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Christianitys Critics: The Romans Meet Jesus

Robert Conner

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Roman authors such as Celsus, Porphyry, Julian, and Lucian of Samosata argued that Christianity is a farce and a fraud. In fact, many of their insights into the new cult, which anticipated the findings of 20th century religious scholars by 18 centuries, are rather easily confirmed by the writings of the earliest Christians themselves. This essay examines some of the charges made by early Roman and Jewish critics and briefly interrogates documents from Christianitys first centuries that confirm their allegations. Although apolo-gists dismiss or at least attempt to minimize the force of the refutation of Roman intellectuals, it bears mention that writers such as Celsus, who wrote in the decade between 170180, read gospels significantly older than any currently surviving copies1 and used real 2nd century Christians as sources, i.e., Celsus did not make do with hypothetical gnostics based on extrapola-tions from a few surviving texts as a basis for reconstructing early Christian beliefCelsus had access to the real thing. Until the middle of the 2nd century Christianity barely registered on the social consciousness of Roman intellectuals and even then they dismissed it as a close-knit Judaistic sect, and an increasingly noxious one,2 at that. As coun-ter-intuitive as it seems to us, living in a world in which some two billion people claim to believe in one of the 40,000 or so permutations of Christian-ity, in the mid-1st century many converts to the cult of Jesus could barely dis-tinguish themselves from Jews if, indeed, they even cared to make such a dis-tinction. That Christianity might eventually emerge victorious from the wel-ter of competing mystery cults, regional and national religions and various Jewish sects may appear self-evident in retrospect, but in the 1st century it probably appeared, even to the most ardent Christians, a most unlikely as-cendency.3 The most plausible explanation for the triumph of Christianity, it seems to me, was proposed by Walter Bauer: although the sum total of consciously orthodox and anti-heretical Christians was numerically inferior to that of the heterodox, by the early 4th century the Roman government finally came to recognize that the Christianity ecclesiastically organized from 1 The oldest manuscripts of the New Testament that preserve any substantial

amount of text are tentatively dated from the late 2nd to early 3rd centuries. P52, the famous Rylands fragment of John, which preserves a mere 114 letters on a piece of papyrus the size of a credit card, has been optimistically dated to the early 2nd century based on its Hadrianic script, but it may come from the late 2nd cen-tury. The terminus post quem of Codex Sinaiticus, which contains the earliest complete copy of the New Testament, is 325 C.E.

2 Frend, The Rise of Christianity, 163. To date, no mention of Jesus of Nazareth has been located in a pagan source

written prior to the year 112 C.E...In the earliest years of the Christian move-ment, the Roman attitude toward followers of Jesus appears to have been marked by casual indifference. (Kannaday, Apologetic Discourse and the Scribal Tradition, 24, 199).

3 Johnson, Among the Gentiles, 172.

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Rome was flesh of its flesh, came to unite with it, and thereby actually en-abled it to achieve ultimate victory over unbelievers and heretics.4 In any case, as Hoffman has so perfectly stated it, the Christian movement was Romes Vietnam, a slow war of attrition which had been fought to stop a multiform enemy.5 Although he certainly does not claim to explain anything so complicated or grandiose as the eventual triumph of ancient Christianity, Pierces observation regarding the inroads made by Christian fundamentalists into the American body politic is worth quoting in this context: Very often, it was the cranks who provided the conflict by which the consensus changed. They did so by working diligently on the margins until, subtly, without most of the country noticing, those margins moved (emphasis added)...[Americas] indolent tolerance of them causes the classic American crank to drift easily into the mainstream, whereupon the cranks lose all of their charm and the country loses another piece of its mind.6 The surreptitious infiltration of Christians into the margins of Roman society must have been something very much like what Pierce describes. The Roman Celsus noted, [Christians] convince only the foolish, dishonorable, and stupid, and only slaves, women, and little children...whenever they see adolescent boys and a crowd of slaves and a company of fools [the Christians] push themselves in and show off.7 Christians, their critics charged, targeted what we today call low information voters, and, like the Campus Crusade for Christ, they proselytized among the impressionable, those whose youth and lack of sophistication or educa-tion rendered them vulnerable to the blandishments of missionaries. Historians have treated Christianity with extreme deference. A combination of theological, cultural, and historical factors has conspired to create a pro-tected enclave for this particular religion. As a consequence, methods and techniques that are taken for granted in the treatment of other religions have been ignored or discarded in dealing with this onethe further assumption has been made, with however much sophistication, that certain events in early Christianity are not only historically distinctive but in some sense religi-ously unique8 ...dogmatic images of normative Christian origins are not only reinforced every Sunday during worship but are also subconsciously lodged in the minds of scholars.9 McKechnie provides an easy example of a scholar so entranced: Jesus was literate, and read Isaiah aloud in the synagogue (Luke 4:16-20). He, there- 4 Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, 231-232. 5 Hoffmen, Porphyrys Against the Christians, 14. 6 Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, 31, 33. 7 Chadwick, Contra Celsum, 162 (III, 49-50). 8 Gager, Kingdom and Community, xi, 3. 9 Ldemann, Paul, 240.

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fore, knew biblical Hebrew as well as Aramaic which was the spoken language of Judea.10 While credulously accepting the testimony of Luke, who was no historian,11 McKechnie ignores the reported opinion of Jesus contempo-raries: The Jews therefore marveled, saying, How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?12 According to Luke,13 when Jesus was crucified the sun was eclipsed (eklipontoj)an astronomical impossibility...since Pass-overs occur at full moon and solar eclipses occur only at new moon...By way of defense [the apologist] Origen insisted that secret enemies of the church had introduced the notion of an eclipse into the text to make it vulnerable to a show of reason.14 As the historian Luke ably demonstrates, the incompe-tence of the authors of the gospels made secret enemies utterly superfluous. At this point one might well ask (rhetorically, of course), as does Paula Fredriksen, Why, then, in a field generally so cautious and self-consciously critical, do New Testament scholars routinely confuse historical reality with theological polemic, and in the name of pursuing the former reproduce the latter?15 As will be pointed out in this essay, Jesus came from an insignificant village and avoided urban areas. Although it is nearly impossible to know anything certain about Jesus biography, a void that extends even to the dates of his birth and death, it is well established that ancient literacy was tightly connect-ed to city life and that in areas where agriculture predominated literacy rates were very low.16 It is quite likely that Jesus himself was illiterate. Regarding the quest for the historical Jesus Gager observed, On no other issue have such prodigious efforts led to more inconclusive results.17 Those years of aimless wandering in the scholarly wilderness is due almost entirely to theo-logical commitment and a maidenly unwillingness to offend the gossamer sensibilities of believers. It has only recently been emphasized that magic, pagan, heresy, and orthodoxy are examples of Christianity supplying the categories of analysis so that the discussion of Greco-Roman religion and Christianity was left to 10 McKechnie, The First Christian Centuries, 27. 11 After a long discussion of Lukes infancy narrative, a respected classical historian concludes, Lukes story is historically impossible and internally incoherent. It clashes with his own date for the Annunciation (which he places under Herod) and with Matthews long story of the Nativity which also presupposes Herod the Great as king. It is, therefore, false. (Lane Fox, The Unauthorized Version, 27-31).

12 John 7:15, ASV. 13 Luke 23:45. 14 Kannaday, Apologetic Discourse and the Scribal Tradition, 97. 15 Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ, 103. 16 Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine, 35. 17 Gager, Kingdom and Community, 7.

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passionate amateurs whose main interest was scoring points for their version of authentic Christianitythe last 40 years have seen a dramatic displace-ment of Christian schools of theology by university departments of religious studies as the center for serious conversation about religion.18 It is instructive to reframe the history of early Christianity by looking at it through the lens of its Roman critics who charged that both believers and the scriptures they read and trusted lacked intellectual integrity...Constituting a third facet of this literary barrage, followers of Jesus were ridiculed as ignorant, gullible fools, and for mainly consisting of women and fanatics.19 This essay dispenses entirely with affable, theologically based assumptions about Jesus and Christianity and utterly rejects the question begging and spe-cial pleading that infests much of the literature on early Christianity. To the surprise of many readers and the dismay of others, it can be rather easily demonstrated that the harshest denunciations of Jewish and Roman detrac-tors aimed at Jesus and his followers can be verified from early Christian writings and the actions of Christians themselves. However, apologetic scholarship raised a serious barrier to understanding the founding docu-ments of ChristianityThe rationalizing instinct not infrequently appears in the service of faith with an apologetic function.20 Nor is this a new ploy. Roman critics frequently charged Christians with practicing magic; Christian apologists who attempted a rebuttal followed a well-worn path: Jewish au-thors from [the Second Temple] period take pains to distinguish extraordi-nary events taking place in their midst from magical practices, especially in cases that require the employment of certain objects and rituals. The most common strategy was to ascribe miracles to Gods power and magic to hu-man agency.21 To regard the triumph of Christianity as merely the victory of one religion over others is to completely miss the significance of the new intellectual re-gime that would dominate the western world for the next fifteen centuries. Far more than a set of religious doctrines, Christianity became the framework around which an enduring social order arose, a distorting prism through which a culture perceived the natural world, and a totalitarian ethos that sought out and destroyed all who challenged it. Christianity did much more than bury the gods of the Greco-Roman world under the rubble of their van-dalized templesits intensely anti-intellectual impulse smothered the voices of generations of genius. As Murdock noted, [Constantine] let loose a philo-sophy that was to pervade every aspect of political, social, cultural, and, of

18 Johnson, Among the Gentiles, 14, 16. 19 Kannaday, Apologetic Discourse and the Scribal Tradition, 35. 20 Moberly, The Cambridge Companion to Miracles, 66. 21 Twelftree, The Cambridge Companion to Miracles, 5.

