the chancel toward the main door. We examined each of the twenty-six panels closely. On the right wall near the chancel, an image of the Last Supper began the thirteen scenes of his Passion. At panel ten we encountered Simon of Cyrene carrying the cross for Jesus to Golgotha. We expected to see the Crucifixion on panel eleven. Instead, we were confronted by an angel who sat before a tomb. The apparition spoke to two women swaying forward like Gospel choir singers. We too leaned forward in astonishment and remembered what the angel had said: I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here (Matt. 28:5–6). The remaining panels showed the risen Christ visiting his followers in the stories of doubting Thomas (John 20:19–29) and the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13–43).

We found no Crucifixions in any of Ravenna’s early churches. The death of Jesus, it seemed, was not a key to meaning, not an image of devotion, not a ritual symbol of faith for the Christians who worshipped among the churches’ glittering mosaics. The Christ they saw was the incarnate, risen Christ, the child of baptism, the healer of the sick, the teacher of his friends, and the one who defeated death and transfigured the world with the Spirit of life.

Why were we looking for the living among the dead? Like most Western Christians, we were accustomed to images of a Christ who died in agony. We had learned in church and in graduate school that Christians believed the crucifixion of Jesus Christ saved the world and that this idea was the core of Christian faith. In our book Proverbs of Ashes, we challenged this idea because we saw that it contributed to sanctioning intimate violence and war. It uses Jesus’s death as the supreme model of self-sacrificing love and encourages those who want to follow him to love in the same way. It places victims of violence in harm’s way and absolves perpetrators of their responsibility for unethical behavior. The idea deeply troubled us, but we never questioned its centrality to Christianity.

After our book was published, we discovered that the idea troubled many Christians. We were invited to discuss our book on Christian radio stations and had lively, engaged conversations with many listeners who were also concerned that this idea might encourage domestic violence and the sexual abuse of children. Rita’s sister-in-law, the daughter of Christian missionaries, wrote us a long letter of gratitude because the book made her think more deeply about her faith. We were gratified that so many were willing to listen to what we had to say and to think about what they believed about the Crucifixion. Even so, we were unprepared for the possibility that Christians did not focus on the death of Jesus for a thousand years.

After we investigated early Christian art, we stepped back, astonished at the weight of the reality: Jesus’s dead body was just not there. We could not find it in the catacombs or Rome’s early churches, in Istanbul’s great sixth-century cathedral Hagia Sophia, in the monastery churches in northeastern Turkey, or in Ravenna’s mosaics. The mystery of its absence deepened. We searched as many sources of early Christian art as we could find; we studied with an expert on first-millennium art at the University of California in Berkeley, and we consulted several times with a distinguished scholar of Christian art.¹

After we realized that the Crucifixion was absent, we began to pay attention to what was present in early Christian art. We found one arresting image in an unlikely place, the most important church in Western Christendom and still the cathedra (seat) of the bishop of Rome, St. Giovanni in Laterano. The basilica was donated to the church by Constantine (274–337). Though the pope now resides at the Vatican, this church is still his official seat. What we saw in the apse of this basilica astonished us. Though the apse mosaic image has changed and been restored over the centuries, parts of it likely date to the fourth to sixth centuries.²

We arrived at St. Giovanni during Mass. It was conducted from a high baroque altar—residue, to modern eyes, of one of the more incongruent restorations of the seventeenth century—placed where the nave and transept intersect. The altar displayed a triptych painting with the Crucifixion in the center. It completely hid the apse. We walked quietly down the right aisle, tiptoed up the transept stairs, ignored the velvet rope blocking further progress, and sneaked behind the altar. When we spotted the apse, we gasped in wonder. At the top of its curve, a bust of Jesus gazed down, serious and dignified. His golden nimbus outlined his countenance against a dark blue background strewn with white, red, and blue clouds. Winged seraphim hovered at the upper edges of the image, four on a side. A single seraph hovered directly above him upside down, wings spread out.

Below this upper blue crescent of sky, the apse sparkled in gold, like the light in a dawn sky. Immediately below Jesus’s bust, a dove emerged head down in the golden sky, like the seraph above his head, with wings similarly spread. From its beak, a pale stream of water poured downward. Below the dove was a gold, segmented cross, with a large jewel in the center of each segment. The stream of water fell behind the cross, slowly widening until it formed a translucent pool around its base. In the center of the cross was an oval medallion. It showed Jesus standing in water, his head slightly bowed while John the Baptist on the shore poured water over his head.

At the base of the golden cross, next to the pool, two delicate six-pointed deer, one on either side, stood atop a hill of grass and flowers. They turned toward the cross, heads lowered, and gazed at the viewer. As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God (Ps. 42:1). Below the pool, four rivers flowed out below the cross like roots, two curving left and two curving right, so that the rivers seemed to lift the cross out of the meadow below. They were carefully labeled Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, and Euphrates, the rivers of paradise in Genesis 2:11–14. Three snow-white sheep on either side, slightly smaller than the deer and directly beneath them, drank from the streams. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want (Ps. 23:1).

