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In this continuation of part I, Tom Lee explores in more detail the background ideas and beliefs current just prior to and into the time of Jesus.

The Invention of Christianity and the Papacy
The first 500 years
by Tom Lee
Setting the Scene for the arrival of Christianity Part 1.3
The background Jewish sects and beliefs

A spirit of revolt…

When King Philip, the ruler of northern Galilee died in 34 CE, his brother Herod Antipas (ruled by passion rather than custom) married Philip's widow, Herodias, who was also his cousin, angering his first wife. The displaced spouse fled to her father, the Nabatean monarch Aretas at his capital Petra (in present day Jordan). The tame clergy of Jerusalem made no open objection to Antipas' marriage but John the Baptist, according to the Gospels and Josephus, was not tame and loudly denounced the king's marriage as illegal and incestuous. Like the Essenes, John stressed monogamy and fidelity, as did Jesus.

Coptic icon of St John the Baptist

The King's incensed father-in-law Aretas, already agitated by a territorial dispute with Herod Antipas, threatened war. Forced to mass his troops on the border, Antipas was anxious not to risk a rising of his subjects inspired by the preaching of John the Baptist and had him arrested and incarcerated. John was beheaded at a banquet celebrating Antipas' birthday, towards the end of 35, which places the baptism of Jesus, at the latest in 34. The Jewish historian Josephus does not blame Herodias or Salome but simply reports that, because of the crowds flocking to the Baptist, the King was afraid the prophet might stir people to revolt and had him executed. Shortly afterwards the Arabians heavily defeated Antipas and the Jews declared that this was a judgment of God upon the king for killing the Baptist.

The spirit of revolt was abroad and it was at this time of ferment, shortly after his baptism that Jesus chose to proclaim in the synagogue a quotation from the Prophet Isaiah: "The spirit of the Lord Yahweh has been given me, for Yahweh has anointed me. He has sent me to bring good news to the poor, to bind up hearts that are broken; to proclaim liberty to captives, freedom to those in prison; to proclaim a year of favor from Yahweh." He pointedly left off the final line, "a day of vengeance for our God."

Jesus would have been at least thirty-five, and if born in 6BCE he was forty-one. We cannot take seriously Luke's statement that he began his ministry when he was about thirty years of age. He is basing himself on the Old Testament, where it is said that David was thirty years old when he began his reign. It is impossible to reconcile Matthew and Luke when it comes to time-lines.

Separate sects of Christianity…

What we know of Jesus' ministry is contained in a set of documents written many years after the events they describe, and from these, on a careful reading, it soon becomes obvious that early Christianity was not a seamless robe. The corpus of documents that we call the New Testament was written by different factions, one might even say separate sects of Christianity, contending against one-another.

The Gospels have been traditionally listed in the order, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, principally because much of Matthew is obviously written from a Jewish point of view and contains material that also appears in Mark and Luke. Both of the latter are Gentile, that is Graeco-Roman polemics; in Mark's case, repudiating the need for the Messiah to be a descendant of David, and thus any Jewish connection for Christianity.

It is clear now to most Biblical scholars that Mark was the first Gospel written, originating in a Greek milieu, while Matthew is a Jewish answer to it, stressing a need for continued emphasis on the Jewish antecedents of Christianity and recognition of Jesus' essential Jewishness. It emphasizes the circumcision of both John the Baptist and Jesus, a hot-button issue amongst the early Christians.

Matthew may have been written in Syria, but more probably at Alexandria in Egypt where the bulk of the refugees from the Roman destruction of Judaea fled before the advancing Romans. It is a point not touched on in the Acts of the Apostles, which for the most part only describes the early career of Peter and then the spread of the faith throughout the lands missionized by St. Paul.

The Gospel attributed to Mark was not written until after 70 CE, when the Jerusalem mother church had been eliminated and most. of the Jews throughout Palestine had been slaughtered or deported by the Romans. To claim that the gospels, that relied extensively and uncritically on the memories of survivors forty years later, are accurate historical documents, is unreasonable and indefensible.

The earliest New Testament documents we have are the surviving Epistles of St. Paul, themselves very contentious documents from the 50s, attesting that Paul's claim to have been commissioned as a missionary to the Gentiles by an apparition of Jesus, whom he had never known in life, was queried and hotly contested by the apostles and disciples that had known Jesus in the flesh.

