Prof: Okay,
last lecture of the semester. We're going to talk about the
big question, how did this little group of
Jews following a prophet, an apocalyptic prophet,
around Galilee, who was then executed shortly
thereafter in Jerusalem, become what we now call a major
world religion. How did that happen?
Because the whole first hundred
years we've talked about in this class of what we now call
Christianity. Of course it's not even called
"Christianity" until the letters of Ignatius.
There's no term
"Christianity" in the Bible itself,
and as I've said, the Apostle Paul certainly did
not use the term "Christian."
He probably would have rejected
it because that would imply that he was doing something else
besides just bringing the Gentiles into Israel.
He thought he was continuing
Israel, not making another religion.
How did this rag tag bunch of
people following Jesus, and then these different house
churches become what's called now a major world religion?
We'll talk a bit about that
today, and then I'm going to talk in the class with a little
bit of stuff on theory of interpretation that we've hit on
over the semester. I should also remind you that
at the end of the class we'll be passing out the instructions for
your final exams. I'll leave about ten minutes or
so of time for us to talk about that so you'll have plenty of
time to ask questions about the final exam once you get the
instructions. Finally, since this is your
last chance, be sure and stick up your hand if you want to ask
a question or make a comment. This is time if you want to
throw things and rebel against the course.
This is probably the best time
to do it, it's your last chance. So ask any questions you want
also about any of these topics, and we'll talk about that.
From the teachings of Jesus to
the gospel about Jesus, that's one of the first things
that happens. We've already seen that going
on. The historical Jesus,
and if you really have not had enough of this and you want to
take a historical Jesus course, I'm going to be teaching a
seminar for undergraduates on the historical Jesus in the
fall, open to anybody,
and we'll have a full semester to deal with these problems of
the historical Jesus in a seminar setting.
The historical Jesus did not
talk about himself as the Christ.
We just don't have him doing
that except in the Gospel of John.
It may well have been that he
thought he was the Messiah or that he was preceding the
Messiah. Somebody must have thought that
he was a Messianic figure because that's what the Romans
executed him for. Either he may have thought he
was the Messiah or some of his disciples may have hoped that he
was the Messiah, but he didn't go around
preaching about himself. The topic that Jesus talks
about the most in the Synoptic Gospels is actually the kingdom
of God, this thing that was expected to
happen in the future. The historical Jesus first is
talking about some gospel that it's good news but it's about
this coming kingdom of God that's going to--
when God's going to break in. Very quickly after his death,
as we see already by the letters of Paul,
the earliest material in the New Testament,
the gospel of Jesus, the good news he proclaimed
became the gospel about Jesus. In other words,
the good news was who was this man, and what does that mean for
us? That's the first major change
that happens in early Christianity on the way to
becoming Christianity. You've seen the growth of the
Pauline churches, so the first thing that happens
is it moves out of Palestine and it moves throughout the Greek
speaking world in the west, and very early,
we don't know by whom, a church was planted in Rome
because it's already there by the time Paul writes to the
Romans. It's been there for years.
We've seen how there's a
diversity of early Christian groups.
In fact your final exam will
require you to choose one of two questions.
It will require you to address
this issue that we've been hitting on all semester long
about how diverse this early movement was,
what did different groups look like?
We've also talked in the last
lecture about how did some of the institutions of the church
start gradually being developed, such as having a bishop,
having priests, having deacons,
and then the establishment of the Lord's Supper as a piece of
liturgy and ritual that becomes celebrated throughout these
different groups, the practice of baptism being
pretty much universally practiced by these groups very
quickly. We also have seen part of the
beginning of the rise of Christian scripture.
We've not gotten to the Canon
in this course, the actual development of the
Canon, because that doesn't happen
until the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries,
when the list of these books that become the New Testament
canon become more solidified. But we've seen the beginnings
of this. We've seen how different Gospel
writers will use other Gospels. We've seen how the writer of 2
Peter will talk about Paul's letters as scripture.
So we've seen a collection of
Paul's letters coming about, and we've seen the Gospels
coming about as a collection in the second century.
Then one of the major things
we've seen the beginnings of that will become more and more
important for the nature of Christianity later is its
separation from Judaism. As I've repeated several times
in this course, the earliest people who
followed Jesus never thought they were starting a new
religion. They thought they were simply
continuing the right behavior of Judaism.
Paul himself thought he was
continuing Judaism. It's just that he thought he
was bringing non-Jews into it in a fairly new way.
We've seen the beginnings of
how, in the letter to the Hebrews,
we've seen the sermon end with the author making this weird
statement about, "let us go outside the
camp," as Jesus was executed outside the city of
Jerusalem, and the sacrifices were done in
Exodus outside of the camp, so we now as followers of Jesus
should go outside the camp, sounding like he's meaning
we're going to leave Judaism, we have a now superior liturgy.