Where the rivers split left and right, they made a triangle in the meadow. Inside the triangle, directly below the cross, a small golden city nestled as if protected by the rivers. A saint stood before the city. Behind his head, above the city, waved a palm tree in whose fronds a peacock perched, both images of immortality. Busts of Peter and Paul peered above the city towers. At the base of the entire apse, the rivers merged with the Jordan. The great river flowed laterally across the bottom of the apse, with a lush meadow, dotted with birds and flowers, as its bank. In the river itself, swans paddled serenely in pairs, a couple of cherubs fished from a boat, one cherub rode a swan, another swam in the waves, and a fifth wind-surfed across them.

This image penetrated our consciousness until, at last, we understood: we stood in paradise. The image depicted a vision found in a popular third-century Christian text called the Apocalypse of Paul:

I entered Paradise and saw the beginning of waters, and the angel beckoned me…. And when I had gone inside I saw a tree planted from whose roots water flowed out, and from this was the beginning of the four rivers. And the Spirit of God rested on that tree, and when the Spirit blew, the waters flowed forth, and I said, My Lord, is it this tree itself which makes the waters flow? And he said to me, From the beginning, before the heavens and earth appeared, the Spirit has been resting upon this tree; wherefore, whenever the Spirit blows, the waters flow forth from the tree.³

As we looked at other early church interiors, we saw more clearly how each captured dimensions of paradise. The spaces placed Christians in a lush visual environment: a cosmos of stars in midnight skies, golden sunlight, sparkling waters teeming with fish, exuberant fauna, and verdant meadows filled with flowers and fruit trees. Punctuating such scenes were images of the great cloud of witnesses, many dressed in purple robes of nobility. Others wore white robes of baptism as brides of Christ. They wore or carried bridal wreaths of victory. Many apse images included exactly four rivers flowing from a lamb, globe, or golden cross.

Paradise, we realized, was the dominant image of early Christian sanctuaries. This both disconcerted and intrigued us. On the one hand, we were dismayed to think that early Christians appeared to be obsessed with the afterlife. On the other hand, we wondered why they covered every inch of church walls with such beautiful sights. We contemplated what it felt like to worship in such spaces. We studied ancient liturgies, ritual practices, prayers, and hymns that may have been used in these churches. We tried, in other words, to feel and sense our way into their visual and liturgical worlds. We also explored early commentaries on Genesis. Reading early church texts on paradise, we sought to understand the ideas worshippers held as they daily prayed, processed, stood, sang, and partook of the Eucharist in such spaces.

To our surprise and delight, we discovered that early Christian paradise was something other than heaven or the afterlife. Our modern views of heaven and paradise think of them as a world after death. However, in the early church, paradise—first and foremost—was this world, permeated and blessed by the Spirit of God. It was on the earth. Images of it in Rome and Ravenna captured the craggy, scruffy pastoral landscape, the orchards, the clear night skies, and teeming waters of the Mediterranean world, as if they were lit by a power from within. Sparkling mosaics in vivid colors captured the world’s luminosity. The images filled the walls of spaces in which liturgies fostered aesthetic, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual experiences of life in the present, in a world created as good and delightful.

Like the breathing of a human body, the images said that God blessed the earth with the breath of Spirit. It permeated the entire cosmos and made paradise the salvation that baptism in the Spirit offered. As the most blessed place imaginable, paradise was also where the departed saints rested from their earthly labors and returned to visit those who loved them. In early Christian understandings, even heaven was a dimension of this life; it was the mysterious abode of God from which blessings flowed upon the earth. Nearby to heaven, the dead rested in their own neighborhood of paradise.

After thirty years of working in religion and theology, we had stumbled inadvertently into paradise. Like most scholars of Christian history and theology, we had studied the texts of creeds and councils, chronicling the many struggles over doctrine. We were taught to regard Christian theology as the gradual unfolding of the truth of orthodox Christianity. Some misguided and infamous heretics contested this truth, but the church fathers had vigorously defended it and triumphed. We have been skeptical of such a limited and apologist version of the faith, but we have had to find our own resources for alternative understandings to derail this juggernaut.⁴

Nearly everything we had previously understood about Christian history, theology, and ritual began to shift as we delved deeper into the meaning of paradise. We felt as if we had been climbing a long, steep mountain trail. We could see behind us the terrain we had trudged through—an arid Golgotha landscape of sharp, barren rocks that had left us thirsty, sore, and spent. At a sudden turn, the switchbacks opened onto a new vista. Opening before us were vast meadows, lush and green. When we began to look at early Christianity through the lens of its visual and ritual worlds, we found that much of what we’d been taught had to be reexamined—beginning with our modern assumptions that doctrinal texts provided a primary orientation to early Christian faith. We worked to understand the world of early Christianity not as the literate few knew it but as the visually literate many knew it when they worshipped in churches and recited memorized scriptures and creeds. For them, visual art and poetic and narrative literature, found in prayers, stories, psalms, and hymns, shaped Christian life and sustained it.