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course, religious life right up to modern times.22 Given all that Christian zealots erased, that we know anything at all about the amazing accomplish-ments of the world before Christianity is due in most cases to pure happen-stance. An obvious example is the recent rescue of the text of the Archimedes Codex, a collection of works by the greatest known mathematical genius of the pre-Christian era. In this particular case, the original writing of Archimedes text was scraped off the parchment on which it had been copied, the codex cut into pieces, and the resulting pages used to create a prayer book. The first piece of parchment in [the Christian scribes] new codex contained On Float-ing Bodies.23 He covered it with a blessing for loaves for Easter. Further into the codex, he wrote over a different section with a prayer for repentance.24 The monk who repurposed the parchment of Archimedes text to make a prayer book was either too ignorant to know he was destroying a foundation-al work on mathematics or knew and didnt care. This essay focuses on two Roman writers in particular, Lucian of Samosata, whose extensive works have survived remarkably intact despite his characteri-zation of Jesus as that crucified sophist,25 and a little known philosopher named Celsus, whose work comes down to us in the form of quotations in the Christian apologist Origens magnum opus, Contra CelsumThat [Con-tra Celsum] still needed refutation seventy years after it was written is an in-dication of how seriously Christians took its arguments.26 We know about these anti-Christian texts because they were quoted (selectively) and para-phrased (tendentiously) by Christian authors: Origen, Against Celsus (Contra Celsum),27 Eusebius, Against Hierocles, and Cyril of Alexandria, Against Ju-lian.28 The case of Flavius Claudius JulianusJulian the Apostatedeserves some extended comment. Born into a Christian family, he converted to a theurgic form of Neo-Platonism, a conversion probably hastened by the murder of his father and eight of his relatives by his uncle, the Christian Constantius. The savagery of what happened, in a Christian court, had a searing effect on the 22 Murdoch, The Last Pagan: Julian the Apostate, 4. 23 The first known work on hydrostatics, or in laymans terms, what makes an iron

ship float and an iron bar sink. 24 Netz & Noel, The Archimedes Codex, 124-125. 25 Lucian, The Passing of Peregrinus, 13. 26 Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 2nd edition, xvi. 27 [Origens] Against Celsus was a sustained piece of theological writing even though

hardly relevant to Celsus charges made seventy years before. (Frend, The Rise of Christianity, 373).

28 Clark, Christianity and Roman Society, 17.

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six-year-old boy...Libanius marked the murders as the major event of Julians infancy.29 While Julian was still in his teens, Constantius had the future em-perors half-brother Gallus murdered as well. As a child, Julian was thoroughly indoctrinated in the tenets of Christianity, and although he came to loath the religion, he feigned belief until declared Augustus, consensu militum, at Paris in 360. Shortly after, Julian openly em-braced the ancient Roman religions. Julians criticismsto the extent they have survivedare of particular interest therefore, coming as they do from the pen of an intelligent, indeed bookish, insider who repaid his Christian instructors with interest for the enforced studies of his boyhood.30 His most direct attack on the Church, Against the Galileans, is, unfortunately, pre-served only in fragments. [Julians Against the Galileans] appears rather disjointed. What remains is disappointing, and it is not just because only around a third has survived. The passages we have are those garnered from an extensive refutation of the work by Cyril of Alexandria in the early 440s. By definition it is the weakest passages that have survived. Not only are the passages Cyril excerpted natu-rally enough the ones he disagreed with, but also they are the one he felt he could refute.31 Julians sense of irony is revealed by his decision to call the Christians Galileans, a choice that reflected the gospel saying, out of Galilee ariseth no prophet.32 Nevertheless, Julians lifelong inclination toward mysti-cism, his ascetic personal habits, as well as his inflexibility may betray the aftereffects of early Christian indoctrination on a susceptible mind. Julians pushback against the Church also took the form of cleverly crafted legal movessince the days of Constantine orthodoxy had been associated with tax exemptions for clergy as well as access to wealth and patronage and the high status enjoyed by the state church.33 Julian turned the tax code against the Church in the same way the Church had used it against the here-tics. He cancelled tax exemptions for the clergy: Julian proclaimed that no one could henceforth claim exemption from service as a decurion (councillor) on the grounds of being a Christian. Since only the clergy had been entitled to seek this exemption, the measure was accordingly directed at them.34 With the withdrawal of their lucrative tax exemptions,35 Julian struck a deft blow at the claim of Christian disdain for materialism. In addition, he passed 29 Bowersock, Julian the Apostate, 23. 30 Wright, The Works of the Emperor Julian, III, 315 (Loeb). 31 Murdoch, The Last Pagan: Julian the Apostate, 133. 32 John 7:52 (KJV). 33 Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind, 194. 34 Bowersock, Julian the Apostate, 73-74. 35 Freeman, 185.

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a law that banned [Christians] from teaching the three pillars of Roman education: grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy...In one fell swoop, Julian cut Christians off from potential converts and from the classical tradition...Julian had marginalized Christianity to the point where it could potentially have vanished within a generation or two, and without the need for physical coercion.36 Julians attack on the cult was that of an intelligent insider who was literally well versed; it is little wonder that Christians reacted with glee to his death in battle in June, 363. Porphyry of Tyre (c. 234-c. 305 C.E.), a polymath and philosopher, wrote a work titled Against the Christians, a great book of fifteen volumes, a scourge of the Christians,37 so feared by the Church that in 448 Theodosius II or-dered any copies still in existence burned. Not only were Porphyrys books destroyed, but many of the works of Christian writers incorporating sections of Porphyrys polemic were burned in order to eliminate what one critic, the bishop Apollinarius, called the poison of his thought.38 In fact, it is no longer certain which fragments attributed to Porphyry are genuine; for the sake of simplicity, and because this is an essay, not a dissertation, I have elect-ed to follow Hoffmans reconstruction. In any case, Porphyrys insights into the new Jewish sect anticipated the conclusions of modern scholars: Cen-turies before the advent of modern biblical criticism, Porphyry already knew that the book of Daniel was a Maccabean pseudepigraph,39 i.e., a faked pro-phecy. Porphyry contentiously reported that the oracle ascribed to Isaiah in Mark 1:2 was in fact a conflation between Isaiah and Malachi (to be exact, Mal 3:1 and Isa 40:3). Similarly, he flagged Matthew 13:35, which wrongly assigns a passage from Psalm 78:2 to Isaiah...Porphyry in fact represented the contradictions and errors in these revered writings as the natural product of rustic and unsophisticated followers of Jesus...Attentive readers...noted within the gospels glaring factual errors, Old Testament citations wrongly attribut-ed, and inconsistencies in the details reported by the separate evangelical ac-counts.40 Later Christian scribes altered the text of Mark, which mistakenly attributed a quote to Isaiah the prophet,41 to read in the prophets in a be-lated attempt to derail further criticism of the supposedly inerrant gospels multiple inaccuracies. At least a generation passed between the appearance of the first Roman criti-ques of Christianity and the Christian apologetic response. Christian ortho-doxy produced no leaders of the intellectual range and status of its oppo- 36 Murdoch, The Last Pagan, 138-139. 37 Frend, The Rise of Christianity, 442. 38 Hoffman, Porphyrys Against the Christians, 164-165. 39 Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 138. 40 Kannaday, Apologetic Discourse and the Scribal Tradition, 65, 68, 82. 41 Mark 1:2.