In the second century this
separation of the church from the synagogue will start
becoming clearer in certain places,
and, finally, what you'll end up with,
after the fourth, fifth, and sixth century is a
Christian church that's not Jewish and Rabbinic Judaism that
comes to look more like what Judaism has looked since that
time, even different from the Judaism
as it was in the time of Jesus. The second century therefore
sees some important changes. First, as I've said,
Christianity is still remarkably diverse even in the
second century, and it does grow.
How quickly it grows
numerically is really impossible to say.
We don't have the kind of
demographic data to know how much numerical growth there was
in the Christian church in the second century,
but we can obviously tell it's happening in different places
by, if nothing more,
an increase in written literature that comes about in
different geographical locations during the second century.
Connections among these
different groups also started growing.
As I've tried to make clear,
we don't really have any reason to believe that the churches
that Paul founded were that closely connected to,
say, other churches that may have existed in Syria,
or in Egypt, or in Italy. Paul did want his churches to
remain closely connected to the church in Jerusalem,
and that's precisely why he started this collection,
among the predominantly Gentile churches,
of money to give to the poorer church in Jerusalem.
Paul already was starting this
connection, and he's writing letters back and forth.
We've seen already that other
churches seem to be writing letters back and forth.
These connections start coming
a bit more networked in the second century also.
We've also seen how Christian
churches start, in the second century,
imitating Roman political and social structures.
They start imitating the Roman
household and their government, which is having the monarchical
bishop, the one ruling bishop over a
town area, and we call it the monarchical
bishop because the bishop becomes like a king,
a monarch, the single bishop over a town.
That starts happening in more
places in the second century. We've already seen it a bit in
the letters of Ignatius; it becomes a lot more prevalent
by the time you get to the end of the second century.
Jewish Christianity starts
dying out. In the second century we do
have some Jews who follow Jesus; they take Jesus to be the
Messiah. Some of the don't seem to
believe Jesus is divine. They just--they take him to be
a great prophet and maybe even the Messiah but not--that
doesn't make him God necessarily.
And these Jewish churches are
still there in the second century.
We gradually see them become
less and less visible after the second century.
We've already seen some other
things in the second century that are going on.
I've talked in the class about
Gnosticism. So the Gnostics--there was no
church of the Gnostics, there was not a movement that
had a sign and website somewhere that said Gnosticism,
but we use the term as an umbrella term for Christians who
held onto certain kinds of mythological views about
Genesis, and angels, and the creation,
and different divine figures. That's one thing that becomes
more visible. In fact, we believe that most
of the texts that we find in the Nag Hammadi Library,
we know that the library itself seems to have been written in
the fourth century, the actual texts,
but we believe that a lot of those texts were written
originally in Greek in the second century,
and then they were translated into mostly Coptic by the fourth
century. This literature,
which modern scholars place under the bigger rubric of
Gnosticism, starts being written in the
second century with these elaborate mythologies,
with different layers of heavens, with different angels
or beings ruling those different layers,
and different mythologies about creation and how the created
world came to be. There is also a very important
figure that some people will call Gnostic,
but we now tend not to. Valentinus was a Christian
scholar who lived in Rome in the middle of the second century,
and he gathered around him other Christians,
and they indulged in sort of a very philosophical way of
thinking about Christianity and the Gospel.
They look Gnostic in some ways,
but they don't seem to have a belief in two gods,
necessarily, that other Gnostic groups do.
Valentinus, though,
represents another kind of Christianity that becomes very
visible in the second century, and it remains important for a
couple of centuries after that until all these kinds of
Christianity are declared heretical later in the fourth,
fifth, and sixth centuries and they're run underground.
Valentinus is a major figure
because you can see him, and he's a highly educated--we
don't know a whole lot about him historically,
biographically, but you can just tell from
pieces of the history that he must have been a highly
educated, philosophically educated
individual, who was trying to raise the
mythologies that he found in Genesis and in the Bible to a
level of higher philosophical platonic speculation,
so that becomes very visible. We've already talked also about
Marcion, and I've said that a lot of
scholars take it that when Marcion came up with his own
Canon of the New Testament, his list of the New Testament,
which included the Gospel of Luke,
which he edited to take out all the Jewish stuff in it that he
thought shouldn't be there, and the letters of Paul which
he also edited and just that list of things was his sort of
New Testament, his Christian Canon,
and he threw out the Hebrew Bible,
the Old Testament, because that was too Jewish.
Marcion also then is being
kicked out of the church in Rome and being declared a heretic in
the second century, but he founds churches that
exist then for a couple of centuries after his death,
especially in the eastern part of the empire.