Beauty and art—in all its forms—engage the more holistic, emotional, and sensory-laden dimensions of experience and memory. They capture multilayered experiences of imagination, feeling, perceiving, and thinking. Through art, the aesthetic, emotional, sensory, and intellectual dimensions of life can come together and be mixed in fresh ways. Throughout this book, and especially in Part I, we have tried to capture the experience of the liturgical spaces of the early Christian world. We include descriptions of some of the images, selections from liturgical poetry and stories, and concrete details of rituals. Though we recognize that these are inadequate to convey the sensory spaces and experiences of a distant time, we have sought to communicate something of the aesthetic experience of paradise.

In addition to these forms of beauty and liturgy, we have drawn on a variety of early thinkers in creating a picture of the early church and its understandings of paradise. We have reached across a wide terrain of resources for understanding early Christianity, including thinkers in Asia, Europe, and Africa who used Latin, Greek, or Syriac as their main language. Although contemporary Christians separate the heretics from the orthodox leaders, at the time these disputes arose such clean divides were not always so obvious. Some heretics, such as Origen of Alexandria (c. 185–c. 254), had great influence on orthodox thinkers. On occasion, we have lifted up voices or texts we believe merit greater attention—some of which may surprise the reader. Finally, in some cases, with well-known thinkers such as Augustine of Hippo and texts such as the Gospel of John and the Martyrdom of Perpetua, we offer alternative ways of reading them in terms of paradise. We reach across such a vast spectrum of thinkers and traditions for two reasons. First, the spectrum allows us to demonstrate how pervasive an idea paradise was in early Christianity, and, second, it reveals how thinkers adapted their views of paradise in relation to the specificities of their own cultures and geographies.

Part I of this book is a genealogy of paradise, showing how it was understood to be in this world and on the earth. We examine the earliest roots of paradise in chapter 1, reaching back nearly four thousand years to explore how the ancient people of West Asia imagined paradise as the best that life could be, long before it was written about in Genesis 1–2. We show how the Bible’s Hebrew prophets invoked the Garden of Eden to raise ethical questions about the exploitation and carnage of empires—even to challenge the kings of Israel. We note how biblical authors periodically rewrite the stories of Creation and paradise in new ways to highlight the importance of their times and places to the fate of God’s world. In chapter 2, we examine how stories of Jesus in the Gospels develop this prophetic tradition during times of Roman oppression, using the idea of the kingdom, or reign, of God. We show how they reinterpret Genesis 1–2 in the first century. In addition, we discuss the meaning of the Passion stories and the Crucifixion in relation to the church’s claim that this world is paradise. We unlock a form of Christianity that affirmed life in this world as the place of salvation. Within their church communities, Christians sought to help life flourish in the face of imperial power, violence, and death. Though persecuted, they refused to surrender their identity as members of the church, and the empire executed them for it. In chapter 3, we explore the meaning of martyrdom in relation to paradise, as well as the emergence of apocalyptic ideas as resistance to Rome.

The church’s fortunes changed significantly starting in the early fourth century under the Emperor Constantine. In chapter 4, we discuss the church’s power struggle with Rome, as emperors attempted, with little success, to inflict uniformity of belief upon the culturally diverse and disputatious world of early churches. We find that struggle especially evident in the flourishing of ideas of the church as paradise in this world. In claiming the space of paradise, Christians staked out ground separate from the rule of Christian emperors and made their spaces superior to any place that marked imperial power. We also examine how, in this pivotal century, church teachers shifted gender ideas to favor more masculine models, established uniformity of belief as the basis of church, and created a deeply fractured relationship to Judaism. Christians understood that they failed often to live as they should. Their failures, however, were not a sign to them of paradise lost, but a sign of their failure to live ethically in it.

The subject of chapter 5 is the intense training that Christians received to prepare them to be initiated into paradise in this life. Through baptism, Christians learned to resist the forces of sin and evil and become wise about how good and evil work in the world, especially the oppressive powers of empires. In becoming ever wiser, Christians were expected to take responsibility for the power they received through the church, a power we call ethical grace. Christians undertook spiritual disciplines together and looked to Jesus as the model of their own divinity and of their own agency in life. As savior, Jesus enabled their adoption into God’s family of divinity. He embodied Spirit in human flesh, he transfigured the world, and he reopened the paradise garden on this earth, created by God as the home of humanity. In this examination of spiritual practices, we focus on the Jerusalem church in the second half of the fourth century as an example of what initiates to Christian baptism undertook in learning lifelong disciplines.

Spiritual disciplines were essential to being at home in the world as paradise. To experience the Spirit of God in all things and the beauties of this world, early Christians cultivated acute attunement to the life around them. We conclude Part I with a twofold discussion of the new humanity the church envisioned and the power of beauty as humanity’s ethical basis. We examine how Christians struggled to stay grounded in love, in justice, in nonviolence, in wisdom, and in freedom, to live together as humanity in the garden of God. Church communities helped everyone to share resources, to cultivate wisdom and honesty, to understand ideas and doctrines, and to care for each other in sickness and need. They created systems of restitution, rehabilitation, and restoration that acknowledged human failure and expected all to take responsibility for their uses of power. These practices did not lead early Christians to idealize themselves or this world. They saw life as an arena of struggle to gain wisdom and to live ethically and responsibly toward others, so that love might flourish in their communities and so that they might live now in paradise together.

