A Short History of Christianity / Second Edition, Revised, With Additions

by J. M. Robertson

Alongside, however, of the systematizing or centripetal process there went on a centrifugal one, the process of innovating Gentile heresy. Already in Paul’s epistles we read of “another Jesus” whom the apostle “had not preached”; and in the second century a dozen “Gnostic” heresies were honeycombing the movement. Their basis or inspiration was the mystic claim to inner light, “gnosis” or knowledge, disparaged in the Pauline phrase about “knowledge [or science] falsely so-called.” It was in nearly all cases a combination of ideas current in the theosophies of Asia and Egypt with the God-names of the Judaic and Christian cults. So powerful was the instinct of independence, then as in later periods of political change, that the spirit of Gnosticism, in a Judaic form, found its way into the expanding gospels, where Jesus is at times made to pose as the holder of a mystical knowledge, denied to the capacities of the multitude, but conveyed by him to his disciples; who, however, are in other passages reduced to the popular level of spiritual incapacity. It cannot be doubted that the ferment thus promoted by what the systematizers denounced as heresy helped at first to spread the cult, at least in name, since all Christists alike would tend to resort to the eucharist, or to the assemblies which were to develop into Churches.

At first the Jewish Christists may well have shared in the ordinary Jewish detestation of the Roman tyranny; and for them Nero may have been “Anti-Christ,” as he appears to be in the Apocalypse; but there is no good reason to suppose that in Nero’s day the historic Christians in Rome were a perceptible quantity. Martyr-making later became an ecclesiastical industry; and the striking passage in Tacitus which alleges the torture and destruction of a “vast multitude” of Christians at Nero’s hands is nowhere cited in Christian literature till after the printing, under suspicious circumstances, of the Annals. No hint of such a catastrophe is given in the Acts of the Apostles. An equivalent statement to that of Tacitus is first found in the chronicle of Sulpicius Severus in the fifth century, where it is an expanded episode in the midst of an extremely curt epitome. The similarly suspicious passage on the same subject in Suetonius is put in further perplexity by the same writer’s statement that in the reign of Claudius the Jews in Rome were constantly rioting, “Chrestus stirring them up”—an expression which suggests, if anything, that there was on foot in Rome a common Jewish movement of Messianic aspiration, in which the Christ was simply expected as a deliverer, apart from any such special cult as that of Jesus. It is quite inapplicable to any such movement as is set forth in the Pauline epistles. In any case, after the fall of Jerusalem Jesuist hopes were visibly confined to the religious sphere; and Gentile Christianity above all was perforce resigned to the imperial system, of which it was one day to become a limb.

There is seen too, even on the face of the Pauline epistles, a superimposing of the new Greek terms and concepts on the vocabulary of Jewish theology—terms of metaphysic and religion such as immortality, conscience, providence, natural, corruptible, invisible—and in the language of the gospels and the Acts the Grecising influence becomes more and more marked, increasing in the Acts and in the third gospel, and becoming paramount in the fourth. The very conception of religious as distinct from temporal salvation is Hellenistic or Persian rather than Judaic; and the title of Saviour, which becomes the special epithet of the Christ, is constituted as much by pagan usage as by the original significance of the name Jesus. Gentile also, rather than Judaic—though common to the pre-Judaic Semites and the idolaters among the Hebrews—was the idea expressed in the Pauline epistles that the Christist who partakes of the mystic rite suffers with and henceforth is one with the slain demigod, being “crucified with Christ.” That conception is precedented generally in all the cults of ritual mourning, notably in that of Osiris, and particularly in that of Attis, in which the worshippers gashed themselves and punctured their hands or necks; some of the priests even mutilating themselves as the God was mutilated in the myth. The Pauline expression is to be understood in the light of the passage in which a bitter censure, for having taken up a false Christism, is passed on the Galatians, “before whose eyes Christ had been openly depicted, crucified” (cp. [1 Cor. xi, 26], Gr. and A.V.). In some but not in all MSS. are added the words “among you,” words which may either have been omitted by late transcribers whom they embarrassed, or added by some one desirous of accentuating the already emphatic expression of the original. When we connect with these the further passage, usually taken also without inquiry as purely metaphorical, in which Paul says he “bears branded on his body the marks of Jesus,” we find reason to surmise that, even as the ministrant in the Dionysian college was called by the God’s name, Bacchus; as the Osirian worshipper spread himself on the cross and became one with Osiris; and as the priest of Attis personated Attis in his mysteries—so Paul or another personated Jesus in the mysteries of his sect; that what has so long passed for verbal metaphor stood originally for a process of acted symbolism; and that the theory of the mystery was that he who personated the crucified demigod became specially assimilated to him. The Pauline language on this head coincides exactly with the general and primordial theory of theanthropic sacrifice: “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me.” (Cp. [Phil. iii, 11].) Obscure and violent if understood as sheer metaphor, such expressions fall into line with much ancient religious belief when read as describing a symbolic rite.

In any case, the first-cited passage seems to tell of either a dramatic or a pictorial representation of the crucified Christ in connection with the sacrament; a procedure which would probably not be favoured by the art-hating Jews, but which, gradually developed among the Gentiles in the fashion of the drama-loving Greeks, is the probable origin of several of the gospel narratives. It belonged to the conception of all such mysteries that their details should never be divulged to outsiders; hence the rarity of such allusions, even in letters to the faithful. The Christian cult adopted the very terms of the heathen practice, and its initiates were called mystæ, like those of all the rival religions.

