Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
thousand bishops
he had gathered in Nicaea to permanently define Christianity was a Roman.
The bishops were not to disband until they had resolved the theological differences
among them, particularly when it came to the nature of Jesus and his relationship
to God. Over the centuries since Jesus’s crucifixion, there had been a great deal
of discord and debate among the leaders of the church over whether Jesus was human
or divine. Was he, as those like Athanasius of Alexandria claimed, God incarnate,
or was he, as the followers of Arius seemedto suggest, just a man—a perfect man, perhaps, but a man nonetheless?
After months of heated negotiations, the council handed to Constantine what became
known as the Nicene Creed, outlining for the first time the officially sanctioned,
orthodox beliefs of the Christian church. Jesus is the literal son of God, the creed
declared. He is Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of the
same substance as the father. As for those who disagreed with the creed, those like
the Arians who believed that “there was a time when [Jesus] was not,” they were immediately
banished from the empire and their teachings violently suppressed.
It may be tempting to view the Nicene Creed as an overtly politicized attempt to stifle
the legitimate voices of dissent in the early church. It is certainly the case that
the council’s decision resulted in a thousand years or more of unspeakable bloodshed
in the name of Christian orthodoxy. But the truth is that the council members were
merely codifying a creed that was already the majority opinion, not just of the bishops
gathered at Nicaea, but of the entire Christian community. Indeed, belief in Jesus
as God had been enshrined in the church centuries before the Council of Nicaea, thanks
to the overwhelming popularity of the letters of Paul.
After the Temple was destroyed, the holy city burned to the ground, and the remnants
of the Jerusalem assembly dispersed, Paul underwent a stunning rehabilitation in the
Christian community. With the possible exception of the
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document (which is, after all, a hypothetical text), the only writings about Jesus
that existed in 70 C.E . were the letters of Paul. These letters had been in circulation since the fifties.
They were written to the Diaspora communities, which, after the destruction of Jerusalem,
were the only Christian communities left in the realm. Without the mother assembly
to guide the followers of Jesus, the movement’s connection to Judaism was broken,
and Paul became the primary vehicle through which a new generation of Christians was
introduced toJesus the Christ. Even the gospels were deeply influenced by Paul’s letters. One can
trace the shadow of Pauline theology in Mark and Matthew. But it is in the gospel
of Luke, written by one of Paul’s devoted disciples, that one can see the dominance
of Paul’s views, while the gospel of John is little more than Pauline theology in
narrative form.
Paul’s conception of Christianity may have been anathema before 70 C.E . But afterward, his notion of a wholly new religion free from the authority of a
Temple that no longer existed, unburdened by a law that no longer mattered, and divorced
from a Judaism that had become a pariah was enthusiastically embraced by converts
throughout the Roman Empire. Hence, in 398 C.E ., when, according to legend, another group of bishops gathered at a council in the
city of Hippo Regius in modern-day Algeria to canonize what would become known as
the New Testament, they chose to include in the Christian scriptures one letter from
James, the brother and successor of Jesus, two letters from Peter, the chief apostle
and first among the Twelve, three letters from John, the beloved disciple and pillar
of the church, and fourteen letters from Paul, the deviant and outcast who was rejected
and scorned by the leaders in Jerusalem. In fact, more than half of the twenty-seven
books that now make up the New Testament are either by or about Paul.
This should not be surprising. Christianity after the destruction of Jerusalem was
almost exclusively a gentile religion; it needed a gentile theology. And that is precisely
what Paul provided. The choice between James’s vision of a Jewish religion anchored
in the Law of Moses and derived from a Jewish nationalist who fought against Rome,
and Paul’s vision of a Roman
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