As the paradise of early Christianity entered our vision and seeped into our consciousness, crucifixion-centered Christianity seemed increasingly strange to us. We wondered what had happened to the understanding of this world as paradise. When and why did Christianity shift to an obsession with atoning death and redemption through violence? What led Western Christianity to replace resurrection and life with a crucifixion-centered salvation and to relegate paradise to a distant afterlife?

In Part II, we unravel the mystery of paradise expelled from this world in the Christian West, especially in the ninth to thirteenth centuries. Like detectives in search of a murder victim, we followed a trail of clues that led us, finally, to a body. We found the corpse of Jesus for the first time at a considerable distance from the Mediterranean world, in the forests of the far north of Europe, where the Rhine wends its way from the Alps to the North Sea. Saxon artists carved the first Crucifixions—life-size three-dimensional wooden figures—in the tenth century. Their ninth-century ancestors were forced by Charlemagne’s soldiers to be baptized at the point of a sword, so that Latin Christianity came to them accompanied by death. The oldest crucifix to survive, the Gero Cross, was created around 965 and is found in the Cathedral of St. Peter and Maria in Cologne, Germany. Chapter 9 tells this tragic tale.

Chapter 10 describes the decisive turning point toward violence, which arrived in 1095, when Pope Urban the II launched the First Crusade in an attempt to quell the feudal violence plaguing Europe. Urban declared that war was not only just, it was holy—it was a pilgrimage that served God and that enacted love for one’s kin. Crusaders who killed Jews and Muslims earned forgiveness for all their sins and were assured of a place in paradise after death, not after baptism. This moral confusion about violence postponed paradise and made it a reward for killing. Holy war became the route to paradise. In chapter 11, we examine the theological innovations that supported the Crusades, especially an explicit theology of atonement, which proposed that God became human in Jesus in order to die on the cross and pay the penalty for humanity’s sins, a death pleasing to God. We show how the erotic joy of paradise was transformed into a union of eros and torture, worship of violence and victims, and self-inflicted harm.

In chapter 12, we expose the impoverishment of spiritual resources and the tragedy of the Christian turn to a piety of Crucifixion during the disasters that afflicted western Europe in the fourteenth century. As a response to the reclosing of paradise and a piety of suffering, western Europe devised various escape routes from this world. We describe a number that emerged in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and led to the transatlantic slave trade, the Protestant Reformation, and the conquest and colonization of North America.

Chapter 13 tells the story of the early history of New England first from the perspective of the indigenous people there, then from the perspective of the Calvinist Europeans seeking to build paradise free of the corrupting influences of Europe. Calvinist approaches to paradise remain important in both conservative and liberal expressions of white American Christianity. In the wake of the worst war in the history of the last five hundred years in North America, King Philip’s War of 1675–76, we describe the emergence of an American identity, developed through the Great Awakening and the myth of the extinct American Indian.

Finally, in chapter 14, we discuss the nineteenth- and twentieth- century reforming impulses of American Christianity that sought to reclaim the value of life in this world and salvation on earth, as it is in heaven. Some nineteenth-century thinkers returned humanity to an appreciation for nature and individual spiritual development. Among their acts of reclaiming the goodness of this world, Christians challenged the medieval atonement theology holding that Jesus’s death saved the world. They also exposed the narrow, self-centered piety of personal sin and salvation and involved themselves in the struggle for the abolition of slavery and the fight for women’s suffrage. They argued that socially organized sin was a far greater evil than personal sins; then they set to work to create justice for the poor, imprisoned, and oppressed. We examine the strengths and the limitations of these reform movements as partial ways to recover the sensibility that paradise is in this life and in this world.

This book is a work of love for this life, in all its tragedies and stunning beauty. As we pieced together the forgotten history of paradise, we discovered how life-affirming forms of Christianity succumbed to the focus on redemptive violence that marks the second millennium of the Christian West. Without such understanding, the Christian West will carry forward fatal errors as though they were damaged genetic codes: invisible, silent killers. We conclude with a meditation on what life in the twenty-first century will require of Christians. In reflecting on the meaning of paradise for our world now, we offer no final solution to the dilemmas of our times. Instead we suggest fresh ways of understanding our dilemmas so that new spiritual guideposts become clearer as we struggle for social change for the common good.

Christians have always sought to see their faith, history, future, and relationship to the world and to other faiths in ways relevant to their concrete historical lives. We recover here a life-giving, life-affirming Christianity, rooted in an ancient Mesopotamian past, that has survived despite many attempts to repress or destroy it and despite theological shifts that have betrayed it. We offer our study of this world as paradise as a way to retrieve a faith that affirms the many ways that people love one another, themselves, and the earth. Such faith remains deeply skeptical of the human will to power and the need to think of the saved as innocent and good. As inheritors of Western Christianity and citizens of a New World stolen from those who still live upon this land, we believe we must stand again at the open doors of paradise and bless this world as sacred soil, as holy ground, and as a home which all must learn to inhabit together.