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nents...Irenaeus possessed a robust common sense, a long memory, and flash-es of theological insight, but between the memorable phrases his writing is prolix and tedious, and his ideas inflexible. Like his colleagues, he was en-cumbered with a millenarian legacy...There could be no accommodation with the thought of the Greco-Roman world so long as millenarianism pre-vailed.42 That any trace of these criticisms survivesand even then only in quotation is evidence of the acute anxiety they caused the early Church. Celsus in particular was a fearsome opponent: He was a man who relied not on ru-mors and hearsay evidence but on personal observation and careful study. Be-cause he had read both the Old and New Testaments and was familiar with Jewish and Christian literature, he knew the difference between Gnostic and orthodox theologies, and his book is on the whole free of mistakes and mis-conceptions, excepting those that reflect the generally held superstitions of the second century. It contains none of the popular pagan antagonism against Christians and makes no unsubstantiated charges.43 Indeed, Celsus accuracy is widely acknowledged: Celsus technical impartiality in the disputes he re-fers to is helpfulhe had no interest in making the Christians seem better or more numerous than they were (exactly the reverse), so he has a good claim to be believed.44 Origens refutation of the Celsus True Doctrine did not ap-pear until some 70 years after its composition and even then Origen may have deleted the most damaging parts.45 The Roman intelligentsia took an extremely dim view of Christianitythey regarded it with the same mixture of disgust and incomprehension that West-erners reserve for Muslim suicide bombers. The three Roman historians whose writings we have investigated were all contemporaries, and all reflected the aristocratic, well-bred Romans judgment that Christianity was one of a multitude of degraded foreign cultsatrocious and shameful things as Tacitus put itthat infested Rome...Romans of higher social classes believed that these oriental superstitions polluted Roman life and that they attacked the very fiber of society like a debilitating disease...Some of the liturgical practices of Christians, notably glossolalia, confessions of sins, prophecies, sacraments, and the sexual aberrations of fringe groups, may have contributed to a distorted picture of this oriental superstition.46 Julian saw Christianity as a sickness infecting the Roman Empire.47 42 Frend, The Rise of Christianity, 231. 43 Benko, Pagan Rome and the Early Christians, 148. 44 McKechnie, The First Christian Centuries, 19. 45 Benko, 156. 46 Ibid, 21, 23. 47 Murdoch, The Last Pagan: Julian the Apostate, 132.

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Christian book burning began early,48 even before the composition of those most Christian of books, the gospels. The burning of books was part of the advent and imposition of Christianity.49 [Christianitys] more extreme pro-ponents equated pre-Christian learning with paganismin finding a home in a pagan building the books themselves became tarred with the brush of pa-ganism. Knowledge has always been the enemy of extremism, and for the most radical elements among Alexandrias Christians, the books in the Sera-peum were a threat. So they simply destroyed them.50 The Council of Ephe-sus (431) decreed that Porphyrys books be burned, and the Christian em-peror Justinian (529) likewise decreed that anti-Christian books were to be consigned to the flames. As mentioned, Julians Against the Galileans survives only in the form of partial quotations in a refutation written by Cyril of Alexandria (429-441)51concerning the much longer original, [Cyril] says that he omitted invectives against Christ and such matter as might contami-nate the minds of Christians.52 Lucretius De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), a celebrated poem that advanced the dangerous ideas that the uni-verse ran without the intervention of gods and that religion actually posed a danger to human life, survived in a single copy discovered in 1417, forgotten in the library of a German monastery. What early critics had to say about the Christianity of their era has been of interest primarily to historians, but I will argue first that their criticisms were remarkably accurate, prescient in fact, and second that the first Romans to investigate the new religion identified fundamental flaws that broadly char-acterize much of Christianity in its present form. Early Christian writers of-ten provided unwitting support for Celsus appraisal of the fledgling faith and the observations of Lucian. Celsus and others accurately anticipated many modern scholarly insights into early Christianity as well as religious scandals of our own day. Relevant terms are sometimes cited in Greek for those interested in the exact text of primary sources, but the essay has been written in a manner that hope-fully makes it easily accessible to the interested layman. Unless otherwise noted, the translations from Greek are my own. That said, lets turn to the specific claims of ancient critics. 48 Acts 19:19. 49 Canfora, The Vanished Library, 192. 50 Pollard & Reid, The Rise and Fall of Alexandria, 282. 51 Cyril is infamous for his connection with the civic disturbances that led to the

murder and dismemberment of Hypatia, the Alexandrian mathematician and astronomer, at the hands of a Christian mob as well as his support for violent confrontations between Alexandrias Christians and Jews that eventually led to the expulsion of the Jews.

52 Wright, Julian, III, 314.

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Jesus and Paul were false prophets.

Radical apocalypticism was the foundation of the earliest form of Christian-ity. Jesus imagined the kingdom to be coming soonvery soonin the very generation that heard his preaching.

The High Priest was standing in their midst and he asked Jesus, Have you nothing to say in response? What are these men testifying against you? But he kept silent and made no reply. Again the High Priest asked him, Are you the Christ, the son of the Blessed One? Jesus said to him, I am. And you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven!53

The High Priest himself will witness the coming of the Son of Man and Jesus own generationTruly I tell you, by no means will this generation disappear until all these things happen54this generation, will not pass away until all these things happen. These two predictions of Jesus [Mark 9:1 and 13:28-31] are related in that they do not simply announce the somewhat vague imminence of the kingdom of God, but they announce its arrival prior to the end of the generation to whom Jesus was speaking...the community which produced the Gospel of Mark [was] an apocalyptic millenarian com-munity living in the imminent expectation of the end of the age.55 The disciples will not even complete their circuit of the towns of Palestine before the coming of the Son of Man: But when they run you out of one town, flee to another, for truly I tell you, by no means will you finish going through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man arrives!56 The end is fast approaching: Truly I say to you, there are some standing here who will by no means taste death until they see the kingdom of God already arrived in power.57 If Jesus really believed that the religious and political order was soon to end, we would expect to hear that belief reflected in his preaching and we do. The disciples are not to imagine that Jesus has come to bring peacefamily mem- 53 Mark 14:60-62. 54 Mark 13:30. 55 Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity, 172, 194. 56 Matthew 10:23. 57 Mark 9:1.

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bers will turn on one another, becoming bitter enemies58 and those who ex-pect to follow Jesus into the kingdom must not even stop to say farewell to those left behind.59 A man must not linger to gather possessions, nor stop even to pick up his cloak.60 The urgency of the situation abrogates even the most basic filial responsibilities:

Another of his disciples said to him, Lord, first allow me to go and bury my father. But Jesus said to him, Follow me and let the dead bury their dead.61

For those hoping to inherit the kingdom the costs will be steep. The disciple must hate his own father, mother, brothers and sisters, wife and children.62 Moreover, he must sell all he has and give the proceeds to the poor.63 So complete is the renunciation of the present age that those who can must be-come eunuchsthere are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this re-ceive it.64

However, one set of familiar texts has repeatedly failed to draw the detailed attention of the Jesus questers: the beatitudes for childless and barren women (Lk 23:29; Gos[pel of] Thom[as] 79b) and the warnings to pregnant women and mothers (Mk 13:17-19; Lk 23:28, 30-31)...when the beatitudes and woes to women are understood in the context of Jewish apocalyptic eschatology, they function together as an injunction against procreation...[Jesus] message of renouncing reproduction in light of imminent tribulation stands firmly in the tra-dition of an ancient prophetic predecessor (Jer. 16:1-9)...Jesus words of renunciation are congruent with his negative response to an un-named woman who blesses the womb that bore him and the breasts that nursed him (Lk 11:27-28; Gos. Thom. 79a)...His retort, Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it! makes a good deal of sense if, as we have seen, part of his message was to warn wo-men against bearing children.65

Nothing must distract the disciple from the nearness of the End, neither self-regardunless you change and become like little children, you will never 58 Matthew 10:34-37; Luke 12:49-53. 59 Luke 9: 61-62. 60 Matthew 24:17-18. 61 Matthew 8: 21-22. 62 Luke 14:26. 63 Luke 18:22. 64 Matthew 19:12. 65 Pitre, Journal for the Study of the New Testament 81 (2001): 60, 78.

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enter the kingdom of heaven66nor standing in the communityI swear to you that the tax men and the whores are going ahead of you into the king-dom of God!67 As Fredriksen points out, anger becomes equivalent to mur-der68 in Jesus ethics, and lust to adultery,69 and notes that such intensifica-tion of ethical norms...is a phenomenon typical within communities commit-ted to the belief that time is rapidly drawing to a close. Passivity in the face of evil70 and a refusal to judge71 would simply lead to the exploitation of those abiding by such rules by those who did not. This impracticality in turn allows us to glimpse the intensity of expectation that motivated Jesus mission and the community that formed around him: the Kingdom was at hand.72 Thus the complexities of moral judgments that typify a complex society are resolved into a series of binary opposites: poor-rich, good-evil, pious-hypo-crite, elect-damned. And a final reckoning is proclaimed for the near fu-ture.73 Aune remarks on the eschatological polarity of Jesus ethical teach-ing and concludes, The teachings of Jesus, therefore, show a strong tendency to use eschatological expectation as the basis for a hortatory or parenetic pur-pose.74 Among the first generation expectations of Jesus quick return ran so high that those with property sold off what they had and Jesus followers lived communally.75 Writing to the newly converted, Paul advised slaves to remain slaves and the virgins and unmarried to remain single. Married men were to act as if they had no wife, for the time allotted has become short.76 It is likely that contempt for Christianity among the common people arose in part from believers divorcing their mates or denying them conjugal relations. The asceticism provoked by the impending End resulted in a household of brothers and sisters rather than husbands and wives, fathers and mothers.77 According to the historian Eusebius, Origen, the church father of the 2nd century went so far as to castrate himself as a teenager, the action of an im-mature mind (frenoj...atelouj), yet praised as an act of faith and self-control (pistewj...kai swfrosunhj). 78 Justin Martyr applauded a young 66 Matthew 18:3, NIV. 67 Matthew 21:31. 68 Matthew 5:22. 69 Matthew 5:28. 70 Matthew 5:38-48. 71 Matthew 7:1-2. 72 Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ, 100. 73 Gager, Kingdom and Community, 25. 74 Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity, 166. 75 Acts 4:34-35. 76 1 Corinthians 7:21-31. 77 Martin, Sex and the Single Savior, 108. 78 Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History VI, 8.

