Who and what were the 12 disciples? The gospels are rather vague and confusing, given that this was evidently supposed to be an important group. Part of the problem is that many Jews shared the same few names: about three-quarters of the population in 1st century Judea had either one of six male names Yehudah (rendered "Jude" or "Judas"), Shimon ("Simon"), Ya'aqov ("Jacob" or "James"), Yochanan ("John"), Yoseph ("Joseph"), Yeshua' ("Jesus" or "Joshua") or one of only two female names Maryam ("Mary" or "Miriam") or Shelomith ("Salome"). They would be distinguished by family-names or patronymics, or by nicknames or alternate Greek names. It is difficult to sort out who is the same as who, but this is how I see it:
The number 12 has been considered sacred in many cultures (consider the 12 Olympian gods in Greece), doubtless originally because it is the best integer approximation to the number of lunar months in a solar year, as in the 12 signs into which the Mideasterners and (independently?) the Chinese divided the Zodiac (for purposes of naming the months by the position of the sun). The "12 disciples" are often thought of as reminiscent of the "12 tribes" of Israel, but certainly their expected role was not to procreate whole new nations. Probably the best analogy is to the 12 thesmothetae of Athens.
Athens was ruled by "archons", three of them elected: the basileos ("king", who had ritual roles in opening their festivals, but no political power) who could only be chosen from the royal family; the polemarch ("commander-in-chief" of the armed forces) who could only be chosen from the strategoi (general officers); and the eponymos ("name-giver", since years were named and numbered by his "reign") who could be any citizen (usually the incumbent was re-elected; if not, he was banished). Then there were 12 lesser archons, the thesmothetes chosen yearly by casting lots: the eponymos would assign them "Cabinet portfolios" (if he didn't like one of them, he didn't have to give him an important job). Why 12? It was a convenient, and resonant, number for a moderate-sized panel; 12 is the number on our juries (chosen randomly again) similarly because that has just become the standard number for such a group. The council of 12 disciples was an administrative body for the nascent church: I am impatient with Catholics who think the whole structure of the Church goes back to the very beginning (I met one Catholic who insisted Peter's successor Linus was elected by a "college of cardinals" chosen by Peter, who doubtless gave them all red hats), but equally impatient with those who think Jesus didn't intend to start an "organized religion" at all. Judas Iscariot was the treasurer (and it is insinuated that he embezzled), in charge of a fairly sizable stream of donations, and outflows for charity and travel expenses. Simon Peter was a kind of prime minister. In one episode, the wife of Zebedee, mother of John and James (typically, we are not told her name) asks Jesus to give her sons the highest-ranking posts once he has taken over the world, and Jesus rebuffs her. My cynical take is that the reason for including this in the gospels (whether it is a true story or not; impossible to tell and not very relevant) is to emphasize to second- or third-generation Christians that John, however venerable, was not #1 and therefore, that successors of Peter outrank successors of John.
"Matthew" (Matthaios from Aramaic Matthat which is another fairly common name) is in my view the same person as Mathias, who was "elected" (by casting lots) to replace Judas Iscariot after his treason and suicide. My reasons for thinking they are the same will appear as we go on. The reason for editing the "gospel of Matthew" to make its author one of the original 12, rather than a late "second choice", would be to boost the authority of the book. The reason for identifying him with Levi the tax collector (an identification I think impossible: it would be common for a Jew to have one Semitic given name and also a Greek name, but not to have two Semitic given names) would be that Matthew was still remembered as having been the "chief financial officer" of the early church. Iscariot had to be replaced, because the group needed a treasurer; but afterwards there was no continuing effort to keep the membership at 12.
There were three among the original 12 named Yehudah distinguished as "Judas Iscariot" (ish-keriot is "man of the villages" but thought to be a code-word for Latin sicarius "dagger-man; assassin", a derogatory name for the Zealot sect), "Jude of James" (this would mean "son of" James, not "brother of" as many interpreters have wanted to make it; the word "son" would be omitted and understood in such a context, but not "brother"), and "Thomas Didymus" (Aramaic thoma and Greek didymos both mean "twin", sometimes more specifically the younger-by-minutes of a pair of twins). The given name underlying the nickname "Thomas" is not in the canonical texts, but the Gnostic texts all call him "Judas Thomas"; most of these are quite unreliable (some say or imply that he was the twin of Jesus, which I do not take seriously) but "Acts of Thomas" has good data (and some very dubious stories; but places and rulers in India are given correctly, spelling garbled no worse than usual) which would have been hard for a late forger in the Roman Empire to come by. So I accept Yehudah as his given name.
There were two named Shimon, one give the nickname "Rock" (Aramaic Kepha or Greek Petros "Peter") and the other usually called Zelotes, but in the gospel of John called Simon Iscariot and the father of Judas Iscariot. The Zealot sect followed a different family that also claimed to be the rightful heirs to the Davidite kingship: many are cynical about the Davidite claims, thinking "Oh, nobody knew anymore, and anybody could have called themselves descendants of David", but I don't think that's true, in such a genealogically-conscious society. Few of the pseudo-Messianic "people who claimed to be somebody" of that time actually said they were heirs of David; I don't believe anybody could have gotten away with that, unless his father (and his father before him, and so on) were already known as Davidite heirs. The first of the Zealot line that we hear of is Hezekiah, who was hunted down and killed by Herod years before Herod became king, when he was governor of Galilee under his father Antipater (whose only title was "collector of the tribute" for the Romans). Indicted for murder, Herod appeared before the Sanhedrin with a large armed guard; the Sanhedrin, seeing they could not actually arrest Herod, resolved never to indict any Jews on capital crimes until they could operate without foreign intimidation. This is referred to in the gospels: when Pilate asks Caiaphas and Annas why they are bothering him with an internal Jewish dispute, they say "We have no law to put a man to death". Hezekiah's son Judas of Galilee revolted during the census of 6-7 AD (when Judea was reduced from tributary kingdom to ordinary province; gospel of Luke says Jesus was born then). Judas and his son Simon were crucified, and his home-town of Tzippuri levelled, the whole populace killed or sold into slavery, and rebuilt as the wholly Greek town of Sepphoris (very close to Nazareth).
Some of his family escaped, however: in the late 40's grandchildren of Judas were crucified as a warning to Zealot troublemakers; and in the 70's the resisters at Masada had an heir, Yeshua' of Ginnosaur (another Galilean town not far from Nazareth). Now, Jesus had brothers Judas and Simon, probably born a little after Judas of Galilee and his son Simon were crucified; and Yeshua' of Ginnosaur was born apparently a little after the crucifixion of Jesus (Yeshua'). Those names were hyper-common, yet it is possible the two families did name children after each other's recent dead; it suggests that despite their rival claims, these two families were on mutually respectful terms. My speculation is that the two claims to be "rightful" heir are analogous to a modern split among the Romanovs, who have two claimant to be the "true" tsar now. The senior heir (by primogeniture principals) is disparaged by some Romanov loyalists as the product of an "unequal marriage" (an insufficiently noble wife). Zerubbabel, the Davidite who led the Jews back to Jerusalem, left children back in Babylon, whose descendants were the "exilarchs" (sometimes-important Jewish leaders of the Middle Ages); Chronicles traces them down to a senior heir Hattush, who moved from Babylon to Jerusalem about the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. Chronicles says nothing about Zerubbabel remarrying in Palestine and having another family, but it would be expected: prophet Haggai dangerously pushed Zerubbabel to assume the title "king" (so he would need heirs); Zechariah is dark about what happened then, but apparently he was assassinated (to keep the peace with Persia) and the prophets told to shut up. I think Joseph and Jesus were from Zerubbabel's Palestinian family, junior in primogeniture terms to the "Zealot" line from Hattush, but regarding them as the result of an "unequal marriage" (assuming Zerubbabel's first wife was Babylonian, not Jewish).
There were two disciples named Ya'aqov, "James son of Zebedee" (brother of John), and "James son of Alphaeus" (father of one of the Judes) who is called by the nickname Mikron "little", generally rendered "James the Less" (if it is about relative rank within the 12), sometimes thought to mean "the Younger" (but he had a grown son), but maybe it simply means "the Short". Alphaeus (a sacred river in Greece, which vanishes into the underground for part of its course, like the Sarasvati in ancient India) is thought to be the Greek name of someone named Chlopha in Aramaic. There were three women who watched the crucifixion to the end: Mary mother of Jesus, "her sister Mary the wife of Clophas", and Mary Magdalene. Then perhaps three women went into the tomb to do as much embalming as they could before sundown: Joanna is not always listed (perhaps the same as the rich patroness Joanna, wife of a "steward" in the household of Herod Antipas), but there is Mary Magdalene and "Mary the mother of James". Then perhaps three women went back a couple days later to finish up, and found the tomb empty: Salome is not always listed (perhaps the same as a sister of Jesus by that name; certainly not the strip-teasing head-demanding stepdaughter of Antipas!), but there is Mary Magdalene and "the other Mary". This is aggravating, but it is a conventional and sensible interpretation that, although the mother was spared the embalming duties, the "other" Mary and Mary "wife of Clophas" and Mary "mother of James" are all the same person. "Sister" of Mary the mother of Jesus means, we hope, "sister-in-law" (would parents really give two daughters the same name, without any distinguishing nicknames?) so that Alphaeus/Clopha is the uncle of Jesus, and James the Little is his cousin. Catholics want him to be the same person as "James the brother of Jesus" nicknamed Tzaddik "the Righteous" so that the Virgin Mary never had more children, making "brother" mean "cousin"; an alternate excuse is that James the Righteous was a half-brother from a previous marriage of Joseph. Neither of these work: James the Righteous by all accounts was lifelong celibate and had no children, unlike James the Little; and he was the next in line after Jesus, not an older son of Joseph who would then be senior; besides, the gospels say the brothers of Jesus were not believing in his mission and "asked whether he was out of his mind" at a time when the 12 disciples had already been chosen. No, James the Righteous was the heir, not one of the "Cabinet ministers" in the "administration".
There was one with the common name Yochanan "John son of Zebedee", and four with less-common names. Thaddeus, according to "Doctrine of 'Addai", had the Aramaic name 'Addai. The orthodox don't like that book (his reported "Doctrine" is rather heretical), but the story it tells has some historical confirmations: Thaddeus converted king Abgar of Osroene (a tributary to the Parthian Empire, in northern Mesopotamia) and made himself High Priest, and then Regent when the old king passed; Abgar the younger, when he came of age, resented the role of Thaddeus, killed him, and reconverted to paganism. The orthodox view is that the Semitic name of Thaddeus was "Jude" and that he was the same person as "Jude of James": the lists of 12 which include Jude of James omit Thaddeus, and vice versa; but I explain this as arising from the need to find room for Matthew/Mathias, and differing decisions about which forgettable disciple to push out. Many manuscripts also have that Thaddeus was "called Lebbaeus" with a number of scribal variants: perhaps a nickname Libbai "my heart"? There is certainly some confusion here, and I will not pretend to be certain I have straightened it out correctly. "Bartholemew" would seem to be Aramaic bar-Tolmai "son of Ptolemy"; the Ptolemies were the Greek dynasty in Egypt, and "Ptolemy" became a common name even among the lower classes in Egypt, if not so much elsewhere. It is puzzling that he would only be called by the patronymic, without his given name (perhaps he was a descendant of an illegitimate branch of the Ptolemies, and proud of it?) but Nathanael in the gospel of John might be that given name: he was supposed to be one of the very first disciples, so it would be unusual for him not to be in the 12. Simon Peter's brother "Andrew" is only called by the Greek name Andros "the man" which sounds a little odd; but a century later there was a Jewish rebel in Cyrenaica (after Hadrian destroyed Judea, many Jews elsewhere rose up) called "Andros" whose Hebrew name was Adam, and that makes sense. For "Phillip" there is not a clue what name besides Philippos "horse-lover" (name of Alexander the Great's father, and a Herodian king of the Greek-speaking Decapolis) he might have had, but surely he had a Semitic name; maybe it was Yeshua' and it is omitted to avoid confusion? The other "finalist" besides Matthew/Mathias for Iscariot's replacement was "Jesus called Justus" (interestingly, Justus is Latin rather than Greek) who is subsequently called Justus bar-Sabbas, by the nickname and patronymic to avoid the confusing given name, whereas his brother Joseph is called by his given name.
The disciples were supposed to travel in pairs for safety and companionship. There were two pairs of brothers, Simon Peter and Andrew, and James and John the sons of Zebedee, or perhaps three, if Thomas was the younger twin and Thaddeus his older-by-minutes brother, although they might have been just unrelated friends (I would like to construe "Lebbaeus" as a word for the older of a pair of twins, but cannot find any such etymology). There were two father-and-son pairs, Simon and Judas Iscariot, and James the Little and Jude. Phillip and Bartholemew were the other pair, not related but very close friends by all accounts (strengthening the identification of Bartholemew with Nathanael, a friend of Phillip's from before they became disciples). Curiously, in the Middle Ages this was given a homoerotic spin: in the same-sex wedding-liturgies (among the Greek and Celtic churches, but never the Roman!) collected by Boswell, the couples are urged to imitate David and Jonathan, Phillip and Bartholemew, and Sergius and Bacchus. The last two were a pair of lovers in the Roman army, Bacchus a Christian but Sergius a pagan until, when Bacchus was about to be martyred, Sergius insisted on declaring himself a Christian so that he could be martyred too and join Bacchus for eternity. The Greek church has since become quite as homophobic as the Roman, but in medieval times this was an acceptable martyrology story, and Sergei remains a common name among the Russians (many of whom would be horrified to be told of its origin). But although it might suit my propagandistic purposes to believe that Jesus sanctioned a same-sex couple among his disciples, I cannot take it seriously. In Acts, Phillip has been married for a long time, with several daughters who could all prophesy, Luke assures us.
A digression on Acts: the second half of the book is called by scholars the "We Document" from its unself-conscious habit of shifting between "we" whenever Luke the physician is present and "they" whenever he is absent. The "We" book appears to be well-preserved 1st-century material (there are variant texts of Acts with extra material, as much as 40% longer, but the canonical text has been faithfully pruned of such accretions) and genuinely by Luke the physician. The first half of Acts I call the "Bridge Document" and believe to have arisen in two stages. Some sections are notoriously out of chronological order: the executions of Theudas, purported successor to John the Baptist, and then some Zealot followers of the line of Judas of Galilee, date to the late 40's but are mentioned early in Acts, well before Herod Agrippa and the Great Famine of the mid-40's; Ananias is introduced when he shelters the blinded Paul, but his death is described much earlier (if this was a different Ananias, there should have been some introduction about who he was). If the chapters are rearranged in chronological order, I discern a chiasma structure, an ancient narrative framework in which events in the beginning of the story receive symbolic echoes in reverse order at the end of the story. This would indicate that the whole thing was written at one time, which I date to the reign of Trajan (the centurion converted by Peter is said to be of the Italica regiment, as if we should care what unit he was from; but the colony of Italica in Spain was the home-town of emperor Trajan, who expresses a don't-ask-don't-tell semi-tolerance of Christians, as long as they don't make trouble, in correspondence with Pliny); and that it was composed to fit precisely where we find it, as a "bridge" to span from the Resurrection to the beginning of the We Document. But then it was edited, to the injury of its chronology and structure (the second imprisonment of Peter was supposed to be a late symbolic echo of the first one; it is clumsy as well as historically inaccurate to put them one right after the other), at some time when the sequence of historical events had faded from memory.
In the We Document, Phillip is introduced (the first time he appears in that document; of course the Bridge Document which had already talked about Phillip a lot was not present when the We Document was written) as one of "the seven". The author of the Bridge Document is puzzled by this and invents a new list of "seven" who supposedly liaise between the Jewish and Greek Christians, at a time when Greek Christians did not yet exist, and they all have Greek names only. This gives rise to some questioning in the orthodox literature about whether the Phillip in "the seven" was or was not the same person as the Phillip in "the twelve". I think this was all just a misunderstanding: by "the seven" Luke simply meant the surviving members of "the twelve". By that time, evidently, six of the twelve were gone, with Matthew/Mathias the only replacement. We know that Judas Iscariot was dead, and Simon the Zealot reportedly went off to Egypt after what happened to his son (maybe he had died of natural causes, being from the older generation, or maybe he had cut off all contact with the Christians); James son of Zebedee had been executed by Herod Agrippa, and while Acts does not mention it, Thaddeus had been executed by Abgar the younger by this time. The other two who seem to have disappeared are James the Little and his son Jude the Obscure (who has become the patron saint of Lost Causes, on the theory that he must have a lot of untapped Divine Grace at his disposal, as the most neglected of the 12). My guess is that they just died, perhaps during the Great Famine of the 40's, during which few groups of Jews would have failed to take some casualties. There is a very late story in which they were martyred in lower Mesopotamia, but it was never widely circulated and has little credibility.
The shrine of Campostella in Spain has a very old skeleton, from someone who was burned alive, kept in a deep-underground crypt and purporting to be James the Little, identified at Campostella with James the Righteous (brother of Jesus). Oddly, when this shrine started advertising itself as a holy pilgrimage site (it was enormously popular in medieval times), the monks did not exhibit the skeleton and were coy about whether they had it; rather than any story about how St. James (Santiago or San Diego in Spanish) had gotten there, the story was that the abbot had seen St. James in a vision of a field of stars (hence Campostella) telling him that anyone who visited this holy place would be blessed (multiple miraculous healings of course followed). But a crusader brought back from the Mideast the purported skeleton of St. James, embarrassing the monks who had to admit that they already had a skeleton. The knight hadn't meant to make trouble: his understanding had been that the vision of Campostella revealed where St. James wanted to be buried, not where he already was. No matter: the new skeleton was a victim of beheading, and therefore must be James the Greater (son of Zebedee, beheaded by Herod Agrippa), while the old one was James the Little (it had not previously been clear which St. James they were claiming), so now Campostella was doubly blessed. A popular theory, which I incline to believe, is that the original skeleton was actually that of Priscillian, a highly-revered Spanish monk of the 4th century who became the first Christian burned for heresy, not by order of the Church but by a usurping emperor Magnus Maximus (from Britain, also ruled Gaul and Spain for a while) who did not like his preaching of communism (Maximus was battling the Bagaudae, a proto-Marxist movement who thought the rich should be forcibly dispossessed of their wealth). This would explain why the remains were so deeply concealed.
