How did the Church become both Jewish and Greco-Roman? Paul did that. [SEMITISM vs. ANTISEMITISM Part 4]

An MOR series: SEMITISM vs. ANTISEMITISM: The structure of our history

Mosaic representing Saul/Paul of Tarsus: a Greek, a Roman, and a Jew.

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If you didn’t read Part 3 yet, you may do so here: 

The Church (and Western) paradox [SEMITISM vs. ANTISEMITISM Part 3]

[ Go to Part 1 ]

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Hobbits vs. orcs?

I always feel like I must apologize for the Tolkienian overtones, because my model of Western history, brutally—but usefully—caricatured, is like this: the good guys vs. the bad guys: semitism (anti-slavery) vs. antisemitism (pro-slavery). Yes, hobbits vs. orcs.

Good vs. Evil.

This epic struggle has defined the entire history of Western Asia (a region that includes Europe and the Mediterranean). Once you adopt this model, the broad sweep of our history—all 4,300 years of it—can be usefully cut into two great eras, the Era of Logic and the Era of Paradox, each lasting roughly two millennia.

Jesus is still the pivot.

The first era, the Era of Logic, is considered in Part 2:

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Semitism Ascendant: The story of ancient Mesopotamia [SEMITISM vs. ANTISEMITISM Part 2]

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But why is the time before Jesus the Era of Logic? Because, in this era, semitism and antisemitism didn’t mix; they each had their separate and distinct home turfs.

The home turf of semitism was originally Babylonia, where Sargon of Akkad’s revolution in very ancient Sumer began semitism’s brilliant career, establishing a tradition where the king is responsible for making and enforcing laws to protect everybody’s rights and freedoms. Semitism later grew its home turf to include all of Mesopotamia. Finally, in the last, glorious phase of the Era of Logic, Babylonian semitism allied with another great ethical movement, Iranian Zoroastrianism, and the home turf of semitism expanded to include much of settled Western Asia, including the Eastern Mediterranean.

The very worst antisemites, for their part, had their home turf intially in northern Mesopotamia (Assyrians) and then in the Mediterranean (Greco-Romans).

Since freedom lovers and slavers could not coexist—indeed, they were mortal threats to each other—these two ideologies, semitism and antisemitism, warred and tried to extinguish each other. And that was logical.

Towards the end of the Era of Logic it actually seemed, after the destruction of the antisemitic Assyrian Empire, that semitism and Zoroastrianism might together win a final and decisive battle. But the Achaemenid Persians disappointed by failing to conquer the Greeks. And then Alexander of Macedon, an antisemitic Greco-Macedonian king, came charging out of the Mediterranean to defeat the benevolent Persians and impose on Western Asia the predatory and parasitic slave-making Greek culture. The Jews survived this World Catastrophe, and kept semitism alive, but they had lost their great protector and also a territorially coherent homeland. They were now foreigners everywhere.

The ancient Jews were not fundamentally uncomfortable with this state of affairs. Long before Alexander’s destruction of the Persian Empire, like a good virus coughed by the Achaemenids, the Jews had already been migrating beyond that empire’s borders, everywhere, to convert the pagans, hoping to abolish war and slavery: to save the world—that was the mission. But by migrating everywhere, the Jews were themselves undermining the territorial coherence of the struggle between semitism and antisemitism.

These eagerly wandering Jews arrived in the city of Rome in the second century before Jesus. As they were doing everywhere else, they began rapidly converting the pagans in Rome to Judaism and philo-Judaism.

Roman power would struggle against this—with the sword, whenever possible, and, when it felt strong enough, with a view to exterminate. But this struggle between semitism and antisemitism had now become an internal affair of the Roman Empire, all of it happening within its territorial and political boundaries.

The astonishing symbolic and physical violence between Romans and Jews—entirely political—was like a series of great digestive convulsions. In one of those inside-out belches, the Empire might become entirely Jewish. Or all Roman. Either outcome would have been logical.

But perhaps a third outcome was possible? A paradoxical outcome?

Yes, such an outcome was indeed possible. Following the appearance of Jesus in the early first century, semitism and antisemitism found a way to mix inside a new movement: the Catholic Church. The Church emerged as an institution both Jewish and Greco-Roman, and hence, simultaneously, semitic and antisemitic. Paradoxical.