Early disagreements about the nature of Jesus…

Paul never mentioned a virgin birth. Unequivocally, if redundantly, he stated that Jesus was born of a woman, with no mention of a father, fueling later Jewish claims that Jesus and his siblings were bastards. Paul's view of the resurrection differs radically also. It is clear that Paul preached a conception of Jesus that differed sharply from the Jesus apprehended and preached by the mother church at Jerusalem, headed by James, the brother of Jesus.

As Hans Kung in his book "On Being a Christian" noted:

"Paul, like the rest of the New Testament writers outside the four Gospels, never mentions either the witnesses of the empty tomb or the empty tomb itself. He attaches importance only to the fact that after his death Jesus 'revealed' himself to his followers. Paul could imagine the resurrection in the sense of being clothed with a new body already awaiting us in heaven and thus in the case of the risen Jesus he might have assumed that the mortal body remained in the tomb ... In Jewish Palestine of course people quite generally thought of the resurrection in material terms. But to Hellenistic Jewry this view was at least strange and for the Greeks scarcely intelligible at all."

While Paul did not claim that Rabbi Jesus was God, he did preach in a way that established in the minds of his Gentile converts an apprehension of Jesus as superhuman, after the manner of the Greek Zeus-fathered heroes, such as Herakles/Hercules. This was a concept totally unacceptable to Jesus' original Jewish followers who never claimed he was anything more or less than the expected Messiah of the Jews. The Messiah had never been conceived of as superhuman and certainly not as God, or even as one person of a triune God. For Paul resurrection was not a follow-after, but follow-through. Jesus did not come back from death: he went through and death itself was dead.

To the Jews, the Holy Spirit was merely another designation for God. The contentious, patently unprovable and ultimately unnecessary formulation of the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit, was not even hinted at in early Christianity but developed gradually from a warped perspective of Paul's teaching, over the first three centuries, promulgated in its more or less final form early in the fourth century. Hans Kung wrote: "We cannot overlook the fact that any talk of the Holy Spirit is so unintelligible to many today that it cannot even be regarded as controversial."

Once Jewish Christianity, especially the Jerusalem mother church had been destroyed in 70 CE, the Gentile churches coalesced into a sort of unity of belief that gradually distanced itself further and further from the Jewish roots of the faith, shifting the blame for Jesus' death from the Romans to the Jews, and steadily enhancing Jesus' role, from rabbi to Messiah, then to Son of God, and finally to God the Son.

Present-day Fundamentalist Christians who regard both Old and New Testament scriptures as the inerrant Word of God ignore the contradictions between the Gospels and blindly dismiss modern textual and historical research, accusing those who question of being at worst atheists and at least agnostics. They refuse to recognize that agnostics are not blinded by faith. As Clarence Darrow wrote: "I do not claim to know, where many ignorant men are sure, and that's all that agnosticism means." The Jewish sages tell us that God dances when his children defeat Him in argument, when they stand on their feet and use their minds.

We nowadays have ample confirmation from the Dead Sea Scrolls that the collection of scriptures known as the Old Testament, the Tanach, the books that Jesus knew and quoted, were regarded as oracles from which could be elicited what would happen in the Last Times to nations, groups and individuals, often in some detail. When we read these strange documents it is not difficult to understand how the Gospel writers assumed that Jesus had arrived at the conviction that he was the Messiah. But according to the gospels, he alluded to himself from the beginning of his ministry as the Son of Man, a mysterious northern title that appeared first in the book of Daniel (c. 167-164 BCE).

Daniel's Son of Man represented the whole people of Israel, not an individual. Paul never used this title in connection with Jesus and it doesn't appear in Christian writings until the Gospels and appears in all four, eighty-two times in total, always from Jesus' lips, and in the third person. He speaks of the coming, the suffering, and the present, earthly Son of Man.

If Jesus did come to believe he was the Messiah it cannot be attributed to megalomania. He is reported to have constantly told those who thought him to be the Messiah to keep it to themselves. He certainly saw himself as the servant of his people — a people with a strange faith that they were the chosen of God to lead all nations to him, so that justice, righteousness and peace might reign on earth. He aimed to reunite the sundered "People of God". Symbolic of his intention, the church teaches, was his call to the Twelve, signifying a reunification of the twelve tribes of Israel.