We seek to rekindle Christian traditions that hold fast to love and thereby teach Christian people how, in the midst of horror and tragedy and loss, to resist violence, to honor the earth, and to humanize life. We offer an understanding of freedom and human agency that calls for responsible uses of power to create just relationships—the cultivation of ethical grace through a love of beauty. This activity of love, embodied in heart, soul, mind, and bodily strength, lies at the core of our work for justice, freedom, human rights, sustainable life, and peace. We invite you now to return home to paradise with us so that, together, we can save it.

PART ONE

FIGURE 1. Cathedral of St. Giovanni in Laterano, Rome, Italy. Apse, mosaic. Fourth to thirteenth centuries. Baptism cross.

CHAPTER ONE

In the Beginning…

Paradise on the Earth

In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground—then the Lord God formed an earth-creature [adam] from the dust of the ground [adamah], and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and the earth-creature became a living being. And the Lord God planted a garden of delight [gan-eden], in the east, and there he put the earth-creature he had formed. Out of the ground the Lord God made every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden of delight, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

A river flows out of the place of delight [eden] to water the garden and from there it divides and becomes four branches. The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; and the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is Gihon; it is one that flows around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

The Lord God took the earth-creature and put him in the garden of delight to till it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the earth-creature. You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.

GENESIS 2:4–17

The four rivers were the visual clue that told us we were in paradise. In the apse mosaic of St. Giovanni in Rome, water poured from the dove, flowed down behind the cross, and became the four streams that fed the meadows of paradise. Seeing images such as this sent us to the library to discover what early Christian sources said about paradise. We knew that this image in St. Giovanni drew on the ancient Genesis text to picture the world blessed by the Spirit, and we discovered that the Genesis story drew on even older sources. Those ancient sources went all the way back to one of the first written languages in West Asia, Sumerian. Sumerian stories of paradise placed it on the earth and described how life was at its most fertile, just, enjoyable, and beautiful. In this chapter, we explore the ancient wellsprings of the Bible’s stories and images of the garden of delight as they emerge in Genesis and elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible.¹

Just as in Genesis, however, Sumerian stories of paradise are accompanied by stories of what can go wrong: violence, competition, greed, and environmental catastrophes. The Sumerian paradise, called Dilmun, existed to the east somewhere nearby, as did Eden in Genesis. Because it could not be clearly located, it could not be conquered or destroyed. Instead, it was always there so that humanity would remember the ethical requirements of living in paradise and so that those requirements would hold accountable those who threatened it. Hence paradise functioned not only to describe life on earth, but also to provide the ethical measure of life. In this long multicultural genealogy of paradise, we trace various streams of its meanings. Most important, we show how stories of paradise place it on the earth and how they raise ethical implications about how humanity should live.

BETWEEN THE RIVERS

The genealogy of paradise begins in Mesopotamia (literally, between the rivers). The Tigris and the Euphrates originate within fifty miles of each other from the far western edge of the Himalayas in eastern Turkey. The two rivers diverge and wander a thousand miles southeast until they meet again in the Persian Gulf. This landscape generated a literature of paradise associated with mountains, rivers, and gardens, beginning with that of the Sumerians.

The Sumerians, a people of mysterious origins, migrated south from the mountains in Turkey in prehistoric times and settled in the hot, flat, fertile delta between the rivers. Around the fifth millennium BCE they began to master flood control and irrigation and built walled settlements. Their stories, first passed on in oral traditions, come to us as texts pressed on clay tablets that date to around 2100 BCE, near the end of their history. They recorded their myths in a phonetic script they invented, called cuneiform (wedge-shaped). One of the oldest written languages on earth, Sumerian became the scientific, sacred, ceremonial, and literary language for the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, and many other surrounding cultures for centuries, despite the fact that it was related to no other language in the region and that, to become fluent, one had to master its separate dialects for men and women.²

For subsequent cultures, Sumerian, the language and the culture, was the equivalent of Greek in Roman society or Latin in medieval Europe: the much admired classical language and culture of antiquity. Sumerians encouraged this view with stories of the glories of their rulers and gods. Their conquerors borrowed Sumer’s stories in creating their own myths and used its script to write their very different languages just as, today, English is written with Latin script.³ The Bible itself indicates the importance of Sumer; Abram and Sarai (renamed Abraham and Sarah) trace their lineage back to Ur, the last capital of Sumer, from which they migrated westward to Canaan (Gen. 11:26–13:12).⁴

It is easy to see the traces of Sumerian stories in Genesis. Long before Genesis 1:2 came to speak of God’s Spirit hovering over the deep waters, the Sumerians began their stories of creation with Nammu, the goddess of the watery abyss or primordial sea and mother of all the gods. Out of her depths, she created the god An, heavens, and the goddess Ki, earth. An-ki meant universe or cosmos. A great cosmic mountain united An and Ki in one solid block. The base of the mountain Anki was in the bottom of the earth with the underworld of the dead and its top was in the heavens with the gods. This cosmic mountain held a three-tiered universe: the heavens of the gods, the earth of all living things, and the underworld of the dead. An and Ki had a son, Enlil, god of air, who separated the lapis lazuli dome of the heavens from the flat disk of the earth and created the world in the space between them. As we find later in Genesis, life on earth in Sumerian myths began with breath, wind, spirit—all translations of the Hebrew ruah, "a wind from God swept over the face of the waters" (Gen. 1:2). Enlil mated with his wife, Ninlil, goddess of air, to give birth to the celestial gods such as the moon and sun.⁵

Dilmun, the Sumerians’ paradise, was without conflict, blessed with abundant fresh water, thick forests, and gardens. There Nammu’s son Enki, god of sweet water, mated with her daughter Ninhursag, another name for Ki (earth), goddess of the sacred mountain, to create the deities of earth and healing.⁶

The land Dilmun is a pure place,

The place, after Enki had laid himself by his wife.