The "seven" were paired differently than the "twelve" had been: Phillip and Bartholemew were inseparable, but Peter was now paired with John, staying put in Jerusalem with James the Righteous as the central administration, and Andrew was now with Matthew, while Thomas was the odd man out, travelling alone (tsk, tsk) to India where he came to a bad end. The community Thomas founded in India was mostly out of touch with other Christians, though briefly reported as being in communion with the heretical Nestorian church of the East in medieval times. By the time the Portuguese re-discovered them, they were rather thoroughly Hinduized, seeing Jesus as one more avatar of the God they did not hesitate to address as Rama. The Jesuits burned thousands of them as heretics, and burned as many of their books as they could get; Portugal only held the small enclave of Goa, but neighboring rulers learned that they could curry favor by turning over people or books from this sect. Some modern Christians in India now claim to be descended from the Thomas Christians, describing them as Protestants of the sola scriptura type; this is obviously fictional, and I for one would dearly love to see what the "gospel of Thomas" actually looked like in India.
According to "Acts of John" (though all non-canonical "Acts" of this apostle or that need to be taken with a grain of salt), John accompanied Peter to Rome, but then went back (smart move!) and lived deep into his eighties, dying peaceably in Ephesus. We have three accounts of what happened to Andrew. "Acts of Andrew and Matthew" has those two going to Ethiopia (following up on Phillip's contact with an official there, specially mentioned in the canonical Acts because it was so successful, the church becoming a state religion in Ethiopia long before it did in Rome) and then into darkest Africa, where they were boiled alive and eaten by cannibals. "Acts of Andrew and Mathias" (the names "Matthew" and "Mathias" treated as interchangeable) has them going instead to Scythia and then into the wildest steppes of central Asia, where they were boiled alive and eaten by cannibals. These appear to be the same story, despite the confusion about which way they went. But later, the story was that Andrew went alone (tsk, tsk) to Byzantium where he was crucified, asking as a last favor that he be nailed to an X-shaped cross because he did not deserve to have his death be exactly like that of Jesus. This is supposed to explain the flag of Byzantium, which actually arose because it was the merger of four smaller villages (later called the Red, Blue, Green, and White quarters of Constantinople from the colors of their teams in the Hippodrome, symbolic of Fire, Water, Earth, and Air). Scotland had the same flag, again because it arose as a fourfold merger (of Dalriad, Pictavia, Strathclyde, and Lothian), but re-explained as invoking Andrew as their patron saint. This story, however, is purest propaganda: the bishops of Byzantium had been minor back-woods prelates, but were now the Patriarchs of Constantinople, and needed an apostolic founder to compete with the Patriarchs of Rome, successors to Peter.
The oldest story about Phillip is that he died of a broken heart at Hierapolis in Asia Minor, having heard of the death of Bartholemew and praying to be re-united with him. Subsequent generations decided that it would be a better story if he was martyred. But how did Bartholemew die? He was the most martyred of all disciples, killed a dozen different ways in a dozen different places if you believe the stories. Eisenman found a surprising solution: Josephus mentions a bar-Tolmai as a respected general among the Jewish rebels, who died valiantly fighting the Romans. This is the only other known occurrence of someone going by that patronymic. It is plain why the Christians would want to forget about any connection between them and the Zealot rebels, but why wouldn't some of them have fought on that side? The commander of Yeshua' of Ginnosaur's forces at Masada was Eleazar bar-Ya'ir "Lazarus son of Jairus" and, although Eisenman's view that these are the "Lazarus" and "Jairus" of the gospels is not a popular one, I am inclined to accept it.
It would help to explain the four very different versions of the story in the canonical gospels. In John we get the famous scene of Jesus miraculously raising Lazarus from the dead. In Luke, however, Lazarus is the name of a character in a parable about the afterlife, in which resurrection only comes up as a hypothetical; no other character is named in any other parable. In Mark, there is an erasure "And they came to Jericho... And as they were leaving Jericho" which we can now fill in. Morton Smith discovered a letter from Clement of Alexandria (the Patriarchs of Alexandria were successors of Mark) responding to an inquiry about a version of the gospel of Mark among the Carpocratians (Carpocrates taught communism and sex-magic; we should probably think of "typical cult with exploitative guru" more than of "hippie-dippie free-love commune"), in which Lazarus is sealed in a tomb, dressed in a white robe, by Jesus, who comes back days later to bring him out and give him secret teachings-- and then take his robe off and lie with him "skin to skin". Clement says the original Mark did have that Lazarus story, except for the "skin to skin" part which he angrily denies, and says that this is why the passage is omitted from the public text, "for not all things are for all ears". Smith was accused of forging "Secret Mark", but this appears impossible, and arose because Smith was cantankerous and made a lot of enemies; he was gay, and wanted the "skin to skin" verse also to be genuine, despite Clement's denial. I cannot take that seriously: why wouldn't Clement have just denied the whole thing if he was going to lie? Similarly, if Smith had forged this, why the extra complication of having Clement accept one part and deny another? The Ockham's Razor explanation is that Clement is being straightforward about what Mark's version of the Lazarus story was and was not; the parable in Luke would be a slightly garbled version of the teachings Jesus gave him before the tomb ritual (the garbling is that “Eleazar” in the parable was surely not the name of the poor beggar, rather, that of the spoiled rich boy who repents too late). In Matthew there is no Lazarus, just Jairus "the head of the synagogue", whose daughter Jesus raises from the dead. That sister of Eleazar is surely Mary Magdalene; elsewhere Jesus cures her by "casting seven devils out" (i.e., curing a severe mental illness) or redeeming her from a life of prostitution (surely not out of economic necessity, if her daddy was that rich). These are different ways of saying the same thing: her "insanity" was an unacceptable sexual libertinism; she was as good as dead in her brother's eyes until Jesus changed her, perhaps with the same ritual of burying the old Mary and raising up a new one, which her brother then also wanted to undergo. There is more here than meets the eye.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
II. PATRIARCHS A. JERUSALEM
Who and what were the 5 Patriarchs? Early Christianity had a huge variety of splinter sects, many of them teaching ideologies that modern Christians would hardly think of as "Christian" at all, but most of the "Gnostic" sects were quite small, a teacher and a handful of disciples, and this was by design. The Gnostic marketed themselves as for the elite, imparting secret wisdom beyond the grasp of most people. The katholikos "for everybody" Christian sects (the term orthodox "right-believing" did not start to be used until the 5th century) aimed at the masses, and indeed were often criticized for appealing to the vulgar and the gullible. Communications were sporadic, and significant regional differences in beliefs as well as practices did emerge. But five units more-or-less recognized each other's legitimacy, and were formally declared administrative divisions of the Church by Justinian (but the Pope at this time already refused to accept a Church council ratifying this, claiming that he was not just one of five co-equals). Roughly in order of age, these were: the Ebionite church of Jerusalem; the Gentile church of Antioch; the Pauline churches headed by Rome; the Johannine churches eventually headed by Constantinople; and the Coptic church of Alexandria.
The church in Jerusalem, despite its obvious seniority, did not maintain a leading role because it early went off in a very different theological direction from the others. Once Peter and John had left, it was under the sole direction of James the Righteous, brother of Jesus, and after his murder the succession passed strictly to the next-of-kin for a century or so. They were called the Desposyni "royal heirs" (despos "king" in Greek did not have the derogatory overtone that "despot" has since acquired), each of them in turn being not just a "bishop" but a "Messiah", that is, anointed rightful king. However, Jesus to them was not just one king among the others in the lineage, but the "king of kings" (a Persian-derived title) who would judge all kings, as well as all other men, at the end of time. He was, however, the most-exalted human, not a God: in particular, the Ebionites denied the "virgin birth" story, which was somewhat embarrassing (who would know the facts better than the family?) The "Protevangelium of James", a late forgery purporting to tell about the life of Mary and the virgin birth, is ascribed to James the Righteous for the propagandistic purpose of claiming that even James believed that story.
The Ebionites had their own version of the "Gospel of Matthew" in Hebrew, which was seen by Jerome and Epiphanius, who note some of the major differences between it and the Greek gospel (unfortunately, we don't have a good text of it). It contained the "Q" material (in the original Hebrew; this is what I think Matthew actually wrote) combined with the Markan narrative (translated into Hebrew), but none of the "F" material (the opening genealogy and nativity story, and other insertions with scriptural quotes and their "fulfillments") or "P" material (a couple stories emphasizing that Peter was #1 plus the ending with the "guards at the tomb"). Instead there is an ending where the risen Jesus meets brother James and shares a meal of bread, fish, and wine with him. This appears intended to emphasize not just the primacy of James, but also that the risen Jesus was just as corporeal as before, not a "glorified" body of some spiritual substance as in the Pauline epistles.
Eisenman has written an informative and highly irritating book "James the Brother of Jesus". He dumps a huge amount of enlightening data about the historical context, in a jumbled order because he keeps losing the thread of his argument to chase down tangents. He filters everything through an intensely Jewish-nationalist and anti-Pauline lens. He wants James and Paul to have been mortal enemies; more accurately, it seems that their relations were often strained but generally polite and correct. He wants the Ebionites to be the same thing as the Zealots, but while there were clearly connections, info that Eisenman himself brings out tends to show that James was very averse to creating any trouble with the Romans. He is even more cynical than I am about the canonical NT, always asking what propagandistic purpose is being served by any piece of text and speculating about what less-pleasant truth might lie underneath; but takes the Ebionite literature (of which he shows that we have more surviving than you might expect) at face value, without any of the same kind of scrutiny. He does make it clear, however, that James was seriously de-emphasized by the NT, and was actually a very prominent figure in mid-1st-century Jerusalem.
His sermons were called the "ascents of James" because he would climb up to the ramparts of the Temple, to address as wide a crowd as possible in a booming voice, wearing a high-peaked white crown (we now associate such a miter with "bishops" but it was the Mideastern style for a "king"). His focus was largely on Jesus, reminding the crowds of how his brother had been executed for no crime but speaking truth, how he had meekly submitted to show that he knew that what is truly of value is not in this world, and how he had risen from the dead as a sign of God's singular approval of him. He called for "righteousness" by which he meant thorough observance of the Torah; but always interpreted Torah as serving the twin principles of honoring God and serving the needs of our fellows, rejecting any legalisms which did not serve such purposes. In this he was not alien to the teachings of Hillel. The Epistle of James in the NT is written in better Greek than it is plausible for him to have known, but may have been written by a secretary at his dictation, against an extreme "salvation by faith alone" interpretation of what Paul was teaching at the time; even if it is actually from a later follower, however, it seems to be true to James' position.
One cannot help but ask how he got away with this, for decades. The priests in the Temple cannot have liked constant reminders about the Jesus case, and you would think the Romans would be alarmed by a "king" openly appearing in a crown. But unlike Jesus, who often made trouble (disrupting the animal sales at the Temple, flouting Sabbath rules), James was a punctilious observer of the Law and gave no excuse for accusations, and he seems to have had sympathy from the people, even among those not inclined to convert to his beliefs about Jesus. And he made plain that his kingship was a "spiritual" one, that is, that his role was to call people to righteousness, not to compel them. And, he acted "as if he owned the place" because, technically, he did: David's purchase of the Temple grounds was recorded in scripture; Zerubabbel had built the second edifice there; and the property had never been alienated from the family of which he claimed to be the heir (and nobody seems to have disputed him on that).
He was at his gravest danger, not from the Romans, but from Herod Agrippa, whose double descent from the Hasmonean and Herodian lines led him to think he could break off from Rome, forming a middle-state between Roman and Parthian Empires. Agrippa's negotiations with Roman and Parthian vassals were well advanced, and apparently he was about to proclaim himself as an emperor (of a realm including Egypt, Palestine, Phoenicia, Syria, and Mesopotamia) when he mysteriously died (struck down by God, or maybe just poisoned). During this time, Flavius Josephus reports that Stephanos "Stephen" was stoned to death by a mob of lestae "bandits" for being "a servant of Claudius Caesar"; lestae is a common derogatory term for Zealots, used also in Josephus for the young bucks who attacked Pontius Pilate's new aqueduct ("what have the Romans ever done for us?") to deface the Roman eagles Pilate had dared to decorate it with, and it is possible that the Barabbas released instead of Jesus, described in the gospels with the same derogatory term, was one of the ringleaders of the aqueduct raid. If this is the same Stephen, which seems a reasonable assumption, the Jewish nationalists were offended at the Christians principally because they opposed Agrippa's project of breaking away from Rome. Around this same time, according to the Ebionite literature, James was knocked down off his perch, twisting his ankle so that he could not resume preaching for a while, by a mob incited by someone who is vaguely described, but one manuscript flat-out says in a marginal note that it was Saul of Tarsus. The canonical Acts says James son of Zebedee was beheaded by Agrippa, and Peter arrested, although he doesn't seem to have dared to arrest James the Righteous.
James survived twenty more years. Jewish/Roman relations got worse and worse: one year a soldier guarding the Temple during the Passover rush mooned the crowd, who threw stones at him, starting riots in which many lost their lives; a group of radicals repeatedly obstructed the delivery of Rome's offerings to the Temple (the imperial government donated to all religious institutions) which they thought the priests should never have been accepting; then the Roman governor was assassinated, with the rumored connivance of the High Priest. On Yom Kippur, James went into the Holy of Holies to make atonement for the sins of Israel; this should have been the High Priest's role alone, but it was the High Priest's sin above all others which needed atoning for, and James apparently felt that in such a case it was up to the King. The symbolic repudiation of the High Priest's legitimacy was a step too far: taking advantage of the vacuum in the Roman administration (the replacement governor was still en-route; it had taken time for word to get to Italy and back), an irregular Sanhedrin was convened, condemned James to death (they were not supposed to do that while foreigners still occupied), and a mob knocked James down and beat him to death with clubs. Later authors sometimes said that this murder (not the killing of Jesus) was the particular sin which called down on Judea the wrath of God; the spiral of violence that ended with the destruction of the Temple escalated from this point on.
Under Domitian, two young Desposyni were captured and questioned about being the heirs to David; they played dumb, saying they were just humble peasants, and got away with their lives. Under Hadrian, the second Jewish Revolt, under Simon bar-Kochba (who "claimed to be somebody" but not an heir of David), led to a ban on Jews living anywhere within a wide radius of Jerusalem, renamed "Aelia Capitolina" with a temple of Venus (complete with sacred prostitutes) on the Temple Mount. The Ebionite headquarters was mostly at Pella in Transjordan for a while; Christianity remained a "Jewish sect" in the eyes of the authorities of "Syria Palestina" as Judea was now called, so they were doubly illegal there, regardless of the fact that the Jews now reckoned the Ebionites among the minim (precise meaning of this word not known) who were not to be allowed to enter any synagogues. But much as Christians elsewhere in the Empire were not actually persecuted full-time, the enforcement of the law against Jews in Judea was very spotty; by the time of Constantine there were large communities of Jews and Ebionites right in Jerusalem.
According to Epiphanius, by the 3rd century the Desposyni were extinct, and there was a division between "Ebionites" who rejected the virgin birth and the Pauline epistles, versus the "Nazarenes" who accepted both (the two words had earlier been used as synonyms). There was also a Gentile Christian church in Jerusalem, but the leader called himself the "bishop of Aelia" using the official name of the city (rather than the name that just about everybody still called it), and was answerable to the metropolitan of Caesarea ("metropolitan" is used for "archbishop" in the East; Caesarea was a Roman-founded port, majority-Greek even before the first Jewish Revolt), who answered to the patriarch of Antioch. It is unclear when the line of bishops of Aelia started, because they had to be even more underground than most Christians at the time. So, after Constantine one of them, named Makarios, "discovered" that actually his line stretched all the way back to James the Righteous, and they became "patriarchs of Jerusalem". They had difficulty with their congregants: a successor to Makarios, Melito of Sardis, complained that even those with no Jew in their ancestry were mostly Ebionite in sympathies. But the Muslim invasion (bloodless here; the Byzantine government had lost support thoroughly, and the Muslims were welcomed) solved this, Christians of Ebionite leanings simply converting to Islam (whose view of Jesus was not alien to their own), leaving the patriarch with only the orthodox.
During the Crusades, a new line of patriarchs of Jerusalem loyal to the Pope was appointed, and the Armenians who had a lot of monasteries around Jerusalem did not see eye-to-eye with either Rome or Constantinople and have their own patriarch. Saladin welcomed all the varieties of Christians and Jews back to Jerusalem (not just enlightened tolerance, but also sound business: the pilgrimage trade was a big money-maker). The Latin, Greek, and Armenian patriarchs were constantly at odds over the Holy Sepulchre, and begged Saladin to appoint a neutral party (Muslim, of course) to hold the keys. The descendants, the Nusreibah family, still have "the keys" (the physical keys of course are totally symbolic now, the locks to which they went having long since rusted away). The current key-holder tried to run against Hamas and Fatah in the ill-fated Palestinian elections, but got only a small share of the vote. He is reviled by Palestinians as "collaborationist" for urging a renunciation of violence, and by Israelis as "intransigent" for continuing to demand that East Jerusalem be the Palestinian capital. The best example of the kind of nonsense his family has had to put up with over the centuries is a ladder left behind when someone tried to do some overdue repairs, causing a furore because all factions had not been consulted, and since no agreement could be reached over which faction had the right to remove the ladder, it remained for centuries until finally removed by natural processes of decay.
The church in Jerusalem, despite its obvious seniority, did not maintain a leading role because it early went off in a very different theological direction from the others. Once Peter and John had left, it was under the sole direction of James the Righteous, brother of Jesus, and after his murder the succession passed strictly to the next-of-kin for a century or so. They were called the Desposyni "royal heirs" (despos "king" in Greek did not have the derogatory overtone that "despot" has since acquired), each of them in turn being not just a "bishop" but a "Messiah", that is, anointed rightful king. However, Jesus to them was not just one king among the others in the lineage, but the "king of kings" (a Persian-derived title) who would judge all kings, as well as all other men, at the end of time. He was, however, the most-exalted human, not a God: in particular, the Ebionites denied the "virgin birth" story, which was somewhat embarrassing (who would know the facts better than the family?) The "Protevangelium of James", a late forgery purporting to tell about the life of Mary and the virgin birth, is ascribed to James the Righteous for the propagandistic purpose of claiming that even James believed that story.