These are all different kinds
of Christianity that are really boiling up in the second century
as-- churches are trying to figure
out what does it mean to be Christian but not necessarily
Jewish anymore. One of the other figures that
we haven't talked about is Montanus.
This was a prophet who went
around declaring that he had a special gift of the Holy Spirit,
maybe even that he was the Holy Spirit,
there were two women who also followed him,
and they all claimed to have prophetic gifts and to be able
to have the Holy Spirit and God speak directly through them.
They developed quite a
following, they were very ascetic, very strict,
so they forbade marriage, and these sorts of things.
So they were practicing a
certain kind of early asceticism and monasticism but with this
very strong prophetic stream of it also.
They were very active in the
second century also, and then people like Augustine
would later have to sort of fight with these people.
You also have in the second
century the first people that we really can say are Christian
philosophers. You could say that Paul had a
rhetorical education. Every once in a while you can
see stuff in Paul's letters that looks a bit like what you'll see
in say philosophy, stoicism perhaps.
A friend of mind,
Troels Engberg-Pederson, a professor at the University
of Copenhagen in Denmark, has written a lot trying to
prove that Paul's ideas are heavily Stoic and probably
deeply influenced by Stoicism itself.
Most of us don't buy that,
but we think you might see traces of Stoicism in Paul's
writing. You might say that you see
traces of Platonism in, say, the letter of Hebrews,
or in the Gospel of John. But you don't find any New
Testament writing that looks like it would have come out of a
real philosophical school. It doesn't have that high level
of philosophical speculation or knowledge that we have.
In the second century,
we do have, though, some individuals
arising who style themselves as Christian philosophers,
and they style Christianity as itself a philosophy.
One of the most famous is
Justin Martyr. "Martyr"
of course is not his last name, and it's not like Justin
H.***Martyr. Martyr is his nickname because
he was martyred around the year 150 in Rome.
Justin claims,
and we have several writings of him that survived,
along with an account of his martyrdom.
Justin claims that he shopped
around when he was a young man in all the different
philosophies and he couldn't find any that really satisfied
him until he found this Christian teacher.
And he attached himself to that
Christian teacher, and that teacher introduced him
to the philosophy of Christianity.
You have a person who goes
around in robes, he grows his beard long,
he carries scrolls around so he can look like a philosopher.
At his trial,
when he's being condemned, he defends himself as a
philosopher like philosophers that had to defend themselves
against Roman emperors often in the first centuries.
Justin Martyr is one of the
first truly sort of philosophical Christians.
Another that existed a little
bit later than this is Clement of Alexandria.
He was probably head of a
catechetical school, a Christian school in
Alexandria in Egypt. He wrote toward the end of the
second century, so around the year 200 is when
he's writing. And Clement also clearly has a
very good philosophical education.
His writing is excellent,
he tries to make Christianity-- for example he downplays
apocalyptic kinds of stuff in Christianity because he knows
that doesn't look very philosophical.
He downplays the emphasis on
poverty, and there are lots of parts in
the New Testament that basically teach that if you're rich you
won't go to heaven. Remember how the letter of
James basically seems to condemn rich people just out of hand,
not just rich people when they're evil and not using their
money badly, but just by being rich itself,
you're condemned in some early Christian documents.
Clement writes against that
kind of stuff. He writes stuff showing how you
can be a rich person and enjoy nice things, and still be a
Christian. So he's writing at the end of
the second century, again, making Christianity into
something that looks much more like a philosophy.
These things are going on in
the second century and that's going to change Christianity to
a great extent because what becomes traditional orthodox
Christianity is heavily influenced by philosophy,
especially by the Platonism that's around in late antiquity.
The very notion,
for example, of the immortality of the soul
that you get in a lot of popular Christianity,
it comes from Platonism more than it does from anything in
the New Testament. The other development that's
going on at this time that will become very important is
martyrdom. I've talked about that last
time, and of course Justin Martyr is one of the examples of
this. So there's no general empire
wide persecution of Christians in the second century,
but you do have sporadic persecutions arising against
Christians in certain areas. In Rome, at certain times,
you will have certain people martyred, usually leaders,
or bishops, or people like Justin Martyr who are key
figures. Martyrdom, therefore,
starts developing its own ideology and its own theology in
the second century, which will become very
important for later monasticism and the how Christianity
develops in the Middle Ages. You have this idea I've talked
about last time, that martyrs are especially
close to God. Martyrs go straight to heaven,
they don't have to go paradise or any place else first,
they go straight to heaven on being killed.