A study of the early Christian tombs shows how much of more or less unconscious compromise took place wherever Christism made converts. The charming myth of Psyche had become for Pagans a doctrine of immortality; and in that sense the figure of the child-goddess was without misgiving carved on early Christian tombs. So with the figure of Hermes Kriophoros, Hermes the Ram-Bearer, who is the true original of the Christian conception of the Good Shepherd, in art and in thought, though a figure of Apollo in the same capacity may have been the medium of conveyance. Orpheus was assimilated in the same fashion; and when art began to be applied to the needs of the new cult, Jesus was commonly figured as a beardless youth, like the popular deities of the Pagans in general.

Last but not least of the Gentile elements which determined the spread of the Christist cult was the double meaning attaching to the Greek form of the Messianic name. In the unplausible passage above cited from Suetonius, that is spelt Chrestus, evidently after the Greek word Chrēstos=“good, excellent, gracious,” which occurs frequently in the New Testament, and which was a special title of the “infernal” or underworld Gods of the Samothracian mysteries, also of Hermes, of Osiris, and of Isis. The two words were pronounced alike; and the coincidence is often such as would be made much of by ancient thinkers, wont to lay great stress on words. In the gospel phrase so loosely rendered “my yoke is easy” the Greek adjective is chrēstos; as also in that translated: “he is kind towards the unthankful and evil” ([Lk. vi, 35]); and in the phrase “the Lord is gracious” ([1 Pet. ii, 3]). In the epistles, too, chrēstotes is the word used in the phrase “the goodness of God”; and in the familiar Pauline quotation from Menander “good manners” is in the Greek chrēsta ēthē. Among the Pagans, again, this epithet constantly figured on the kind of tomb called herōon, erected to distinguished persons who thus received the status of inferior deities or demigods, and who in consequence of this very epigraphic formula came in later times to be regarded as Christian martyrs, and to be so celebrated in festivals which were really continuations of the pagan feasts in their honour. The Christians themselves, on the other hand, habitually wrote their founder’s name Chrestos or Chreistos on their tombs in the second and third centuries, thus assimilating it to the pagan epigraphic formula chrēste chaire; and the term Christian frequently followed the same spelling. Several of the Fathers, indeed, make play with the double spelling, claiming that the terms are for them correlative. So fixed was the double usage that to this day the spelling of the French word chrétien preserves the trace. There was thus on the Christist side an appeal to Gentiles on the lines of a name or badge already much associated with Gentile religion, and attractive to them in a way in which the name “Christ” as signifying “one anointed” would not be.

How far this attraction operated may be partly inferred from such a document as the apologetic treatise of Theophilus of Antioch, conjecturally dated about the year 180, in which there is not a single mention of Jesus as a basis of the Christian creed, while the names Christos and Christian are repeatedly bracketed with “chrēstos.” The writer figures less as a Pauline Christist than as a Gentile proselyte who founded on the Hebrew sacred books, and believed in some impersonal Christ at once “good” and “anointed.” Similarly in the Apology of Athenagoras, belonging to the same period, the founder figures purely as the divine Logos, not being even mentioned as a person with a biography, though the writer quotes the Logos through an apocryphal gospel. In such a propaganda the Greek associations with the epithet chrēstos would count for much more than those of the Judaic standpoint.

But above all other gains on this score may be reckoned those made in Egypt, where the cult of the cross belonged alike to the ancient worship of Osiris and the recent one of Serapis. Not only was Osiris in especial chrēstos, the benign God, but the hieroglyph of goodness, applied to him in common with others, had the form of a cross standing on a hillock (= a grave?), while the cross symbol in another form was the sign of immortal life. In the imported worship of Serapis, which inevitably conformed in the main to that of Osiris, the cross was equally a divine and mystic emblem. It thus becomes intelligible that some devotees of Serapis should, as is stated in the well-known letter of the Emperor Hadrian, figure as bishops of Christ; and that Serapis-worshippers should rank as Christians, their God being like Osiris “Chrēstos.” To gather into one loosely-coherent mass the elements so variously collected was the work of the gradually-developed hierarchical organization; and the process involved a retention of some of the characteristics of the various worships concerned.

That there were yet other sources of membership for the early Church, apart from direct conversion, is to be gathered from the allegorical writing known as the Pastor of Hermas, which is known to have been one of the most popular books in the whole Christian literature of the second century. This work, apparently written in Italy, never once mentions the name Jesus or the name Christ, and never quotes from any book in either Testament, nor alludes to a crucifixion or a eucharist; but speaks of One God, a Holy Spirit, and a Son of God who underwent labours and sufferings; of a “Church” which appears to mean the community of all good men; and of bishops and apostles and presbyters. It is intelligible only as standing for some species of pre-Jesuist propaganda very loosely related to Judaism, inasmuch as it appears to cite some apocryphal Jewish work, yet utters no Judaic doctrine. Its sole specified rite is baptism; and its moral teaching barely recognizes the idea of vicarious sacrifice. Such a work must have had its public before the Jesuist movement took sectarian or dogmatic form; and its popularity in the early Church must have come of the inclusion of its earlier following. When the Church attained definite organization and a dogmatic system the book was naturally discarded as having none of the specific qualities of a Christian document.

A “Church” such as is ambiguously set forth in the Pastor may conceivably have been set up by one of the movements of Samaritan Christism already mentioned, or by that connected with the name of the Jew Elxai, who is recorded to have written of “Christ” without making it clear whether he referred to the gospel Jesus. As among the Elcesaites, so in the Pastor, the “Son” is conceived as of gigantic stature. On any view, being neither Christian nor anti-Christian, but simply pre-Christian, yet turned to Christian uses, the book strengthens the surmise that a number of the so-called heresies of the early Church were in reality survivals of earlier movements which the Church had absorbed, perhaps during times of persecution. The “heresy” of Simon Magus was certainly such a pre-Christian cult; that of Dositheus appears to be in the same case; and the ideas of the Pastor conform to no canonical version of the Christian creed.