The Ebionites had their own version of the "Gospel of Matthew" in Hebrew, which was seen by Jerome and Epiphanius, who note some of the major differences between it and the Greek gospel (unfortunately, we don't have a good text of it). It contained the "Q" material (in the original Hebrew; this is what I think Matthew actually wrote) combined with the Markan narrative (translated into Hebrew), but none of the "F" material (the opening genealogy and nativity story, and other insertions with scriptural quotes and their "fulfillments") or "P" material (a couple stories emphasizing that Peter was #1 plus the ending with the "guards at the tomb"). Instead there is an ending where the risen Jesus meets brother James and shares a meal of bread, fish, and wine with him. This appears intended to emphasize not just the primacy of James, but also that the risen Jesus was just as corporeal as before, not a "glorified" body of some spiritual substance as in the Pauline epistles.
Eisenman has written an informative and highly irritating book "James the Brother of Jesus". He dumps a huge amount of enlightening data about the historical context, in a jumbled order because he keeps losing the thread of his argument to chase down tangents. He filters everything through an intensely Jewish-nationalist and anti-Pauline lens. He wants James and Paul to have been mortal enemies; more accurately, it seems that their relations were often strained but generally polite and correct. He wants the Ebionites to be the same thing as the Zealots, but while there were clearly connections, info that Eisenman himself brings out tends to show that James was very averse to creating any trouble with the Romans. He is even more cynical than I am about the canonical NT, always asking what propagandistic purpose is being served by any piece of text and speculating about what less-pleasant truth might lie underneath; but takes the Ebionite literature (of which he shows that we have more surviving than you might expect) at face value, without any of the same kind of scrutiny. He does make it clear, however, that James was seriously de-emphasized by the NT, and was actually a very prominent figure in mid-1st-century Jerusalem.
His sermons were called the "ascents of James" because he would climb up to the ramparts of the Temple, to address as wide a crowd as possible in a booming voice, wearing a high-peaked white crown (we now associate such a miter with "bishops" but it was the Mideastern style for a "king"). His focus was largely on Jesus, reminding the crowds of how his brother had been executed for no crime but speaking truth, how he had meekly submitted to show that he knew that what is truly of value is not in this world, and how he had risen from the dead as a sign of God's singular approval of him. He called for "righteousness" by which he meant thorough observance of the Torah; but always interpreted Torah as serving the twin principles of honoring God and serving the needs of our fellows, rejecting any legalisms which did not serve such purposes. In this he was not alien to the teachings of Hillel. The Epistle of James in the NT is written in better Greek than it is plausible for him to have known, but may have been written by a secretary at his dictation, against an extreme "salvation by faith alone" interpretation of what Paul was teaching at the time; even if it is actually from a later follower, however, it seems to be true to James' position.
One cannot help but ask how he got away with this, for decades. The priests in the Temple cannot have liked constant reminders about the Jesus case, and you would think the Romans would be alarmed by a "king" openly appearing in a crown. But unlike Jesus, who often made trouble (disrupting the animal sales at the Temple, flouting Sabbath rules), James was a punctilious observer of the Law and gave no excuse for accusations, and he seems to have had sympathy from the people, even among those not inclined to convert to his beliefs about Jesus. And he made plain that his kingship was a "spiritual" one, that is, that his role was to call people to righteousness, not to compel them. And, he acted "as if he owned the place" because, technically, he did: David's purchase of the Temple grounds was recorded in scripture; Zerubabbel had built the second edifice there; and the property had never been alienated from the family of which he claimed to be the heir (and nobody seems to have disputed him on that).
He was at his gravest danger, not from the Romans, but from Herod Agrippa, whose double descent from the Hasmonean and Herodian lines led him to think he could break off from Rome, forming a middle-state between Roman and Parthian Empires. Agrippa's negotiations with Roman and Parthian vassals were well advanced, and apparently he was about to proclaim himself as an emperor (of a realm including Egypt, Palestine, Phoenicia, Syria, and Mesopotamia) when he mysteriously died (struck down by God, or maybe just poisoned). During this time, Flavius Josephus reports that Stephanos "Stephen" was stoned to death by a mob of lestae "bandits" for being "a servant of Claudius Caesar"; lestae is a common derogatory term for Zealots, used also in Josephus for the young bucks who attacked Pontius Pilate's new aqueduct ("what have the Romans ever done for us?") to deface the Roman eagles Pilate had dared to decorate it with, and it is possible that the Barabbas released instead of Jesus, described in the gospels with the same derogatory term, was one of the ringleaders of the aqueduct raid. If this is the same Stephen, which seems a reasonable assumption, the Jewish nationalists were offended at the Christians principally because they opposed Agrippa's project of breaking away from Rome. Around this same time, according to the Ebionite literature, James was knocked down off his perch, twisting his ankle so that he could not resume preaching for a while, by a mob incited by someone who is vaguely described, but one manuscript flat-out says in a marginal note that it was Saul of Tarsus. The canonical Acts says James son of Zebedee was beheaded by Agrippa, and Peter arrested, although he doesn't seem to have dared to arrest James the Righteous.
James survived twenty more years. Jewish/Roman relations got worse and worse: one year a soldier guarding the Temple during the Passover rush mooned the crowd, who threw stones at him, starting riots in which many lost their lives; a group of radicals repeatedly obstructed the delivery of Rome's offerings to the Temple (the imperial government donated to all religious institutions) which they thought the priests should never have been accepting; then the Roman governor was assassinated, with the rumored connivance of the High Priest. On Yom Kippur, James went into the Holy of Holies to make atonement for the sins of Israel; this should have been the High Priest's role alone, but it was the High Priest's sin above all others which needed atoning for, and James apparently felt that in such a case it was up to the King. The symbolic repudiation of the High Priest's legitimacy was a step too far: taking advantage of the vacuum in the Roman administration (the replacement governor was still en-route; it had taken time for word to get to Italy and back), an irregular Sanhedrin was convened, condemned James to death (they were not supposed to do that while foreigners still occupied), and a mob knocked James down and beat him to death with clubs. Later authors sometimes said that this murder (not the killing of Jesus) was the particular sin which called down on Judea the wrath of God; the spiral of violence that ended with the destruction of the Temple escalated from this point on.
Under Domitian, two young Desposyni were captured and questioned about being the heirs to David; they played dumb, saying they were just humble peasants, and got away with their lives. Under Hadrian, the second Jewish Revolt, under Simon bar-Kochba (who "claimed to be somebody" but not an heir of David), led to a ban on Jews living anywhere within a wide radius of Jerusalem, renamed "Aelia Capitolina" with a temple of Venus (complete with sacred prostitutes) on the Temple Mount. The Ebionite headquarters was mostly at Pella in Transjordan for a while; Christianity remained a "Jewish sect" in the eyes of the authorities of "Syria Palestina" as Judea was now called, so they were doubly illegal there, regardless of the fact that the Jews now reckoned the Ebionites among the minim (precise meaning of this word not known) who were not to be allowed to enter any synagogues. But much as Christians elsewhere in the Empire were not actually persecuted full-time, the enforcement of the law against Jews in Judea was very spotty; by the time of Constantine there were large communities of Jews and Ebionites right in Jerusalem.
According to Epiphanius, by the 3rd century the Desposyni were extinct, and there was a division between "Ebionites" who rejected the virgin birth and the Pauline epistles, versus the "Nazarenes" who accepted both (the two words had earlier been used as synonyms). There was also a Gentile Christian church in Jerusalem, but the leader called himself the "bishop of Aelia" using the official name of the city (rather than the name that just about everybody still called it), and was answerable to the metropolitan of Caesarea ("metropolitan" is used for "archbishop" in the East; Caesarea was a Roman-founded port, majority-Greek even before the first Jewish Revolt), who answered to the patriarch of Antioch. It is unclear when the line of bishops of Aelia started, because they had to be even more underground than most Christians at the time. So, after Constantine one of them, named Makarios, "discovered" that actually his line stretched all the way back to James the Righteous, and they became "patriarchs of Jerusalem". They had difficulty with their congregants: a successor to Makarios, Melito of Sardis, complained that even those with no Jew in their ancestry were mostly Ebionite in sympathies. But the Muslim invasion (bloodless here; the Byzantine government had lost support thoroughly, and the Muslims were welcomed) solved this, Christians of Ebionite leanings simply converting to Islam (whose view of Jesus was not alien to their own), leaving the patriarch with only the orthodox.
During the Crusades, a new line of patriarchs of Jerusalem loyal to the Pope was appointed, and the Armenians who had a lot of monasteries around Jerusalem did not see eye-to-eye with either Rome or Constantinople and have their own patriarch. Saladin welcomed all the varieties of Christians and Jews back to Jerusalem (not just enlightened tolerance, but also sound business: the pilgrimage trade was a big money-maker). The Latin, Greek, and Armenian patriarchs were constantly at odds over the Holy Sepulchre, and begged Saladin to appoint a neutral party (Muslim, of course) to hold the keys. The descendants, the Nusreibah family, still have "the keys" (the physical keys of course are totally symbolic now, the locks to which they went having long since rusted away). The current key-holder tried to run against Hamas and Fatah in the ill-fated Palestinian elections, but got only a small share of the vote. He is reviled by Palestinians as "collaborationist" for urging a renunciation of violence, and by Israelis as "intransigent" for continuing to demand that East Jerusalem be the Palestinian capital. The best example of the kind of nonsense his family has had to put up with over the centuries is a ladder left behind when someone tried to do some overdue repairs, causing a furore because all factions had not been consulted, and since no agreement could be reached over which faction had the right to remove the ladder, it remained for centuries until finally removed by natural processes of decay.
II.B. ANTIOCH
Antioch, the capital of Syria in Seleucid and Roman times (Damascus was an older city, but was somewhat smaller than Antioch for a while), is where the first sizable contingent of non-Jews converted to a belief in Jesus, and where according to Acts the name "Christian" was first used. An early council in Jerusalem (reported in the "We" document, the most reliable part of Acts) decided that the Gentile Christians were not subject to the full Jewish Law (in particular, circumcision was not required, which might have limited the appeal of Christianity to males). Antioch was the launching point for missionary ventures like Paul's, and since seniority was the basis for leadership among the churches, the church of Antioch had a good claim to govern all of Gentile Christianity.
Indeed, early patriarchs of Antioch claimed that they, not the bishops of Rome (the term "Pope" was not widely used until the 4th century), were the successors to Peter. This claim to "succession" was somewhat weakened because the first two were not on record as saying such a thing. When Peter went to Rome (probably not expecting to die there!) he left a certain Evodius in charge. But we know almost nothing about him except the name, not even whether he was Gentile or Jewish (one tradition has him being the first pagan to convert, which doesn't fit well with the story of Peter and the centurion; but another has him as one of the "seventy" appointed by Jesus as missionaries in addition to the 12; neither of these is at all trustworthy); or whether that name was a given name or a nickname: if a nickname, since it means "good song" perhaps his talents were more musical than literary, which would explain why we have no writings from him. He lasted for decades, unlike many of the early Christian leaders, and there is no martyrdom story although he appears to have died around the time of Domitian's persecution. His successor Ignatius, however, wrote a large number of influential epistles around the turn of the century.
Early Christians thought the epistles of Ignatius were so good that there ought to be more of them. Pseudepigraphy (writing new texts in the name of old authors) is a common problem in early Christian literature. We have the "short recension" of Ignatius (excerpts from numerous letters all put together in Greek), the "middle recension" (letters separated out and given in full, also in Greek), and the "long recension" (in Latin, with more letters, and extra material inserted into the other letters). The long recension is certainly full of forgeries: it includes Latin words for institutions and theological concepts that did not exist in Ignatius' time, so the new material cannot be a translation from the Greek. Some scholars think all of the middle recension is genuine; some that we can only trust what is in the short recension; some that we cannot trust any of it. I think the middle recension is at least majority genuine. It is noteworthy that Ignatius does not present himself as any kind of authority: he urges unity among the "catholic" church against the dubious gnostic sects (katholikos first appears as the designation of the mainstream Christian church in Ignatius), and tells the priests (or diakonoi rather: they are still called by this word for "waiters", as the servants who distribute the bread and wine, rather than by any term like "priest" suggesting a particular holiness) to obey the bishops (episkopoi "overseers") in matters of doctrine and discipline. Yet he does not rank himself among the bishops, using the phrase "my fellow servant" whenever addressing another diakonos, as if he himself belongs to the lower rung, rather than the higher, of this nascent hierarchy.
However humble Ignatius may have been, subsequent leaders in Antioch did claim the top spot in the church. Theophilus (patriarch in the mid-2nd century) is addressed as "Your Excellency" in the cover letters which open the "gospel of Luke" and "book of Acts" as we now have them. Theophilus was forced to respond to Marcion, a teacher whose scholarship was acknowledged by everyone but whose views were quite radical. Marcion published the first "canon" of Christian texts: the Evangelion, Apostolikon, and Antitheses. The Evangelion was like "Luke" except that it was just called "the gospel" without ascription to Luke or any other particular author (Marcion did not claim to have written it himself, and probably didn't, since much of it is not very compatible with his views), and lacked the opening chapters (the nativities of John the Baptist and Jesus, the baptism, and the temptation in the desert: it started "The Son of Man came to Capernaum" with Jesus reading Isaiah in the synagogue and starting his ministry by saying "This day these prophecies are fulfilled"). Orthodox writers naturally claim that the full "Luke" must have existed first, and that Marcion must have suppressed those chapters, but this will not wash: there is simply no reference to anything like the third gospel existing before Marcion's publication, and if Marcion were going to delete anything from the book, those chapters are not what he would have objected to.
The Apostolikon was a collection of ten Pauline epistles. Five had been circulating in Greece and are quoted in other early Christian authors prior to Marcion: 1st Thessalonians, 1st and 2nd Corinthians, Phillipians, and Romans (not addressed to "Romans" in Marcion's text, which again did not include all the chapters we have now); Marcion also included 2nd Thessalonians, which is certainly a forgery that he was taken in by (it presumes that collections of Paul's epistles are already circulating, and that people are already forging letters in Paul's name, neither of which is plausible in Paul's lifetime). Marcion scoured Asia Minor to find some others, which had not been previously well-known: Philemon (certainly genuine), Galatians (only some minor tamperings, in a couple of verses referring to Petros "Peter" where the real Paul always says Kephas instead), Ephesians (much debated, but probably contains extracts of a couple different Pauline letters plus a lot of non-Pauline material; Marcion's text was addressed to the "Laodiceans" instead and had some differences), and Colossians (probably not by Paul at all). Marcion did not have 1st or 2nd Timothy, Titus, or Hebrews: none of those were by Paul, although Hebrews is by somebody in the 1st century.
The Antitheses presents Marcion's theology. God's first creation was the Demiurge, the agent through whom all the other work of creation was accomplished; this was not new: the Logos "Word" in Philo of Alexandria and the gospel of John has this role. Marcion however believed that the Demiurge turned evil, through the sin of pride, unable to perceive that there was anything higher than himself and therefore acting against God. This became a very influential concept among many Gnostic sects, but not all of them took Marcion's next step: he identified YHWH in the Old Testament as the evil Demiurge, although thinking that other parts of the Old Testament were referring to the true Most High God; the role of Jesus was to free us from the tyranny of YHWH. The "antitheses" to which the title referred were a selection of "contradictions" between the loving teachings of Jesus and bloodthirsty passages in the Old Testament (of the sort that you can find cited in "angry atheist" literature nowadays). Theophilus fought against this anti-Semitic version of Christianity, but wanted to salvage the valuable texts of the gospel and epistles which Marcion had put together: it is from his efforts that the orthodox "canon" began to take shape.
Antioch's leadership role began to decline subsequently, however. A low point was Paul of Samosata, a mid-3rd-century patriarch who promoted an "adoptionist" theology in which Jesus had just been an ordinary human until God raised him to divine status at the time of the baptism. The original text of "gospel of Luke" (as published under Theophilus; Marcion's Evangelion did not have the baptism sequence) correctly quoted Psalms 2:7 "This is My beloved son; this day I have begotten thee" (as also quoted once in Acts, referring to every believer, and twice in Hebrews, referring to Jesus) but many manuscripts changed it to "This is My beloved son, in whom I am well pleased" to avoid precisely the implication which Paul of Samosata insisted on. He also thought the Holy Spirit had once been an ordinary angel until God raised him to divine status: he was not teaching Trinitarianism but rather Tritheism, that these three were fundamentally different Gods, only one of them existing from all eternity. Syrian bishops got together, deposed him, and elected Dominus in his place. This was during the chaotic "barracks emperor" period of frequent military coups in the Empire, and queen Zenobia of Palmyra (an Arabian kingdom, tributary to Rome) was an independent power in the East (a formidable woman, proudly descended from a daughter of Antony and Cleopatra, she had taken territory from Sassanian Persia, purportedly on behalf of Rome). Paul appealed to her, and she invaded Syria and took Antioch on this pretext.
Zenobia found so little resistance from the disorganized Roman forces in the East that she moved on to take Egypt, where she was hailed as a native daughter come home (the Cleopatra connection), and when forces from Asia Minor tried to re-invade Syria, she ended up with a good chunk of Asia Minor too. But a Western emperor named Aurelian was re-unifying the realm, putting down a separatist line of emperors in Gaul (the city of "Orleans" was his foundation) and turning finally to Zenobia. Her son he had to kill, but she was retired honorably to a villa, with a new Senator husband, where she conducted seminars on her own unique version of Christianity. Paul of Samosata then sued in the imperial court to get the patriarchal palace in Antioch back! Christianity was still only semi-legal (there was a "toleration" edict in place), but Aurelian was trying to reconcile everyone and was not at all a persecuting sort. He ruled that it was the property of the Christian organization as a whole, and that the bishop of Rome was the proper spokesman for that organization. Felix, the Pope (as I suppose we can begin calling the bishop of Rome, with this legal endorsement of supremacy), ruled in favor of Dominus.