Confessors, that is,
people who are condemned to martyrdom but not martyred,
also become especially important, as figures who are
considered to be closer to God. These attacks on Christianity
and the way Christians respond to it with this sort of martial,
almost warlike ideology of martyrdom--
the martyr becomes a soldier in the army of God in the way it's
depicted in the second century. This is even picked up by
enemies of Christianity. Galen was a very famous doctor.
Galen was the most famous
medical writer of antiquity and tons and tons of his medical
writings still survive, and it takes forever to read
through them, even in an English translation
much less in Greek and now in Arabic translation that
survived. Galen actually mentions Jews
and Christians in a few places in his writings.
One of the things he says is
that he thinks Christians are stupid.
He thinks they're crazy because
they believe in a God who gets angry.
God doesn't get angry!
That goes against the very
definition of God. He believes that Christians are
superstitious, uneducated.
He thinks that it probably only
succeeds with the gullible. But he still admires Christians
because of the way they face death.
Even Christians' enemies
recognize that they had a certain bravery and courage in
being totally willing to face death.
Celsus was a contemporary,
also living in the middle of the second century,
he wrote against Christianity also and wrote against
Christians, and he will admit,
though, that they seem to have a certain bravery.
He just says they're foolhardy
in being willing to throw themselves on a sword the way
they do, and throw themselves to the
beasts as we've seen Ignatius do in his letters,
let the beasts come to me. So Celsus and Galen admire
Christians for the courage and the almost military discipline
they have even though they despise them for being,
they believe, gullible, superstitious
bumpkins. So you have for the first time
in the second century, also then, educated
non-Christians taking notice of the movement and writing about
it and having an idea about it. Then in response to this kind
of thing you have the beginning of apologists,
people like Justin Martyr himself, who wrote an apology
for Christianity against its detractors.
Either against the governmental
type detractors who said it was seditious because it wasn't
loyal enough to the emperor, or philosophical detractors who
said it was superstition, and Celsus famously said,
the only people these people can convince are old women,
and slaves and kids. No educated man would fall for
all this bunk. You have Christian apologists,
therefore, writing apologies in the second century,
trying to defend Christianity against these attacks.
All of that's already in the
second century, one hundred years after Jesus,
this little Palestinian movement is turning into
something that's going to start looking more recognizable to us.
But it still takes a long time.
In the third century you have
developments that are very important.
You have the real rise of
monasticism. Now all the way through the
beginning of Christianity we've seen that some Christians
practiced asceticism. You know the word asceticism
just comes from the Greek word for "exercise."
It's come to mean any sort of
self-discipline for a higher good: the avoidance of sex,
the avoidance of food, as much as possible,
the avoidance of wine, drinking only water.
So different groups in the
ancient world including some Jewish groups will be called,
for example, "water drinkers"
because they will avoid wine. It's not because they felt like
these things were in themselves sinful.
It's that they were using these
deprivations of pleasures in order to train the body and
train the soul. Again, they were borrowing from
Roman military imagery and military ideology.
St.
Anthony becomes famous,
he's not necessarily but he gets the reputation later for
being the first one to go out in the desert and live totally by
himself and discipline his body. He gets attacked by demons all
the time. Demons are always going out to
the desert to find him, and disguising themselves as
young lovely girls or boys, and trying to seduce Anthony.
And so he has to fight these
demons all alone out in the desert in the middle of the
night. How do you fight demons like
that? Well, you buffet your body,
you buffet your soul, and you make your will strong.
How do you do that?
You avoid sex,
you avoid desire, you avoid rich food,
you avoid wine, so training the body and
training the will, like a soldier or an athlete,
they use both these athletic imagery and soldier imagery,
to describe the training. This all becomes a highly
elaborated ideology and theology starting in the third century.
You have not only groups of
monks and sometimes nuns living together,
that's one kind of monasticism we call cenobitic,
koinonia, monasticism, that is monks or nuns living--
not monks and nuns living together,
although that seldom happened but sometimes did--
but usually monks living together or nuns living
together. Then you have with this
movement, like I said with Anthony, of some monks going off
into the desert and living alone and that sort of thing.
You have both these forms of
monasticism starting to develop in the third century.
This will become hugely
important, as you know, for Christianity all the way
through the Middle Ages. You couldn't have had Europe,
as we think about Europe. You couldn't have the learning,
the vast learning and the texts,
and the classical stuff, all the classical texts,
the passing on of literature and in philosophy from
antiquity; you couldn't have had any of
that without monasticism through the Middle Ages.
That begins in the third
century when you have these movements really taking off,
and they become hugely important and hugely popular for
people. You also have in the third
century the first really empire wide persecution of the church.
An attempt to actually destroy
it and get people to de-convert and to denounce Christianity and
to sacrifice to the emperor, and this happens with the
Emperor Decius, so we call this the Decian
Persecution. It happens around the time the
year 250, so right in the middle of the third century.
