Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years
By Paula Fredriksen.
Princeton University Press, 2024.
Hardcover, 288 pages, $29.95.
Reviewed by Daniel James Sundahl.
Our local priest uses the phrase “our separated brethren” when referencing other denominations which could number as much as 200 in the United States alone. According to a religion professor of my acquaintance, there’s likely 45,000 globally, a staggering number, suggesting there’s never been a united Christianity.
There are also those of my acquaintance who blame it all on the “Reformation.”
As with Christianity currently, however, so it was with the early church when interpretations of Jesus’ teachings led to major breaks or schisms, or to some, heresies. Paula Fredriksen writes in Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years that traditions of biblical interpretations were configured differently by different Christian intellectuals, but in the arguments of the heresy hunters, these early “theologies” represented madness and sickness, misreading of scripture, demonic inspiration, pride muddled with excessive philosophy, and merely knowledge falsely so called. Too much diversity, in other words, too many strategies of control. There were others who wrote in St. Paul’s name, demonstrating another way to control how he was interpreted.
Consider for a moment that statement of belief in the Nicene Creed: “Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God,” a central statement to Christian identity. One might further note that the phrase “begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father” is a refutation of an early Christian “belief” in which Jesus some time after his birth and then some years of earthly living was “adopted” by God.
A bit more on this “adoption theory” later in this review. When Paula Fredriksen takes up this notion, she does so by remarking that if the word “made” is not clearly defined and understood both as content and context, Jesus could be understood to be a “lesser” God and a bit like Greek anthropological gods who were capable of adopting mortals right and left, and when things soured, well, you know the stories. Christ would thus not “own” an inner-trinitarian relationship. Begotten, therefore, secures a belief in which Christ secures the exact nature with the Father.
But wait, there’s more: Consider the first few verses from John who writes, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made that have been made; without him nothing was made that has been made.”
So what?
As Fredriksen makes clear, debate deepens and foments in various “Christianities” until that term, “Word,” that Logos, is understood to be Christ. But the word is Greek and is used to express the idea that the world is rational. The Bible transforms the meaning of the word into theology and in reference to Jesus as the “Word,” which is profoundly different than arguing that the “Word” is merely spoken by Christ as a prophetic utterance.
It’s not just a war of words upon which Fredriksen focuses. What is essential is the truth of the doctrine “not made.” I recall an occasion at my college when there was a seminar on John. A dispute over whether the Greek term monogenes means “only son” or “only begotten son.” Apart from nit-picking, I recall a quiet statement made by a young woman from Oklahoma who voiced carefully if not a bit shakily that “begotten not made” assures the full divinity of Christ and that interwoven with this phrase, “begotten, not made” is Christ’s work of redemption. There wouldn’t be any redemption, in other words without this truth, “begotten, not made.”
Arius, a priest from Alexandria, claimed that since Jesus was begotten, brought about by God, he was a lesser divinity. Athanasius, by contrast, also an Alexandrian, claimed that Jesus was God Incarnate. This debate is perhaps the most prominent example among many in those first five hundred years where such wars over words were the very stuff of competing “Christianities.”
We also know that in A. D. 325 at the Council of Nicea theologians and scholars sided against Arianism when the term homoousios, “of one substance,” became the statement of faith. Arius was deposed and sent into exile.
If we could summarize Fredriksen’s Ancient Christianities under one rubric it would be “context reveals content.”
The evidence is complicated, but let’s begin with Fredriksen’s argument that the history of Christianity finds its “stirrings” within the Second Temple period during which, according to Jewish tradition, authentic prophecy ceased. Malachi is thus usually believed to have been the last prophet. This is made problematic since the book came into being as the result of multiple stages of redaction over time, from the Persian period to the Hellenistic period.
The consequence is that without divine guidance Jews were left without both support and direction. Imagine then how traditionalists would resent the Hellenization of Judaism under Hellenized rule as a violation of their strict monotheistic beliefs. In time—the later years of the Second Temple period—this led to the development of Jewish Messianic ideas of which there were several. Fredriksen, who specializes in the history of Christianity, argues that these developmental ideas offer an “arc” beginning with those Messianic sects and their apocalyptic messages.