The patriarchate of Antioch shattered completely during the theological controversies over the "Council of Chalcedon" which defined Jesus as one Person who had two Natures. The Nestorian view was that there were two different Persons, the human carpenter's boy and the divine Word of God for whom the human acted as a willing channel (in particular, Nestorius thought that any special veneration of his mother Mary was improper; the title Theotokos "bearer of God" which was popular in Alexandria was a total blasphemy, Nestorius said); this was popular in Asia Minor. The Monophysite view was that Jesus had only one Nature, totally divine; this was popular in Egypt. In Syria, both forms of opposition had a following, as well as the orthodox Chalcedonian compromise. The Nestorians largely fled across the eastern border to Persia, where their patriarch had his seat in Nisibis; they grew into an enormously large church in Asia, with converts as far east as Mongolia, but were almost entirely wiped out in the time of Tamerlane, and are now the "Assyrian Church" in Iraq, the smaller of the two Christian denominations there, with a couple thousand surviving members.
The Jacobites (after an early patriarch of theirs), who leaned toward the Monophysite direction, also outnumbered the Melkites "king's men" who obeyed the imperially-sanctioned patriarch. Some of the Jacobites also went east, becoming the larger "Chaldean" denomination in Iraq, but others maintained a semi-underground presence in Lebanon and Syria until the Muslim conquest, when they didn't have to hide anymore, and became the dominant "Maronite" church in Lebanon (there are also some "Greek Orthodox", that is "Melkite", Christians in Lebanon). Both the Chaldeans and the Maronites are now in communion with Rome, accepting the supreme leadership of the Pope. In early medieval times, the Maronites were responsible for a theological innovation called the "Monothelite" position, which some thought a good solution to the puzzle about Jesus, and others thought a dangerous heresy: it means "one will", teaching that although of course there was a difference between the humanity and divinity in Jesus, Jesus had completely surrendered his human will to the divine will, and in that sense was unified. The 9th-century Agatho accepted this position, but his successors agreed with a council condemning the Monothelite doctrine, and had to sign a humiliating acknowledgement that Agatho was a heretic (the only Pope condemned by later Popes as a heretic). Nonetheless, eventually Rome and Lebanon reached some kind of weasel-wording about the senses in which the "one will" could be considered correct.
Indeed, early patriarchs of Antioch claimed that they, not the bishops of Rome (the term "Pope" was not widely used until the 4th century), were the successors to Peter. This claim to "succession" was somewhat weakened because the first two were not on record as saying such a thing. When Peter went to Rome (probably not expecting to die there!) he left a certain Evodius in charge. But we know almost nothing about him except the name, not even whether he was Gentile or Jewish (one tradition has him being the first pagan to convert, which doesn't fit well with the story of Peter and the centurion; but another has him as one of the "seventy" appointed by Jesus as missionaries in addition to the 12; neither of these is at all trustworthy); or whether that name was a given name or a nickname: if a nickname, since it means "good song" perhaps his talents were more musical than literary, which would explain why we have no writings from him. He lasted for decades, unlike many of the early Christian leaders, and there is no martyrdom story although he appears to have died around the time of Domitian's persecution. His successor Ignatius, however, wrote a large number of influential epistles around the turn of the century.
Early Christians thought the epistles of Ignatius were so good that there ought to be more of them. Pseudepigraphy (writing new texts in the name of old authors) is a common problem in early Christian literature. We have the "short recension" of Ignatius (excerpts from numerous letters all put together in Greek), the "middle recension" (letters separated out and given in full, also in Greek), and the "long recension" (in Latin, with more letters, and extra material inserted into the other letters). The long recension is certainly full of forgeries: it includes Latin words for institutions and theological concepts that did not exist in Ignatius' time, so the new material cannot be a translation from the Greek. Some scholars think all of the middle recension is genuine; some that we can only trust what is in the short recension; some that we cannot trust any of it. I think the middle recension is at least majority genuine. It is noteworthy that Ignatius does not present himself as any kind of authority: he urges unity among the "catholic" church against the dubious gnostic sects (katholikos first appears as the designation of the mainstream Christian church in Ignatius), and tells the priests (or diakonoi rather: they are still called by this word for "waiters", as the servants who distribute the bread and wine, rather than by any term like "priest" suggesting a particular holiness) to obey the bishops (episkopoi "overseers") in matters of doctrine and discipline. Yet he does not rank himself among the bishops, using the phrase "my fellow servant" whenever addressing another diakonos, as if he himself belongs to the lower rung, rather than the higher, of this nascent hierarchy.
However humble Ignatius may have been, subsequent leaders in Antioch did claim the top spot in the church. Theophilus (patriarch in the mid-2nd century) is addressed as "Your Excellency" in the cover letters which open the "gospel of Luke" and "book of Acts" as we now have them. Theophilus was forced to respond to Marcion, a teacher whose scholarship was acknowledged by everyone but whose views were quite radical. Marcion published the first "canon" of Christian texts: the Evangelion, Apostolikon, and Antitheses. The Evangelion was like "Luke" except that it was just called "the gospel" without ascription to Luke or any other particular author (Marcion did not claim to have written it himself, and probably didn't, since much of it is not very compatible with his views), and lacked the opening chapters (the nativities of John the Baptist and Jesus, the baptism, and the temptation in the desert: it started "The Son of Man came to Capernaum" with Jesus reading Isaiah in the synagogue and starting his ministry by saying "This day these prophecies are fulfilled"). Orthodox writers naturally claim that the full "Luke" must have existed first, and that Marcion must have suppressed those chapters, but this will not wash: there is simply no reference to anything like the third gospel existing before Marcion's publication, and if Marcion were going to delete anything from the book, those chapters are not what he would have objected to.
The Apostolikon was a collection of ten Pauline epistles. Five had been circulating in Greece and are quoted in other early Christian authors prior to Marcion: 1st Thessalonians, 1st and 2nd Corinthians, Phillipians, and Romans (not addressed to "Romans" in Marcion's text, which again did not include all the chapters we have now); Marcion also included 2nd Thessalonians, which is certainly a forgery that he was taken in by (it presumes that collections of Paul's epistles are already circulating, and that people are already forging letters in Paul's name, neither of which is plausible in Paul's lifetime). Marcion scoured Asia Minor to find some others, which had not been previously well-known: Philemon (certainly genuine), Galatians (only some minor tamperings, in a couple of verses referring to Petros "Peter" where the real Paul always says Kephas instead), Ephesians (much debated, but probably contains extracts of a couple different Pauline letters plus a lot of non-Pauline material; Marcion's text was addressed to the "Laodiceans" instead and had some differences), and Colossians (probably not by Paul at all). Marcion did not have 1st or 2nd Timothy, Titus, or Hebrews: none of those were by Paul, although Hebrews is by somebody in the 1st century.
The Antitheses presents Marcion's theology. God's first creation was the Demiurge, the agent through whom all the other work of creation was accomplished; this was not new: the Logos "Word" in Philo of Alexandria and the gospel of John has this role. Marcion however believed that the Demiurge turned evil, through the sin of pride, unable to perceive that there was anything higher than himself and therefore acting against God. This became a very influential concept among many Gnostic sects, but not all of them took Marcion's next step: he identified YHWH in the Old Testament as the evil Demiurge, although thinking that other parts of the Old Testament were referring to the true Most High God; the role of Jesus was to free us from the tyranny of YHWH. The "antitheses" to which the title referred were a selection of "contradictions" between the loving teachings of Jesus and bloodthirsty passages in the Old Testament (of the sort that you can find cited in "angry atheist" literature nowadays). Theophilus fought against this anti-Semitic version of Christianity, but wanted to salvage the valuable texts of the gospel and epistles which Marcion had put together: it is from his efforts that the orthodox "canon" began to take shape.
Antioch's leadership role began to decline subsequently, however. A low point was Paul of Samosata, a mid-3rd-century patriarch who promoted an "adoptionist" theology in which Jesus had just been an ordinary human until God raised him to divine status at the time of the baptism. The original text of "gospel of Luke" (as published under Theophilus; Marcion's Evangelion did not have the baptism sequence) correctly quoted Psalms 2:7 "This is My beloved son; this day I have begotten thee" (as also quoted once in Acts, referring to every believer, and twice in Hebrews, referring to Jesus) but many manuscripts changed it to "This is My beloved son, in whom I am well pleased" to avoid precisely the implication which Paul of Samosata insisted on. He also thought the Holy Spirit had once been an ordinary angel until God raised him to divine status: he was not teaching Trinitarianism but rather Tritheism, that these three were fundamentally different Gods, only one of them existing from all eternity. Syrian bishops got together, deposed him, and elected Dominus in his place. This was during the chaotic "barracks emperor" period of frequent military coups in the Empire, and queen Zenobia of Palmyra (an Arabian kingdom, tributary to Rome) was an independent power in the East (a formidable woman, proudly descended from a daughter of Antony and Cleopatra, she had taken territory from Sassanian Persia, purportedly on behalf of Rome). Paul appealed to her, and she invaded Syria and took Antioch on this pretext.
Zenobia found so little resistance from the disorganized Roman forces in the East that she moved on to take Egypt, where she was hailed as a native daughter come home (the Cleopatra connection), and when forces from Asia Minor tried to re-invade Syria, she ended up with a good chunk of Asia Minor too. But a Western emperor named Aurelian was re-unifying the realm, putting down a separatist line of emperors in Gaul (the city of "Orleans" was his foundation) and turning finally to Zenobia. Her son he had to kill, but she was retired honorably to a villa, with a new Senator husband, where she conducted seminars on her own unique version of Christianity. Paul of Samosata then sued in the imperial court to get the patriarchal palace in Antioch back! Christianity was still only semi-legal (there was a "toleration" edict in place), but Aurelian was trying to reconcile everyone and was not at all a persecuting sort. He ruled that it was the property of the Christian organization as a whole, and that the bishop of Rome was the proper spokesman for that organization. Felix, the Pope (as I suppose we can begin calling the bishop of Rome, with this legal endorsement of supremacy), ruled in favor of Dominus.
The patriarchate of Antioch shattered completely during the theological controversies over the "Council of Chalcedon" which defined Jesus as one Person who had two Natures. The Nestorian view was that there were two different Persons, the human carpenter's boy and the divine Word of God for whom the human acted as a willing channel (in particular, Nestorius thought that any special veneration of his mother Mary was improper; the title Theotokos "bearer of God" which was popular in Alexandria was a total blasphemy, Nestorius said); this was popular in Asia Minor. The Monophysite view was that Jesus had only one Nature, totally divine; this was popular in Egypt. In Syria, both forms of opposition had a following, as well as the orthodox Chalcedonian compromise. The Nestorians largely fled across the eastern border to Persia, where their patriarch had his seat in Nisibis; they grew into an enormously large church in Asia, with converts as far east as Mongolia, but were almost entirely wiped out in the time of Tamerlane, and are now the "Assyrian Church" in Iraq, the smaller of the two Christian denominations there, with a couple thousand surviving members.
The Jacobites (after an early patriarch of theirs), who leaned toward the Monophysite direction, also outnumbered the Melkites "king's men" who obeyed the imperially-sanctioned patriarch. Some of the Jacobites also went east, becoming the larger "Chaldean" denomination in Iraq, but others maintained a semi-underground presence in Lebanon and Syria until the Muslim conquest, when they didn't have to hide anymore, and became the dominant "Maronite" church in Lebanon (there are also some "Greek Orthodox", that is "Melkite", Christians in Lebanon). Both the Chaldeans and the Maronites are now in communion with Rome, accepting the supreme leadership of the Pope. In early medieval times, the Maronites were responsible for a theological innovation called the "Monothelite" position, which some thought a good solution to the puzzle about Jesus, and others thought a dangerous heresy: it means "one will", teaching that although of course there was a difference between the humanity and divinity in Jesus, Jesus had completely surrendered his human will to the divine will, and in that sense was unified. The 9th-century Agatho accepted this position, but his successors agreed with a council condemning the Monothelite doctrine, and had to sign a humiliating acknowledgement that Agatho was a heretic (the only Pope condemned by later Popes as a heretic). Nonetheless, eventually Rome and Lebanon reached some kind of weasel-wording about the senses in which the "one will" could be considered correct.
II.C. ROME
The church of Rome, surprisingly, does not have any official story about how it was founded. My opinion is that it was founded by Paul, when he arrived and started preaching as described at the end of the book of Acts. This appears to be the implication (though not plainly stated) of the oldest document from the Roman church we have, the epistle of Clement to the Corinthians (often called "1st Clement" because there are other writings attributed to Clement of Rome, but none of the others are genuine), which even skeptical scholars accept, on linguistic grounds, as dating to the 90's AD. The official list of "Popes" is rather confused right at the beginning: Clement is either the second or the third or the fourth after Peter, depending on whether "Cletus" and/or "Anacletus" came after Linus and before Clement. We don't know if Cletus or Anacletus were the same person (possibly Anacletus "the upper Cletus" means Cletus Sr. and the other Cletus was Cletus Jr.) or if either or both was ever officially "bishop of Rome": there may not even have been such an official designation at the time; one possibility is that Greek-speakers and Latin-speakers in the city met separately with separate presiders (Kletos "called" is a Greek name; Clemens "merciful" a Latin one). Another possibility is that, since the later Xystos ("polished" in Greek) is often called Sixtus (Latin for "sixth"), somebody tampered with the list to insert Cletus so that Sixtus would be number six (including Peter) and somebody else thought he should be number six after Peter and duplicated Cletus into Anacletus and Cletus to make it so.
Howsoever it may be, Clement depicts himself more as the successor of Paul rather than of Peter, resolving a leadership crisis in Corinth with claims that he has the same authority as Paul to speak to them in God's name. He describes the sufferings of the church of Rome during the "Great Fire" persecution under Nero, telling how the women were gang-raped and the men crucified or burned alive. Paul is said to have been "sent on" to the furthest west (sent by the Holy Spirit? or by the Romans?) where he met "the fate of John the Baptist" (beheading)-- and Peter is mentioned as one of those who was crucified in Rome. I read it that Rome was one of the churches founded by Paul, but that Peter came there and ran it for a while after Paul went on to Spain, voluntarily or involuntarily.
But the New Testament contains an "epistle to the Romans" which purports to be Paul addressing a quite sizable congregation, that already existed in Rome, although Paul had not yet been there. Who founded it then? And why doesn't the book of Acts bother to mention a missionary who achieved the great coup of converting a large group right in the imperial capital? The body of "Romans" is most certain to be genuinely by Paul: it is arch-typical of Paul, in doctrine, style, and language; one scholar puts it "If this isn't by Paul then nothing is"; we might also put it that we can define the name "Paul" to mean "whoever wrote Romans" and judge all other epistles by whether they are "by the same author as Romans", since all of the features which distinguish the unquestioned epistles from the dubious ones appear most clearly in Romans. And yet, this one has more textual problems than all the other epistles together: Marcion's publication of it is described as lacking several verses in the first chapter, and whole chapters at the end, but we don't have a copy of it to know exactly what was and wasn't present; the copies we have from orthodox sources have serious discrepancies about the last chapters.
All other epistles claiming to be by Paul ("Hebrews" is anonymous, not claiming to be by anyone in particular) start in a fairly standardized manner, "I Paul, an apostle of the Lord Jesus, and [whoever is giving him secretarial assistance at the time], to the assembly [or 'brothers'] at [such-and-such place]..." They all finish with an invocation of blessings on the recipients, and an "Amen" (though many manuscripts omit the "Amen" on this epistle or that). In Romans, Paul introduces himself as an apostle but immediately launches into one of his run-on sentences; verses 1:7-15 belatedly mention that he is writing to the Romans whom he says he would like to visit sometime, but if we skip from verse 6 to verse 16 we see that this interpolation is actually interrupting the sentence. Presumably these are the verses that were missing in Marcion, who is accused of leaving it unclear who the book was addressed to. There follow eleven chapters about why Christianity is equally applicable to Jews and Gentiles, arguing from the Old Testament itself that the Torah was always intended as a provisional revelation, good and necessary for its time but preparing for a fuller revelation to come. All of this is difficult to reconcile with Marcion's views, and must have required some intricate tap-dancing on his part to explain how Paul is only relying on the "good" parts and not the "bad" parts of the Jewish scriptures; but Marcion is not accused of having failed to transmit faithfully all of this text. At the end of chapter 11, Paul wraps it up and says "Amen"; chapters 12 to 14 appear to be a separate letter, missing its opening, discussing a related yet distinct topic, about what sort of "laws" Christians should obey.
"The whole of the law is summed up in the saying, Love your neighbor as yourself" Paul tells us: a similar sentiment is ascribed to Jesus in the gospels, but Paul does not say (here, or anywhere where he echoes gospel sayings) that he is quoting Jesus. Laws imposed by the secular government should be scrupulously obeyed, for government in general is a good thing, restraining the wicked, and whoever holds power (even if the powerful are subject to human failings) is holding power because God allows it. He spends a lot of time discussing vegetarianism, deriding as "weak" those who think it is improper to eat meat. The reason for Christians to worry about meat-eating at the time was that most "butchers" were actually pagan priests (animals were always killed with some ritual dedication to some deity or other), so that in areas where a "kosher" butcher (dedicating the animal to the Jewish god) was not available, eating the meat might be considered an endorsement of idolatry. This was precisely the issue at the Council of Jerusalem, at which the opposite position from Paul's was decreed, that indeed Christians should refrain from eating any meat that had been dedicated to an idol. The text of Romans as we have it claims to have been written after this council, and would therefore represent an outright flat defiance of the Jerusalem church by Paul; I am more inclined to think this was written before the council, when the issue was still an open question.