And this is the first time that
there is an empire wide attempt to suppress the Christian
church. Also in the third century you
have one of the most brilliant and famous Christian scholars of
all of history actually, Origen.
Origen was later considered to
be a heretic for some of the teachings that he came up with--
for example he taught that even Satan could be converted in the
end. He believed that all created
beings would be brought back up somehow into God in the end.
And he had views about the
nature of God and the nature of human beings that later would be
deeply suspected of being not quite orthodox enough.
In his own day,
though, in the third century, he was completely orthodox.
He had actually been trained in
probably the catechetical school in Alexandria that I mentioned
before that Clement probably headed up.
He started his own school,
then, in Palestine, and that's where he spent the
rest of his life in Palestine. Origen was a great biblical
commentator. He was the first one,
for example, who took all the different
versions of the Old Testament, for example,
the Hebrew of it, the Septuagint,
which was the most famous Greek translation,
but then parts of other Greek translations like by Theodosian
or Aquila, and he would put these in
parallel columns. This was a remarkable sort of
technology for studying the Bible: to be able to have all
these things in parallel columns to be able to compare side by
side. He did that sort of thing;
it's called the Hexapla because it had six columns of the Old
Testament. He wrote reams and reams of
commentaries on different books of the Bible,
most of which don't survive, but we do have quite a bit of
it. Origen practiced this way of
interpreting scripture I had illustrated for you from the
medieval period, that scripture always has more
than one level of meaning. In fact, you remember you read
some Origen's commentary when you read that chapter from my
book, Pedagogy of the Bible.
Origen represents,
in the third century, a new very, very strong rise in
the level of Christian biblical scholarship.
He's also very philosophically
educated, so he's part of that too.
The tradition of commentary and
high level of Christian scholarship also becomes much
more visible in the third century than it had been before,
especially through people like Origen.
The fourth century,
then, brings us to basically where I'm going to stop,
because it's in the fourth century that you have the
triumph of Constantine. He beats all the rivals to the
throne. The Roman Empire,
by this time, by the year 300,
has been divided up into two different basic empires,
the west and the east. There was an emperor for each
one and then there was also a Caesar for each one,
so there are four rulers who ruled the Roman Empire in the
year 300. Two emperors,
one in the west and one in the east, and two Caesars,
one in the west and one in the east.
Constantine went to war with
the other guy on the other side, and he won.
He was actually in the west in
the beginning. He won.
He reunited the empire,
east and west. He built his new Rome.
He didn't take Rome anymore as
the capital. He moved the capital to
Constantinople, named after him of course,
the city of Constantine, what we call Istanbul,
or Byzantium was its ancient name also.
This is basically where we
start talking about the beginning of Byzantine
Christianity because it's named after the town Byzantium or
Constantinople, or Istanbul.
That becomes the capital of the
Roman Empire that goes on for them.
Constantine also wanted to stop
all this feuding about what was orthodox Christianity.
So he uses the power of the
emperor's throne to force bishops to come together in
several different councils. The most famous of which,
in 325, is the council of Nicaea,
and of course this is where we get the term the Nicene Creed,
which if you're Roman Catholic or Episcopalian or several other
kinds of Christianity, you may recite the Nicene Creed
on certain holy days or in church.
This is the longer creed,
which talks about Jesus being fully man, fully human.
It brings in the Trinity,
so you have Trinitarian theology becoming a bit more
solidified at the council of Nicaea.
It didn't win the day because
throughout the fourth century you still had fights among
different bishops, some people not accepting the
Nicene Creed. Years later you had another
creed pronounced at Chalcedon, so that's called the
Chalcedonian Creed. And all of these were attempts
though promoted by the emperors. The emperors wanted to use
Christianity to solidify a one empire again and to keep it from
being split. You couldn't do that if you had
different groups claiming to represent the right Christianity
and claiming that everybody represents the wrong
Christianity. That was the real push for what
counts as orthodox Christianity and the bringing of more unity
to Christianity. What we have not seen in this
semester is what you would call correct Trinitarian doctrine in
the New Testament, it's just not there.
You've got all kinds of views
about Jesus that would later be declared heretical.
They're still there in the New
Testament, and what Christians do is that
we just read kind of carefully and interpret it a little bit
slickly so that it makes it look more orthodox than it actually
is. That's because there was no
orthodoxy that could claim to rule different Christians who
called themselves Christians throughout the empire.
This is what starts changing in
the fourth century. Like I said, they don't succeed.
