Jesus Forever Reborn

Copyright © 2013 by Colin Kirk.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-4836-9457-3

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Rev. date: 01/31/2014

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Contents

Acknowledgements and Explanation

Babylon

The Three Marys

Jesus of Nazareth

Saul of Tarsus

Sancta Sophia

John the Divine

Divus Augustus

Justin and Tatian

Heliogabalus and Valerian

Diocletian

Helena Augusta and Constantine

Aurelius Ambrosius

Jerome and Augustine

Schoolmen and Protestants

Cities where Christianity was made

Contemporary Christianity

for Laura, Ebony, Freddie, Cathryn, Lily and David

I am delighted to acknowledge the work of those who have created web sites where vast amounts of invaluable documents have been made available to everyone.

Web sites acknowledged with grateful thanks:

LacusCurtius……………….Bill Thayer’s web site for Ancient History

New Advent…………………Kevin Knight’s web site for Patristic Literature

Poetry in Translation……..Tony Kline’s web site for Poetry

Wildwinds…………………….Dane Kurth’s web site for Ancient Coins

The Center for Epigraphical and Palaeographical Studies……………….Ohio State University’s web site, curator Wendy Watkins

All these web sites are open access and free to all. In memory of

Aaron Swartz

may they stay that way.

Other works quoted in the text are acknowledged in situ. Translators are acknowledged in situ. Translations not acknowledged are mine. Illustrations, other than of coins, are acknowledged to artists and locations where they can be seen. Coin illustrations are from the archives of the Classical Numismatic Group.

Acknowledgements and Explanation

Christianity remains popular and successful after many centuries, as the foundation of much of the culture and morality of the Western world. It achieved success almost by accident. At its outset it was created within the context of Judaism, a much more ancient religion. What began as an obscure eastern mystery religion has dominated European thought for two millennia. Now Christianity has spread throughout the world. This is a miracle that requires explanation.

Augustus Caesar founded the Roman Empire as a military monarchy with the backing of the best army and navy of the time, arguably of all time. He used republican principles of the Senate of Rome to legitimize monarchy and Praetorians to enforce it. His rule extended from the Straights of Gibraltar to the Syrian desert, the mouth of the river Rhine to the Sahara desert. His achievements were astronomical.

A decade or two after the death of Augustus, Jesus of Nazareth sent close followers of his from an obscure corner of the Roman Empire to tell all nations to believe in him the Way, Truth and Life in order to obtain eternal salvation. He told his emissaries to go as they were, in the clothes they stood up in, beg for their food, live rough.

Christianity, after a gestation period of some four hundred years, became the religion of most of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, of what had been the Roman Empire, then in process of disintegration.

Early Church historians included the Roman Empire, founded at exactly the moment of Christ’s birth by Augustus Caesar, as an essential part of the divine plan.

John Henry Newman wrote his Development of Christian Doctrine, in the middle of the nineteenth century. His account was theological. He traced doctrinal development of demonstration that a man, who had lived in Galilee and died in Judea, was identical to infinite godhead and a third party, the Holy Spirit, available to every one of us. All three included in, and without deviation from, the principle of one God.

This was no mean intellectual feat. Early theologians took over three hundred years to work it out. Another century was spent in achievement of agreement between warring factions of theologians before orthodoxy almost froze. Christian doctrine of the Trinity: God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, as one indivisible god, became de rigor.

Precise knowledge of an unknown God has to be the ultimate oxymoron. Indeed, most Christians find theology marginal to their beliefs, will accept and repeat by rote such theological formulae as are required of them.

Christian folk live in a totally different cultural milieu to that dear to theologians. It is the makings of their Christianity that is traced here. Theologians, of course, leave better traces than other folk. They write, under divine inspiration, with clarity, aimed at posterity. But in the surrounding debris a clear picture can still be found.

Christianity, as practiced for centuries, is an amalgamation of religious belief, narrative, song, dance, annual events and daily ritual from many sources. Most of this material predates the life of Jesus of Nazareth, is part of human cultural development over millennia: humanity in its ancient and modern settings. Christianity’s success is universal because it satisfies some very basic human needs and aspirations, which may, or may not, imply its core truth.