The first few verses and the last one in chapter 15 are the "wrap-up" to this second letter, interrupted with a very long interpolation called the "Itinerary" section. Here Paul says he is about to visit Jerusalem to deliver contributions to the Jerusalem church from his churches in Greece and Asia Minor, and then intends to visit Rome on his way to Spain. The account of this visit in Acts gives a very different impression, that Paul hadn't had any plans at all to go to Rome, and indeed intended to go back to Asia Minor. In Jerusalem, Paul was denounced as a traitor to the Torah who should not be allowed to make any donations to sacred purposes (he was going to fund some Torah students who were taking the nazir vows of abstention from alcohol and hair-cutting, to show that he was no enemy of orthodox Judaism), and only escaped the ensuing riots with the aid of a relative who got him a military escort to Caesarea. Governor Festus (the authority in Caesarea) and king Agrippa (the authority in Jerusalem) interrogated him, and he stood on his rights as a citizen (Roman "citizenship" at that time was a rare status east of Italy). Agrippa, rather spitefully, said "If he had not appealed to Caesar, we would let him go; but, we'll send him on to Caesar" (this is Agrippa II, not the Agrippa who tried to break away from Rome some years earlier; but though he was more subservient to Rome than his father, he didn't like having his nose rubbed in the limitations of his power). And this is how Paul went to Italy. A few Christians had, indeed, drifted into Italy before: Acts 28:13 says Paul encountered some in Puteoli and stayed there a week, before being ordered to move on to Rome. Acts 28:14 kai-ekei-then "and from that place" the brothers who had heard about it came to accompany him, as far as the Three Taverns in the Appian Forum, for which Paul thanked them and took encouragement. The orthodox reading of this verse is rather strained: Greek has two demonstrative pronouns like English this "the nearer thing" and that "the further thing", which in texts mean respectively "the latter" (the more-recently mentioned) and "the former" (the less-recently mentioned), so the use of ekei "that; the further; the former" (related to ex "out; removed from") should mean that these brothers came from the earlier-mentioned place in the previous verse (that is, Puteoli); but we are told that here it means the brothers came from the later-mentioned place (that is, Rome). Instead of Puteolis travelling along with the road with him as far as Three Taverns, Romans come out of the city to intercept him at Three Taverns. There is a little shrine at the former site of the Three Taverns to mark this meeting.
The purpose of this strained reading of the verse is to cover for the strange fact that otherwise the book of Acts doesn't seem to have any Christians at all in Rome whom the epistle to the Romans could have been addressed to. Paul does not stay with any Christians in Rome, although that is always what he did when he had Christians to stay with; instead he rents a room "at his own expense" (no Christians even lend him a hand). He then talks to Jewish rabbis in Rome, who are curious to hear what Paul has to say for himself, because they have never met any Christians: "all we know is, that everywhere this sect is spoken against." The Roman government, unlike a lot of Jews, does not yet have anything against Christians (Paul was already on good terms with the brother of Seneca, the imperial tutor, and presumably did meet Seneca in Rome, whether or not we trust any of the letters they are supposed to have exchanged); Paul is allowed to preach freely all the time he is there-- so Acts concludes, without a hint that things were about to turn very sour.
Romans concludes with the “epistle of Tertius” and/or the “doxology”. Tertius (otherwise unknown) gives a shout-out to a long list of Christians he knows in Rome, with multiple “et cetera” indications that the list is far from exhaustive. This ends with the short wrap-up “The grace of Jesus Christ be upon you, Amen!” like Paul's typical sign-off, or with the longer wrap-up called the “doxology” (which invokes more elaborate blessings), or with both, in either order; or in some manuscripts we only get the doxology and nothing from Tertius; in others the doxology is inserted before the “Itinerary” as if the book were supposed to end there: we have no manuscript actually missing the Itinerary, but Marcion's text surely did not have it. We recognize one pair of names from the 1st century: Aquila (famous Jewish scholar, published a literalist Greek translation of the Tanakh which was regarded as better than the Septuagint) and his wife Priscilla, whom Paul befriended and converted after they were banished from Rome, along with all Jews, by Claudius. But when the ban on Jews in Rome was lifted, they did not go back, according to Acts, moving to Asia Minor instead; so they don't belong here, and were probably interpolated by some confused editor who thought they should have been on the list; perhaps Aquila had been suggested by some tradition as an answer to the puzzle about who founded the church of Rome? We recognize a name from the 2nd century: Hermas, elder brother of Pius who was bishop of Rome c. 150, and author of The Shepherd, a mystical vision of heaven found in many New Testaments (still canonical in Ethiopia), but rejected by the Muratorian Canon c. 170, despite praise for it, because it “was written in our own time.” Possibly there was a 1st century Hermas after whom the later Hermas was named, but I don't think so: we also find a “Herodion”, and I cannot see any member of the Herodian family accepting Christianity in the 1st century. I take it that the epistle of Tertius is a cover letter to the early-2nd-century church of Rome, enclosing some texts of Paul's letters that he has found; for whatever reason, he did not copy the “address” in the main letter (verse 1:1 ought to tell us who it was originally sent to), and the opening of the second letter is lost, hence all these editorial tamperings to explain why this book is found in Rome. A good guess for the “address” of the first letter would be the church of Berea, which did not survive, but is described in Acts as posing to Paul some probing questions about how his teachings fitted with the existing scriptures; Paul looks to be answering something very like what Bereans were asking. Whether the second fragmentary letter was to the same destination is difficult to guess.
It is frustrating that Acts breaks off without telling of Paul's trip to Spain or the “Great Fire” disaster, but presumably the “We Document” ends where it does because that is when Luke wrote it: in my view as a report to Peter and John, who came to Rome to check up on what Paul was up to and how his legal case was going. I think I can figure out when Paul was exiled to Spain: in the epistle to the Philippians, Paul seems to be in trouble (he says “Farewell!” repeatedly, as if thinking he is about to die) but says “They of Caesar's household salute you” indicating that he does have some powerful converts. Unfortunately, any tie to Otho, the head of Nero's “household”, was a back-fire (like his connection to Seneca, whom Nero turned on around this time, and would eventually order to commit suicide). Otho had been ordered to marry Nero's mistress Poppaea, as an excuse to keep her in the palace, but then genuinely fell in love with Poppaea; when Nero found out, he “promoted” Otho against his will to be governor of Farther Spain. A preserved ditty from the streets: “Is Otho banished? Yes and no / That is, we do not call it so / It was for adultery, more or less / It was his own wife he caressed!” Perhaps Nero decided to ship that troublemaker Paul off to the end of the world at the same time (Otho went on to support the revolt against Nero by Galba, governor of the larger and more prestigious Nearer Spain, and expected the childless Galba to name him as successor; when Galba picked Piso instead, Otho killed Galba and Piso to take over briefly as Emperor, unfortunately discovering that the army expected to be paid off with more money than he could raise). If I have the sequence right, then indeed Peter ran the church in Rome for a few years in Paul's absence. I do accept that John came with Peter but left (although Acts of John , the only source on that, is late and dubious), because Nero's initial reason for accusing the Christians of starting the Great Fire (confirmation was obtained through torture, of course) was that Christians allegedly had predicted it in advance: I think Revelation 18:18 is what he was talking about (most scholars don't think this is from John, but I do).
Linus (a companion of Paul, not Peter) headed the survivors of Nero's persecution probably because he was the most senior person left, not because any succession had been planned in advance. Other important Christians managed to get out: Silas was also of Paul's party, not Peter's, but showed up in Asia Minor with a "letter of introduction" from Peter not Paul (I accept "1st Peter", unlike the thoroughly pseudepigraphic "2nd Peter", as likely to reflect Peter's thought), tending to confirm that Paul had not been in charge at Rome towards the end. I will discuss Mark when we come to Alexandria. Trophimus, a companion of Paul, made it to Arles, where his successors claimed that he had been converted before Linus, and therefore that they, rather than the bishops of Rome, were the true successors of Paul. Sometimes they called themselves "patriarchs" of Arles; although no other patriarchs recognized them as such, they remained a thorn in the side of Rome for centuries.
Perhaps this was one reason Rome shifted its focus from Paul to Peter, or perhaps it was to combat the claims of Antioch. A simpler explanation is that they had (or at least, sincerely thought they had) the body of Peter (the place, south of Rome, where Peter's body was originally dumped is still marked by a little shrine; the body was retrieved and re-buried in the Vatican catacombs, then a cemetery) whereas nobody has, or claims to have, the body of Paul (bodily relics were very important to the ancient and medieval mind-sets). Oddly, the first claims that the bishops of Rome were successors to Peter is found in Ebionite literature: the "pseudo-Clementine" literature claims that Clement was converted in Judea (I seriously doubt that he was Jewish) by Peter shortly after the crucifixion (he would have to have been very young!) and early tapped as Peter's successor (directly; Linus is left out of the story); and of course Clement and Peter like James the Righteous wanted nothing to do with that infiltrator Saul of Tarsus (never called "Paul") in these books. Italy was a major source of pilgrims to Jerusalem from early on, Antioch was a common enemy, and the church of Rome already had a wide reach: but in seeking an alliance with Rome, the Ebionites were barking up the wrong tree. The epistles of Paul always remained doctrinally foundational in Rome; the "Nazarene" schism in the 3rd century may have been a recognition by some Ebionites that they needed to agree to accept Paul's conversion as genuine if they were ever going to be in communion with other churches. Pope Damasus (late 4th century: finalized the Roman canon and commissioned Jerome's Latin translation) gave Ebionite hopes a death-blow by announcing the doctrine of Mary's "perpetual virginity": politically, this meant that James the Righteous was not considered a brother, but only a cousin, of Jesus; and his successors not ranked as important.
The Vatican archives do not become anything like complete until Innocent III (13th century) due to frequent sacks of Rome, and the problems of preservation (one researcher noted an 8th-century land grant which had been recopied centuries later, the original attached in an envelope; but a look in the envelope revealed that the original "has the consistency of a pile of sand"), but archivists have recopied old records wherever they could be found, and we have some tantalizing bits of old stuff. Fragmentary administrative records from the 2nd-century Pope Victor reveal that the church of Rome was already supervisory over numerous churches, over all Italy at least; a principal function was accounting for donations and redistributing them in the nature of a mutual-insurance association, that is, as with many "fraternal societies" from that day to this, a major social role of the church was to reassure members that their burial expenses and surviving widows and orphans would be taken care of if anything happened to them. The top posts were assigned strictly by seniority (not chronological age, but time since ordination as a priest); one worked up to “bishop of Rome” by outliving everyone ahead. Outside Italy, Spain and also Greece (however little the Greek Orthodox now like to remember this) were unquestionably loyal in the early days, even though Gaul was iffy (bishop Irenaeus of Lyons urged c. 170 that all Christians in Gaul obey Rome; but he would not have had to say so if it wasn't an issue): we have a document from Damasus confirming (it was not an innovation) that the bishop of Thessalonica (Paul's first foundation in Greece) was Rome's "vicar" in Greece, and the bishop of Cordova (capital of Further Spain, probably where Paul went from Rome) early played a similar role in Spain.
North Africa was also a problem. There were recurring schisms in the western church from the “rigorists” who wanted to take a harsh line against Christians who co-operated with the authorities, even slightly, to save their lives. The first antipope in Rome, Hippolytus, objected to Pope Calixtus as too lax about re-admitting the “lapsed”: the persecutions had ended under the Severan dynasty (one of whom included Jesus among his portrait gallery of wise men, alongside other greats like Pythagoras and Socrates and some charlatans like Appolonius of Tyana and Simon the Magus), but when followers of the two rivals began fighting in the streets, Hippolytus and Calixtus were both banished to the mines of Sardinia; a little experience of hard labor softened the attitudes of Hippolytus, who apologized and made up with Calixtus, writing some valued theological writings which earned him sainthood. But later there was another rigorist antipope Novatian, and in Carthage bishop Cyprian (also later sainted) tried to steer a middle line, and got flak from both sides, so that for a while there were three bishops of Carthage, one aligned to Novatian and another attacking Cyprian from the opposite side of the spectrum. We have correspondence between Cyprian and Pope Stephen I, who agreed on re-admitting the lapsed but only after sincere acts of penance, but disagreed on “re-baptism”. There were two cases where re-baptism might be considered: if someone had converted to “Christianity” through one of the unorthodox Gnostic sects, but then joined the orthodox church, Cyprian saw no reason to re-baptize if he had been baptized “in the name of Jesus” or “in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” (both formulas were in use) while Stephen insisted only a baptism by an ordained priest was valid; but if someone had left Christianity for some other religion (Manichean, Mithraist, the cult of Serapis, etc.) and come back, Cyprian thought re-baptism necessary while Stephen took the “once saved, always saved” position (as modern Baptists put it). Eventually, in the “Donatist” schism, much of North Africa went over to a hard-line rigorist position, refusing to recognize any priests or bishops who had compromised with persecutors in any way, while Rome maintained that a properly ordained priest always remained a priest. Major debates were held between the pro-Rome bishop Augustine of Hippo and the anti-Rome theologian Pelagius (literacy was low, but public readings of intellectual tracts with spirited Q-and-A afterwards, think “Chautauqua” meetings, were a popular entertainment; the masses were surprisingly sophisticated about such controversies), bringing out the core issues.
Pelagius believed in free will, and thought the sacraments derived their efficacy from the decision of the participant to accept the grace of God; the role of the priest was solely symbolic, to assist in turning one's mind to God, and a priest who had committed grave sins was not appropriate in such a role. Augustine denied that any of us have the power to choose good: grace flows from God without any possible help from us; and if a priest fails to be virtuous, that is unsurprising, since all men are prone to sin. To use an anachronistic metaphor, grace flowed through the sacraments like electricity if a “circuit” is closed: baptism confers grace if performed by a validly ordained priest, regardless of his own state of grace or sin; the ordination in turn was valid if performed by a validly ordained priest, and so on back to the 12 chosen by Jesus. Pelagius, by leaving it up to us to judge whether a priest is good enough to work the sacraments, was undermining the whole “apostolic succession” structure, creating insoluble uncertainty. Rome decreed that Pelagius was teaching heresy, and Augustine triumphantly said Roma locuta, causa finita! “Rome has spoken, the case is over!” without really grasping that this is just what Pelagius denied. Pelagius did have to flee Africa, but the “patriarchs” of Arles supported him. In the 5th century, Pope John I (his given name was “Mercury” but he decided to change it, the first to take a “throne name”) summoned the bishop of Arles to answer for his Pelagian heresy, and condemned the “contumacious” fellow in his absence when nobody from Arles showed; a bishop Germanus of Auxerre was despatched to Britain to combat Pelagianism there, but found that the Saxon invasions were making it too difficult for him to even get ahold of most of the churchmen there. The "Celtic Church" of Britain and Ireland would remain largely independent until Henry II invaded England, with the excuse of forcing Ireland to submit to the Pope-- which is ironic, in view of Catholicism's later identification with anti-English resistance in Ireland.
Howsoever it may be, Clement depicts himself more as the successor of Paul rather than of Peter, resolving a leadership crisis in Corinth with claims that he has the same authority as Paul to speak to them in God's name. He describes the sufferings of the church of Rome during the "Great Fire" persecution under Nero, telling how the women were gang-raped and the men crucified or burned alive. Paul is said to have been "sent on" to the furthest west (sent by the Holy Spirit? or by the Romans?) where he met "the fate of John the Baptist" (beheading)-- and Peter is mentioned as one of those who was crucified in Rome. I read it that Rome was one of the churches founded by Paul, but that Peter came there and ran it for a while after Paul went on to Spain, voluntarily or involuntarily.
But the New Testament contains an "epistle to the Romans" which purports to be Paul addressing a quite sizable congregation, that already existed in Rome, although Paul had not yet been there. Who founded it then? And why doesn't the book of Acts bother to mention a missionary who achieved the great coup of converting a large group right in the imperial capital? The body of "Romans" is most certain to be genuinely by Paul: it is arch-typical of Paul, in doctrine, style, and language; one scholar puts it "If this isn't by Paul then nothing is"; we might also put it that we can define the name "Paul" to mean "whoever wrote Romans" and judge all other epistles by whether they are "by the same author as Romans", since all of the features which distinguish the unquestioned epistles from the dubious ones appear most clearly in Romans. And yet, this one has more textual problems than all the other epistles together: Marcion's publication of it is described as lacking several verses in the first chapter, and whole chapters at the end, but we don't have a copy of it to know exactly what was and wasn't present; the copies we have from orthodox sources have serious discrepancies about the last chapters.
All other epistles claiming to be by Paul ("Hebrews" is anonymous, not claiming to be by anyone in particular) start in a fairly standardized manner, "I Paul, an apostle of the Lord Jesus, and [whoever is giving him secretarial assistance at the time], to the assembly [or 'brothers'] at [such-and-such place]..." They all finish with an invocation of blessings on the recipients, and an "Amen" (though many manuscripts omit the "Amen" on this epistle or that). In Romans, Paul introduces himself as an apostle but immediately launches into one of his run-on sentences; verses 1:7-15 belatedly mention that he is writing to the Romans whom he says he would like to visit sometime, but if we skip from verse 6 to verse 16 we see that this interpolation is actually interrupting the sentence. Presumably these are the verses that were missing in Marcion, who is accused of leaving it unclear who the book was addressed to. There follow eleven chapters about why Christianity is equally applicable to Jews and Gentiles, arguing from the Old Testament itself that the Torah was always intended as a provisional revelation, good and necessary for its time but preparing for a fuller revelation to come. All of this is difficult to reconcile with Marcion's views, and must have required some intricate tap-dancing on his part to explain how Paul is only relying on the "good" parts and not the "bad" parts of the Jewish scriptures; but Marcion is not accused of having failed to transmit faithfully all of this text. At the end of chapter 11, Paul wraps it up and says "Amen"; chapters 12 to 14 appear to be a separate letter, missing its opening, discussing a related yet distinct topic, about what sort of "laws" Christians should obey.
