Part I
The Christian Church emerged from Judaism slowly, over the
course of decades.
At the earliest moment we are able to distinguish Christians
from Jews, Christians had already laid the foundation and were building their “New
Jerusalem” on a shifting system of syncretic beliefs.
The term syncretism
[i]
is controversial among Christian Scholars, and believers.
I do not use the term syncretism lightly.
It is a term ripe with negative connotations among
Christians scholars, and the studied faithful. It connotes, compromise, impurity,
heresy.
It is still the mission of Christian apologists, even in the
21st century, to insist that in the Christian witness, the “New
Testament,” the writings of the Apostles, and of the apostolic age, something
fundamentally new, distinct, and unique was being communicated to the world.
There were some among the people I studied with who would
even deny that the teachings of the Church grew out of the historical Judaism.
Rather than accept the historical correlates between Christian and Jewish
traditions after the common era, they insisted that the “Holy Spirit” gave the
Church a new, complete, and perfect systems of belief, with no antecedent in
the cultural repository of the Hebrew people, and that any similarities a
person might think that they are be able to discern between the two traditions are
merely coincidental.
For these scholars, the revelation of Christianity to the
world is a divine dispensation. It does not emerge from the Jewish tradition,
but corrects it.
For instance, even at the time of Christ the Jewish people
had a ritual of “purification by water” for those seeking to convert to the
Jewish faith, but these Christian apologists would insist that such rituals
bore no relationship whatsoever to the baptism offered by John, in the river
Jordan, or the later traditions of baptism practiced among the first generation
of Apostles.
They would suggest that the Jewish ritual of water purification
merely foreshadowed the dispensation of the Sacrament of Baptism. They would
suggest that the Sacrament of Baptism did not emerge from the Jewish ritual,
but that the Jewish ritual anticipated the coming dispensation.
While it is true that these traditions were significantly
different in practice, the basic premise, that water is a vehicle for ritual
purification is at the core of each. Furthermore, the Jewish ritual was a prominent
feature of spiritual praxis among the sect of Jews known as the Essenes, who
lived in a proto-monastic community, in the desert at Qumran, a community which
is strongly identified with both John the Baptist, and Jesus of Nazareth.
It requires a profound act of denial, has always required a
profound ability to deny reality, to overlook these facts, and claim that
despite these facts the Church in its use of baptism brought something new to
the world, a brand-new creation, a-historical and perfect.
Christian apologists in any age might believe that this is a
qualitatively more “faithful” position to take.
They are wrong.
It is not.
Faith in the witness of the Church can never be predicated on
lies, irrationality, or absurdities.
Part II
The Christian Church is a syncretic institution; borrowing
language and thought systems, rituals and organization, from every culture it
encounters. From the time that Jesus was crucified, to the drafting of Saint Paul’s
first letter, the Church was adapting, changing, learning to communicate to an
ever-widening audience, synthesizing their diverse beliefs and values, as if
they were pulling together thousands of individual threads to form a single
piece of cloth.
Good scholarship cannot view this as a negative, because it
is true.
Recognition of the truth and abandoning what is false, this
is a pillar of the faith.
The Christian Church, emerging as it did from the traditions
of the Pharisaic Judaism, is the first great syncretic system of beliefs
This is not a negative commentary.
There is nothing pejorative in these statements of fact. It
is merely a statement of what is, the inevitable result of inter-cultural
dialogue.
[ii]
The Church has handled our natural inclination toward
syncretism and synthesis with caution and diligence, too much, always acting to
filter our syncretic tendencies, to manage them, to mitigate them, seeking to include
and affirm outside ideas only in the narrow light of orthodoxy.
This always involves considerable mental gymnastics, for
instance, in the Church’s desire to incorporate the writings of the Hellenistic
philosophers, such as; Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, into its cannon, the church
felt compelled to find in the writing a prefiguring of the coming of Jesus. They
found a way to say that, while the great philosophers were not Christians, they
were nevertheless visited by the Holy Spirit and given a vision of the coming
of Christ, thereby legitimating their work, allowing for its use as a tool in
the construction of a Hellenic/Christian world-view.
The record of the Church on this score is one of mixed
success, marked by a constant application of effort. Depending on who you talk
with, you will get a different idea of how much and to what extent the
Christian tradition has syncretized itself with other traditions.
The truth is this; the Christian narrative is one of
continuous syncretization, from the myth of the Virgin Birth, to the Saint
Constantine’s vision of the Chi-rho at
the battle of the Milvian Bridge…and beyond.
There is little that differentiates the customs and rituals of
the Christian tradition, after its transformation into the Imperial Church from
the traditions of the Indo-European culture that gave birth to it.
At the beginning of the Christian movement, Jews looked at
Christians in their own community as people who were guilty of syncretizing
their tradition with the customs of the broader Greco-Roman world.