It is reasonably practical to trace Christian cultural development over the time frame of its doctrinal development. However, the wider range of interests requires some subjects be taken out of strict chronological sequence, not least because, whilst their antiquity is much older, their modernity is much newer. In addition some unlikely contributors are included because their contributions were fundamental, although they didn’t know that. Help to Christian development was not amongst the life goals of Heliogabalus, Valerian or Diocletian.

Babylon was the great crossroads of Eurasia at the time writing became more generalized than its ancient monumental, liturgical and accountancy uses. Cyrus made Babylon an international centre of learning never surpassed in antiquity. For a brief period Chinese and Indian as well as Jewish and Greek influences met and were cross fertilized in a milieu dominated by Persian ideas of one God, who governs all. Some conception of what was involved can be gleaned and sets the scene for cultural and religious development thereafter.

Christianity started as a mystery religion. Like the Eleusinian and Orphic Mysteries it kept itself to itself, was practiced behind closed doors. That is all that is meant by a mystery religion. It was not the proclaimed religion of the state, practiced in the open.

Bishops and priests cause confusion when their later roles are projected back into the early mystery religion. Epi scopus, Greek for overseer is a term that goes back to Paul. It was an essential role in new communities of Christians to ensure cohesion, some commonality of belief, responsibility for accumulation and distribution of community funds. Presbuteros, Greek for an older man, implied maturity, stability, a father figure within the community. Paternalism has a venerable but unhealthy history in Christian culture.

These roles underwent profound mutations to produce the overweening bishops and priests needed to administer the sacraments that they had contrived by the late third and early fourth centuries. Sacraments made priests indispensable. By then the secret mystery religion had come out, found a social role and moved several notches nearer to becoming the elite.

During the first two centuries of the Common Era there were very few, if any, Christians in the Latin west of the Roman Empire. Christianity arose out of Judaism. Jews had long been integrated into the Greek east, where Christianity first appeared less than a century after the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire were established.

Jews were banned by Emperor Claudius in the middle of the first century. A ban that operated in Rome and the Latin west of the world of Rome, which at the time comprised northern Italy and southern Gaul. Romanization spread slowly and surely but by the middle of the first century was still quite limited.

Two or three decades later, after Titus destroyed Jerusalem, the Jewish nation migrated further east, beyond Mesopotamia. The first two hundred years of Christian development occurred in the Greek east of the Roman Empire and beyond in the Parthian Empire and Armenia. Only in the middle of the third century was Christianity much in evidence in the Latin west, despite libraries of books with footnotes and extensive references that claim otherwise.

Roman writers told the story of Christian development at the time Christianity was declared the state and only religion, just before the fall of the Roman Empire. Rome was their central focus. Paul, John and Peter, the great apostles of Christianity, were all celebrated in Rome by magnificent basilicas and must therefore have suffered martyrdom in Rome. Paul did. John and Peter did not. In spite of a massive fictive history, Rome had no further part in the Christian story for a century after Paul was beheaded there.

The disciples Jesus dispatched did their job thoroughly and well, are proof of the power of his message. The resurrection was at the core of their teaching, with compassion at the heart of Christian behavior, together with an abhorrence of war and greed. It was a rather different message from the one General Ambrosius, Governor of Æmilia Liguria, Bishop of Milan forced on the whole of the Latin speaking western world of Rome nearly four hundred years later.

Unnecessary technical argument and academic delight in footnotes and separate references have been avoided. Read diligently they disrupt the flow of thought. If not to be read why include them? Maybe they attempt to be scientific, to produce an impregnable knowledge base, which science can’t achieve either.

Technology has an impregnable knowledge base. It has to to make things work. Science benefits from association with technology, not the other way round. Here all essentials are incorporated in the text. All being well technical arguments, which are unavoidable, don’t obtrude as such.

Phantasy portrayal of the Tower of Babel

A detail from the oil painting by Lucas van Valckenborch 1594, Louvre, Paris.