So you have debates about
orthodoxy for centuries, but it's with Constantine in
the beginning of the fourth century, and he had a long
dynasty. His progeny,
his sons, and then their sons, and their sons retained the
throne for years after that. So you had this Constantinian
dynasty that was able to bring a good bit of solidity to the
Roman Empire in the fourth century that it hadn't enjoyed
in the third century. And therefore,
they used this to sort of bring about orthodox Christianity as
the single form of Christianity. That's the most important
change, therefore, for the fourth century.
After that, of course,
as you know from your history, the empire splits again.
Later you have this split
between eastern Christianity, which is represented by those
churches we call Orthodox, located mainly with the
authority of the Greek Orthodox church,
but of course you have Orthodox churches in each of the nations
of the east. So you have Russian Orthodoxy,
Greek Orthodoxy, Syrian Orthodoxy,
and you have different Orthodox communities in the east and then
Roman Catholicism in the west. And that split of course is
still with us. That starts happening in later
antiquity. But notice it's still not what
anybody would call a world religion.
Now the very term "world
religion" is something that has only come
about in the twentieth century. It was a term that was invented
when Christians were exploring around and seeing that there
were other ways of being religious,
and how do you want to categorize these things?
Around 1900,
some scholars invented this concept: well,
there are world religions and then there are local religions.
African religion is not a world
religion; it's just a certain different
kind of paganism, they thought.
They thought that Judaism is
not a world religion. It's a religion of the Jews,
and by its very definition it's an ethnic religion.
Therefore, it's not a religion
that is for anybody in the world.
That's why Jews don't go around
missionizing and trying to convert everybody in Asia to
Judaism, or everybody in Africa to Judaism.
But they said Christianity is
different. Christianity believed that it
was the one true religion, and therefore launched in the
nineteenth century all these missionary activities.
It was in the nineteenth
century that you had mainly Protestants that in the
nineteenth century really trying to convert the whole world to
Christianity and sending out missions.
This of course had started in
the beginning in the seventeenth century with Roman Catholics,
in North America and South America,
trying to convert the Indians and trying to set up colonies.
The conversion of the Indians
in North America and South America,
mainly by Roman Catholics to Roman Catholicism,
and then later the attempt in the nineteenth century by
Protestant churches to convert people all over the world really
does make Christianity start looking like a worldwide
phenomenon. That's not really until the
nineteenth century that that happens.
Before that,
Christianity is basically the religion of Europe.
That's why Europeans,
still to this day, even if they're not religious,
even if they don't consider themselves Christian,
they may consider themselves completely atheistic,
but they see Christianity as part of the very fabric of
European identity. This is what's leading to the
big debate about whether to admit Turkey into the European
Union. There are a lot of people in
Europe, even good liberal people,
who are open minded and don't necessarily have anything
against Islam, who don't want to have Turkey
as part of Europe. One of the main reasons is
because it's not a Christian nation.
It doesn't have this--of course
most of their nations aren't really Christian in the sense of
having the majority of people observing Christianity,
but they still have this idea that what it means to be
European is some connection, historically, with Christianity.
That's quite true,
because Christianity was not a world religion;
it existed in Europe until the modern period.
But with the idea that there
are other world religions, that had to do with
colonialism. Christianity starts defining
itself as a world religion. So the first scholars who
talked about this term said, well there's only one world
religion, Christianity. All the rest are local
religions linked to some particular geographical area.
Then they started saying,
well, okay wait a minute, they kind of liked Buddhism,
they thought it kind of looked a bit like Protestantism.
So they said,
we'll let Buddhism be a world religion also.
So for a while around 1900,
the two world religions recognized were Christianity and
Buddhism. Then gradually they started
saying, well maybe Islam is because you
don't have to be an Arab to be Muslim,
and you can see Muslims existing all through Asia and
that sort of thing, and Africa.
So maybe Islam is the third
world religion. Then kind of more for
ideological purposes they said, we'll let the Jews in,
so Judaism can be a world religion also,
because you don't actually have to be in one location to
practice it. Hinduism was a problem because
the very word "Hindu" is a made up term for a
religion because it just means Indian.
Hinduism is a modern invention,
a label to put over whatever people in the subcontinent
practice that relates to something that we would call
gods. We're going to call that
"Hinduism." So "Hinduism"
gets invented in the twentieth century, and then that gets to
be another world religion. Then you get this ideology.
If you had taken a class in
world religions or Introduction to Religion in,
say, the year 1980, you would have probably read a
textbook that would probably list as the undisputed world
religions five: Christianity,
Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism.
Now does Confucianism count?
Well, some textbooks would say
no. What do you do with paganism?