• The Church Paradox. The Church’s holy books, the Old and New Testament, are a product of Jewish ethical and political values: an expression of semitism; but the Church’s practical ideology of government comes from the Greco-Roman tradition, and is therefore an expression of antisemitism. (This paradox is discussed in Part 3.)

Since the Church got to remake the West, she bequeathed her syncretic paradox to our entire civilization. The Era of Paradox thus begins with the establishment—following the great Roman genocide of the Jews—of the Catholic Church as the official religion of Empire.

But how was this paradoxical and chimeric institution, the Church, in fact put together? That is our present question.

My answer (expanded below) is as follows: the encounter, in the Mediterranean, of the Greco-Roman and Jewish peoples produced a violent political conflict, but it also yielded syncretic identities. Paul of Tarsus (‘Saint Paul’) was simultaneously a Greek, a Roman, and a Jew. As founder of the Catholic Church, Paul inherited his multiple identities to the movement that he launched.

I shall begin with the sociological processes and will end with the person: Paul.

Greco-Romans and Jews collide and… stick?

The Achaemenid Persian emperors, ethical Zoroastrians, had encouraged Jewish proselytism because they appreciated the ethics of semitism, which Judaism had developed to an exquisite degree (see Part 2). After 200 years of this imperial sponsorship, large Jewish populations could be found everywhere in the Persian Empire, and indeed all over what the Greeks called the oikoumene, or the ‘Known World’ of city folk, as many Jews had spilled out beyond the Achaemenid borders, East and West.

In the West, the Jews spilled into the Mediterranean basin.

Jews got busy converting the Mediterranean Greeks and Romans at a furious, simply astonishing, pace.¹ This brought them into direct conflict, first, with the Greco-Macedonian antisemites ruling the Hellenistic empires established in the wake of Alexander’s conquest. Why? Well, because the Greco-Macedonians were enslaving everybody, whereas the Jews were abolishing slavery.

Enormous mass killings of Jews followed in the Ptolemaic and Seleucid Empires.

The Hellenistic world that resulted from Alexander’s destruction of the Achaemenid Persian Empire.

The worst of those mass killings, the Seleucid genocide, ended with a Jewish victory that created an independent Jewish State! The Jews commemorate this military miracle, and the establishment of their ancient Hasmonean or Maccabean State, in Hannukah. But Jewish independence was short lived, as the Romans soon came knocking.

It was the Jews, however, who’d made the first move: they had already gone knocking on the Roman home turf.

Already in the 2nd century BCE, Jews had begun settling in the city of Rome, making converts there. The Romans—whose culture was in many ways a development of Greek culture, and was therefore entirely organized around making slaves—quickly understood they had a ‘Jewish Problem’ (see Part 2).

As one historian explains:

“The very active proselytising efforts of the Jews caused much of the friction between the Imperial power of Rome and Judaism. For [Judaism] … had much political content (…) It is easy to see that Jewish proselytism would have undermined the whole Roman system.”² (emphasis mine)

Thus, after the Romans, flush from their victory against the Carthaginians, turned their bellicose attentions on the Greco-Macedonians, they also made a bee-line for the Jewish State, hoping to solve their ‘Jewish Problem’ by quashing the Jewish center of power. Roman General Pompey conquered Jerusalem in 63 BCE.

Though the Roman Empire had now established itself in the Mediterranean, the Jews were already quite numerous all over this new Roman domain. And the Judaizing ‘God-fearers’ (people who adopted some Jewish practices and allied with the Jews, but did not convert) were an even larger population.³ The ‘Jewish Problem’ of the Romans had hardly disappeared. And it was acute.

If the Romans did nothing, they would lose the empire to Jewish proselytism, because thousands upon thousands were converting or approaching to Judaism, whose system of ethics and law was entirely incompatible with the cruel and oppressive slave-making system of the Roman Empire. To survive as the predatory and parasitic culture that they were, the Romans needed to be rid of the Jews.

But too much anti-Jewish repression might cause the Romans to lose the Empire anyway. If they weren’t careful, as the Romans understood, they might trigger a revolutionary uprising—led by the Jews and supported by their numerous allies—that would be impossible to contain. The Romans had come by this caution the hard way, after some costly miscalculations (about which I will write soon).