Trade routes from the four corners of the Earth met in Babylon, the western capital of Persia. Babylon became the intellectual hub of Eurasia. Languages, and the ideas conveyed by them, came together in Babylon and enriched the ancient world in all directions. As well as portable valuable commodities, ideas were exchanged between Europe and the Far East,

The Jews were in exile there at the height of Babylon’s intellectual importance. The hubbub impressed itself upon the Jewish prophets: Ezekiel, Daniel and Ezra, who thought they kept their beliefs uncontaminated by outside influences.

In Babylon the Torah was written down and the Mishnah was started. It was there that God began to send messengers instead of putting in personal appearances. By the time of Christ, Ctesiphon was the western Persian capital. There were very large Jewish populations in Babylon and Ctesiphon by then.

Babylon

Nebuchadnezzar II ruled the Babylonian Empire some six hundred years before the birth of Christ. He conquered Judea, destroyed Jerusalem and exiled the Jews to Babylon. According to the Bible he was put out to grass during the regency of his son Belshazzar, who had his head smashed in by his body guards Cyrus and Xerxes, after warnings of impending doom written on the wall of his palace by the finger of God. There is a degree of poetic license in the biblical account.

Cyrus was the first Persian King of kings to make Babylon his western capital after the Persians overran Mesopotamia as part of a massive expansion of the Persian empire, which was said to embrace the four corners of the Earth.

Cyrus respected the beliefs, cultures and customs of conquered peoples. His own religion was that of Zoroaster, who had had an encounter with God in a cave on a Persian hillside. Zoroaster is credited with being the first person to conceive of one God, who governs all humanity. Worship of the one God by everyone was held to unite humanity by a common bond that avoided conflict.

Cyrus was a magnanimous conquering hero, who sought to put the world to rights. Jews in exile in Babylon were respected by Cyrus. He learned of Jewish beliefs and practices and dubbed the Jews the anointed people of God. He funded their return to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple of Yahweh.

Cyrus regarded Yahweh as the Jews’ appreciation of the one God, the God of the whole of humanity. The Jews did not see it that way. There were non Jewish gods in abundance, worship of them was idolatry. Theirs was the only one true God with whom they had a special relationship.

Only a minority of the Jews wanted to leave the comforts of Babylon for a long journey on foot back to a ruined land to rebuild a dream. It was two or three generations after their forefathers were exiled. They had settled down into acceptable routines. They much preferred to stay by the waters of Babylon than trek along desert tracks back through rocky desolation to what promised to be an arduous task.

Those who returned were sustained on their journey by song. Song and dance were always essential elements of religious practice. Heightened physical and spiritual existence brought the believer closer to his god.

King David was credited with authorship of a collection of famous songs. A favorite, in troubled times of serious deprivation, remains at the peak of human literary achievement. It’s simplicity is deceptive:

The Lord is my shepherd

I shall not want for anything.

He leads me beside still waters,

gives me rest in green pastures.

He restores my soul

Even if I walk in the valley

of the shadow of death

I shall fear no evil.

His discipline comforts me.

He prepares a table for me

with my enemies all around.

He anoints my head with oil,

my wine glass overflows.

For certain, goodness and mercy

will stay with me all the days of my life

and I shall live for ever in the house of the Lord.

Importance of recall of Jewish literature of a thousand years before Jesus of Nazareth is first its immediacy. Further, there is a personal one to one relationship demonstrated here. Finally, there is an infinite permanency in the state of grace exhibited. There is no better statement of belief in a personal god.

Babylon obtained its bad reputation in the Bible, which still persists, because many Jews after three generations there found life in Babylon more attractive than a long trek across desert wastes to the wreckage and decay at Jerusalem. The Jews who did return to Jerusalem intermarried with the locals, which implies few women had accompanied the men. They made limited progress with the restoration of Jerusalem.

Half a century or more later Ezra the Scribe, according to the Bible, was sent by the then King of kings Artaxerxes to teach the Torah to the Israelites. Ezra insisted on racial purity, that Jews give up their non Jewish partners and comply with the teachings of the Torah in all things.

