“…anyone who piously and earnestly ponders the Sermon on the Mount—as we read in the Gospel according to Mathew—I believe he will find therein … the perfect standard of the Christian Life.”
-Augustine of Hippo
This is the 5th Part of our Series. Links to the other parts can be found at the end of this post.
We began with a discussion of Pope Francis and his views on Libertarianism and we have evolved into an examination of our own core beliefs and where they came from and why we believe different things. In order to understand me, or Francis, or you, we will have to look at where we came from.
I was born and raised not far from the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. Two thousand years ago this region was the home of the middle woodland Hopewell society, the ancestors of the Mississippian culture of nearby Cahokia. The Hopewell Tradition was a diverse set of hunters and mound builders that were part of an extensive system of trade in eastern and central North America.
Two thousand years ago my genetic ancestors were somewhere in Northern Europe. They were most likely somewhere in one of the new Roman Empire’s far-flung provinces like Germania or Britannia or Gaul, although it is impossible to know.
The Ellisville Methodist Church was not far from that North American confluence of rivers. Pastor Phil taught us everything we needed to know to be confirmed as Methodists, including the history of the Church. He taught us about the covenant with Abraham. We learned the books in the Bible. We went over the Sermon on the Mount. And we said the Nicene Creed.
Although I was born and raised in North America and my ancestors were not from Rome or Athens or Jerusalem, my heritage passes through each of those cities and so we have to talk about that history. This will be neither a sales pitch nor a critique. These conversations are always delicate but there is no intent to offend anyone here. Being uncomfortable is no excuse for not examining the origin of our belief system.
There is no serious debate among historians about the basics of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. He lived between about 4 BCE and 30 CE. He was Jewish, born to Jewish parents in the Roman province of Judea. He was baptized by John the Baptist and had a ministry of about 3 years before being found to be a threat to the Pax Romana and crucified. He developed a large and fervent following of believers who were moved by his message.
There are no videos. No newspaper or television reports. Jesus did not write down his message the way Aristotle did. The Gospel of Mark was written first, more than three decades after his death. Matthew and Luke were written over a decade later, near the time of the war between the Jews and the Romans. The Gospel of John was written later, after the destruction of the Jewish Temple.
Paul was typical of many Jews of the day in that he was a devout Pharisee who, though there is no evidence he ever heard or saw Jesus, hated his followers and participated in persecuting them. He had a conversion on the road to Damascus and became a fervent evangelist. He was a key figure in the early church and his writings comprise half of the New Testament.
The early church was comprised of a core group of individuals who set out to spread this new message to different places, and in different ways. The disciples all had different personalities, backgrounds, and perspectives. As they started spreading the message they realized they had some problems to resolve. They all needed to be spreading the same message, and so they had to discuss what that message was.
The Jews at the time had a fairly closed society; if you were not Jewish you were a Gentile, and the two groups did not necessarily mix. They had to decide if their message was only for Jews, or was it for Gentiles too? If they included Gentiles would they have to follow Jewish Laws?
This second question was a real problem because that covenant with Abraham, if you recall, included circumcision. Grown men who wanted to follow Jesus but were not Jews would have to be circumcised, and follow the strict dietary rules associated with the Law of Moses, which would not be popular.
The early church leaders met in Jerusalem around 50 CE and discussed these issues some 25 years after the death of Jesus. Many of the followers of Christ were Jews who followed Mosaic Law but simply added a belief in Jesus as messiah. But Paul had been preaching to Gentiles and argued that Jewish laws and the circumcision requirement should not apply to them. James had a different view but in the end was flexible and the Council of Jerusalem sided with Paul.
Churches were established. Mark started one in Alexandria and then Peter started one in Rome. Mark’s church is claimed as the first church by the Orthodox and Coptic Churches. Peter was the first bishop of Rome. Paul went to Antioch. Mark spread Christianity deep into Africa, while Paul did the same into Persia.
The next problems the new church faced involved questions of divinity. The Jews had always been monotheists, believing in one singular God. There was much debate about the nature of Christ and his relationship to God the Father. They had to preserve monotheism, so there is only one God. Jesus was God and so God had to have three persons. Jesus had to be both God and Man, with two distinct natures in balance. The Trinitarian view became the norm, but there were other views.
As the early followers of Jesus were pondering these questions there were other momentous things happening around them. The Romans had begun going a little crazy after Caesar Augustus and Tiberius. Caligula faced a financial crisis and started to levy a lot of taxes. The reign of Herod and his large building projects had drained resources and resulted in economic hardship. And the Jews had reached their limit. They revolted in 66 AD, partly due to high taxes and poor economic conditions.
Unfortunately for the Jews, the Romans came to Judea and put down the revolt and destroyed their Temple in Jerusalem. In the meantime the Romans got rid of Caligula and then imposed another Jewish tax. Being a Jew in Judea wasn’t such a good thing anymore, as the Romans imposed even more rules on their society.