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Alexandrian convert who petitioned the Roman governor to give a surgeon permission to castrate him.79 Although permission was refused, Justins apo-logetic use and evident approval of the effort itself are striking.80 Like many apocalyptic movements since, early Christianity exemplified sex-ual psychopathology and extremism. Origen, who took Matthew 19:12 rather too seriously, urged fellow Christians in his Exhortation to Martyrdom, Therefore, hate your souls because of eternal life,81 persuaded that the hatred Jesus teaches is noble and useful.82 Little wonder that the Stoic Marcus Au-relius despised the Christians, calling their preaching the claims of the mir-acle-mongers and sorcerers (twn terateuomenwn kai gohtwn) about incantations and casting out devils (daimonwn apopomphj), and characterized their fascina-tion with martyrdom as originating not in personal acts of judgment but from dissent unsupported by evidence (kata yilhn parataxin),83 from mere obstinacy based on irrational ideas.84 If Marcus despised the Chris-tians, the Christians despised him right back; his magnificent bronze eques-trian statue remained intact only because it was mistakenly believed to be of Constantine.85 Of course Jesus did not return in the lifetime of the High Priest or in the life-time of those of this generation. As believers began to die awaiting the Coming of the Son of Man, anxiety reached a peak. Pauls letter to the house church in Thessalonica, widely regarded as the oldest surviving Christian document, likely written as early as 52 C.E., offered the following false as-surance to the flock:

Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope. We be-lieve that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to the Lord's own word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left till the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be

79 Justin Martyr, Apology 29:1-2. 80 Caner, Vigiliae Christianae 51 (1997), 396. 81 John 12:25. 82 Greer, Origen: An Exhortation to Martyrdom, 3, 69. 83 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations I, 6; XI, 3. 84 Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 82. 85 Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind, 267.

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with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage each other with these words.86

Paul obviously believed that some would survive until the return of the Lordwe who are still alive and are leftand that at least some of the believers who read his letter would be physically, corporeally, alive when Jesus returnedmay your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blame-less until our Lord Jesus Christ comes again.87 ...the Second Coming of Jesus will occur in the immediate future...the hope that the vast majority of Christians would be living witnesses to Christs return from heaven points to the likelihood of composition in the first decade of the Chris-tian movement.88 But Pauls ecstatic house churches contained the seeds of their own destruction: Paul had opened a Pandoras box among the Jews and God-fearers wherever he established Christian communities. His first letter to the Corinthians indicates that the proclamation of free-dom from the Law through the love of Christ and the approaching end led to wild revivalist prophesyings in which men and women partici-pated, to claims of possession of knowledge (that is, esoteric knowledge of the beyond)...89 As time would tell, defeated expectations of the End, as well as unrestrained individualism, would eventually be suppressed by the rise of the Church and so began the ageless drama of The Church versus the churches. Aune notes the rapidly diminishing sense of immediacy in later writings: ...the Christians of the Macedonian community lived in the fervent ex-pectation of Jesus return to save them and judge their enemies. In con-trast, Luke-Acts does not convey the notion that early Christians lived in imminent expectation of the end of the age. Lukes more relaxed attitude toward the parousia of Jesus is due in part to the fact that he wrote his two-volume treatise more than a generation after 1 Thessalonians.90 Looking back from our vantage point we can identify several Jewish apo-calyptic movements from the era, and, based on the testimony of writers like Josephus and the Essene evidence, conclude that early converts did not represent the established sectors of Jewish society; we are thus able to locate [earliest Christianity] within the tradition of apocalyptic Judaism, which in itself represents a paradigm case of great expectations followed by repeated disappointments.91 The figure of the prophet 86 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, NIV. 87 1 Thessalonians 5:23. 88 Ldemann, Paul, 14, 49. 89 Frend, The Rise of Christianity, 105. 90 Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity, 192. 91 Gager, Kingdom and Community, 26-27.

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was the object of widespread eschatological fantasy in first-century Pales-tine. This nostalgic emphasis on prophets of the past was partially moti-vated by the desire to replace the dismal realities of the present with the idealized glories of Israels past.92 Josephus, a near contemporary of Jesus, describes the destabilizing role wonder-working apocalyptic prophets played in Roman-occupied Pales-tine. Among them were Theudas, who Josephus calls a gohj (gos), sor-cerer or imposter, and a profhthj (prophts), prophet. At Theudas com-mand the Jordan River was supposed to part so the rabble that followed him could cross on dry land.93 Notwithstanding Theudas sticky end, Josephus also tells of those deceived by a certain man, a magician (tinoj anqrwpou gohtoj), who proclaimed salvation and an end to their troubles if they chose to follow him into the wilderness.94 Like Theu-das, the Roman authorities promptly dispatched this man and his follow-ers. Josephus also describes the Egyptian false prophet: A man ap-peared in the countryside, a magician, who established a reputation as a prophet (anqrwpoj gohj kai profhtou pistin epiqeij)... 95 The Egyptian prophet led 30,000 into the desert and attacked Jerusalem but was re-pulsed and escaped. According to Acts 21:38, Paul was once mistaken for the Egyptian. The apologist Origen acknowledged several prophetic figures Celsus compared to Jesus: Theudas and a certain Judas of Galilee who the Ro-mans executed, as well as Dositheus, a Samaritan, supposedly the one prophesied by Moses (o profhteumenoj upo Mwusewj), and (naturally) Simon the Samaritan magician (Simwn o Samareuj magoj). Celsus per-ceptively noted these and many other deceivers of Jesus type (opoioj hn o Ihsouj)96it is clear that Celsus recognized Jesus as belonging to a fami-liar category: the apocalyptic prophet who established his bona fides by magi-cal wonder working. Stanton notes that the most widely attested ancient criticism of Jesus is that he was a magician and false prophet...accusa-tions of magic and false prophecy are very closely related to one an-other.97 By the time Paul wrote his letter to the Corinthians, around 55-56 C.E., significant numbers of the first generation Christians had fallen asleep. 92 Aune, 154. 93 Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, XX, 97. Theudas fate is noted in Acts 5:36. 94 Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, XX, 188. 95 Josephus, Jewish War, II, 259. 96 Origen, Contra Celsum, I, 57; II, 8. 97 Stanton, Jesus of Nazareth, Lord and Christ, 166-167.

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Yet Pauls letter assures the survivors, Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep but we shall all be changed during the last trumpet.98 Paul clearly seems to indicate that not all shall die though the majority will. In 1 Corinthians, that is, survival represents the exception, whereas in 1 Thessalonians it is the rule...the fate of members of the community who have already died is becoming a divisive issue. The death of some members of the community obviously led to hopelessness and mourning in the communityprobably because the notion of the resurrection of Christians was unknown in Thessalonica.99

But what exactly will happen on the Day of the Lord? And when will it occur? Here Pauls teaching is uncharacteristically clear and consistent throughout his letters. Believers whether living or dead will receive a new, glorious body, like Christs at his resurrec-tionand this will happen very, very soon. Christs resurrection itself proves the nearness of the End of all things: it is a sign, for Paul, that the final days are not merely at hand, but have already arrived. It is upon us, he informs his Corinthian community, that the end of the ages has come...Paul expects to live to see the Last Days. He speaks of his hope for the transformation of his present body before death (2 Cor 5:1-5)...So near is the End that both Paul and his communities are troubled by the death of believers before Christs Second Coming: they did not expect this and do not know what to make of it (1 Thes 4:13).100

For Mark, writing a generation after Paul, the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. was the latest sign of the times. When is the End? Soon, Mark ar-gues; very, very soon. The Temples recent destruction clearly marks the beginning of that period that will terminate with the Second Coming of the Son of Man. In fact, the Lord has already shortened the days before the consummation for the sake of his elect (13:14): the Parousia101 could occur at any time, certainly within the lifetime of Marks community...By the time Matthew and Luke write, the destruction of the Temple as well in the past, and things had continued much as before. It could not, therefore, have been the signal for the beginning of the End. But Mark, writing shortly after 70, could not have known this and for him the destruction of the Temple an-nounced the nearness of the Parousia...Christian tradition in various ways continually adjusted itself to successthat is, to its own vigorous existence 98 1 Corinthians 15:51. 99 Ldemann, Paul, 51, 206. 100 Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ, 58. 101 The term parousia, parousia, means arrival or presence as at 1 Thessalonians 2:19

(NIV): For what is our hope, our joy, or the crown in which we will glory in the presence (parousia) of our Lord Jesus when he comes? Is it not you?