Fredriksen reconstructs numerous ways in which Mediterranean people created often cryptic revelations about a forthcoming dramatic intervention by God in history which would include the judgement of humanity, the salvation of the faithful elect, and the eventual rule of the elect with God in a renewed heaven and earth.
To summarize without courting heresy, there was a quest for the historical Jesus before there was a historical Jesus. He would be an authentic prophet whose eschatological teachings would form the basis of the four Gospels and the early church would be formed around apocalyptic intentions. The problem? The parousia was thought to be imminent, albeit the theology and eschatology lacked consistency even while becoming the core prophecy of the New Testament.
Odd to think, however, that the story about the first five hundred years of Christianity would begin before Christ. She writes that it “is easier to see when this story ends than when it begins.” What is certain is that it does begin with a Jewish message. Fredrickson notes that this five hundred year history is further coupled with the consequences of the Babylonian conquest and the time in which the Jewish people were forced to leave the land of Israel. She notes that what is known as the diaspora was not only a physical displacement but also a melancholy displacement.
For centuries, the Jewish people were everywhere such that in every city it was easy to find practicing Jews (even as far west as the southern geographical areas of what came to be known as France) albeit that practice varied in diversity which would include educated Hellenistic Jews “who literally wrote themselves” into pagan Greek culture. Jewish scriptures were translated into Greek which led to wars of words and arguments over various claims from Jewish authors that Moses developed the alphabet or that Moses taught music to Orpheus.
Laborious thinking on the “nature” of the Jewish monotheistic God who was unitary and from whom mankind was given the law, but who also was either more or less than the Platonic deity: such was the debate over gnosis when the texts so treasured by Jewish thinkers were read through the lens of Platonic philosophy.
Why mention this? According to early Christian theologians knowledge of God was particularly revealed through Jesus. How that revelation had occurred and what knowledge it conveyed was settled through a war of words.
One might think of matters this way: For pagan philosophers, higher deities dictated to lower deities which arranged, shall we say, surrogates. Matters become complicated, then, when the Old Testament Jewish God who created and ordered the heavens and the earth “incarnates” a lower god, the Christ of Christianity.
How to disprove this became the matter of story-telling evangelists whose narratives Fredriksen refers to as “high” Christology which sought to explain with precision Christ’s divinity and sonship.
She turns here to later Christian theologians who reflected back on Paul’s letters and the gospel stories explaining how a divine figure was also human and how Christ related to God the Father. There were also those who focused on Mark’s gospel but in which they favored that idea labeled “adoptionism,” which meant that Jesus began life as a mortal who became in time the adopted son of God at his baptism, which conferred divinity.
Fredriksen notes that these latter ideas were already familiar in Roman culture. For example, the son of a Roman emperor was no less a figure than the emperor. Julius Caesar claimed divine descent from Venus and was thus deified. After his own death Caesar’s divinity was conferred on his adopted son Augustus, thus producing “god from god.”
The book’s exceptional scholarship is enhanced by its skilled readability. The seven chapters are divided into subchapters averaging no more than five pages. The conclusion is the exception which is to be expected. Here Fredriksen poses the argument that, at the time of the mid-third century, what “stands out in the process of Rome’s Christianization . . . . is the strong institutional organization centered around the bishop.” Discipline always followed but communities continued to muster around their bishops to receive both sacraments and the patronage of charity.
Inherent in this process over time are the means by which localized Christian sects became the universal Roman church. There was still the inheritance from Jewish apocalyptic eschatology, but in the fourth century right religion was defined as exclusivist, one God, one church, one empire, one emperor, in short, one type of Christianity, Nicean orthodoxy. Even so there would be disagreements, but this universalizing impulse would remain especially as a bulwark against catastrophe and changing politics.
What history reveals is “ancient Christianity” with a sprawling cast of characters through five centuries of empire all found in a fine book of impeccable scholarship.
Daniel James Sundahl is Emeritus Professor in English and American Studies at Hillsdale College where he taught for thirty-three years.
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