"The whole of the law is summed up in the saying, Love your neighbor as yourself" Paul tells us: a similar sentiment is ascribed to Jesus in the gospels, but Paul does not say (here, or anywhere where he echoes gospel sayings) that he is quoting Jesus. Laws imposed by the secular government should be scrupulously obeyed, for government in general is a good thing, restraining the wicked, and whoever holds power (even if the powerful are subject to human failings) is holding power because God allows it. He spends a lot of time discussing vegetarianism, deriding as "weak" those who think it is improper to eat meat. The reason for Christians to worry about meat-eating at the time was that most "butchers" were actually pagan priests (animals were always killed with some ritual dedication to some deity or other), so that in areas where a "kosher" butcher (dedicating the animal to the Jewish god) was not available, eating the meat might be considered an endorsement of idolatry. This was precisely the issue at the Council of Jerusalem, at which the opposite position from Paul's was decreed, that indeed Christians should refrain from eating any meat that had been dedicated to an idol. The text of Romans as we have it claims to have been written after this council, and would therefore represent an outright flat defiance of the Jerusalem church by Paul; I am more inclined to think this was written before the council, when the issue was still an open question.
The first few verses and the last one in chapter 15 are the "wrap-up" to this second letter, interrupted with a very long interpolation called the "Itinerary" section. Here Paul says he is about to visit Jerusalem to deliver contributions to the Jerusalem church from his churches in Greece and Asia Minor, and then intends to visit Rome on his way to Spain. The account of this visit in Acts gives a very different impression, that Paul hadn't had any plans at all to go to Rome, and indeed intended to go back to Asia Minor. In Jerusalem, Paul was denounced as a traitor to the Torah who should not be allowed to make any donations to sacred purposes (he was going to fund some Torah students who were taking the nazir vows of abstention from alcohol and hair-cutting, to show that he was no enemy of orthodox Judaism), and only escaped the ensuing riots with the aid of a relative who got him a military escort to Caesarea. Governor Festus (the authority in Caesarea) and king Agrippa (the authority in Jerusalem) interrogated him, and he stood on his rights as a citizen (Roman "citizenship" at that time was a rare status east of Italy). Agrippa, rather spitefully, said "If he had not appealed to Caesar, we would let him go; but, we'll send him on to Caesar" (this is Agrippa II, not the Agrippa who tried to break away from Rome some years earlier; but though he was more subservient to Rome than his father, he didn't like having his nose rubbed in the limitations of his power). And this is how Paul went to Italy. A few Christians had, indeed, drifted into Italy before: Acts 28:13 says Paul encountered some in Puteoli and stayed there a week, before being ordered to move on to Rome. Acts 28:14 kai-ekei-then "and from that place" the brothers who had heard about it came to accompany him, as far as the Three Taverns in the Appian Forum, for which Paul thanked them and took encouragement. The orthodox reading of this verse is rather strained: Greek has two demonstrative pronouns like English this "the nearer thing" and that "the further thing", which in texts mean respectively "the latter" (the more-recently mentioned) and "the former" (the less-recently mentioned), so the use of ekei "that; the further; the former" (related to ex "out; removed from") should mean that these brothers came from the earlier-mentioned place in the previous verse (that is, Puteoli); but we are told that here it means the brothers came from the later-mentioned place (that is, Rome). Instead of Puteolis travelling along with the road with him as far as Three Taverns, Romans come out of the city to intercept him at Three Taverns. There is a little shrine at the former site of the Three Taverns to mark this meeting.
The purpose of this strained reading of the verse is to cover for the strange fact that otherwise the book of Acts doesn't seem to have any Christians at all in Rome whom the epistle to the Romans could have been addressed to. Paul does not stay with any Christians in Rome, although that is always what he did when he had Christians to stay with; instead he rents a room "at his own expense" (no Christians even lend him a hand). He then talks to Jewish rabbis in Rome, who are curious to hear what Paul has to say for himself, because they have never met any Christians: "all we know is, that everywhere this sect is spoken against." The Roman government, unlike a lot of Jews, does not yet have anything against Christians (Paul was already on good terms with the brother of Seneca, the imperial tutor, and presumably did meet Seneca in Rome, whether or not we trust any of the letters they are supposed to have exchanged); Paul is allowed to preach freely all the time he is there-- so Acts concludes, without a hint that things were about to turn very sour.
Romans concludes with the “epistle of Tertius” and/or the “doxology”. Tertius (otherwise unknown) gives a shout-out to a long list of Christians he knows in Rome, with multiple “et cetera” indications that the list is far from exhaustive. This ends with the short wrap-up “The grace of Jesus Christ be upon you, Amen!” like Paul's typical sign-off, or with the longer wrap-up called the “doxology” (which invokes more elaborate blessings), or with both, in either order; or in some manuscripts we only get the doxology and nothing from Tertius; in others the doxology is inserted before the “Itinerary” as if the book were supposed to end there: we have no manuscript actually missing the Itinerary, but Marcion's text surely did not have it. We recognize one pair of names from the 1st century: Aquila (famous Jewish scholar, published a literalist Greek translation of the Tanakh which was regarded as better than the Septuagint) and his wife Priscilla, whom Paul befriended and converted after they were banished from Rome, along with all Jews, by Claudius. But when the ban on Jews in Rome was lifted, they did not go back, according to Acts, moving to Asia Minor instead; so they don't belong here, and were probably interpolated by some confused editor who thought they should have been on the list; perhaps Aquila had been suggested by some tradition as an answer to the puzzle about who founded the church of Rome? We recognize a name from the 2nd century: Hermas, elder brother of Pius who was bishop of Rome c. 150, and author of The Shepherd, a mystical vision of heaven found in many New Testaments (still canonical in Ethiopia), but rejected by the Muratorian Canon c. 170, despite praise for it, because it “was written in our own time.” Possibly there was a 1st century Hermas after whom the later Hermas was named, but I don't think so: we also find a “Herodion”, and I cannot see any member of the Herodian family accepting Christianity in the 1st century. I take it that the epistle of Tertius is a cover letter to the early-2nd-century church of Rome, enclosing some texts of Paul's letters that he has found; for whatever reason, he did not copy the “address” in the main letter (verse 1:1 ought to tell us who it was originally sent to), and the opening of the second letter is lost, hence all these editorial tamperings to explain why this book is found in Rome. A good guess for the “address” of the first letter would be the church of Berea, which did not survive, but is described in Acts as posing to Paul some probing questions about how his teachings fitted with the existing scriptures; Paul looks to be answering something very like what Bereans were asking. Whether the second fragmentary letter was to the same destination is difficult to guess.
It is frustrating that Acts breaks off without telling of Paul's trip to Spain or the “Great Fire” disaster, but presumably the “We Document” ends where it does because that is when Luke wrote it: in my view as a report to Peter and John, who came to Rome to check up on what Paul was up to and how his legal case was going. I think I can figure out when Paul was exiled to Spain: in the epistle to the Philippians, Paul seems to be in trouble (he says “Farewell!” repeatedly, as if thinking he is about to die) but says “They of Caesar's household salute you” indicating that he does have some powerful converts. Unfortunately, any tie to Otho, the head of Nero's “household”, was a back-fire (like his connection to Seneca, whom Nero turned on around this time, and would eventually order to commit suicide). Otho had been ordered to marry Nero's mistress Poppaea, as an excuse to keep her in the palace, but then genuinely fell in love with Poppaea; when Nero found out, he “promoted” Otho against his will to be governor of Farther Spain. A preserved ditty from the streets: “Is Otho banished? Yes and no / That is, we do not call it so / It was for adultery, more or less / It was his own wife he caressed!” Perhaps Nero decided to ship that troublemaker Paul off to the end of the world at the same time (Otho went on to support the revolt against Nero by Galba, governor of the larger and more prestigious Nearer Spain, and expected the childless Galba to name him as successor; when Galba picked Piso instead, Otho killed Galba and Piso to take over briefly as Emperor, unfortunately discovering that the army expected to be paid off with more money than he could raise). If I have the sequence right, then indeed Peter ran the church in Rome for a few years in Paul's absence. I do accept that John came with Peter but left (although Acts of John , the only source on that, is late and dubious), because Nero's initial reason for accusing the Christians of starting the Great Fire (confirmation was obtained through torture, of course) was that Christians allegedly had predicted it in advance: I think Revelation 18:18 is what he was talking about (most scholars don't think this is from John, but I do).
Linus (a companion of Paul, not Peter) headed the survivors of Nero's persecution probably because he was the most senior person left, not because any succession had been planned in advance. Other important Christians managed to get out: Silas was also of Paul's party, not Peter's, but showed up in Asia Minor with a "letter of introduction" from Peter not Paul (I accept "1st Peter", unlike the thoroughly pseudepigraphic "2nd Peter", as likely to reflect Peter's thought), tending to confirm that Paul had not been in charge at Rome towards the end. I will discuss Mark when we come to Alexandria. Trophimus, a companion of Paul, made it to Arles, where his successors claimed that he had been converted before Linus, and therefore that they, rather than the bishops of Rome, were the true successors of Paul. Sometimes they called themselves "patriarchs" of Arles; although no other patriarchs recognized them as such, they remained a thorn in the side of Rome for centuries.
Perhaps this was one reason Rome shifted its focus from Paul to Peter, or perhaps it was to combat the claims of Antioch. A simpler explanation is that they had (or at least, sincerely thought they had) the body of Peter (the place, south of Rome, where Peter's body was originally dumped is still marked by a little shrine; the body was retrieved and re-buried in the Vatican catacombs, then a cemetery) whereas nobody has, or claims to have, the body of Paul (bodily relics were very important to the ancient and medieval mind-sets). Oddly, the first claims that the bishops of Rome were successors to Peter is found in Ebionite literature: the "pseudo-Clementine" literature claims that Clement was converted in Judea (I seriously doubt that he was Jewish) by Peter shortly after the crucifixion (he would have to have been very young!) and early tapped as Peter's successor (directly; Linus is left out of the story); and of course Clement and Peter like James the Righteous wanted nothing to do with that infiltrator Saul of Tarsus (never called "Paul") in these books. Italy was a major source of pilgrims to Jerusalem from early on, Antioch was a common enemy, and the church of Rome already had a wide reach: but in seeking an alliance with Rome, the Ebionites were barking up the wrong tree. The epistles of Paul always remained doctrinally foundational in Rome; the "Nazarene" schism in the 3rd century may have been a recognition by some Ebionites that they needed to agree to accept Paul's conversion as genuine if they were ever going to be in communion with other churches. Pope Damasus (late 4th century: finalized the Roman canon and commissioned Jerome's Latin translation) gave Ebionite hopes a death-blow by announcing the doctrine of Mary's "perpetual virginity": politically, this meant that James the Righteous was not considered a brother, but only a cousin, of Jesus; and his successors not ranked as important.
The Vatican archives do not become anything like complete until Innocent III (13th century) due to frequent sacks of Rome, and the problems of preservation (one researcher noted an 8th-century land grant which had been recopied centuries later, the original attached in an envelope; but a look in the envelope revealed that the original "has the consistency of a pile of sand"), but archivists have recopied old records wherever they could be found, and we have some tantalizing bits of old stuff. Fragmentary administrative records from the 2nd-century Pope Victor reveal that the church of Rome was already supervisory over numerous churches, over all Italy at least; a principal function was accounting for donations and redistributing them in the nature of a mutual-insurance association, that is, as with many "fraternal societies" from that day to this, a major social role of the church was to reassure members that their burial expenses and surviving widows and orphans would be taken care of if anything happened to them. The top posts were assigned strictly by seniority (not chronological age, but time since ordination as a priest); one worked up to “bishop of Rome” by outliving everyone ahead. Outside Italy, Spain and also Greece (however little the Greek Orthodox now like to remember this) were unquestionably loyal in the early days, even though Gaul was iffy (bishop Irenaeus of Lyons urged c. 170 that all Christians in Gaul obey Rome; but he would not have had to say so if it wasn't an issue): we have a document from Damasus confirming (it was not an innovation) that the bishop of Thessalonica (Paul's first foundation in Greece) was Rome's "vicar" in Greece, and the bishop of Cordova (capital of Further Spain, probably where Paul went from Rome) early played a similar role in Spain.
North Africa was also a problem. There were recurring schisms in the western church from the “rigorists” who wanted to take a harsh line against Christians who co-operated with the authorities, even slightly, to save their lives. The first antipope in Rome, Hippolytus, objected to Pope Calixtus as too lax about re-admitting the “lapsed”: the persecutions had ended under the Severan dynasty (one of whom included Jesus among his portrait gallery of wise men, alongside other greats like Pythagoras and Socrates and some charlatans like Appolonius of Tyana and Simon the Magus), but when followers of the two rivals began fighting in the streets, Hippolytus and Calixtus were both banished to the mines of Sardinia; a little experience of hard labor softened the attitudes of Hippolytus, who apologized and made up with Calixtus, writing some valued theological writings which earned him sainthood. But later there was another rigorist antipope Novatian, and in Carthage bishop Cyprian (also later sainted) tried to steer a middle line, and got flak from both sides, so that for a while there were three bishops of Carthage, one aligned to Novatian and another attacking Cyprian from the opposite side of the spectrum. We have correspondence between Cyprian and Pope Stephen I, who agreed on re-admitting the lapsed but only after sincere acts of penance, but disagreed on “re-baptism”. There were two cases where re-baptism might be considered: if someone had converted to “Christianity” through one of the unorthodox Gnostic sects, but then joined the orthodox church, Cyprian saw no reason to re-baptize if he had been baptized “in the name of Jesus” or “in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” (both formulas were in use) while Stephen insisted only a baptism by an ordained priest was valid; but if someone had left Christianity for some other religion (Manichean, Mithraist, the cult of Serapis, etc.) and come back, Cyprian thought re-baptism necessary while Stephen took the “once saved, always saved” position (as modern Baptists put it). Eventually, in the “Donatist” schism, much of North Africa went over to a hard-line rigorist position, refusing to recognize any priests or bishops who had compromised with persecutors in any way, while Rome maintained that a properly ordained priest always remained a priest. Major debates were held between the pro-Rome bishop Augustine of Hippo and the anti-Rome theologian Pelagius (literacy was low, but public readings of intellectual tracts with spirited Q-and-A afterwards, think “Chautauqua” meetings, were a popular entertainment; the masses were surprisingly sophisticated about such controversies), bringing out the core issues.
Pelagius believed in free will, and thought the sacraments derived their efficacy from the decision of the participant to accept the grace of God; the role of the priest was solely symbolic, to assist in turning one's mind to God, and a priest who had committed grave sins was not appropriate in such a role. Augustine denied that any of us have the power to choose good: grace flows from God without any possible help from us; and if a priest fails to be virtuous, that is unsurprising, since all men are prone to sin. To use an anachronistic metaphor, grace flowed through the sacraments like electricity if a “circuit” is closed: baptism confers grace if performed by a validly ordained priest, regardless of his own state of grace or sin; the ordination in turn was valid if performed by a validly ordained priest, and so on back to the 12 chosen by Jesus. Pelagius, by leaving it up to us to judge whether a priest is good enough to work the sacraments, was undermining the whole “apostolic succession” structure, creating insoluble uncertainty. Rome decreed that Pelagius was teaching heresy, and Augustine triumphantly said Roma locuta, causa finita! “Rome has spoken, the case is over!” without really grasping that this is just what Pelagius denied. Pelagius did have to flee Africa, but the “patriarchs” of Arles supported him. In the 5th century, Pope John I (his given name was “Mercury” but he decided to change it, the first to take a “throne name”) summoned the bishop of Arles to answer for his Pelagian heresy, and condemned the “contumacious” fellow in his absence when nobody from Arles showed; a bishop Germanus of Auxerre was despatched to Britain to combat Pelagianism there, but found that the Saxon invasions were making it too difficult for him to even get ahold of most of the churchmen there. The "Celtic Church" of Britain and Ireland would remain largely independent until Henry II invaded England, with the excuse of forcing Ireland to submit to the Pope-- which is ironic, in view of Catholicism's later identification with anti-English resistance in Ireland.
II.D. CONSTANTINOPLE
The churches in Asia Minor, even where Paul was a founder, broke with him over the issue of pagan-butchered meat. Abstention from meat was unusual (in some places, meat was only in the diet of the rich, but much of Asia Minor is too mountainous for crops and is devoted to sheep-grazing), drawing attention to Christians and causing trouble with the government because of its implied disrespect to the gods of the state. Pliny's report to Trajan notes that after a crackdown on Christianity, the meat markets were back to normal “where previously they could scarce find buyers” (indicating that his province of Bithynia already had a substantial percentage of Christians). Thus, Paul's position was part and parcel of his policy against causing any trouble with the ruling authorities. The complaint “All Asia has turned against me!” may or may not be from Paul (it is in the Pastorals, whose material is always questionable) but does reflect a general breach between the Pauline churches and the “Johannine” churches of Asia. John may have mellowed in his age, but at first was a firebrand (Jesus nicknamed him and his brother James bani-rgesh “sons of thunder” for asking that an unfriendly town be destroyed by fire from heaven) with more hostility to Rome, and to Paul, than either James the Righteous or Simon Peter. He congratulates the church of Ephesus for turning against “those who call themselves apostles but are no such thing” (Paul claimed to be an apostle directly appointed by Jesus, regardless of whether the disciples approved of him or not). At some point, Paul's friend Timothy was booted out of Ephesus; John took over, probably shortly after his trip to Rome.
Bishops of Ephesus would later be proud to claim both Timothy and John in their lineage, though it was probably not amicable at the time. Ephesus did not, however, exert any supervisory authority over the other churches of Asia, or claim to have the right to. A notable difference between this zone and the others was the absence of any formal line of “successors”; authority among churchmen appears to have been a matter of individual prestige, and seniority. John came to be called Presbyter “the elder” in his later days; some think “John the elder” was a different person from “John the disciple”, but I see it as a natural title for him to acquire when he was not only of advanced biological age, but the most senior surviving Christian. Sometimes later authors would speak of bishop Polycarp of Smyrna as “the successor of John”, but he became so, again, because he lived a long time, eventually becoming the last person to have met any of the 12 disciples (although he cannot have been more than a teenager in John's last days), much as John had become the last of the 12. Earlier, bishop Papias of Hierapolis had been an important leader among the Johannines: Hierapolis was where Phillip ended his life, but Papias put more stress on John, as the one who had lived most recently. In his discussion of writings about Jesus, Papias knows a gospel of Mark identical or similar to what we have, and a “gospel of Matthew” which was rather different (sayings of Jesus only, as contrasted to the narrative style of Mark; and in Hebrew, although variant Greek translations, he says, were available), but notably states that he puts no stock in books at all, preferring the “living tradition” passed down orally.