That place is clean, that place is bright.

In Dilmun the raven uttered no cries,

The lion killed not,

The wolf snatched not the lamb,

Unknown was the kid-killing dog,

Unknown was the grain-devouring boar.

The singer utters no wail,

By the side of the city he utters no lament.⁷

Also unknown were disease, hunger, war, death, and sorrow. The exact location of Dilmun was a bit mysterious. It was not Sumer itself, but was located just east of it on a sacred mountain. This combination of specificity of description and vagueness of location gave it both a sense of reality and of inaccessibility—a place true and real but belonging to no ruler, city, or civilization. Dilmun continued to be a synonym for paradise long after Sumer ceased to exist.⁸

The Sumerians built ziggurats to replicate their cosmic mountain, complete with paradise: they united An and Ki (heavens and earth) linking the gods, humanity, and paradise. Rising from the river delta, ziggurats were rectangular towers, stepped to look like a mountain, with trees and shrines at every level. At the peak, one or more temples were constructed with a main sanctuary and multiple side rooms with altars for making sacrifices. The temples were lavishly decorated, with vividly colored mosaics and frescoes showing the whole range of life-giving community activities, such as planting, harvesting, herding, and processions to the temples. Beautiful flowers, guardian animals such as leopards and bulls, and mythical beasts such as eagles with lion heads and bulls with human faces adorned porticoes and sanctuaries. These centers of ritual, towering above the deltas, grew to contain housing for the community’s priests, artists, engineers, scribes, and other tradespeople.⁹

Sumer’s stories and art celebrated the goodness of ordinary life in ways we can still understand, depicted as activities of paradise. Their myths tell of gods enjoying sexual pleasure, making music, dancing, traveling about and having adventures, and encouraging the fertility of the land. They also waged wars in defense of the land against its enemies and mourned the deaths of those they loved. Inanna, a goddess who lost her shepherd husband, Dumuzi, to the underworld, played the greatest role in Sumer’s epics of all the gods and behaved like any powerful deity.¹⁰ On many cylinder seals, she and other deities are shown riding in flat reed boats or striding up stepped mountains. All wear wide-brimmed hats with tall conical crowns—even Utu, the sun, wears a hat. Enki—the god who separated the sweet and salty waters—can be identified by the waves of water cascading from his hands or shoulders, which often contain fish.

A creative, resourceful, and practical people who figured out how to flourish on a hot, flat river delta, the Sumerians tell stories of gods who take pride in such inventions as the pickaxes they used to build canals that protected them from spring floods. Remains of their cities show they cultivated carefully planned gardens and created public architecture. Tablets found in temples give evidence that they held the resources essential to survival, what we might call public utilities—water, fields, orchards, flocks, and herds—as a community trust. Through their temple systems, which replicated the great cosmic mountain and its earthly paradise, they managed these resources by keeping written records of things held in trust and tracking how they were distributed.¹¹

The Sumerians told their stories of creation and paradise as a preface to their stories of the many gods. The prefaces were a literary formula such as once upon a time when… or in the beginning when God created… These recitations established the way the world was at its best, as a contrast to the stories they told of disasters, conflicts, violence, and war. The Sumerians loved their rivers, but a rare deluge could deposit as much as fifteen feet of silt in one spring season, so they had a story about a great flood with only one human survivor, Ziusudra, who gained life like a god…breath eternal. Ziusudra subsequently dwelt on a mountain in the land of Dilmun, the Sumerian paradise, somewhere east of the Tigris.¹² Later biblical traditions pictured Noah landing his ark on Mount Ararat—the highest peak in the mountains at the headwaters of the Tigris and the Euphrates.