Ezra found the city in a poor state with no walls, depressed and depressing. He lead the people in acts of repentance, prayers for forgiveness and reestablished worship of Yahweh. Artaxerxes responded to requests for help by sending Nehemiah, a Jew in his entourage, as satrap to reorganized the city, its defenses and develop its hinterland. The jews prospered in the Holy Land under the combined leadership of Ezra as High Priest and Nehemiah as satrap or Governor.

The Jews had gone into exile as an essentially non literate people. The first people to return to Jerusalem did not have the Torah. Ezra the Scribe returned with the Torah. TheTorah is what is known in Christendom as the Old Testament. They are not identical but not that far from. The Torah traced the history of the Israelites from creation to exile in Babylon, gave an extensive account of the Jews in Babylon and some, but very little, post exilic writing too. All of Jewish law is contained in the Torah.

Only a small part of the Torah was composed in Babylon but all parts, other than the post exilic additions, were written down there. Hence it required Ezra to bring the Torah from Babylon to Jerusalem.

The four or five generations between exile of the Jews to Babylon and Ezra’s return with the Torah were the most remarkable in the intellectual development of humanity. Influences had crossed Eurasia, mainly along trading routes, for centuries. Babylon attracted to one centre all manner of folk from China, India, Egypt, Greece and many others, who were curious about ideas and beliefs from the rest of the world.

Composed in Babylon were parts of the Book of Jeremiah, who regarded the exile as lost opportunity; the last part of the Second Book of Kings which saw the exile as the end of a Jewish era; the Second Book of Chronicles where the Holy Land was seen as resting whilst it awaited the return of the Jews and the beginning of the Book of Ezra, which described preparation for return.

Most well known of exilic literature are the stories of Daniel in the lions’ den, of Susanna and the Elders and the Story of the Three Youths: Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace.

Daniel is of greatest importance here because he not only prophesied the birth of the Messiah but with sufficient precision as to when it would occur for Christian historians to calculate that Jesus was born at the time predicted. This information was dictated to Daniel by an archangel sent from God. Up until then God made his own contact with people. Moses and Samuel were privileged in this way. Messengers from God are a rare late arrival in Torah.

Writing had an almost immemorial antiquity before its first full flowering in Babylon after the Persian conquest. Earlier media available, however, were not conducive to record of extensive amounts of text. Monumental inscriptions, marks in clay, scratches on slate were used to record information of significance to government, religion, trade and commerce. Otherwise people relied on their memories.

To an extent written records, other than proclamations by kings and high priests, were also demonstration of lack of trust between contracting parties. They suggested my word is my bond could not always be relied on.

The idea of writing things down, when ink marks on papyrus or parchment became more readily available, was reasonably widespread in Babylon, at least towards the end of the exile. Egyptians had written sacred texts in this way using papyrus, which was unique to Egypt, for many years. The practice spread but an alternative to papyrus had to be found first.

Goat or sheep skin scraped thin served the purpose. The Torah was written on parchment, which is more durable than papyrus. Parchment has to be in the form of a scroll as it cracks if bent over. Torah in synagogues are still in scroll form written by hand on parchment.

Ancient parts of Torah, the majority of it, were folk memories, literally. Brilliant sequences of words conveyed, in sound as well as meaning, ideas that resonated. This is readily understandable in the case of the Psalms. The same principle applied to all material important to the well being of the tribe.

Importance of material in this sense was gauged by the suitability and sounds of the words chosen to convey it. Otherwise record was not fully appropriate, could not be memorized, was not memorable enough and the material was lost. Here was a vibrant dynamic process by which tribal history, tribal law was formulated and memory of it retained. Unimportant material was filtered out by inappropriate, unmemorable formulation.

Children were taught to develop their memories from an early age. What is now called learning by rote and deprecated, as contrary to proper education, was then most of what comprised education.

Children’s minds were filled with material learned by rote that their teachers regarded as essential to tribal identity and survival. All this material was in the form of poetry, song and had associated dance steps or was prose with a strong narrative line. It was learned to be retold.