In the time of Christ, the Sadducees (the most traditional
sect of Jews in Judea, in the 1
st century) would have named any Jew
who held a belief in angels or the resurrection of the dead, a syncretizer.
[iii]
The chief proponents of such doctrines at that were the Pharisees, a sect to
which both Jesus of Nazareth, his disciples, and Saint Paul belonged.
In the first century of the common era, Saint Paul is
credited with forming most of the Christine communities outside of Judea, his
writings, being the earliest in the Christian cannon, formed the core of what
became Christian doctrine. From the perspective of traditional Judaism Saint
Paul was synthesizing a new religious tradition, not from their own tradition, but
from a corrupt and syncretic system of beliefs popular throughout the Ancient
Near East and broader Greco-Roman world.
Part III
By the Late Fourth century, when Saint Jerome issued his
famous question, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” he was looking back on
350 years of Christian syncretization with the categories of Hellenistic
philosophy, and calling the Church out for what he perceived to be its failing
in this regard, criticizing it, and admonishing it, calling it back to what he
believed was its true locus, the Jewish faith of 1st century CE.
Saint Jerome was mistaken.
There was no pure form of Christianity true to its Jewish
antecedents. The movement to syncretize
the Jewish, and then the Christian tradition with the work of Socrates, Plato,
Aristotle and others began at the beginning. It was contemporaneous with the
ministry of Jesus. This movement had its finest, most articulate pre-Christian
proponent in the person of Philo of Alexandria, in many way, the Christian
movement was an extension of Philo’s work.
Philo, a contemporary of Jesus, developed a scheme by which
he demonstrated that the figure of Wisdom in the Jewish cannon was analogous to
the Word or “rational soul” of Hellenistic philosophy.
[iv]
In the New Testament, Jesus is depicted as being both Wisdom
and Word. Philo shared the Stoic and Platonic view that all rational beings
share in a part of the “rational soul.”
[v]
In the cannon of Hellenic philosophy, this teaching goes back to Socrates, and
Pythagoras.
In the first century of the common era, just after the death
of Jesus, after Saint Paul had written his letters and was martyred, but while
the books of the Gospel were still being written, the Stoic philosopher turned
Christian, Saint Justin the Martyr developed his theology of the Spermatikos Logos.
Saint Justin carried on the work of Philo and the Stoics. He
described a system in which Jesus was identified as the Word of God, as the
complete and perfect Word. He taught that the Word of God was disseminated into
every rational creature. He taught that the principle that we are crated in the
Divine Image was this, that each of us bears within us a seed of the Word, and
that this seed is the house of reason, and rationality.
Saint Justin syncretized the work of his predecessors with
the teaching and traditions of the Church, utilizing the Hellenistic
philosophical categories to augment the emerging narrative of sin, the fall,
and redemption through the death of Jesus into his schema.
Saint Justin taught, that as rational beings we share not
only a similarity to, but in the actual being of God, the creator of the
universe. And that despite this fact, nevertheless, sin has corrupted our
nature, and cut us off from God who is the source of our being, and therby sin
has limited the full development of our potential.
Saint Justin taught that despite our vitiated nature, the
seed of the word endures in us, like a seed that lies dormant. People are still
able to live rationally, and come into the knowledge truth, but it is a
difficult and uncertain process.
Through the categories of Hellenistic philosophy Saint
Justin established the foundation of sacramental theology. He taught that we
encounter Jesus (The Word) through the sacraments in a mysterious way that activates
our true nature.
Like a dormant seed, made to germinate, we are enlivened by
the Holy Spirit.
In this way, Saint Justin Christianized those categories of
Hellenistic philosophy, while simultaneously Hellenizing the narrative of the
early Church.
This is synthesis, it is syncretization.
Part IV
In the span of years that passed between the lifetimes of Saints
Justin and Jerome several Christian theologians rose to positions of prominence
through their mastery of Hellenistic philosophy, such as Origin, and Saint
Irenaeus of Lyons.
These philosophical systems were used with remarkable effect
to fend of rival interpretations of Christianity, loosely referred to as
“Gnostic,” and thereby to set standards for what must be considered orthodox,
and normative. Saint Irenaeus was the greatest champion of these efforts.
The Gnostic interpretations of Christianity he struggled
with, were themselves the product of a different trend in the ongoing process
of Christian syncretization with the broader Hellenistic and Near Eastern world,
such as the so-called “mystery traditions” and the traditions at the root of
the Hebrew Qabalah.
To put it simply:
What prevailed as Orthodox and Catholic Christianity
syncretized itself according to the mainstream schools of Greek philosophy.