Polycarp also wrote about available writings, in an epistle to the Phillipians. It is clear that by this time any bad feelings about Paul had evaporated: perhaps Paul's death as a martyr improved his reputation; perhaps many Christians had abandoned the practice of avoiding meat, as Pliny indicates; or perhaps the whole issue had ceased to seem important. In any case, asked to tell the Phillipians what they should read, Polycarp warmly commends the epistles of Paul, from which he quotes (especially Paul's epistle to the Phillipians of course), and also the epistles of Ignatius, of which he says he is enclosing a copy (we wish we had Polycarp's edition of Ignatius), and the preachings of the martyrs Rufus and Zosimus (about which we know nothing). He does not mention gospels, which is curious, but it is clear he wants unity among the Pauline, Johannine, and Antiochene churches. Late in life he traveled to Rome, to discuss with Pope Anicetus some differences in church practice. The early church as described in Acts still attended synagogue on the seventh day of the week, but met separately on the first day (the planetary names of the weekdays, like “Sunday”, were not used, just numbers; but the “first day” came to be called “the Lord's day” as the weekly anniversary of the resurrection); once the Jews refused to allow Christians in the synagogues (after the first Jewish Revolt), most Christians met on the first day only, but some on the seventh day only. Polycarp didn't think this mattered, but Anicetus did (however, this was not even uniform in the West: the 4th century bishop Ambrose of Milan held services on Saturday at home, but on Sunday in Rome, hence the saying “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”). Asia commemorated the Passion at the first full moon of spring, coinciding with the Jewish Passover; but Rome only had special readings on the Sundays before and after the Passover (“Palm” and “Easter” Sundays we would now say), otherwise doing nothing special. Polycarp thought the Passion needed its own dedicated holiday, but Anicetus thought it unwise to celebrate on the same day as the Jews; they had to agree to disagree. When Polycarp went home, he was arrested in an ironic foreshadowing of “blood libel” persecutions of the Jews in medieval times: it was believed that Christians practiced cannibalism (a misunderstanding of the Eucharist), so when a boy disappeared it was said that the Christians had eaten him, and Polycarp was well known to be a Christian. The Romans said to him, “Spare yourself, old man! Denounce the Christians! Say, away with the atheists!” (Christians were called “atheists” because they denied the Roman gods) so Polycarp gestured at the crowd and said “Away with the atheists!” His sarcasm was detected, and he died for it.
At some point the Johannines decided that they did indeed need a written “gospel” of their own. The fourth gospel contains three sorts of material: the “Passion” is a well-preserved 1st-century narrative, by someone well familiar with the geography and customs of the city of Jerusalem during the period (information it would be hard for someone later than the Jewish Revolt and its attendant destruction to obtain); the “Discourses” are speeches purportedly by Jesus, but never matching anything attributed to Jesus in the “Q” material (in the gospels of Matthew and Luke) or “the gospel of Thomas”; the “Signs” are a set of disconnected wonder stories, similar to the “Eggerton gospel” (a manuscript containing an otherwise unknown gospel of this genre) or the “W” material in Luke (the “wonders and women” source, concentrating on faith-healings and redemptions of women; possibly, this and the “We Document” are what Luke the physician actually wrote). We have a small but revelatory fragment from c. 125, earlier than anything from any other gospel, probably not long after Polycarp's epistle with its mysterious failure to mention any gospels (typically, that date is questionable, because in one verse Ignatius is alive and in another his martyrdom is reported; I take it that the epistle was written before Ignatius' death, but some later tamperer has made an interpolation, as happens with annoying frequency in early Christian literature). The fragment gives a scene from the trial before Pilate, with “Passion” text present but “Discourses” text absent: Pilate asks “Are you a king? What is the truth?” whereas, in the canonical book, between “Are you a king?” and “What is the truth?” a speech by Jesus (“My kingdom is not of this world...”) is interpolated (other accounts have Jesus keeping his mouth shut). The editor who stitched these three strands together (and probably created the “Discourses” which, unlike the other two, probably never existed as a stand-alone document) appears also to be the author of “1st John” (2nd and 3rd John are too short for much linguistic analysis) and a follower of Polycarp, some of whose phrasings are used. We would like to know the author of the “Passion”: I cannot make myself believe that the “beloved disciple” was from Galilee (Jerusalem, rather), or a poor fisherman (socially well-connected, rather), or the kind of hothead who wrote Revelation (that, I do believe to be the genuine voice of a semi-literate Galilean fisherman); but neither can I take seriously recent arguments that Mary Magdalene wrote it. An old tradition, hotly disputed by the orthodox, had Cerinthus writing both the gospel of John and the Revelation (I think it impossible that the same author wrote both). Cerinthus taught Ebionite views in Asia Minor in the late 1st century. Irenaeus denounces him as a Gnostic, claims that Polycarp told a story about how John knew him and detested him, and says that 1st John with its denunciation of those who deny that Jesus was a being of flesh-and-blood was specifically written against Cerinthus; but Irenaeus is often wrong (and not seldom seems to be flat-out dishonest) about the views of opponents: Epiphanius, a better source, says the views of Cerinthus were quite the opposite of what Irenaeus accuses him of; Jesus was, as for Ebionites generally, an exalted human, totally flesh-and-blood; Cerinthus taught about a “demiurge” agent of God, but as in Philo or the “gospel of John”, the demiurge is the Logos and good, not evil as among the Gnostics; the Torah is of God, and remains binding; Cerinthus did have a written gospel, but it was in Hebrew.
There were three subsequent additions to the gospel of John, two of them minor: the “woman taken in adultery” story is a popular favorite (the line “Let he that is without sin cast the first stone” is among the most-quoted gospel verses), but did not appear until the 5th century (in one manuscript, spliced into Luke instead of into John); chapter 21 (appearance of the risen Christ in Galilee, to eat some fish) is present in all full manuscripts, from the 3rd century onward, but does not appear to belong, since chapter 20 ends with a “wrap-up” (and chapter 21 casually refers to “the sons of Zebedee” as if we know who they are: the rest of the gospel of John never mentions “Zebedee”). The most important addition, however, is the “Logos hymn” at the beginning. Tatian's epistle to the Greeks c. 150 AD quotes it with the phrase “as it is said” rather than “as it is written” (as for any scriptural quote); he knows it as an oral saying, in the liturgy. Tatian composed the Diatessaron “through four sources”, a translation into Aramaic of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John folded together: those four gospels existed in roughly, but not exactly, their present forms, and there came to be many variant Diatessaronic texts, as editors “fixed” them to make them match passages in the Greek canonical texts which Tatian's original didn't; the inclusion of the Logos hymn in some, but not all, texts was one of those fixes. Eventually the Peshitta “separated” translation of the gospels supplanted the Diatessaron, which the church collected and burned (we have few surviving copies) because of these embarrassing variations; but the passage in Tatian's epistle clarifies the case of the Logos hymn, that it was not in the gospel text as of the mid-2nd century. All of John 1:1-17, in my view, is an editorial elaboration of the original liturgical hymn, which at first was in a “call and response” form between the presider and the congregation, and was probably the same “hymn addressed to their founder as if to a god” which Pliny's letter to Trajan says the early Asian Christian church service opened with. The gospel would earlier have started with the line “This is the testimony of John” (1:18) where “John” there actually refers to John the Baptist, who relates the first of the “Signs” stories; but perhaps a careless reading of that line caused some readers to attribute the “Signs” book to John the disciple.
Ironically, I do think that the Logos hymn, although not in the first “edition” of the gospel of John, is the section that is most likely to have been actually composed by John. If it was already well established as a liturgy by the time of Pliny, it has to have come from a 1st century leader, and John is the primary candidate. John's view of Jesus as we see in Revelation was much higher than what we find among the Ebionites: to Cerinthus, for example, Jesus was infused with the Logos at the time of baptism, but abandoned at the time of the crucifixion; the author of the Logos hymn sees Jesus as metaphysically identical to the Word of God from the beginning of time to the end, much as Revelation addresses Jesus as “the Alpha and the Omega”; the Logos hymn seems more “sophisticated” than Revelation, drawing on philosophical terminology and using correct grammar, but John lived a long time and had ample opportunity to become better educated than he was when Revelation was composed. Irenaeus is the only source for the claim, which has come to be dogma in some circles, that Revelation was written very late in John's life, during the reign of Domitian; I don't trust Irenaeus for much, and see Revelation much more as a product of youth (Irenaeus may have had a propagandistic motive for denying that Revelation existed during Nero's reign, to avoid any possible implication that Christians really were guilty in the “Great Fire” case). The “Discourses” material, though composed well after John was dead, were at least faithful, in their exaltation of the status of Jesus, to the tradition represented by the Logos hymn. We can see why Cerinthus was reviled, but the “Passion” narrative probably come from him (or through him, if he was not old enough to be the “beloved disciple” himself); much as Theophilus of Antioch detested Marcion's views but respected the texts he had collected, the Johannines did find his book, if not his teachings, to be valuable.
The absence of a central authority in Asia made it possible for unorthodox sects to grow to mass movements, which was not generally the case elsewhere. Marcion's followers, the “Paulicians” (since they thought they were the only ones to understand Paul), outnumbered the orthodox in eastern Asia Minor for many centuries, even though the Antiochenes kept them out of Syria. The Valentinians, a Gnostic group from Egypt with a different evil demiurge, identified with “Adam” the first man, had their largest branch in Asia Minor (though they also had a presence for a while in Italy and Gaul). And the “Montanist” or “Cataphrygian” movement had a spectacular boom-and-bust in the late 2nd to early 3rd century. Montanus, from Lower Phrygia, declared himself a new incarnation of God, the “Paraclete” promised by Jesus, embodying the Holy Spirit in fleshly form; but when a couple of his women disciples (and lovers? it is always hard to tell) began to speak in tongues and prophesy, they too were proclaimed Paracletes and after a while, every Montanist was a Paraclete. Their services were a cross between Pentecostal and Quaker: a leader would be chosen by lot, to read a random passage from scriptures (they had their own books) and extemporize, then others would speak as they felt moved, often in tongues, which someone else would then “interpret”. This kind of thing had been common in the early church too, of course, although Paul doesn't seem to have liked it much. The thoughtful theologian Tertullian had been Montanist in his youth, so we are better informed about them than about many smaller sects.
It was Constantine, of course, who created the Patriarchate of Constantinople to govern this region. Constantine is often accused of creating the Papacy in Rome: this is a residue from the medieval forgery “Donation of Constantine” which told how Constantine at the start of his reign had a fatal disease which the priests of Jupiter said they could cure with a baby-sacrifice ritual, but Constantine couldn't go through with it because the babies' mothers were wailing, so he turned to Pope Sylvester who miraculously cured him, and therefore Constantine moved to the Eastern Empire, building a new capital, and turning over the whole Western Empire to the Pope. Vico, a Renaissance scholar, pointed out how absurdly fictional this all was; it is surprising this text was actually believed for as long as it was. As with some other pseudepigrapha, it started with a couple of genuine documents: a land grant to the Pope of an unused administrative building that became Lateran Palace (for a long time a more important seat than the Vatican), and a grant of privilege to use the tightly-regulated red dye (called “Tyrian purple”, Rome's main source of foreign exchange, though insufficient to balance the outflow of gold coin to pay for silk from the east; therefore Rome always wanted as much as possible exported, and allowed few to use it domestically). These genuine bits read almost as a touch of humor within the “Donation”: the Pope is granted all of Italy, Spain, Gaul, Britain, Africa, Dalmatia, Germania, and an office building, with the right to exercise all imperial powers, to judge in all cases whatsoever, and to wear red shoes.
The facts are that Constantine was very disappointed with Rome, both as a city (not only did he move to a new capital, but even when he visited the west he preferred to reside at Treverum, modern Trier, by the German front, and even when he came to Italy he preferred not to go south of Milan) and as an ecclesiastical hub. During the persecutions of Constantine's predecessor Diocletian, Pope Marcellinus had actually renounced Christianity, the most embarrassing “lapse” ever, and though his father Marcellus Sr. tried to take over, he wasn't universally recognized. By Constantine's time, there was again an agreed Pope, the North African Miltiades (his name was a Latinization, assimilated to militus “soldier”, of Melchiades from Punic for “king” plus a Greek affix for “descended from”). Constantine demanded that he deal with the Donatist schism in North Africa: above all, he wanted a unified Christian church; contrary to some impressions, he didn't actually care what the Council of Nicaea decided about doctrine, just as long as they decided something. But because Miltiades had connections among the contending factions in North Africa, he was rejected as a mediator. Constantine then asked the patriarch of Arles to settle the matter: the mutual recognition brokered by Arles did not last, but it was humiliating to Rome for Arles to be given such a role. Sylvester was Pope when Nicaea was convened, but he wasn't invited: Constantine didn't want to take the time to wait for western representatives. However, bishop of Hosius of Cordova (the papal “vicar” in Spain) happened to be in the east, and was given some deference as standing for the whole western church. Rome did get its way on some important issues: Sunday was decreed as the day for the church to meet; Easter was not to be celebrated on the Jewish Passover but delayed to the following Sunday (the Quartodecimans “14th [of Nisan] faction” in Asia who kept to the old custom were stamped out by force); and while most of the eastern bishops didn't like the teachings of Arius (that Jesus was not co-eternal with God, but a subsequent creation) either, Rome particularly opposed them and was glad to see them rejected at the Council. Unfortunately, members of Constantine's family favored Arianism, and forced some subsequent patriarchs of Constantinople to adopt it; imperial domination of the religious authorities in Constantinople was taken for granted from the start, and the Popes in Rome would take pride that they did not change their line, regardless of what various Emperors said (some Popes were banished, tortured, or killed for refusing to knuckle under).
The jurisdiction of Constantinople was expanded, with some resistance. From the 4th century we have the “Acts of Barnabas” supposedly by his cousin Mark (the author of the gospel), giving a believable account of his missionary journeys (probably good information, though it is certainly not by Mark) ending back home in Cyprus: the propagandistic point was that Cyprus was a first-generation church, and shouldn't have to answer to late-comers like Constantinople. Under the Valentinian and Theodosian dynasties, the Empire was formally divided into West and East, and ecclesiastic jurisdictions changed accordingly: the bishop of Thessalonica, formerly the “vicar” of Rome, was now subordinated (along with all Greece) to Constantinople, and although the Popes protested, they never got Greece back. The Goths were converted to Arianism during a period when it was official in the East, and remained Arians when they spilled over the Roman border in flight from the Huns: Roman authorities did not know how to cope with the situation and made promises they couldn't keep, then tried to assassinate Gothic chiefs; the angry Goths invaded Thrace, killed an Emperor and wiped out much of the army at the battle of Hadrianople, but could not attack Constantinople (Constantine had made a wise strategic choice of the capital site) and tried to enter Greece, which didn't work either, so they came back to Thrace (which never recovered from this double rampage) until troops recalled from the Persian frontier finally pushed them back. They retreated across the West/East divide to Illyria, a major military-recruiting center (Naissus, now Nish in Serbia, was the home-town of Constantine's father Constantius, and the ancestral home of the Justinian family, which would later produce some strong Emperors). The West could not dislodge them, so Illyria except for “Dalmatia” (a broader area than the coastal strip now called that, also including modern Croatia and parts of Austria) was temporarily transferred to eastern jurisdiction. Like many “temporary” arrangements, it was never undone, and the modern border between “Orthodox” Serbs and “Catholic” Croats still roughly follows that “temporary” line.
A major part of Rome's downfall was fighting among Romans. The West wanted that bit of Illyria back, and a power-behind-the-throne (another part of the downfall was the growing tendency to put in weak puppets as nominal Emperors) named Flavius Stilicho (a very revealing name: “Flavius” from his mother's side was an old prestigious family, from which had come Emperors Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian; “Stilicho” from his father, a Vandal) proposed an alliance with king Alaric of the Goths against the East. Alaric re-invaded Thrace (yes, they “raped Thrace thrice”) but Stilicho did not show up, and the Goths realized they were being played for suckers, Stilicho hoping they would wipe themselves out while doing enough damage to the East that he could pick up the pieces. Alaric finally moved into Italy and threatened the city of Rome, seeking some recognition: he never wanted to bring down the Empire, just to be granted some rank within it, and some territory where his people could settle; but imperial officials holed up in Ravenna, refusing to defend Rome, which Alaric finally sacked, with some reluctance (Augustine noted that Alaric recognized churches as sanctuaries, rather unheard-of behavior given the nature of war in those days, especially since Alaric was not even Catholic). He then tried going south, hoping to assemble a fleet and move to Sicily or Africa, but Goths never had much luck with ships. When he died, his successors went back north and established their realm in Gaul and Spain; another branch of Goths would finally take over Italy, until Justinian retook it for the Empire, without much enthusiasm from the Popes or the Italian populace, so that this restoration of partial imperial control in the west soon shrank back to small patches. The Popes won the allegiance of the Franks to Catholicism, and it was to them rather than to the East that they looked for help against the Goths and Lombards. A Gothic king Reccared, his realm reduced to Spain, sought peace and a marital alliance with the Franks, the price being renunciation of the Arian heresy. The Council of Toledo set out the terms for Reccared to be accepted into the good graces of the Catholic church, and this included recitation of the creed. By some unfortunate error, the text of the creed imposed on the Goths said that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father “and from the Son”, an addition that did not belong there, and which Constantinople would never accept.