The way it was retold was equally important, accompaniment by music or sung was usual. Which families were responsible for keeping which part of tribal memory fresh was part of the fabric of society, with reasons lost in the mists of time.

Exile must have caused great anxiety in many ways, fundamental was how to safeguard folk memory, whilst in captivity. Many other demands on time, chosen by masters outside the tribe, reduced tribal capacity for transmission of sacred material. But the Jews in Babylon, as earlier in Egypt, maintained their tribal identity, their folk memory. In fact there is no other ancient literature of the extent and complexity of that as the Jews.

Nebuchadnezzar conquered most of the Middle east. There is no evidence of wholesale population transfer of any other peoples to Babylon. The Jews had something to offer in addition to cheap labour. It could have been entertainment. Attractive youngsters singing and dancing, few people were not young in those days, may well have accounted for the Babylonian exile. Being feted in Babylon would explain reluctance to return to Jerusalem.

Language is not a barrier with song and dance. Moreover, language change during the exile is vouched for by changes in vocabulary and script. Indeed, the Jewish alphabet evolved increased precision. But most significantly tools became available to record in writing what had previously been retained in memory.

People from all over Eurasia were drawn to Babylon at the time of the exile of the Jews. Most record remaining, apart from Torah, is in the form of cuneiform script on clay tablets and cylinders. Almost all of this material is routine record of business transactions of the kind required by accountants. The trading activities involved span Eurasia from Iberia to China, Mongolia to southern India.

In addition Babylon was an intellectual hub. The tolerant attitude of early Persian Kings of kings, with their support of Zoroastrian teaching, was found attractive by many intelligent youngsters keen to learn from and about other cultures.

Like the Jews, Pythagoras was taken captive to Babylon. He had been sent to buy gems in Egypt by his father, who was a jeweler on the island of Samos. Not only did this expose young Pythagoras to the mathematical genius of Egypt, it also took him to Babylon. He was in Heliopolis when Cyrus swept through Egypt as conqueror.

Why Pythagoras waited in Babylon for eight years for his father to fund his return to Samos is not known. He most likely chose to because of the intellectual stimulation he found there. When he finally returned to the Greek world, his contributions to Greek thought, harmonics and the mathematics of construction were profound. He’d learned a lot.

The Greeks were the next race of middle eastern conquerors. They had already colonized the whole of the northern Mediterranean coast and hinterland from the Bosporus to the Straights of Gibraltar.

The southern coast had been colonized by Phoenicians, including into southern Spain. Phoenicians were from eastern Mediterranean coastal cities. They are credited with the invention of script, signs that signify sounds, phonetics, centuries before compilation of extensive texts. The Phoenician alphabet is the root of Hebrew, Greek, Hindi and effectively all alphabets that are based on symbols for sounds rather than pictograms.

Greek conquest of the Middle east was lasting. Alexander had rampaged across Persia, where he followed long established trade routes that linked areas of existing Greek culture as far as Transoxiana and the Indus valley. Then he returned, destroyed Persepolis and died of excess in Babylon age thirty three. Like Genghis Khan, Napoleon and Hitler he commanded armies far larger than those of the unprepared peoples he attacked without provocation. The vast empires of all three collapsed as quickly as they had been assembled.

However, there were some lasting conquests by two of Alexander’s generals. They started the Ptolemy dynasty of Egypt and the Seleucid dynasty of Syria. They and their successors maintained stability around Judea. Rome took over that responsibility a generation of two before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.

Greek philosophy was influential. Syria was flanked by two great philosophical schools: Stoics dominated the school of Rhodes to the north and Cynics and Epicureans the school of Alexandria to the south. These philosophies had permeated Palestine for three centuries. Maccabees the latest book of the Old Testament reported these philosophies in order to find them deficient. They lacked regard for the one true God, the God of the Jews.

Stoics taught self examination, frugal regulation of life style, community responsibility and generosity to others but had no problem with possession of material wealth.

Cynics on the other hand deplored riches, were distrustful of social mores, political fiats and indeed any restrictions on individual native intelligence. Their lives were dedicated to identification and satisfaction of essential natural needs only. They sought