What was condemned as Gnostic and Heterodox, either took the
categories of Hellenic philosophy too far, which was a problem with the popular
work of Origin, or they were syncretized in the direction of the Greco-Roman
and Persian mystery cults.
While these were the main dividing lines in the Church in
that era, every faction influenced every other faction. These thought systems
were living traditions of belief. They were dynamic and evolving.
There was a push and a pull, what emerged from the dialog
was a compromise, and as with all compromise, it did not fully satisfy anyone.
Hellenistic Philosophy was used by Christians to defend
itself from heterodox interpretations of its tradition. They were also used to provide
a rational explanation of the Christian movement to the Roman Empire.
Christians adopted the prevalent language and thought system
of their day in order to demonstrate that neither Christianity nor Christians themselves
posed a threat to the stability of society. Such was the motive behind Saint
Justin’s 1st & 2nd
Apologies.
In this way, the Church was protected and preserved through
its syncretic use of the categories Hellenistic philosophy, even as it was
transformed by them.
By the time of Saint Jerome, the Christian Church had so
completely identified itself with the categories of Hellenistic philosophy that
those categories precipitated major conflict in the Church over the use of
single words, such as homoousious vs.
homoiousious or Theotokos vs.
Christotokos, which were at the epicenter of the Arian and Nestorian schism.
These conflicts led to centuries of bloody warfare, and the
breaches in the unity of the Church never healed.
Part V
In the time of Saint Jerome, the Christian tradition had
crossed the threshold of its second major syncretic transformation. This was
not a theological, or a philosophical transformation. This was not a liturgical
or ritual transformation, though it should be noted that syncretic
transformations in each of those spheres was ongoing and continuous.
The second great syncretic movement was the transformation
of the Church, founded on the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, into the imperial
Church of the Roman Empire.
When Saint Constantine, the first Christian emperor achieved
his decisive victory over the armies of his enemies in his quest for control of
the Roman Empire, he did it in the name of Jesus Christ, and what it meant to
live the Christian life was changed forever.
The battle of the Milvian Bridge (28 October, 312 CE) was an
epoch defining event.
The transformation of the Church, from the Church of Jesus,
to the Church of Rome was not sudden. The emperor, Saint Constantine did not
snap his fingers and make it so. It had been happening slowly over the course
of generations, and centuries.
Since the time of Jesus, from one generation to the next the
changes were gradual. From the beginning of the 1st century in the
common era, to the beginning of the 4th century the change was also extreme.
Jesus of Nazareth, murdered by the Romans, executed for
treason and sedition, murdered for preaching on the necessity of love, and
mercy, and justice, became Jesus the Christ, a godling who brings victory in
battle, and the cornerstone of the imperial government.
After the conversion of the Church, the range of vocations
that qualified as “Christian” had drastically expanded. The act of filling
these new roles: Christian emperor, Christian consul, Christian governor and
Christian warrior is what constituted the new phase of syncretization in the
Christian tradition according to the cultural norms of imperial society.
Bishops went from being the shepherds of a persecuted
minority to being judges wielding authority in ecclesiastical courts, responsible
for the prosecution of heresy, holding lands and titles, levying taxes and
raising armies.
Bishops and priests went from being promoted by the members
of their own community, to being appointed by the state.
Part VI
The conversion of Saint Constantine and the mythology
associated with it, provide an excellent example of the syncretic process at
work on a symbolic level, between the state and the church.
In Constantine’s conversion narrative we are able to see the
complete synthesis of a religious tradition, Christianity, founded on the story
of the life and death of a Hebrew prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, with that of the
good old time Indo-European religion, with their pantheon of deities, and their
cults of sacrifice.
Prior to Saint Constantine’s conversion to Christianity,
even on the eve of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, Constantine was not yet a
Christian. He was an adherent of the Celtic cult of Sol Invictus, which was
itself a syncretic variant of the Romano-Persian cult of Mithras Invictus,
Zoroastrianism.
This so-called “mystery-cult,” the cult of Mithras-Sol
Invictus was the most prominent religious tradition among the officers and ranks
of the Roman armies. At the beginning of 4th century, roughly thirty
percent of Roman citizens had some affiliation with it, approximately
equivalent to the number of Christians living in the empire at the time.
On the eve of the battle that brought him his decisive
victory, Saint Constantine purportedly had a vision, revealing to him that he
would conquer under the sign of Christ, and so he ordered his soldiers to paint
the sign of Christ, the Chi-Rho on their shields, and he was in fact victorious.
This event became the justification for transforming the
Christian religion into the official religion of the Roman Empire.
Some might like to view Saint Constantine’s conversion as a
radical transformation, but it is a murky matter.
This was not divine intervention.
The soon to be emperor made a political calculation.
Saint Constantine’s opponents had seen the burgeoning Church
as a threat to themselves and the imperial government. They saw the suppression
of the Church as their path to victory, and control.