The Jewish people were resilient and more revolts continued around the Roman Empire, which was distracted with other wars and crazy emperors. In 132 AD the Bar Kokhba revolt in Judea caused the Romans to come into Judea and kill over half a million Jews and practically wipe certain sects from history. Jews were banned from Judea and it was renamed Syria Palaestina by the Romans. This marks the split of Judaism from Christianity. Without a temple or a homeland the Jews focused on local synagogues and their messianic view became more conservative.
Nero burned down much of Rome and blamed the Christians for it. Nero killed Peter and Paul. James the Just was killed as well. The Romans started killing Christians with lions. The effect of martyrs on the spreading of the faith was significant.
The differences in views on divinity and theology began to cause rifts in the church. This continued for a couple of hundred years, from the end of the first century when the Gospel of John was written and just before the Third Roman-Jewish war, to a couple of hundred years later when the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD decided the matters officially.
Sabellius had believed that there is only one God, who had different “modes”, like father, son, and spirit. Monarchianism is the belief in God as one person, whereas trinitarianism is the belief that God is three persons coexisting in one being. Some believed God was one being with three parts but that two were subordinate to the Father. Sabellius was excommunicated as a heretic.
Arius was an early church leader in the third century who, along with Origen, believed that Jesus was begotten by God, and that God the Father was Superior to God the Son. In 325 the Roman Emperor Constantine invited all of the bishops of the early church to attend the Council of Nicaea to decide this and a number of other questions. In the end they came up with the Nicene Creed to explain their positions. Arius was excommunicated and Arianism was defined as heresy.
"In addition, if any writing composed by Arius should be found, it should be handed over to the flames, so that not only will the wickedness of his teaching be obliterated, but nothing will be left even to remind anyone of him. And I hereby make a public order, that if someone should be discovered to have hidden a writing composed by Arius, and not to have immediately brought it forward and destroyed it by fire, his penalty shall be death. As soon as he is discovered in this offence, he shall be submitted for capital punishment. ... "
— Edict by Emperor Constantine against the Arians
Constantine legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire as it gained popularity, especially with his soldiers. Constantine II who followed him was ironically a believer in Arianism but after him the concept mostly went away and the Nicene Creed became the accepted statement of church doctrine going forward.
There is of course much more to discuss. There have been thousands of books written on the history of the church and the Roman Empire and on the wisdom of the Bible and the lives and wisdom of the early church leaders. We will revisit these things again as they remain relevant.
Whatever your views are, your religious beliefs are central to how you view the word. In the end we all want answers to the same basic questions:
-How did this all begin, and how did we get here?
-What are we doing here; what is our purpose?
-Is there more than this? What happens when we die?
-How will all of this end?
-How should we live our lives?
Growing up not far from the confluence of two large rivers in the middle of North America in the 1960’s I was taught that the answers to all of those questions could be found in the same place. Pastor Phil taught about Adam and Eve and Noah and our covenant with Abraham. We celebrated the birth and death of Jesus and heard the Sermon on the Mount and read the Letters from Paul. And every Sunday we would all repeat the Nicene Creed, which explained what we believed, and when taken as a whole explained every one of those important questions, more or less.
I came to understand the cultures of China and Russia and India and Persia and Africa and South America much later in life. We were taught about those societies but the cultures that developed around the Mediterranean which had such a significant effect on our culture were given much more attention. The society that I was born into in 1961 was part of a nation colonized and founded by Europeans whose roots, like mine, went through Athens and Rome and Jerusalem and Alexandria and Constantinople.
The challenge for each of us is to go back through history and look at how we came to know that which we know, especially at our core. If you were raised in any Christian Church you were taught about the covenant with Abraham, the Sermon on the Mount, and the Nicene Creed. You may have different views about those things, but after the First Council of Nicaea there was still only one Christian Church.
But the Jews were no longer part of our tradition. The Buddhists and Hindus and Incas were never part of our tradition, so there was never any pain of separation with those cultures. But the separation of the Christians and the Jews was different, as we are all aware.
Another reflection involves the relative speed with which a tiny sect of followers could form a movement and break away from their roots to then become the predominant religion of the Roman Empire within about three hundred years. Their nature changed from being a tiny group of messianic outsiders to being protected by, and protectors of, the State. It is necessary for movements to change as they go from inception to outreach to organization and then on to maturity with its hierarchy and orthodoxy and rules, and the church changed in the process.
Paul directed the early church to be flexible and bring more people into the fold rather than being pure (as James would have preferred) and retaining their base. Later that same church began demanding the same purity that they had set aside during their big membership drive, once the audience was more or less captive by decree of the emperor.
Left with all of this, I go back and read that Sermon on the Mount. All I can do is honestly evaluate the words and the ideas presented to me. The words ring true, as they always have. We have a lot more to discuss before my story begins in the 1800’s, (including the split between Francis and I from a theological point of view), but we do have one important milestone behind us. Given the nature of our journey we will have to come back here often. We have not yet discussed Augustine, and his thoughts on free will and natural law; but that is up next.
http://rakestrawjeff.blogspot.com/2017/05/part-2-introduction.html?m=1
http://rakestrawjeff.blogspot.com/2017/05/in-beginning.html?m=1
http://rakestrawjeff.blogspot.com/2017/05/setting-stage.html?m=1
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