Bishops of Ephesus would later be proud to claim both Timothy and John in their lineage, though it was probably not amicable at the time. Ephesus did not, however, exert any supervisory authority over the other churches of Asia, or claim to have the right to. A notable difference between this zone and the others was the absence of any formal line of “successors”; authority among churchmen appears to have been a matter of individual prestige, and seniority. John came to be called Presbyter “the elder” in his later days; some think “John the elder” was a different person from “John the disciple”, but I see it as a natural title for him to acquire when he was not only of advanced biological age, but the most senior surviving Christian. Sometimes later authors would speak of bishop Polycarp of Smyrna as “the successor of John”, but he became so, again, because he lived a long time, eventually becoming the last person to have met any of the 12 disciples (although he cannot have been more than a teenager in John's last days), much as John had become the last of the 12. Earlier, bishop Papias of Hierapolis had been an important leader among the Johannines: Hierapolis was where Phillip ended his life, but Papias put more stress on John, as the one who had lived most recently. In his discussion of writings about Jesus, Papias knows a gospel of Mark identical or similar to what we have, and a “gospel of Matthew” which was rather different (sayings of Jesus only, as contrasted to the narrative style of Mark; and in Hebrew, although variant Greek translations, he says, were available), but notably states that he puts no stock in books at all, preferring the “living tradition” passed down orally.
Polycarp also wrote about available writings, in an epistle to the Phillipians. It is clear that by this time any bad feelings about Paul had evaporated: perhaps Paul's death as a martyr improved his reputation; perhaps many Christians had abandoned the practice of avoiding meat, as Pliny indicates; or perhaps the whole issue had ceased to seem important. In any case, asked to tell the Phillipians what they should read, Polycarp warmly commends the epistles of Paul, from which he quotes (especially Paul's epistle to the Phillipians of course), and also the epistles of Ignatius, of which he says he is enclosing a copy (we wish we had Polycarp's edition of Ignatius), and the preachings of the martyrs Rufus and Zosimus (about which we know nothing). He does not mention gospels, which is curious, but it is clear he wants unity among the Pauline, Johannine, and Antiochene churches. Late in life he traveled to Rome, to discuss with Pope Anicetus some differences in church practice. The early church as described in Acts still attended synagogue on the seventh day of the week, but met separately on the first day (the planetary names of the weekdays, like “Sunday”, were not used, just numbers; but the “first day” came to be called “the Lord's day” as the weekly anniversary of the resurrection); once the Jews refused to allow Christians in the synagogues (after the first Jewish Revolt), most Christians met on the first day only, but some on the seventh day only. Polycarp didn't think this mattered, but Anicetus did (however, this was not even uniform in the West: the 4th century bishop Ambrose of Milan held services on Saturday at home, but on Sunday in Rome, hence the saying “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”). Asia commemorated the Passion at the first full moon of spring, coinciding with the Jewish Passover; but Rome only had special readings on the Sundays before and after the Passover (“Palm” and “Easter” Sundays we would now say), otherwise doing nothing special. Polycarp thought the Passion needed its own dedicated holiday, but Anicetus thought it unwise to celebrate on the same day as the Jews; they had to agree to disagree. When Polycarp went home, he was arrested in an ironic foreshadowing of “blood libel” persecutions of the Jews in medieval times: it was believed that Christians practiced cannibalism (a misunderstanding of the Eucharist), so when a boy disappeared it was said that the Christians had eaten him, and Polycarp was well known to be a Christian. The Romans said to him, “Spare yourself, old man! Denounce the Christians! Say, away with the atheists!” (Christians were called “atheists” because they denied the Roman gods) so Polycarp gestured at the crowd and said “Away with the atheists!” His sarcasm was detected, and he died for it.
At some point the Johannines decided that they did indeed need a written “gospel” of their own. The fourth gospel contains three sorts of material: the “Passion” is a well-preserved 1st-century narrative, by someone well familiar with the geography and customs of the city of Jerusalem during the period (information it would be hard for someone later than the Jewish Revolt and its attendant destruction to obtain); the “Discourses” are speeches purportedly by Jesus, but never matching anything attributed to Jesus in the “Q” material (in the gospels of Matthew and Luke) or “the gospel of Thomas”; the “Signs” are a set of disconnected wonder stories, similar to the “Eggerton gospel” (a manuscript containing an otherwise unknown gospel of this genre) or the “W” material in Luke (the “wonders and women” source, concentrating on faith-healings and redemptions of women; possibly, this and the “We Document” are what Luke the physician actually wrote). We have a small but revelatory fragment from c. 125, earlier than anything from any other gospel, probably not long after Polycarp's epistle with its mysterious failure to mention any gospels (typically, that date is questionable, because in one verse Ignatius is alive and in another his martyrdom is reported; I take it that the epistle was written before Ignatius' death, but some later tamperer has made an interpolation, as happens with annoying frequency in early Christian literature). The fragment gives a scene from the trial before Pilate, with “Passion” text present but “Discourses” text absent: Pilate asks “Are you a king? What is the truth?” whereas, in the canonical book, between “Are you a king?” and “What is the truth?” a speech by Jesus (“My kingdom is not of this world...”) is interpolated (other accounts have Jesus keeping his mouth shut). The editor who stitched these three strands together (and probably created the “Discourses” which, unlike the other two, probably never existed as a stand-alone document) appears also to be the author of “1st John” (2nd and 3rd John are too short for much linguistic analysis) and a follower of Polycarp, some of whose phrasings are used. We would like to know the author of the “Passion”: I cannot make myself believe that the “beloved disciple” was from Galilee (Jerusalem, rather), or a poor fisherman (socially well-connected, rather), or the kind of hothead who wrote Revelation (that, I do believe to be the genuine voice of a semi-literate Galilean fisherman); but neither can I take seriously recent arguments that Mary Magdalene wrote it. An old tradition, hotly disputed by the orthodox, had Cerinthus writing both the gospel of John and the Revelation (I think it impossible that the same author wrote both). Cerinthus taught Ebionite views in Asia Minor in the late 1st century. Irenaeus denounces him as a Gnostic, claims that Polycarp told a story about how John knew him and detested him, and says that 1st John with its denunciation of those who deny that Jesus was a being of flesh-and-blood was specifically written against Cerinthus; but Irenaeus is often wrong (and not seldom seems to be flat-out dishonest) about the views of opponents: Epiphanius, a better source, says the views of Cerinthus were quite the opposite of what Irenaeus accuses him of; Jesus was, as for Ebionites generally, an exalted human, totally flesh-and-blood; Cerinthus taught about a “demiurge” agent of God, but as in Philo or the “gospel of John”, the demiurge is the Logos and good, not evil as among the Gnostics; the Torah is of God, and remains binding; Cerinthus did have a written gospel, but it was in Hebrew.
There were three subsequent additions to the gospel of John, two of them minor: the “woman taken in adultery” story is a popular favorite (the line “Let he that is without sin cast the first stone” is among the most-quoted gospel verses), but did not appear until the 5th century (in one manuscript, spliced into Luke instead of into John); chapter 21 (appearance of the risen Christ in Galilee, to eat some fish) is present in all full manuscripts, from the 3rd century onward, but does not appear to belong, since chapter 20 ends with a “wrap-up” (and chapter 21 casually refers to “the sons of Zebedee” as if we know who they are: the rest of the gospel of John never mentions “Zebedee”). The most important addition, however, is the “Logos hymn” at the beginning. Tatian's epistle to the Greeks c. 150 AD quotes it with the phrase “as it is said” rather than “as it is written” (as for any scriptural quote); he knows it as an oral saying, in the liturgy. Tatian composed the Diatessaron “through four sources”, a translation into Aramaic of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John folded together: those four gospels existed in roughly, but not exactly, their present forms, and there came to be many variant Diatessaronic texts, as editors “fixed” them to make them match passages in the Greek canonical texts which Tatian's original didn't; the inclusion of the Logos hymn in some, but not all, texts was one of those fixes. Eventually the Peshitta “separated” translation of the gospels supplanted the Diatessaron, which the church collected and burned (we have few surviving copies) because of these embarrassing variations; but the passage in Tatian's epistle clarifies the case of the Logos hymn, that it was not in the gospel text as of the mid-2nd century. All of John 1:1-17, in my view, is an editorial elaboration of the original liturgical hymn, which at first was in a “call and response” form between the presider and the congregation, and was probably the same “hymn addressed to their founder as if to a god” which Pliny's letter to Trajan says the early Asian Christian church service opened with. The gospel would earlier have started with the line “This is the testimony of John” (1:18) where “John” there actually refers to John the Baptist, who relates the first of the “Signs” stories; but perhaps a careless reading of that line caused some readers to attribute the “Signs” book to John the disciple.
Ironically, I do think that the Logos hymn, although not in the first “edition” of the gospel of John, is the section that is most likely to have been actually composed by John. If it was already well established as a liturgy by the time of Pliny, it has to have come from a 1st century leader, and John is the primary candidate. John's view of Jesus as we see in Revelation was much higher than what we find among the Ebionites: to Cerinthus, for example, Jesus was infused with the Logos at the time of baptism, but abandoned at the time of the crucifixion; the author of the Logos hymn sees Jesus as metaphysically identical to the Word of God from the beginning of time to the end, much as Revelation addresses Jesus as “the Alpha and the Omega”; the Logos hymn seems more “sophisticated” than Revelation, drawing on philosophical terminology and using correct grammar, but John lived a long time and had ample opportunity to become better educated than he was when Revelation was composed. Irenaeus is the only source for the claim, which has come to be dogma in some circles, that Revelation was written very late in John's life, during the reign of Domitian; I don't trust Irenaeus for much, and see Revelation much more as a product of youth (Irenaeus may have had a propagandistic motive for denying that Revelation existed during Nero's reign, to avoid any possible implication that Christians really were guilty in the “Great Fire” case). The “Discourses” material, though composed well after John was dead, were at least faithful, in their exaltation of the status of Jesus, to the tradition represented by the Logos hymn. We can see why Cerinthus was reviled, but the “Passion” narrative probably come from him (or through him, if he was not old enough to be the “beloved disciple” himself); much as Theophilus of Antioch detested Marcion's views but respected the texts he had collected, the Johannines did find his book, if not his teachings, to be valuable.
The absence of a central authority in Asia made it possible for unorthodox sects to grow to mass movements, which was not generally the case elsewhere. Marcion's followers, the “Paulicians” (since they thought they were the only ones to understand Paul), outnumbered the orthodox in eastern Asia Minor for many centuries, even though the Antiochenes kept them out of Syria. The Valentinians, a Gnostic group from Egypt with a different evil demiurge, identified with “Adam” the first man, had their largest branch in Asia Minor (though they also had a presence for a while in Italy and Gaul). And the “Montanist” or “Cataphrygian” movement had a spectacular boom-and-bust in the late 2nd to early 3rd century. Montanus, from Lower Phrygia, declared himself a new incarnation of God, the “Paraclete” promised by Jesus, embodying the Holy Spirit in fleshly form; but when a couple of his women disciples (and lovers? it is always hard to tell) began to speak in tongues and prophesy, they too were proclaimed Paracletes and after a while, every Montanist was a Paraclete. Their services were a cross between Pentecostal and Quaker: a leader would be chosen by lot, to read a random passage from scriptures (they had their own books) and extemporize, then others would speak as they felt moved, often in tongues, which someone else would then “interpret”. This kind of thing had been common in the early church too, of course, although Paul doesn't seem to have liked it much. The thoughtful theologian Tertullian had been Montanist in his youth, so we are better informed about them than about many smaller sects.
It was Constantine, of course, who created the Patriarchate of Constantinople to govern this region. Constantine is often accused of creating the Papacy in Rome: this is a residue from the medieval forgery “Donation of Constantine” which told how Constantine at the start of his reign had a fatal disease which the priests of Jupiter said they could cure with a baby-sacrifice ritual, but Constantine couldn't go through with it because the babies' mothers were wailing, so he turned to Pope Sylvester who miraculously cured him, and therefore Constantine moved to the Eastern Empire, building a new capital, and turning over the whole Western Empire to the Pope. Vico, a Renaissance scholar, pointed out how absurdly fictional this all was; it is surprising this text was actually believed for as long as it was. As with some other pseudepigrapha, it started with a couple of genuine documents: a land grant to the Pope of an unused administrative building that became Lateran Palace (for a long time a more important seat than the Vatican), and a grant of privilege to use the tightly-regulated red dye (called “Tyrian purple”, Rome's main source of foreign exchange, though insufficient to balance the outflow of gold coin to pay for silk from the east; therefore Rome always wanted as much as possible exported, and allowed few to use it domestically). These genuine bits read almost as a touch of humor within the “Donation”: the Pope is granted all of Italy, Spain, Gaul, Britain, Africa, Dalmatia, Germania, and an office building, with the right to exercise all imperial powers, to judge in all cases whatsoever, and to wear red shoes.
The facts are that Constantine was very disappointed with Rome, both as a city (not only did he move to a new capital, but even when he visited the west he preferred to reside at Treverum, modern Trier, by the German front, and even when he came to Italy he preferred not to go south of Milan) and as an ecclesiastical hub. During the persecutions of Constantine's predecessor Diocletian, Pope Marcellinus had actually renounced Christianity, the most embarrassing “lapse” ever, and though his father Marcellus Sr. tried to take over, he wasn't universally recognized. By Constantine's time, there was again an agreed Pope, the North African Miltiades (his name was a Latinization, assimilated to militus “soldier”, of Melchiades from Punic for “king” plus a Greek affix for “descended from”). Constantine demanded that he deal with the Donatist schism in North Africa: above all, he wanted a unified Christian church; contrary to some impressions, he didn't actually care what the Council of Nicaea decided about doctrine, just as long as they decided something. But because Miltiades had connections among the contending factions in North Africa, he was rejected as a mediator. Constantine then asked the patriarch of Arles to settle the matter: the mutual recognition brokered by Arles did not last, but it was humiliating to Rome for Arles to be given such a role. Sylvester was Pope when Nicaea was convened, but he wasn't invited: Constantine didn't want to take the time to wait for western representatives. However, bishop of Hosius of Cordova (the papal “vicar” in Spain) happened to be in the east, and was given some deference as standing for the whole western church. Rome did get its way on some important issues: Sunday was decreed as the day for the church to meet; Easter was not to be celebrated on the Jewish Passover but delayed to the following Sunday (the Quartodecimans “14th [of Nisan] faction” in Asia who kept to the old custom were stamped out by force); and while most of the eastern bishops didn't like the teachings of Arius (that Jesus was not co-eternal with God, but a subsequent creation) either, Rome particularly opposed them and was glad to see them rejected at the Council. Unfortunately, members of Constantine's family favored Arianism, and forced some subsequent patriarchs of Constantinople to adopt it; imperial domination of the religious authorities in Constantinople was taken for granted from the start, and the Popes in Rome would take pride that they did not change their line, regardless of what various Emperors said (some Popes were banished, tortured, or killed for refusing to knuckle under).
The jurisdiction of Constantinople was expanded, with some resistance. From the 4th century we have the “Acts of Barnabas” supposedly by his cousin Mark (the author of the gospel), giving a believable account of his missionary journeys (probably good information, though it is certainly not by Mark) ending back home in Cyprus: the propagandistic point was that Cyprus was a first-generation church, and shouldn't have to answer to late-comers like Constantinople. Under the Valentinian and Theodosian dynasties, the Empire was formally divided into West and East, and ecclesiastic jurisdictions changed accordingly: the bishop of Thessalonica, formerly the “vicar” of Rome, was now subordinated (along with all Greece) to Constantinople, and although the Popes protested, they never got Greece back. The Goths were converted to Arianism during a period when it was official in the East, and remained Arians when they spilled over the Roman border in flight from the Huns: Roman authorities did not know how to cope with the situation and made promises they couldn't keep, then tried to assassinate Gothic chiefs; the angry Goths invaded Thrace, killed an Emperor and wiped out much of the army at the battle of Hadrianople, but could not attack Constantinople (Constantine had made a wise strategic choice of the capital site) and tried to enter Greece, which didn't work either, so they came back to Thrace (which never recovered from this double rampage) until troops recalled from the Persian frontier finally pushed them back. They retreated across the West/East divide to Illyria, a major military-recruiting center (Naissus, now Nish in Serbia, was the home-town of Constantine's father Constantius, and the ancestral home of the Justinian family, which would later produce some strong Emperors). The West could not dislodge them, so Illyria except for “Dalmatia” (a broader area than the coastal strip now called that, also including modern Croatia and parts of Austria) was temporarily transferred to eastern jurisdiction. Like many “temporary” arrangements, it was never undone, and the modern border between “Orthodox” Serbs and “Catholic” Croats still roughly follows that “temporary” line.
A major part of Rome's downfall was fighting among Romans. The West wanted that bit of Illyria back, and a power-behind-the-throne (another part of the downfall was the growing tendency to put in weak puppets as nominal Emperors) named Flavius Stilicho (a very revealing name: “Flavius” from his mother's side was an old prestigious family, from which had come Emperors Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian; “Stilicho” from his father, a Vandal) proposed an alliance with king Alaric of the Goths against the East. Alaric re-invaded Thrace (yes, they “raped Thrace thrice”) but Stilicho did not show up, and the Goths realized they were being played for suckers, Stilicho hoping they would wipe themselves out while doing enough damage to the East that he could pick up the pieces. Alaric finally moved into Italy and threatened the city of Rome, seeking some recognition: he never wanted to bring down the Empire, just to be granted some rank within it, and some territory where his people could settle; but imperial officials holed up in Ravenna, refusing to defend Rome, which Alaric finally sacked, with some reluctance (Augustine noted that Alaric recognized churches as sanctuaries, rather unheard-of behavior given the nature of war in those days, especially since Alaric was not even Catholic). He then tried going south, hoping to assemble a fleet and move to Sicily or Africa, but Goths never had much luck with ships. When he died, his successors went back north and established their realm in Gaul and Spain; another branch of Goths would finally take over Italy, until Justinian retook it for the Empire, without much enthusiasm from the Popes or the Italian populace, so that this restoration of partial imperial control in the west soon shrank back to small patches. The Popes won the allegiance of the Franks to Catholicism, and it was to them rather than to the East that they looked for help against the Goths and Lombards. A Gothic king Reccared, his realm reduced to Spain, sought peace and a marital alliance with the Franks, the price being renunciation of the Arian heresy. The Council of Toledo set out the terms for Reccared to be accepted into the good graces of the Catholic church, and this included recitation of the creed. By some unfortunate error, the text of the creed imposed on the Goths said that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father “and from the Son”, an addition that did not belong there, and which Constantinople would never accept.
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