While the Romans learned these lessons and hesitated, the Jews went right along converting the pagans as fast as they could, seducing now even some Romans in the powerful and wealthy classes. At the synagogues, to which the pagans flocked, there was all this talk about a coming ‘Messiah’ who would defeat Roman oppression and set all of the Mediterranean peoples free. Everybody paid attention (not least the Romans) because contenders for the ‘Messiah’ title were sprouting left and right.

Remember that story in the New Testament about King Herod killing all the under-two children in Judea when he got word that the ‘Messiah’ had just been born? That story—the ‘Massacre of the Innocents’—might be true.

The Gospel of Matthew (2.1-23) attributes this violence to Herod’s malevolence. That’s ok as far as that goes—according to all historical accounts, Herod was indeed a bastard. But Matthew leaves out a great deal of context. Herod was the puppet ‘Jewish’ king installed by the Romans to oppress the Jews and make their country Greek. If Herod really did kill a lot of children because a rumor spread of the Messiah’s recent birth, then he did it to please the Romans. For the Romans were indeed quite worried that the Jews (and their many, many allies) might come to a consensus over who was the expected Messiah.

Victor Wolfvoet the Younger: The Massacre of the Innocents, after Rubens.

Time was running out for the Empire, and the Roman aristocrats—shaking in their military boots—could feel it. We know this because they wrote their fears on paper and those writings have survived. I cover a bit of that in Part 2 (soon I will have a dedicated article on the Roman fears).

It was in this moment of great peril—both for the antisemites running the Roman Empire and for the Jewish people—that one Jesus, a Jewish rabbi from the town of Nazareth, intensified some key Jewish teachings in his passage through Judea and Samaria during the early first century. For certain special reasons—addressed in Part 6 of this series—the Jesus movement became wildly appealing to the Greco-Roman pagans, even beyond the strong attraction they already felt for the world of love, justice, compassion, and ethics that Judaism held out for them.

The impact of Jesus was… cosmic. He shook the Roman Empire, reordered the calendar, and transformed the Western world. Not all of it single-handedly, or in his lifetime, but he certainly got the ball rolling.

Or… balls.

After Jesus’s execution by the Romans, a great variety of Jesus movements sprouted in his name: Gnostics (Marcionites, Valentinians, Sethians, Ophites, Naassenes…), Ebionites, Montanists, Arians, Donatists, Manichaeans, Docetists, Nestorians, Monophysites, Catholics…

Those of us who’ve examined this ample literature sometimes get the impression that Jesus was all that the Mediterraneans could talk about in the first five centuries of the current era. But the various Jesus movements didn’t all make the same claims about him: they accepted different ‘gospels,’ and each aspired to be recognized as the legitimate Jesus movement.

Who would win the Jesus sweepstakes?

The Roman Eastern Mediterranean, indeed the entire Roman Empire, was a time and place of great syncretic ferment between a great variety of cultures. Many contenders in the Jesus sweepstakes were syncretic movements that combined aspects of Jewish and Greco-Roman culture. It was one of these syncretisms that, in the Mediterranean basin, won hands down: the Catholic Church.

This syncretic, paradoxical Church was founded by a man who was himself a paradox, a blended product of the encounter between the Greco-Roman and Jewish peoples: Paul of Tarsus.

Paul of Tarsus: “I have become all things to all people”

Paul of Tarsus (‘Saint Paul’), the man who founded the Church as an organizational concern, famously said, “I have become all things to all people.” He was describing his marketing strategy, which he represented candidly as such:

“To the Jews I became as a Jew … To those outside the law [non-Jews] I became as one outside the law … I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.”⁴

Indeed, Paul, who wore simultaneously the Jewish and Greco-Roman identity hats, was himself the embodiment of the Church Paradox. In the pages of the New Testament, we find him saying the following about himself:

1.      that he is Jewish by birth, and also a rabbi

“[I was] circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee [Rabbi]” (Phillipians 3.5)

2.      that he is a Greek-speaking citizen of the Greek city of Tarsus

“Just as Paul was about to be brought into the barracks, he said to the tribune, ‘May I say something to you?’ The tribune replied, ‘Do you know Greek? Then you are not the Egyptian who recently stirred up a revolt and led the four thousand assassins out into the wilderness?’ Paul replied, ‘I am a Jew, from Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of an important city.’ ” (Acts 21.37-39)