What about people who just
worship all kinds of gods of trees, and rocks,
and things? So this whole category of
having "world religions"
and having a list of them becomes something that really is
only developed in the academic study of religion in the
twentieth century. If someone asked you the
question, how did this little movement, started by this Jewish
prophet in Galilee, how did it become a world
religion? You really--the most honest
question is to say, well it didn't really happen
until scholars invented it in the twentieth century because
that's when the very category of "world religion"
came about for us to use. Of course if you wanted to say,
well when did you start having Christians all over the world,
not just in Europe? Well you'd have to say starting
in the seventeenth century with missions to North and South
America, and then really in the
nineteenth century with the missionaries,
especially from England and North America,
going to China, and going to Japan,
and going to all over Africa. When you talk about,
when did this thing become a world religion?
Probably about the nineteenth
century would be a good answer, but that's counterintuitive to
most of us. The last question I'm going to
talk about is--nah, we're out of time.
I was going to talk about why
did Christianity grow before Constantine?
Obviously with Constantine you
get the emperor promoting this religion now.
There are various theories
about what caused it to grow before that.
Some people have said because
they forbade abortion and birth control, contraception.
Most early Christians seem to
think that contraception was wrong and abortion was wrong,
and putting out infants was wrong.
Some people will say,
well, it's because they promoted the family.
I don't particularly buy that
because we've got all these monks and nuns running around
too not reproducing. Some people have even said,
well, when Christians themselves write in this period
about why they grow and why people are flocking to them it's
because we're better healers and exorcists.
We're better than Asclepius at
healing people and exorcising demons.
So Ramsey McMullen,
retired historian right here at Yale,
has written famously about this that,
apparently, in the second and third century Christians were
just really damn good healers and exorcists,
and that may be why they grew. The question of why
Christianity grew before then is a hot one that a lot of
historians are even right now debating.
Are there any questions about
that? I'm going to cut the lecture
there because I want to pass out the final exams.
I think we've talked enough
about in previous classes the difference between historical
interpretation and theological interpretation,
and modern interpretation and post-modern interpretation,
that was what I was going to end up on but I believe we've
covered that enough, and you can always ask me
questions about that later at some point if you like.
Let's pass the exams out please.
Any questions while they're
doing that? This is your chance.
Yes sir?
Student: Can you talk a
little bit about >?
Prof: Why we think Rome
was persecuting Christians? Was your question,
what evidence do we have that they were doing it or why were
they motivated to do it? Student:
> Prof: Why were they
motivated to do it? It's a very good question,
and you've got to realize that so much of the power of Rome was
built on the ideology of the emperor.
Romans really did believe that
they were the most pious nation on earth.
This is why whenever the Roman
army went to another country they would always sacrifice to
the local gods, because they believed the local
gods protected them and caused growth.
The Romans would sincerely
believe that if you don't sacrifice to the gods,
if you're not a pious person, the gods may punish you.
Well, what happens then if you
have a bunch of these Christians running around who refuse to
sacrifice to the gods, refuse to sacrifice to the
emperor? Not only is it a threat against
the emperor himself, it's a threat against all the
people, and it's also just a matter of patriotism.
What would happen to you,
right after 9/11, or even now,
if at a Yankees game when they stand up and we're going to sing
"The Star Spangled Banner,"
if you refused to stand up, you sat down,
you kept your baseball cap on your head,
and you started singing "Happy Birthday"
instead. You're going to get beat up
because the locals just won't like it.
Well that's the way it was a
lot with early Christians. It was the locals who felt like
what they were doing was dangerous.
It tore against the social
fabric of Roman society, and it offended the gods.
They had a lot of reasons to
try to suppress Christianity. Yes sir?
Student: Do we know why
Constantine converted? Prof: Do we know why
Constantine converted? He says it's because he saw a
vision right before the battle. Scholars debate that.
Some scholars say he converted
because he looked around and he saw that this was,
although it was a minority movement,
there was no way that this was a majority,
it was a vibrant movement that was going on in Rome,
in the Roman Empire, and maybe he said,
that's something I can use. He was already an admirer of
the sun god, and he was moving toward a certain form of
monotheism where the sun was the only god.
Some people say it wasn't that
big of a jump for him to switch that to Jesus,
and so some people say, he had this political idea that
it would be a smart thing to do and that he made up the vision
later. There are different reasons.
We don't really know truly his
psychological motivations for conversion.
Okay--yes sir?
Student: What's the
nature of >?
Prof: The question was
what was the nature of persecution?
Was it really throwing
Christians to the lions and that sort of thing,
or was it more like destroying Christian texts?
It was different things at
different times. A lot of times it was
crucifixion or killing people, torture to get the people to
confess, sometimes, especially in the
Decian Persecution, there was an attempt to force
priests and bishops to turn over Bibles and Christian literature.
And in fact,
people could save their lives by giving up Christian books or
Christian Bibles, and they would be destroyed by
the authorities. It took different forms like
that, and sometimes it was just less overt pressure.