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as its central prophecy failed.102 For early Christians, the destruction of Jeru-salem in 70 was a signWhen you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, you will know that its desolation has approached.103just as the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 was a sign for present day Armageddonists. Unfor-tunately for the prophets, past and present, for something to count as a sign of the End, the End has to actually occur at some point. While the believers sat up nights waiting for Jesus return, their private ban-quets in Christian households, beyond the pale of synagogue surveillance, centered on the belief that the Lord was soon coming to finish what the Ro-man legions had started...For the expectant community, their attention riveted on the heavens for some sign of the reappearance of their savior, the eucharist was the interim realization of his presence...As often as you eat the bread and drink the cup, you are proclaiming the death of the Lord before he comes (1 Cor. 11.26)...Later Christians seem to have advanced a variety of inconsistent rationales for the delay...We must see all these rationales, strictly speaking, as the defensive posture of a community challenged to provide evidence of its beliefs.104 As Pauls words to the Corinthians imply, With the collapse of the eschatological hope for the speedy return of Jesus the spiritual and sacramental presence of Jesus was all that remained.105 By the time the pseudepigraphical letter attributed to Peter was compos-ed in the early 2nd century, disbelief in the Second Coming had become open and probably common, not surprising given Jesus repeated failure to appear as foretold:

They will say, Where is this coming he promised? Ever since our ancestors died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.106

The disillusioned (former?) Christians who posed the question, Where is this Coming he promised? had arrived at an inescapable conclusion: both the prophesy of Jesus and the assurances of Paul were belied by the passing of time. Jesus and Paul had proven to be false prophets, and not just around the edges. No sane person could take their words in context and honestly claim to be-lieve them. That doubt about the Second Coming had become widespread is evident from the letter of 1 Clement to Christians in Corinth, written in the late 1st century, probably about the same time as Revelation: Those who are uncertain are miserable, those who doubt in their soul, who say, We have 102 Fredricksen, 50-51, 135. 103 Luke 21:20. 104 Hoffman, Celsus On the True Doctrine, 9-11. 105 Hoffman, Porphyrys Against the Christians, 138. 106 2 Peter 3:4, NIV.

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heard these things since our fathers time and look! We have grown old and none of these things has happened! The writer of the letter insists, You have peered into the scriptures, and assures his listeners, that nothing mis-taken nor anything falsified has been written in them.107 Those who were disabused among the Christians were hardly the only ones to notice the failure of Christian predictions. Porphyry declared, And there is more to Pauls lying: He very clearly says, We who are alive.108 For it is now three hundred years since he said this and nobodynot Paul and not anyone elsehas been caught up in the air.109 Porphyry knewover sixteen centuries agothat Jesus of Nazareth was no more than a thimbleful of dust and his Kingdomwith its hundredfold houses and fields110an empty sack. Indeed, Julian makes clear that Romans regarded Christianity as the veneration of a corpse: those who follow after you abandoned the immortal gods and changed over to the [worship of the] cadaver of the Jew (epi ton Ioudaiwn metabhnai nekron).111 At the end of the 1st century at least some still clung for dear life to the illu-sion of the Parousia. The Didache (Teaching), a tract written around the end of the century, cautioned its listeners, Dont let your lamps go out, nor your loins be ungirded!...The Lord will come with all his saints. Then the world will see the Lord coming on the clouds of heaven!112 The faithful waited, loins girded and lamps ablaze, scanning the clouds in vain while the world continued to turn. More than any other scholar, Albert Schweitzer exposed this lie that is the bedrock of primitive Christianitythe radical apocalyptic belief of Jesus of Nazareth113and by so doing uncovered the scandal at the heart of apolo-getic scholarship. Commenting on the significance of Schweitzers landmark study, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Kmmel notes,

Only when Schweitzer, at the end of an account of the Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forchung [The Quest of the Historical Jesus], presented

107 1 Clement 23:3; 45:2-3. 108 1 Thessalonians 4:17. 109 Hoffman, Porphyrys Against the Christians, 69-70. 110 Mark 10:30. 111 Julian, Against the Galileans, 194D. 112 Didache 16: 1, 7-8. 113 Schweitzer regarded Matt. 10:23 as an authentic apocalyptic prediction of Jesus,

who expected the present age to close and the future age to dawn before the mis-sion of the Twelve was completed. According to Schweitzer, when this expectation failed to materialize, Jesus experienced his first crisis, which led him to attempt to force the coming of the kingdom by going to Jerusalem. (Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity, 183).

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consistent eschatology as the right solution of the question concern-ing the historical Jesus did there emerge a really dangerous opponent of the picture of Jesus that had hitherto been accepted...The pro-clamation of Jesus as wholly dominated by the expectation of the imminent supernatural kingdom of God, Schweitzer had presented as the answer to all debatable questions of previous life-of-Jesus research, and had accordingly characterized as entirely demolished the liberal picture of Jesus...First of all there is the question of the expectation of the End in early Christian thought and its permanent significance. Bultmann, Lohmeyer, and Dibelius had acknowledged without quali-fication the central importance of the expectation of the End for the thought of Jesus and early Christianity, but in their effort to interpret this early Christian faith for men of today they in various ways in-curred the danger of imposing concepts taken from a modern philo-sophical system on the primitive Christian belief in the End...the fundamental faith of early Christianity is to be found precisely in the strictly temporal expectation of an imminent end of the world, a view that obviously soon proved to be false and by so doing compelled the early church to put something else in its place.114

In a recent survey of the New Testament evidence regarding the end-of-the-world beliefs of Jesus and the primitive church and the modern theological response, Allison concluded, I myself do not know what to make of the es-chatological Jesus. I am, for theological reasons, unedified by the thought that, in a matter so seemingly crucial, a lie has been walking around for two thousand years while the truth has only recently put on its shoes. But there it is.115 Behold, I come quickly!116 was, is, and always will be a lielittle wonder that for centuries in the orthodox churches the apocalypse has been an em-barrassment and little preached. Any cult that survives the failure of its ini-tial prophecy must necessarily modify or scrap its beliefs about the future...by definition no millenarian cult can long survive in its original form...The one undeniable fact is that the attention of the community, and thus of its worship, was entirely on the imminent End. The time is near [Revelation 1:3] and Amen, come Lord Jesus [22:20] frame the [Revelation] as a whole as much as they express the mood of its hearers.117

114 Kmmel, The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of Its Problems, 238,

241, 283-284. 115 Allison, Journal of Biblical Literature 113 (1994): 668. 116 Revelation 22:12. 117 Gager, Kingdom and Community, 21, 56.

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Fredriksens trenchant observation about the apocalyptic worldview is worth quoting at some length:

Happy people do not write apocalypses. The apocalyptic description of the joyful future that awaitsthat is in fact imminentis the mirror image of the perception of present times, which are seen as ultimately, indeed terminally, terrible...But apocalyptic symbol-ism provided more than just protective camouflage for potentially dangerous political statements. It also enhanced the prestige and mystique of these writings and gave them almost unlimited inter-pretive elasticity. The more obscure the symbolism, the more privileged the reader who understood it and the more elevated the revelation.118

It has been remarked that Jesus expected the coming of the Kingdom of God but the Church arrived instead. Evangelical Christians, particularly Ameri-cans who ever alert to commercial possibilities, have dubbed the sky fantasy described by Paul as the Rapturewe who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with [the dead] in the clouds to meet the Lord in the airand have turned it into a highly successful business model, playing on both the evangelical dissatisfaction with the liberalizing present and the self-aggrandizing figment that fundamentalists are vouchsafed unique insight into world events through their parsing of biblical jabberwocky. Despite the fact that each and every one of the hundreds of predictions of Judgment Day by Armageddonists has proven false, non-prophet preachers continue to foretell divine wrath on a nearly weekly basis with no apparent fear that their credu-lous followers will awaken to the obvious. However, one of the signs of the End has been completely and indubitably fulfilled: In their greed these teachers will exploit you with fabricated stories.119 Or as the King James Version renders it, And through covet-ousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you (umaj empo-reusontai). The verb in question means to make a profit from, or exploit for gain. Christian false prophets were quick to monetize the hopes of the gull-ible; the Didache, composed in the late 1st century, warned early believers, But if [a man claiming to be a prophet] has no trade, according to your understanding, see to it that, as a Christian, he shall not live with you idle. But if he wills not to do it, he is a Christ-monger (cristemporoj). Watch that you keep away from such.120 The christemporos, or Christ-monger, was an early forebear of modern-day salesmen of the apocalypse. 118 Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ, 82-83. 119 2 Peter 2:3, NIV. 120 Didache, 12:5.

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Lucian describes the Christian career of the religious grifter Peregrinus:

It was then that he learned the wondrous lore of the Christians, by associating with their priests and scribes in Palestine...in a trice he made them all look like children; for he was prophet, cult-leader, head of a synagogue (xunagwgeuj), and everything, all by himself. He interpreted and explained some of their books and even composed many...Then at length Proteus was apprehended for this and thrown into prison, which itself gave him no little reputation as an asset for his future career and charlatanism and notoriety-seeking he was enamored of...Indeed, people came even from the cities in Asia, sent by the Christians at their common expense, to succor and defend and encourage the hero...So if any charlatan and trickster, able to profit by occasions, comes among them, he quickly acquires sudden wealth by imposing on simple folk.121

Christians were an easy target for the racketeers of the Roman Empire.122 As they are for the hucksters of the modern eraLucians [Peregrinus] is a shysterthe first example in literature of an anything-for-profit evangelist who bilks his congregations.123 As Kannaday points out, it was not merely the widows and orphans who were easy marks for shysters like Peregrinus. Even those members of the cult who were viewed as persons of means are portrayed [in The Passing of Peregrinus] as fools who will soon be parted from their money. The bigwigs of the sect, as he calls them, come across as impul-sive, even whimsical, as they bribe guards for the privilege of sleeping inside the cell with Peregrinus. Lucians satire, therefore, leaves the impression that Christians are not so much generous as they are gullible, and not so much faithful as they are foolish.124 Hundreds of modern examples might be cited to support Lucians obser-vation about Christian bred-in-the-bone credulityfrom faith healer Ken-neth Copelands $20 million Cessna Citation bought with donor funds to Joel Osteen, known for his cotton-candy, feel-good, self-help style of peach-ing, who moved his 40,000 member church to a Houston sports arena after 121 Harmon, Lucian, V, 13-15.