3.      that he is a Roman citizen

“But when [the Roman soldiers] had tied him up with thongs, Paul said to the centurion who was standing by, ‘Is it legal for you to flog a Roman citizen who is uncondemned?’ When the centurion heard that, he went to the tribune and said to him, ‘What are you about to do? This man is a Roman citizen.’ The tribune came and asked Paul, ‘Tell me, are you a Roman citizen?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ The tribune answered, ‘It cost me a large sum of money to get my citizenship.’ Paul said, ‘But I was born a citizen.’ ” (Acts 22.25-29)

Conclusion

Our title question—How did the Church become both Jewish and Greco-Roman?—may be answered briefly as follows.

The arrival of the Jews in the Mediterranean, though it produced a violent confrontation between the Greco-Romans and the Jews, also produced syncretic mixes of their two cultures. There was a whole menu of such syncretisms to choose from in the first century. One of those mixes, the Catholic Church, won the Jesus sweepstakes when its claim to be the legitimate Jesus movement, which claim required that all other Jesus movements (‘heresies’) be defeated, was recognized and supported by the Roman Empire. This winning movement was launched by Paul of Tarsus, himself a man of mixed Greco-Roman and Jewish identity.

So it all boils down to Paul?

Yes, in a sense. But a fuller and more extended answer will be more interesting. Up next, in Part 5, I will explain how the Church became so heavily Greco-Roman despite the fact that it cherished the Jewish tradition as holy.

1. “[T]here were numerous converts to Judaism throughout the Empire and in Rome … [because of] successful Jewish proselytism in the Hellenistic and Roman world. The Jews were zealously propagating their religion wherever they happened to exist in the Diaspora. … Special steps (direct or indirect) taken by various Emperors against Jewish proselytism demonstrate the fairly consistent aim of Roman law to confine Judaism within racial boundaries. Nevertheless, the simplicity and purity of the Jewish doctrine of God attracted many gentiles to Judaism. Yet most of these admirers did not become full converts, partly because of fear of repressive law, but especially on account of the deterrent effect of the complicated ritual prescriptions and dietary and social limitations imposed by the Jewish religion on its followers. The majority of them stopped far short of conversion to full Judaism and they formed the group of so-called ‘god-fearers’ … A rejection of polytheism and idolatry may have seemed to be almost an adoption of Judaism, and when this rejection was accompanied by the observance of the Sabbath and a certain conformity to the Jewish law, though short of circumcision, all this may have appeared a respectable degree of conversion to Judaism.”

SOURCE: Keresztes, P. (1973). The Jews, the Christians, and Emperor Domitian. Vigiliae christianae, 1-28. (pp.4-5)

2. Keresztes, P. (1973). The Jews, the Christians, and Emperor Domitian. Vigiliae christianae, 1-28. (p.12)

“Many gentiles, both men and women, converted to Judaism during the last centuries BCE and the first two centuries CE. Even more numerous, however, were those gentiles who accepted certain aspects of Judaism but did not convert to it. In polytheistic fashion they added the God of Israel to their pantheon and did not deny the pagan gods. Throughout the Roman empire various practices of Judaism found favor with large segments of the populace. In Rome many gentiles observed the Sabbath, the fasts, and the food laws; in Alexandria many gentiles observed the Jewish holidays; in Asia Minor many gentiles attended synagogue on the Sabbath… The phenomenon of [the so-called] ‘God-fearers’ implies… [that a]ncient Judaism was visible and open to outsiders. Gentiles were able to enter synagogues and witness the Jewish observances. Josephus insists that Judaism has no mysteries, no secrets that it keeps hidden from curious observers (Against Apion 2.8, & 107). This claim is not entirely true, but it is essentially correct.”

3. SOURCE: Cohen, S. J. D. 1987. From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press. (pp.55-56)

4. “For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them. To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law) so that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings.” 1 Corinthians (9.19-23)

SOURCE: Attridge, Harold W.; Society of Biblical Literature. HarperCollins Study Bible: Fully Revised & Updated (p. 6471). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.