You couldn't get promoted,
you couldn't do certain things, sometimes people would try to
get you out of the Roman army if they found out you were a
Christian, and so it took different forms.
Yes sir?
Student:
>? Prof: The institution of
what? Student:
> Prof: The papacy?
He asked about the institution
of the papacy. It was originally simply the
Bishop of Rome. But as you might imagine,
pretty early in Christianity in the third century,
the bishops of the most important cities just became
more important. The Bishop of Jerusalem was
important because Jerusalem was important.
The Bishop of Alexandria was
important because Alexandria was important.
The Bishop of Constantinople
was important because it was Constantinople.
Likewise, the Bishop of Rome
was important, and there was struggling among
different major bishoprics about which one would be leading.
Rome was still considered the
center of the earth for a long time,
and so gradually it just became so that the Bishop of Rome just
sort of held preeminence among all other bishops,
and it was informal in how it developed.
The real recognition of the
Bishop of Rome as sort of the Pope, in the way we think of it,
that actually develops in the Middle Ages.
You don't, for example,
have papal infallibility declared as a doctrine until the
early twentieth century. So when we think of the Roman
papacy now as being sort of the infallible Pope who has kind of
has full say over everything, that really is almost a
development that starts more in the medieval period and comes
into the modern period. In the beginning he was just
recognized as the head--the sort of recognized,
more respected bishop. Alright, let's talk about the
finals. You have two questions on your
final and you get to choose Option A and Option B.
I'm not going to read all of
this; you can talk to your section
leaders, email them, talk to me, and email me if you
have questions about this. The things that I want to
stress are a few things. Don't go to the library.
If you need things like a
concordance, that's great, use a concordance.
Use a Bible dictionary if
there's something you just don't know the meaning of a word or a
concept, but don't go look up
commentaries because already we've gotten papers from some of
you that it's clear that what you did was you went and read
some book somewhere in the library that told you about
something in the New Testament. Chances are it's bullshit
because there's been more shit written about the Bible than any
other topic in the world for the last 2000 years.
Even if you're taking this
semester course you may not be able to tell the good stuff from
the bad stuff, so you don't need other
scholarship to answer these questions.
These questions are designed so
that you can use Bart Ehrman's textbook,
the tools we've shown you, and the notes from class,
and just your own brain and the primary text you've been
reading. You can answer these questions
yourself with what we've given you in class.
That's one the main things is:
don't try to go to the library to get answers to these
questions. Use your brain.
I'm going to stress the length.
We've always said eight pages,
but some of my teaching fellows have been complaining that you
all have creative ways of either stretching or shrinking eight
pages, and so there's a word limit,
2,500 words. So we're still looking for
eight pages, double spaced, but not to exceed 2,500 words.
Use your word counter on your
software now. The papers are due by 5:00 p.m.
Monday April 27th.
You may email them as an
attachment to your teaching fellow, if the teaching fellow
has given you permission to do that, and I think they all did.
If you want to turn in a hard
copy please do so at the Religious Studies Department on
451 College Street. Both of the questions address
the kind of issues we raised all semester long,
so they shouldn't really be a surprise.
Several times we've talked
about how did Christianity spread geographically,
and when I gave the lecture on Acts,
I explained how Acts gives you a schematic outline of the
growth of Christianity. Taking that one lecture on Acts
and the readings that you've done with that,
and then pull things from other lectures and from other things
in the semester, sort of thinking about,
well, now what kind of Christianity would promote the
sort of letters of John, what kind of Christianity would
look different, and use other of these writings
to say, well, I think maybe this kind
of Christianity may have developed a bit differently.
You can focus on doctrinal
issues, you can focus on social
structures or forms, you can focus on ideologies,
and many of the issues that we've raised throughout the
semester, it's your choice.
The main thing is to show how
Christianity did not develop in the smooth schematic way that
it's presented in the Book of Acts.
The second question,
I've given a couple of lectures where I've stressed a whole lot
more Christology, what Christology is,
the nature of Christ and how different early Christian
documents seem to be working with different Christologies.
You're given three columns of
text, primary text, and it's a Chinese menu kind of
thing. You have to use at least one
source from column A, at least one source form Column
B, and at least one source from Column C,
and you can use any others too. You're not restricted to this
but you have to use one of each of those sources in order to
construct this answer of illustrating the diversity of
Christology's in early Christianity.
Any questions?
We do not accept or read late
papers. They just get a flat zero.
If you do need an extension,
ask for it ahead of time, not at 5:00 p.m.
on Monday.
All right, your teaching
fellows have the authority to work with me and grant you an
extension, but you have to ask for it ahead of time.
Otherwise we expect those
papers to be done by 5:00 p.m. Monday.