Vatican II's belated but necessary document on the Jews, Nostra Aetate, overturning centuries of vilification, teaches that Jews were not collectively guilty of deicide, or killing Jesus, and that the irreversible covenant between Jews and God has never been revoked or altered. Pope Benedict XVI, when still a cardinal, said, "Jewish Messianic expectation is not in vain" because "we all live and wait in expectation."

The God that Jesus preached was one of love and forgiveness for all persons, his law designed to enhance life, not to restrict it with petty-fogging rules. He clearly believed that in the near future, God's rule would inaugurate the final consummation of the world. "Your kingdom come" in the Lord's Prayer referred to the last things, the kingdom of God at the end of time.

The Jewish sects…

In Galilee there were many religious teachers who could have enlightened Jesus on messianic matters. It was the home of the sect of Essenes and the solitary Nazirites, two types of the Elect or Saints who were perfecting themselves for the expected coming. One of Jesus' brothers, James, was attracted to the Nazirite ascetic way of life. They were persons who had been dedicated to God, like Samson and Samuel, and who had taken either a lifetime or a temporary vow of celibacy, like the Hindu and Jain sadhus of India. A distinguishing mark of Nazirites was that they did not cut their hair and abstained from intoxicants. The Nazirites were not a sect, or even a special order. Members of various messianic sects took Nazirite vows for a set time or for life. The Healing Art was also cultivated and practiced by the communities of the Saints.

Tablet with a list of eclipses between 518 and 465, mentioning the death of king Xerxes (British Museum, London)

Astronomy was a vital and practical form of knowledge. The sun and moon were the basis for calendars by which people marked time. The solar cycle told farmers the best times for sowing and harvesting, while the lunar cycle was commonly used as the basis for civic and religious observances. The stars also provided a means for sailors and desert travelers to navigate at night.

For the Jews, like the Babylonians and the Greeks before them, the year consisted of twelve lunations, or new-moon-to-new-moon cycles, each of which lasted an average of twenty-nine and a half days. The problem with a lunar calendar is that twelve lunar cycles takes about eleven days less than one solar cycle, which means that if you don't make regular adjustments to the calendar the seasons soon slip out of synch with the months, and after eighteen years or so the summer solstice will occur in December.

Most ancient societies adjusted their calendars by adding a thirteenth, "intercalary" month every three years or so, although methods of calculating the length of these months, and when they should be added, were never precise. But. Babylonian astronomers discovered that there are two hundred and thirty-five lunar months in nineteen years, so that if you observe a full moon on April 4th, there will be another full moon in that same place on April 4th nineteen years later. This cycle eventually came to be known as the Metonic cycle, after the Greek astronomer Meton of Athens. The Metonic cycle is still used by the Christian Churches to calculate the correct day for celebrating Easter.

The Babylonians also observed that eighteen years, eleven days, and eight hours after an eclipse a nearly identical eclipse will occur. Eclipses were believed by many ancient societies to be omens that, depending on how they were interpreted, could foretell the future of a monarch, for example, or the outcome of a war.

Josephus called the Essenes Sun worshipers. They kept to the old solar calendar and rejected the lunar calendar introduced by the Greek influenced Seleucid dynasty after the death of Alexander the Great. Consequently the Essenes celebrated the major feasts on different days to mainline Judaism. They attempted to atone for the sins of the people with prayer and unflinching fidelity to the letter of the Law. Jesus' astonishing freedom in regard to the law would have appalled the Essenes just as it did many Pharisees and Scribes. In Hans Kung's words, "Sour-faced piety he found repulsive."

Jesus' teaching seems to mirror the 58th chapter of Isaiah, where God says that fasts and penance and adhering to rules and regulations, are not substitutes for good works…

"Is not this the sort of fast that pleases me — to break unjust fetters, and undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and break every yoke, to share your bread with the hungry, and shelter the homeless poor, to clothe the man you see to be naked and not turn from your own kin?"

The prophet Micah summed up Jesus' approach when asked, "What is real religion and what is your relationship to God?" Micah replied, "To act justly, to love tenderly and to walk humbly with your God."

