A New History of Early Christianity by Charles Freeman
Yale University Press, £25
There are so many books on the history of Christianity that Charles Freeman’s A New History of Early Christianity is new only in the sense that it is the latest. This is such a well-ploughed furrow, not least by the author himself in his earlier book The Closing of the Western Mind, that I confess to approaching this work with wariness… and weariness, doubting there was much more to unearth.
But the Western Mind was such an excellent book I was prepared to give this one a go, and I’m delighted I did. Freeman may not have discovered any facts we did not already know, but he has found a fresh approach to the subject, from the birth of Christ to the death of the Roman Empire.
This is no hagiography of early Christianity – for instance, Freeman shows why Luke’s nativity narrative could not have happened. And he brings a critical historian’s eye to bear on all the gospels, dispassionately questioning how much they had to do with the hand of God or the pens of men. “Jesus was a Jew,” he says bluntly. And the beginnings of Christianity must be seen in that context.
St Paul, who gave Christianity its theology, was also born a Jew, but he was legally a Roman and intellectually a Greek. As Bamber Gascoigne says: “Three trump cards for someone hoping to spread any faith through the empire.” Freeman tells us he was not very likeable, either. He could by turns be a sullen, hectoring bully boy, insecure and lacking in confidence, ambivalent towards women, and prone to sulks if he didn’t get his own way. His whole rag-bag of “issues” would have given a modern psychotherapist a field day, not least in deciphering what lay behind his distaste for sex. Women who want to be bishops today, or homosexuals who aspire to become priests, have little for which to thank Paul.
Yet his courage and perseverance are never in doubt, yomping 20 miles a day over blistering desert lands, surviving shipwrecks and offering himself up to be flogged or imprisoned when his Roman citizenship would have allowed him to avoid both.
Freeman examines the strange and disturbing Book of Revelation, dismissed by Thomas Jefferson as “merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams”.
We learn how to arrive at 666, the “mark of the beast” which has been the inspiration for so many Hollywood horrors. It was assumed to be code for the Emperor Nero, and if you care to do the calculation, then take the Greek form of Nero Caesar and turn it into Hebrew consonants, replace each by its numerical equivalent, and add them together. There – your very own do-it-yourself devil kit.
It was the Emperor Constantine who did most to cement the foundations of Christianity by making it the state religion of the Roman Empire. But, as Freeman shows, Constantine was a political and religious opportunist, happy to embrace whichever gods best suited his purpose. And because he linked polytheism to social disorder, a single god was a more effective symbol of authority.
But the great difference between then and now is the amount of thought which went into belief. Contrary to modern popular myth, the ancients were not superstitious primitives who swallowed religion wholesale. As Freeman says: “At the higher end of the social hierarchy this was one of the best educated and most intellectually alive generations ever known, heir to the classical philosophers who had defined most areas of knowledge from mathematics to science in a form which we still use, and still capable of original thought.”
Freeman gives one of the best explanations of the Arian controversy – essentially an argument over whether the Son was equal to the Father – that I have come across. And it is the way Freeman explores such issues that gives this book its modern relevance.
In using the phrase “begotten not made” the Nicene Creed never really solved the problem because begetting still implies an independent act of creation. So it allows subordinationism, the belief widely held in the first centuries of Christianity that Jesus was a subordinate figure to his father, to cause splits in Christ’s church to this day.
Nigel Nelson