...there is significant evidence to suggest that we have here a fairly accurate pic-ture of historical events. In particular the mention of widows visiting Peregrinus is striking...The visibility of widows in the story of Peregrinus will come as no sur-prise to anyone who has even the most basic knowledge of the involvement of wo-men in early Christianity. (MacDonald, Early Christian Women and Pagan Opin-ion, 74-75).

122 Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 98. 123 Hoffman, Porphyrys Against the Christians, 146. 124 Kannaday, Apologetic Discourse and the Scribal Tradition, 144-145.

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performing a $75 million renovation to the facility. As Posner noted, despite revelations of their flamboyance, secrecy about money, and apocalyptic world view...lavish spending, or bizarre policy prescriptions,125 not to men-tion continuous exposs of questionable finances, sexual scandal and outland-ish pronouncements, the carny world of Christian Armageddonism continues to be a billion dollar enterprise. In 1970, The Late Great Planet Earth, which sold something on the order of 30 million copies, suggested that Armageddon would occur one generation after the establishment of the nation of Israel. The Left Behind business, which to date has spawned sixteen novels and several low-budget moviesas well as a graphic video game in which teenagers can blow away nonbe-lievers and the army of the Antichrist on the streets of New York126has garnered an estimated 75 million customers for its books alone. The dis-pensationalist dreck dispensed by the evangelical Left Behind fantasies appro-priately includes a Catholic cardinal among the Antichrists inner circle.127 The co-author of the Left Behind nonsense, Timothy LaHaye, is a Southern Baptist preacher man, who before becoming the champion of Christian America and the apocalypse...made his living as a fortune teller.128 Among Christians in the mainstream sects, the solution to the failure of Je-sus prophesy has been to simply ignore it and all that it implies, essentially the imposition of a species of institutional senile dementia that has, most conveniently, erased the memory of Christian origins from millions of Chris-tian minds. Among evangelicals the specter of a planetary holocaust, from which they alone will be saved, is a source of selfish satisfactionto say noth-ing of the endless mercenary possibilities for the End Times business empire. After the Eurcharist, the Parousia is Christianitys most lucrative productbeing an illusion it costs nothing to manufacture and because it will never arrive costs nothing to shipand its vast earning potential has been extended indefinitely through the application of the economic theory called dispensa-tionalism. The creature of John Darby (d. 1882), who, like the apostle Paul, received his revelation after falling off a horse, dispensationalism depends on an illit-erate reading of scripture that encourages amateur Bible bricoleurs to select suggestive bits of text and cobble them together into oracular utterances only they can interpret. Darby, who believed the invention of the telegraph was a sign of impending Armageddon, invented a prophecy-generating device that 125 Posner, Gods Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters,

21, 113, 172-173. 126 Hedges, American Fascists, 186. 127 Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, 70. 128 Hedges, American Fascists, 187-188.

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any feeble-minded preacher with a grade school education could easily oper-ate. Biblical literalists from Jehovahs Witnesses to Southern Baptists assidu-ously applied themselves to the task, cranking out an endless series of failed predictions. The Jehovahs Witnesses, for example, foretold that Armageddon would occur in 1975 and when 1975 came and went with nothing specta-cular having happened membership in the cult dipped. Strangely, many Witnesses, particularly those in responsible positions, seemed to suffer from some sort of collective amnesia which caused them to act as though the year 1975 had never held any particular importance to them at all.129

It has been estimated that as many as 40 million people in the United States alone subscribe to some version of dispensationalism. To its Roman critics, who regarded Christianity as inherently irrational, an epidemic of religious psychosis, a folie plusieurs, none of this would have come as any surprise: One ought first to follow reason as a guide before accepting any belief, since anyone who believes without first testing a doctrine is certain to be deceived ...Just as the charlatans of the cults take advantage of a simpletons lack of education and lead him around by the nose, so too with the Christian teach-ers: they do not want to give or receive reasons for what they believe.130 Despite failures beyond counting of End Times predictions, there is little hope that endless disconfirmation will stop the prophecy scam in modern times any more than it did so in the first Christian centuries. Hoffman notes that the Jewish apocalyptic tradition to which Jesus belonged had been mys-tically vague, studiously mysterious regarding the timing of apocalyptic events, and concludes, Christianity did not so much invent its imprecision as use it to advantage, having mimicked the style of its Jewish prototype...the belief that unfulfilled prophecies had been misread prophecies, provided some consolation to the beleaguered community.131 However, I suspect that the evangelical fascination with End Times whacka-doodle springs from a darker needDarbys End Times head-trip was a nihilistic vision expressive of the modern death wish. Christians imagined the final extinction of modern society in obsessive detail, yearning morbidly to-ward it...Premillennialism was a fantasy of revenge: the elect imagined them-selves gazing down upon the sufferings of those who had jeered at their be-liefs, ignored, ridiculed, and marginalized their faith, and now, too late, realized their error...the reality it purports to present is cruel, divisive, and tragic.132 As one of the most effective modern critics of Christianity noted, Religion looks forward to the destruction of the world. By this I do not 129 Penton, Apocalypse Delayed: The Story of Jehovahs Witnesses, 99-100. 130 Hoffman, Celsus on the True Doctrine, 54. 131 Hoffman, Porphyrys Against the Christians, 136-137. 132 Armstrong, The Battle for God, 138-139.

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mean looks forward in the purely eschatological sense of anticipating the end. I mean, rather, that it openly or covertly wishes that end to occur.133 Like the Christians who gloated over the destruction of Jerusalem and inter-preted it as retribution for the Jewish rejection of Jesus, evangelicals itch to see the secular world that dismisses their literalist belief go down in a sea of flame. The fast approaching Kingdom turned out to be a mirage. As believers ima-gined themselves steadily approaching it, the Kingdom steadily receded, leav-ing them to die, one by one, generation after generation, forever. Events proved Jesus to be a false prophet and Paul a peddler of delusionBehold, I tell you a mystery!134 could be amended to Behold, I tell you a lie! Apo-calypticism, the bedrock of Christianitys original theology, is a laughable piece of Levantine folklore.

Christianity is a Jewish heresy. The Jesus of primitive tradition cares not a whit for GentilesGo nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go instead to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. As you go, proclaim the good news: the kingdom of heaven is almost here.135 Jesus traveled through the small, often anonymous towns of Galilee, seemingly avoiding the major cities. Citizens of Sepphoris, Tiberius, the coastal plain and the Decapolis heard none of his sermons. When Jesus did enter the territory of cities in the Decapolis, he re-mained outside the walls (Mk 5:1; 7:31; 8:27).136 Jesus preaching reflects the village137Jesus parables accordingly speak of sowers and fields,138 shep-herds and flocks,139 and birds and flowers.140 Before his fateful trip to Jeru-salem, it appears Jesus had little to do with any major city. Jesus attitude reflected the history of the region, in particular the aftermath of the Maccabean revolt (167-160 B.C.E.), the first religious war in the his-tory of humankind from which the Jewish nation that emerged was self- 133 Hitchens, god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, 56. 134 1 Corinthians 15:51. 135 Matthew 10:5-7. 136 Jeffers, The Greco-Roman World of the New Testament Era, 67. 137 Ldemann, Heretics, 63. 138 Mark 4:3-8. 139 Mark 6:34. 140 Matthew 6:26-28.