The Golden Rule…

The catalyst for religious change was a revulsion against violence. Even in China and India, religious leaders insisted that their followers step outside the ego to encounter what was called Brahman or God, Nirvana or the Tao – what we now call the Golden Rule. Five hundred years earlier, Confucius had written: "Look into your heart. Discover what it is that gives you pain, and then refuse to inflict that pain on anybody else."

His century was an era of personalities and uprisings, the time of Xenophanes, Syrus, Solon the law maker, Sappho, the Buddha, Aeschylus, Pythagorus, Lao-tzu and Nebuchadnezzar. It was the era in which the central Asian silk trade developed. Christianity, Islam and modern Judaism had their roots in the 6th century BCE.

Matthew 22:34-40 has Jesus stating the Golden Rule most succinctly. When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they got together and, to disconcert him, one of them put a question, "Master, which is the greatest commandment of the Law?" Jesus said, "You must love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second resembles it. You must love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang the whole Law and the Prophets also." He essentially wanted each person to become the change they wanted to see in others.

Jesus probably had contact with the sectarian nomadic tribes of Rechabites and Kenites who abstained from wine and the practice of agriculture,. following the trades of smith and carpenter. Jesus' reputed father, Joseph, Jesus himself and his disciple Thomas are all described as carpenters; at the time essentially an itinerant profession, but a well-paid one. The Aramaic word describing their work really means builder and judging from the metaphors in the parables, Jesus was very familiar with the craft of masonry as well as carpentry. He was probably a strong and powerfully built individual, but none of the Gospels give us a physical description of him. By the time the first Gospel was written, at a time when great age made of one a prodigy, there wouldn't have been many people alive who had ever seen Jesus and certainly no portraits of any kind.

Jesus knew many Pharisees. They preached Judaism as a universal religious faith and not just the political cult of a particular race. Rigorous missionaries, they were largely responsible for the expansion of Jewish membership throughout the Roman Empire and beyond it. In their view a man became a Jew not so much by birth as by circumcision accompanied by a form of ritual washing or baptism. He remained a Jew by obeying the dietary and ritualistic requirements of the Torah — the detailed code of Law by which the pious Jew was to sanctify every part of life; the Torah with its concept of equality before the Law, which Jesus came "not to destroy but to fulfill." He did not repudiate any of the now disregarded antiquities of Jewish Law.

"I tell you solemnly, till heaven and earth disappear, not one dot, not one little stroke, shall disappear from the Law until its purpose is achieved. Therefore, the man who infringes even one of the commandments and teaches others to do the same will be considered the least in the kingdom of heaven; but the man who keeps them and teaches them will be considered great in the kingdom of heaven."

Judaism had, since the time of Daniel, some five hundred years before Jesus, been a proselytizing faith, believing it had a mission to bring the Gentiles to belief in the one universal God, but not to become Jews. The Prophets had revealed that even in the Messianic Age the world would consist of many nations; but they would know and worship the One God, practice justice and mercy, and abolish war.

ARTICLE NAVIGATION: You are presently looking at Part 1.3
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INTRO | PART 1.1 | PART 1.2 | PART 1.3 | PART 1.4 | PART 1.5 | PART 1.6
PART 2.1 | PART 2.2 | PART 2.3 | PART 2.4 | PART 4.0
PART 5.1 | PART 5.2 | PART 5.3 | PART 5.4 | PART 5.5 | PART 6.2 | PART 6.3
PART 7.1 | PART 7.2 | PART 31.1 | PART 31.2 | PART 31.3 | PART 31.4
Acknowledgements | Bibliography

PHOTO CREDITS: The image of the Rising Sun used in the headline and footer graphics graphics was taken by Ines Mad. Linz, Austria and sourced through stock.xchng.
Clicking on the other images will take your to the original source of the image.

Tom Lee is an Australian, now semi-retired in Phoenix, Arizona, who has had an illustrious international career as an actor, writer, and broadcast commentator. He does not claim to be a professional theologian, nor an historian, but he undertook this study because, like many of the people who are attracted to what we're doing here at Catholica Australia, he was simply inquisitive about the history of Christianity and trying to better understand what he had been brought up to believe. In a sense, his book is a one-man journey seeking to better understand who Jesus was and what his own faith was about.

What are your thoughts on this commentary? You can contribute to the discussion in our forum.

©2008 Tom Lee (Star Concepts LLC) 15633 N. 17* Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85023-3409

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