The Sumerians pondered the problems that accompanied centralized city-states and the rise of empires. Their stories spoke of inequality in the distribution of resources and the exploitation of forced labor, and they even suggested some of the problems of male dominance over women. Humanity was created, they said, because the gods were tired of all the work involved in farming the fields and digging canals. At a drunken banquet of the gods, Enki and Ninhursag, using clay, created six flawed humans to do the work. Enki created one human so feeble that Ninhursag was the only one capable of feeding it. Ninhursag cursed Enki and indicted him as a remote god who did not understand life on the land. She accused him of abandoning her when her city was attacked, her temple was destroyed, her son the king was taken captive, and she was made a refugee. Instead of helping her, she said, he tried to dominate her. Though the full contents of this curse are not entirely clear, Enki seemed to accept it as his due.¹³

Early in the third millennium BCE, rulers rose up from the most powerful Sumerian city-states, centralized their control, and expanded their territories. Nippur became the center of the Sumerian temple system. Its patron deity, Enlil, the god of air, superceded older city-state deities, such as An, Ki, and Nammu, and his temple in Nippur collected tributes from them. Eventually, a king system existed alongside of or, in some cases, instead of priests to rule the city-states. Cylinder seals began to show kings approaching deities without being accompanied by priests, and the kings began to be seen as divine themselves.¹⁴

By the time Sumer’s myths were recorded, the Sumerians had experienced the rise and fall of several kings, who had consolidated power by unifying some of the city-states into a monarchy and conquered territories as far east as Syria. The last empire fell within a century or two of the time of the recording of the myths. The stories reflect on the costs and dangers of empires and the talents and liabilities of various kings. Arguments among the patron gods symbolize wars among city-states. The Sumerian hymns extolled their ideal king as like the shepherd Dumuzi, consort of Inanna, and they may have been sung by way of contrast with the real thing. The ideal king filled the granaries, protected the city, and was distinguished-looking, intelligent, daring, eloquent, learned, astute, courageous, just, kind, and pious.¹⁵

In contrast to the centralized power associated with Sumer’s actual empires and the glorification of its kings, the stories of Dilmun suggested that the deities of old held council meetings, and women and men held relatively equal power. The powers of the gods were limited to their spheres of influence, and they governed their spheres for the good and security of the whole. Dilmun’s peace required the interactive functioning of all the powers, not the independent actions of heroic gods or one god lording it over all the others. The gods were capable of both good and evil, and the council managed the will to power of any one deity with humor, cajoling, negotiation, trickery, seduction, competition, scolding, and distraction. The council, when effective, maintained life at its best, and the stories of the gods of Dilmun contrast with life in the city-states. Dilmun depicts an image of Sumerian life as a confederacy of interdependent city-states or as a distant land no longer so easily accessed, even by the gods.

The Sumerians lived in Mesopotamia for several thousand years before a Semitic tongue began to supplant their language. During their later history, they saw a number of centralized kingdoms come and go, and powerful empires formed at their borders. The Babylonians conquered them for the last time around 2050 BCE, adapted their myths, and re-created their ziggurats. Babylonia transformed Sumer’s myths into more aggressive tales of war, conquest, and male dominance. Nammu’s creation of the heavens and earth became a deadly contest between the Babylonian dragon Tiamat, the sea, and her son Marduk, the warrior and chief hero of the gods who had been one of the minor sons of Enki in Sumer. Marduk slew Tiamat in fury. From this matricide, he took the two halves of his mother’s body to create the heavens and the earth.¹⁶

Sumer became the lost primordial culture of West Asia. By the time Genesis was written, the Sumerians’ myths had been adapted and edited through more than a millennium of history in Canaan, where the legendary immigrants from Sumer, Abram and Sarai, had migrated. The kingdom of Israel emerged in Canaan under Saul (1029–1000 BCE) and David (1000–961 BCE). The Davidic dynasty collapsed with the death of David’s son Solomon (961–922 BCE). The one nation Israel, composed of twelve tribes, became two kingdoms in 921. The Assyrians conquered and annexed the northern nation of ten tribes, called Israel, in 722 (2 Kings 17:5–6). The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar defeated the southern kingdom of Judah in 586 BCE and kidnapped its leaders, initiating five decades of exile for Judah’s people. The term Jews was later derived from its name.

The Persians and Jews had a long period of contact beginning with King Cyrus the Great (ca. 576–529 BCE), who conquered Babylonia in 539, ending its domination of Mesopotamia. Persia, today’s Iran, was a blend of ancient peoples that Cyrus consolidated into a vast empire with territory from the Aegean and North Africa to India. He created the first empire of many languages and cultures ruled by one administration and one language, Persian, a modern form of which is now called Farsi and which remained a common language of the diverse peoples of India for many centuries. The word paradise comes into Persian through Median, paridaeza, pari (around), and daeza (wall), meaning a garden surrounded by a wall. Persian, an Indo-European language like Sanskrit and Greek, uses paridaida to refer to vineyards, orchards, forests, tree nurseries, and stables. Greek borrowed it as paradeisos, and Latin as paradisos. Paridaeza also appears as a loan word in the Semitic languages of Babylonian, as pardēsu, and Hebrew, as pardès.¹⁷

The Persian kings constructed huge paridaida, walled gardens with trees, streams, vegetation, and animals for hunting. One ancient tribute paid to kings by client countries were rare, exotic animals, which Persian kings kept in their paradises as something like private zoos. By hunting in their paradises, they practiced the arts of war.¹⁸ Cyrus the Great was known for his vast paridaida. The Persians prized the trees in their paridaida and cultivated them carefully. Lysander, a Spartan guest of King Cyrus the Younger, described the grandeur of the trees, the uniform distances at which they were planted, the straightness of the rows of the trees, the beautiful regularity of all the angles and the number and sweetness of the odours that accompanied them as they walked around. Persian paradises would become a model for grand gardens across their empire.¹⁹