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conscious and intolerant towards all Gentiles whether friendly or unfriend-ly.141 Romans regarded the Jews as a people who were true only to each other[they were] regarded as misanthropesby the vast majority of Ro-mans, and they had a long history of conflict with the authorities in Rome,142 a simmering animosity that exploded into a series of disastrous wars in 66 C.E. Writing to Jewish believers in Rome, Paul said, The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you,143 possibly in reference to such bias. The dogma of a chosen people, while at least impli-cit in most faiths, achieved a stridence in Judaism that was unknown in the ancient world. Among cultures that worshipped a plurality of Gods, the later monotheism of the Jews proved indigestible.144 Despite occasional encounters with Gentiles, Jesus attitude toward them appears to have been openly antagonistic. Jesus refers to Gentiles as dogshe tells the Canaanite woman whose daughter he eventually heals, It is not right to take the childrens bread and throw it to the curs.145 Some commen-tators have interpreted Jesus use of kunarion (kunarion), the diminutive of kuwn (kun), dog, as ironic or even affectionate,146 but as corrected by Grant, the diminutive form rather expresses contempt and distaste.147 Jesus intend-ed to draw the strongest possible distinction between the Jews, to whom alone he has been sentI was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel 148 and the Gentile mongrelsDo not give what is holy to dogs149which he generally avoids.150 The Jesus movement...did not show any inclination to reach out to Gentiles. The life of Jesus and the history of the Jerusalem church illustrate this.151 It is quite clear from the hesitations of the Apostles in the first chapters of Acts that there was a firm tradition that Jesus had not ordered a mission to the Gentiles.152 Jews even regarded the Samaritans, who claimed descent from the Israelite tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, as racially impure on the grounds that the Samaritans had inter-married with heathen peoples.153 Outside the archipelago of fundamentalist 141 Frend, The Rise of Christianity, 17. 142 Benko, Pagan Rome and the Early Christians, 16-19. 143 Romans 2:24. 144 Harris, The End of Faith, 93. 145 Mark 7:27. 146 Connolly, New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity, 158. 147 Grant, Jesus, 122. 148 Matthew 15:24. Compare Matthew 23:37: Jerusalem, Jerusalemhow often I wanted to gather

your children together 149 Matthew 7:6. 150 Matthew 10:5. 151 Ldemann, Paul, 221. 152 Lane Fox, The Unauthorized Version, 285. 153 Frend, The Rise of Christianity, 18.

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Bible colleges this understanding of Jesus mission has now become common: There is no evidence whatsoever, apart from the tendentious writings of the later church, that Jesus ever conceived of himself as anything other than a Jew among Jews, seeking the fulfillment of Judaismand, likely, the return of Jewish sovereignty in a Roman world.154 Christian scholarship long ago parted company from the Jewish Jesus, estab-lishing a self-conscious Christian tradition that deliberately distanced itself from the historical Jewish context in which Jesus had lived and died...[Chris-tians] had to explain to themselves, to potential converts, and, should they be so challenged, to skeptical Jews, how it was that the Jewish understanding of Jewish history and religion was false, and why those who had heard this Christian revelation most directlyJesus Jewish audience in Palestineshould have so completely failed to receive it.155 Nevertheless, Christianity could never have spread into the Greco-Roman world without the interna-tionally distributed Jewish enclavesthe Dispersion communities were the magnet which drew [Christian missionaries] beyond the boundaries of Pales-tine.156 As late as the end of the 1st century the Christian communities were still conceived in terms of the Jewish DiasporaJames, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes which are of the Dispersion, greeting.157 The theological divorce between Jews and Christians has translated into real- world horror on numerous occasions but never more so than in Germany in the 1930s in the setting of die Endlsung der Judenfrage, the The Final Solu-tion to the Jewish Question. Gerhard Kittel, the editor of the Theologisches Wrterbuch zum Neuen Testament, the German work translated into English as the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, a work much admired by many scholars,

...produced a body of work between 1933 and 1944 filled with hatred and slander towards Jews and warmly supportive of National Socialist anti-Jewish policies...Kittel admits he was a good Nazi. He had not joined the Party under pressure or for pragmatic reasons; rather he thought, as did countless people in Germany, that the Nazi pheno-menon was a vlkisch renewal movement on a Christian, moral foun-dation...[Kittel] set German, Christian, social and vlkisch unity against the Enlightenment, modern secularism and liberal democracy ...Some scholars, e.g., the liberal theologian, Adolf von Harnack, had maintained that Christianity was totally unique from Judaism and

154 Harris, The End of Faith, 94. 155 Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ, vii, 211. 156 Frend, The Rise of Christianity, 43. 157 James 1:1.

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that the Old Testament should be removed from the Bible...the con-clusion he reached coincided with the antisemitic prejudice that Juda-ism was necessarily inferior and unworthy to be considered the source of Christianity...The clinching assurance for [Emanuel] Hirsch in his encouragement of a Volks church was his conviction that Hitler was a heaven-sent Christian leader...[Kittel] created a theological founda-tion for Nazi oppression of Jews, yet he somehow was able to recon-cile his work with his Christian and academic values...Kittel, Althaus and Hirsch were not isolated or eccentric individuals...These three theologians saw themselves and were seen by others as genuine Chris-tians acting upon genuine Christian impulses.158

In his magisterial work on the Catholic origins of anti-Semitism, Carroll re-marks on the depth of Christianitys antipathy: Without this strain in Eu-ropes past [the Crusades, the Inquisition...the intermingling of antimodern-ism and antisemitism] a fascist movement organized around Jew hatred, would not have occurred...[Hitler] was a much a creature of the racist, secu-lar, colonizing empire builder who preceded him on the world stage as he was of the religion into which he was born, and which he parodied. But in truth, the racist colonizers, before advancing behind the standards of nations and companies, had marched behind the cross...However modern Nazism was, it planted its roots in the soil of age-old Church attitudes and a nearly unbro-ken chain of Church-sponsored acts of Jew hatred. However pagan Nazism was, it drew its sustenance from groundwater poisoned by the Churchs most solemnly held ideologyits theology.159 Paul, heretic and founder of Christianity. In Antioch Paul and Barnabas preached in the synagogue to Jews, descend-ants of Abrahams race, and God fearing proselytes to whom the word of salvation had been sent. The next Sabbath they appeared again to address the Jews and [God] fearing proselytes160 but met resistance that culminated in a shocking announcement.

The coming Sabbath nearly the entire city assembled to hear the word of the Lord, but when the Jews saw the crowds they were filled with rivalry and they began to speak out against what Paul was say-ing, blaspheming.

158 Ericksen, Theologians Under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch, 30, 31, 35, 50, 148, 198-199.

159 Carroll, Constantines Sword: The Church and the Jews, 475-476. 160 [God] fearing proselytesebomenoj proshlutojis a fixed expression for Gen-

tiles converted to Judaism.

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Speaking freely, Paul and Barnabas said, It was compulsory that the word of God be spoken first to you. Seeing that you have cast it aside and do not judge yourselves worthy of everlasting life, listen! We turn to the Gentiles! For the Lord has commanded us as follows: I have placed you as a light to the Gentiles to spread salvation to the ends of the earth.161 When the Gentiles heard this they began to celebrate and praise the word of the Lord and as many as were destined for everlasting life be-lieved. The word of the Lord spread throughout the region, but the Jews incited the devout women of noble rank and the principle men of the city and stirred up trouble for Paul and Barnabas and drove them out of the [city] limits. So they shook the dust off their feet [as a curse] against them and left for Iconium and the disciples were fill-ed with joy and holy spirit.162

Lukethe true identity of the gospel writers was a matter of conjecture even in the 2nd century, but following convention well call the author Lukethe only Gentile author among the gospel writers,163 composed Luke-Acts, the first, and greatest, of Christian apologies to be addressed to highly placed pagans,164 sometime after 80 C.E. Luke-Acts pretends that the mission to the Gentiles resulted from a divine revelation. In the coastal town of Caesarea lived a certain Cornelius, a centurion, a devout man who feared God. An angel instructed Cornelius to summon Peter who by happy coincidence fell into an ecstatic trance and saw a vision of unclean animals he was command-ed to kill and eat. While still pondering the meaning of the vision, the spirit told Peter that men were asking for him at the gate. Peter, invited to the home of an unclean Gentile, concluded, In truth I am convinced that God is not one who judges by appearances. With the conversion of Corne-lius and his household, the faithful of the circumcision who accompanied Peter were amazedthat the gift of the holy spirit had been poured out on the Gentiles.165 One who judges by appearances more or less captures the sense of prosw-polhmpthj (prospolmpts)one who receives [an impression] by the face but the notion that the God of Israel didnt judge people by appearances would have been news to Jesus who, in addition to being circumcised,166

161 Isaiah 49:6. The context reveals that the restoration of Israel is being predicted (Isaiah 49:5-7). 162 Acts 13:26, 43, 44-52. 163 Pagels, The Origen of Satan, 89. 164 Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, 430. 165 Acts 10:1-6, 9-17, 34, 45. 166 Luke 2:21.