They were wrong.
Saint Constantine saw the balance of power tipping in favor
of the Christians, he saw their strength in urban centers throughout the
empire, he witnessed and acknowledged their ownership and control of various
systems of social welfare, the most important of which was the grain dole. He
courted their favor and threw in with the Christians.
Not only did the Christians come out for him at the battle
of the Milvian Bridge, opening the gates of the city for his soldiers, bearing
the mark of Chi-Rho on their shields. When the battle was over they exercised
their influence in their communities through the empire, backing the new
emperor, allowing him to consolidate control.
Beyond the political calculation that Saint Constantine
made, it was insightful, his conversion to Christianity was not that
remarkable.
[vi]
It must be noted that, in the first three centuries of the common
era, there had been an affinity between Christians and members of the cults of
Mithras-Sol Invictus.
This affinity went beyond a basic philosophical agreement
about the nature of reality, good versus evil, salvation and redemption, Christians
and the members of these cults shared seach other’s worship spaces and participated
in each other’s liturgies.
[vii]
There is evidence that some groups of Sol/Mithraites
identified Jesus as Mithras or Sol, seeing the Invictus (the unconquered son)
in the risen Christ, believing that they were the same entity.
Given this context, it must be note that even though Saint
Constantine gave credit for his decisive victory to Christ, when he was crowned
emperor, the coins that were struck to commemorate the event bore his countenance
with the inscription Sol Invictus.
This is an example of Saint Constantine’s
self-identification with Sol, the Celtic solar deity. His simultaneous embrace
of the Christian Church indicates that he also identified Mithras-Sol Invictus
with Christ, and we must allow for the probability that Saint Constantine
confused himself with Christ as well.
In Saint Constantine’s mind, he was an incarnation of Sol,
of Mithra, of Christ. He took their birthday as his own, December 25th.
He saw himself as the second coming of Christ, as the Invictus, the Unconquered
Son.
Saint Eusebius was the chronicler of Saint Constantine’s
life, as well as the dramatic transformation of the Church during the emperor’s
reign, including the first plenary council of the Church at Nicea c. 318 CE.
Saint Eusebius hails the rise of Saint Constantine, and explicitly
depicts the transformation of the Christian Church, into the state of Christendom
that became the Holy Roman Empire, as the coming of the kingdom of God on
earth, as a moment of eschatological triumph for the Church.
[viii]
Saint Eusebius interpreted the events of Saint Constantine’s
life this way, either because he genuinely believed it to be true, or to
flatter his emperor. It does not matter which it was. It is consistent with the
thinking Saint Eusebius’ expresses, to see Saint Constantine in the role of
Christ! For Saint Eusebius, the emperor is the Messiah, returning to usher in
the New Age.
Like other Caesars before him, the syncretic transformation
of Saint Constantine the emperor, into an allegory of Christ Invictus, represents
deification, uniting the ancient imperial pantheon of the state with the new
religion institution of the Christian Church. In that moment the new synthesis
of Church and State was both symbolically complete, and complete in reality.
This is a seminal event, in it the pattern of syncretization
changes.
The growth and spread of the Church is now modulated in
accordance with the reality that it has become an apparatus of imperial
government.
The Pontifex Rex, an ancient title and station, once held by
the head of the Imperial Pantheon, and since the time of Julius Caesar, held by
the reigning emperor, was a title now given to the Bishop of Rome, the Pope,
the Papa, and the synthesis was complete.
[ii]
David Krieger,
The New Universalism,
Foundations
for a Global Theology, The Faith Meets Faith Series,
An Orbis Series in Interreligious Dialogue, General Editor Paul
Knitter (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1991), 20.
[iii]
Justo Gonzalez,
The Story of Christianity,
The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation, v. 1 (San
Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1984), 10.
[iv] The
Oxford Companion to the Bible,
Philo,
592; also,
The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church,
Philo, 1297, for a list of his writings.
[v]
Justo Gonzalez,
The Story of Christianity, v.1, 13.
[vii]
Please see, Mithraic Iconography and Ideology,
by Leroy A. Campbell, published by E. J. Brill, 1968. Mithraic Studies,
edited by John R. Hinnells, published by Manchester University Press, 1975. Mithraism
in Ostia, edited by Samuel Laeuchli, published by Northwestern University
Press, 1967. The Mithras Liturgy, edited and translated by Marvin W.
Meyer, published by Scholars Press, 1976. Mysteries of Mithras, by Franz
Cumont, translated by Thomas J. McCormack, published by The Open Court
Publishing Company, 1903. The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries, by
David Ulansey, published by Oxford University Press, 1989.
[viii]
Justo Gonzalez,
The Story of Christianity, v. 1, 133 – 135.