Cyrus the Great was somewhat unusual for his time. Although he was a great military strategist who amassed a powerful army and waged brutal wars, he preferred to keep the loyalty of subjugated people by offering religious tolerance and rebuilding what his predecessors had destroyed. He freed the Jews from their captivity by the Babylonian Empire and assisted them in the rebuilding of Jerusalem (Ezra 1:2–11, 6:3–5). With such benevolence, he elicited cooperation and support from conquered peoples. The post-exilic prophet, third Isaiah (the book of Isaiah has three separate authors: the pre-exilic first Isaiah, second Isaiah of the exile, and the post-exilic third Isaiah), enthusiastically referred to Cyrus, a gentile, as God’s Messiah, an anointed one, translated in Greek as Christ (Isa. 44:28–45:1–8). Sometimes he was more popular with peoples he conquered than their own rulers were.

Cyrus was likely a Zoroastrian, practicing a Persian religion founded by the prophet Zarathustra (Zoroaster in Greek), who lived around the beginning of the first millennium BCE. Scholars of the history of Zoroastrianism link its early roots to Hindu ideas, but it became more monotheistic. Zoroaster preached a form of monotheism with lesser spirits and demons. He also developed a postmortem dimension of paradise tied to a strong dualism of good and evil. Upon death, human beings would be judged for their deeds by Ahura Mazda, Lord Wisdom, and enter a heavenly paradise or fall into hell. The arrival of three saviors and a final battle to annihilate evil would bring the new perfect age and would defeat Angra Mainyu, evil spirit. Humans could save the world by defending Wisdom with reason and insight. The new age, purified by holy fire, would be similar to the one in the distant past that preceded the current age of evil. While Cyrus’s religious ideas are harder to determine, his son Darius left inscriptions naming Ahura Mazda as creator of the universe.²⁰

Today, it may be tempting to read this apocalyptic vision of paradise as kin to the hope that motivates suicide bombers or that leads Christian Zionists to pray for an intensification of war in Israel to hasten Armageddon. However, Zoroaster lived at a time when empires were relatively new in human history. Their wars of expansion had devastated human societies and the environment, and the idea of capricious gods or the hand of fate encouraged humans to see themselves as pawns of greater powers. They also often saw their kings as divinities. Zoroaster offered a vision of good and evil that affirmed human free will and called for human ethical responsibility. Only those who were ethical belonged in paradise. The responsibility of humanity was not to serve the exploitive, capricious gods or fate, but to take the side of good and to be ethical. He challenged the ideas that those with extraordinary power had the right to decide right and wrong and that kings were divine. He said, instead, that the carnage and injustices of earthly empires would not go unnoticed or unpunished by a greater power that ruled from heaven. The self-defeating contradiction in this vision was the suggestion that a cosmic war would put an end to human wars. Violence can beget fear, stalemate, annihilation, dominance, or more violence, but it cannot beget love, justice, abundant life, community, or peace.

Zoroastrian apocalyptic ideas probably entered Jewish thinking in the post-exilic time of contact with Persia, since they do not appear in Jewish literature until after this time—for example, in the book of Daniel. The Hebrew Bible generally follows Sumerian traditions in imagining life after death as an underworld that is mysterious, cold, and dark. It depicts the cosmos as a three-tiered universe: heavens, earth with paradise, and the underworld, united by the cosmic sacred mountain. Zoroastrian apocalypticism assuredly influenced Christianity, which we discuss in chapter 3, but a divide of the afterlife into heaven and hell is absent from Christianity’s visual world until the medieval period.

PARADISE IN THE HEBREW BIBLE

Genesis reflects the long history of Israelite and Jewish contact with Sumer and Persia. It pictures paradise with Sumer’s geography of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and it echoes Sumer’s stories. Like them, it tells the story of Creation first, beginning with the chaos of the watery, deep abyss. God, or Elohim—who speaks in the plural—bears some resemblance to Enlil and Ninlil, the god and goddess of air. Like Enlil and Ninlil, God created with wind and made breathing space for earthly life between the heavens and the primordial waters.²¹ The orderly progression moved from cosmic to geologic to vegetative and animal forms and, finally, to humanity, male and female in the image of Elohim, a plural noun. The formulaic endings of divine delight after each day lend themselves to oral recitation. Alternate translations for it was good include it was delightful, it was blessed, and it was beautiful—Creation is all these things: joy, blessings, and beauty.

Though biblical scholars have shown how the account of Creation in Genesis 1 is separate from that in chapter 2, most interpretations have read them in relation to each other, just as stories of Dilmun can be read as a second stage of the story of the creation of the cosmic mountain. In Genesis 2, God—called Yahweh—shaped the muddy earth into a human creature. Yahweh breathed air into its nostrils to give it life. This story was often interpreted as an elaboration on Genesis 1:26–30:

Then God [Elohim] said, "Let us make humankind [adam] in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth."

And God created humankind [ha-adam] in-his-image,

in-the-image-of God created-he him;

male-and-female [zakar un eqeba] created-he them.²²

God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it…. See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and