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wore magical tassels that healed those who touched them,167 tassels (tycyc, tsitsith) that all pious Jews wore in obedience to the law of Moses.168 Longer tassels were the mark of greater holiness.169 Strict observance of the Torah also forbid the cutting of the forelocks or corners (twap peot), the hair growing in front of the ears.170 Jews were obviously meant to be different in appearance from Gentiles, sanctification by segregation.171 The questionable history of Acts aside, it is clear from the letters of Paul, the missionary-in-chief to the Gentiles, that inclusion of non-Jews provoked a strong reaction from the leadership in Jerusalem. (The letters of Paul, who was executed in Rome around 64 C.E., predate the gospel accounts written after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. The gospels read the results of the war back into the preaching of Jesus by having him predict the war as a judg-ment on the Jews.)172 Pauls push back is particularly notable in his letter to the Galatians, a cir-cular letter to churches in Asia Minor. Paulan apostle neither from men or by men, but from Jesus Christ and God the father173confronts the house churches that were breaking ranks and changing sides to a different gospel and pronounces a curse on his competitorsagain I say, if someone preaches a gospel to you different from what you received, a curse on him!174 The opposition to Paul comes not from pagan Romans, but from fellow Jews as the context of the letter makes clear,175 false brothers,176 who have turned against Paul due to the machinations of the so-called pillars (oi dokountej stuloi)177 of the Jerusalem church, Peter, James and John. Paul reveals that after a delegationcertain peoplecame from James, the brother of Je-sus,178 in Jerusalem, Peter stopped eating with the Gentile Christians due to fear of those of the circumcision and even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy.179 167 Mark 6:56; Matthew 9:20-21; Luke 8:44. 168 Numbers 15:37-41. 169 Matthew 23:5. 170 Leviticus 19:27. 171 Ldemann, Heretics: The Other Side of Early Christianity, 65. 172 Luke 20:20-21, for example. 173 Galatians 1:1. 174 Galatians 1:6, 8, 9. 175 Galatians 4:10; 6:12. 176 Galatians 2:4. 177 Galatians 2:9. The verb dokew (doke), to seem, carries strong implications of an appearance bas-

ed on opinion, pretense, or conjecture. 178 Mark 6:3. 179 Galatians 2:9, 11-12.

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Pauls rejection of the Jerusalem leadership was absolutewe at no time ac-ceded to a subordinate position in order that the truth of the gospel might always endure among you. From those so-called [pillars]whatever they were means nothing to meGod does not judge by human appearances (pro-swpon o qeoj anqrwpou ou lambanei). The so-called [pillars] contributed noth-ing to me!180 Not only does Paul have no intention of knuckling under to the notables from Jerusalem, he follows up with a scandalous claim:

Listen! I, Paul, am telling you that if you let yourselves be circumcis-ed, Christ will be of no benefit to you! Yet again I call every man who submits to circumcision to witness that he is obliged to perform the whole Law. You have been cut off from Christ! Whoever is justified by law, you have fallen from grace!181

As other references from his letters make clear, Paul rejects circumcision as a sign of election.182 His rejection of the rites and rituals of Judaism as a means of salvation for Gentiles is absolute:

Watch out for the dogs (touj kunaj)! Watch out for the evil workmen! Watch out for the mutilation (thn katatomhn)! For we are the circum-cision (h peritomh), we who serve in the spirit of God and boast in Christ Jesus and do not rely on the fleshalthough I also have reason to rely on the flesh. If anyone else is confident in the flesh, I am much more so: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew [born] of Hebrews, a Pharisee in regards to the Law, a zealous persecutor of the church, as for righteousness according to the Law, blamelessI have lost everything and I regard it as filth (hgoumai skubala)183 so I may gain Christ!184

In Pauls mind the reversal is completethe immediacy of prophetic cha-risma functions to neutralize traditional canons of authority.185 Circum-cision has become mutilationreal circumcision occurs through the spirits effect on the heart.186 The dogs are no longer unclean Gentiles but the evil workmen who insist on imposing Jewish ritual on Pauls Gentile house.187 180 Galatians 2:5-6. 181 Galatians 5:2-4. 182 Romans 3:30; 1 Corinthians 7:19; Galatians 5:6. 183 The term skubalon (skubalon), means dung, manure, offal. It would barely be an

exaggeration to translate it as shit. 184 Philippians 3:2-9. 185 Gager, Kingdom and Community, 30. 186 Romans 2:29. 187 1 Corinthians 3:9-17.

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This vision clearly contradicts the Jesus of the gospels: Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.188 Indeed, Jesus tells a rich man he must keep the Law to gain eternal life189If the same person approached Paul with the same question twenty years later, what would he have said? Would he have told him to keep the Law? His own writings give a clear answer: decidedly not (cf. Rom. 3:10; Gal. 2:15-16).190 Indeed, Pauls relationship to Jesus has provoked frequent comment. As Frend notes, Paul made no recorded attempt to explain Jesus teaching, to prove from his words and deeds that he was the Messiah...he made no refer-ence to the virgin birth, the miracles, or any salient incident in Jesus minis-try...The Lord Christ, the God-man to be known by faith, replaced the pro-phet from Nazareth experienced by the disciples. [Paul] was not the man to feel compassion for crowds. In some ways, even his sense of the elite prepared the way for a Gnostic system of salvation...Paul was a apocalypticist, believing that the end was rapidly approaching. He imagined himself carrying the gos-pel as one of the messengers promised for the end times.191 Pauls inconsistency regarding the Mosaic law did not escape the notice of his Roman detractorseven though he called circumcision mutilation,192 he nevertheless circumcised a certain man named Timothy, as the Acts of the Apostles193 instructs us...And as if to press the point and make it an offense for anyone to heed the law he says, Those under the law are under a curse. The same man who writes, The law is spiritual194 to the Romans, and The law is holy and the commandment holy and just195 now puts a curse196 upon those who obey what is holy!197 Celsus could argue that Christianity was patently false because, contrary to its own claims, it had deserted Jewish ways. Christians may have claimed to have the correct interpretation of the Jewish Scriptures, but on those points which were clearly set forth in the Scriptures such as circumcision and keeping of the Sabbath, the festivals, and the food lawsChristians wantonly disregarded the meaning of the very books 188 Matthew 5:19, NIV. 189 Matthew 19:17. 190 Ehrman, Lost Christianities, 99. 191 Frend, The Rise of Christianity, 92-93, 97. 192 Galatians 5:12; Philippians 3:2. 193 Acts 16:3. 194 Romans 7:14. 195 Romans 7:12. 196 Galatians 3:10. 197 Hoffman, Porphyrys Against the Christians, 58, 62.

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they claimed as their own...Christianitys claimed relation to Judaism was perceived as one of its most vulnerable points.198 Julian certainly did not miss pointing out that the Christians were double apostates: Why is it that you do not abide even by the traditions of the Hebrews or accept the law which God has given to them? Nay, you have forsaken their teachings even more than ours, abandoning the religion of your forefathers and giving your-selves over to the predictions of the prophets.199 Oddly enough, Jesus had nothing incisive to say about the cutting issue of circumcising of Gentiles: He never had to. His mission did not extend to Gentiles.200

The whitewashing tendencies of Acts aside, it is apparent from Pauls letters to his house churches that he did not go unchallenged by the Jerusalem dogs who preached mutilation. Pauls followers are being seduced by another Je-susa different spirita different gospel preached by crackerjack apos-tles.201 Such men are false apostles, treacherous workers, disguised as apos-tles of Christ. In case there is the slightest doubt about just who these minions of Satan are, Paul asks, Are they Hebrews? So am I! Are they Israel-ites? So am I! Are they the seed of Abraham? So am I! Are they ministers of Christ? I speak like a man derangedI am even more so!202 For the Aramaic-speaking community which remained in Jerusalem, the Torah was still valid. Anyone who was baptized in the name of Jesuswhether Jew or Gentilewas not free to dispense with the law.203 Theologi-cal merits aside, the circumstances of history were to seal the fate of the Jeru-salem faction. Around the year 62 C.E. a mob inspired by the Jewish authori-ties murdered Jesus brother James. The Christian historian Eusebius, writing many years after the fact, described James as having been entrusted with the throne of the bishop (o thj episkophj qronoj) in Jerusalem204Eusebius his-tory seeks to validate the hierarchical organization of a later age by superim-posing it artificially on the early Jesus movement. Earliest Christianity con-sisted in a loosely associated collection of local assemblies that were each sociologically marginal and powerless...leadership in the assembly is clearly both local rather than general and intimately connected to the structure of the household.205 198 Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 116-117. 199 Wright, Against the Galileans, The Works of the Emperor Julian, III, 389. 200 Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ, 107. 201 2 Corinthians 11:4-5. 202 2 Corinthians 11:13-14, 22-23. 203 Ldemann, Heretics, 40. 204 Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History II, 23. 205 Johnson, Among the Gentiles, 234-235.

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A war added destruction and chaos to the loss of leadership in the mother church when, in C.E. 67, Vespasian invaded Galilee in response to a Jewish revolt. Roman troops entered Judea in 68 C.E. and sacked and burned Jeru-salem two years later. While the Romans slaughtered, enslaved and scattered Jews in Christianitys homeland, the new cult, profoundly changed in char-acter, progressed apace among Gentiles. As a lasting result in this change in fortunes the New Testament canon, formed in the 3rd and 4th centuries, over-represented the importance of Paul among his 1st century rivalsbecause he figures so prominently in the New Testament, Pauls significance in early Christian history has tended to be grossly overrated.206 Significantly it was in Antioch following Pauls arrival that the disciples were first called Christians207in short, a Jewish faction that followed Pauls Christ just as some identified themselves by allegiance to particular preachers as mentioned by Paul himself: What I mean is this: One of you says, I fol-low Paul; another, I follow Apollos; another, I follow Cephas; still an-other, I follow Christ.208 Antioch, a city infamous for its sense of humor, did not mean Christian as a complimentit was the Antiochenes who dub-bed the followers of Christ Christians or Christ-groupies.209 Seen from the standpoint of the founding family in Jerusalem, defeated as much by demographics and the vicissitudes o